A new proposal
For example
in the previous
case about the bill
on education, the vote
of teachers
should have a
"weighting coefficient"
of 10 and the vote of engineers of 1.
For a bill on
mines
the coefficients
would be reversed:
1 for teachers and 10 for engineers.
The factor 10 is
used here only symbolically.
The more
specialised the question e.g.
"Shall the
application of the
pesticide Z-R 14 be
approved?",
the higher should
be the factor.
The more general
the question,
the lower the
factor.
If it comes
to the appointment
or dismissal
at the highest
governmental level
(for
the Prime Minister or the President of the Republic)
there should be no
factor.
All votes would
have equal weight.
― And
is it impossible that an engineer, from personal interest,
might have studied the
problems of education in such depth
and have accumulated so
much knowledge that his opinion
would be valuable?
Why should you condemn his vote to
have only the factor 1?
For this problem
we could,
in addition to
professional
competence,
introduce
a
kind of test to prove how
informed
every citizen is
on a
particular problem.
For example:
Before he gives
his opinion on
the main question:
"Do you think
we should extend time
spent in the high-school
by one year?"
he has to answer
some other
questions which show
•
whether
he has understood the question
fully and can answer it
seriously.
•
Whether
he has studied the problem.
•
Whether
he has taken into account all the
parameters that
accompany the problem and
•
has
considered the impact of his decision.
Let's say:
1. Do you know how long attendance is
in high-school today?
2. Do you know how long it is in the
other European countries?
3. How much additional knowledge do you
think there is since
we had the last school
reform?
4. What increase in the budget of the
Ministry of Education will
an additional year in
high-school cause?
5. What do you think will be the impact
on the national economy,
if the young people
enter the University or the production line
a year later?
6. ….
(Had
we asked a group of education specialists,
they
would certainly have given us much better
examples
of questions for such a test)
If it is proved by
the preliminary questions
that the
interviewee is fully aware of what this
change means and what
the implications are,
then his vote has
to
receive the highest
weighting.
If it turns out
that he is completely unaware,
then we do not
need to take
his answer very
seriously.
With such a test
there is less risk
that a particularly
gifted orator may
dazzle his listeners
and lead them to vote
in his favour.