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4 stars
You know what? Kudos to this book for actually saying something with its full chest. I frequently come across political books that read like, "everything sucks and here's why," but this goes a step further with tangible and direct suggestions for what to do about it; it really is a guide of sorts.
Of course there's the standard solutions like ranked-choice voting and campaign finance reform, but this also discussed a concept of "citizen deliberation" (think of a souped-up round of jury duty except the results get pushed to a public election as a referendum question) that I'd never even heard of before. It even laid out real-world examples of how these have operated in the (then) recent past. There's also discussions on how to tweak recall election rules to better hold politicians accountable in between elections, and just an overall grab bag of specific things that foreign countries do. …
You know what? Kudos to this book for actually saying something with its full chest. I frequently come across political books that read like, "everything sucks and here's why," but this goes a step further with tangible and direct suggestions for what to do about it; it really is a guide of sorts.
Of course there's the standard solutions like ranked-choice voting and campaign finance reform, but this also discussed a concept of "citizen deliberation" (think of a souped-up round of jury duty except the results get pushed to a public election as a referendum question) that I'd never even heard of before. It even laid out real-world examples of how these have operated in the (then) recent past. There's also discussions on how to tweak recall election rules to better hold politicians accountable in between elections, and just an overall grab bag of specific things that foreign countries do.
The book reads as a little dated now because it was published in 2014 when the Greek austerity programs and the Eurozone crisis was the big news of the day. I did find it curious that even in a pre-Brexit/pre-Trump society the general attitude was described as "literally everyone from the far left to the far right hates establishment politicians". I guess the more things change the more they stay the same. But this is still definitely a book worth checking out if you come across it though.