All us WEIRD (western educated industrialized rich democratic) countries seem to spend a really embarrassing amount of time talking about the pointless minutiae surrounding our candidates for office and their personal lives.
We are also prone to backing very crap candidates based on personality, rhetoric, appearance ie: things that have nothing to do with being a good executive or legislator.
I think we should ban names from the election process and just have each party submit their ideas in writing and let people vote based on those submissions.
Hard disagree. It’s really easy for candidates to talk the talk on the campaign trail, and then do a 180 once they’re in office.
That being said, this doesn’t work if you let them use flowery speech and vague promises. If you had parties submit a platform of actually actionable decisions they would make (e.g. “decrease the federal minimum wage”), you’d be able to suss out what they actually want to do. It would also provide a rubric for re-election - how many of the things you wanted to do did you accomplish? Are there good reasons why you weren’t able to?
So what you’re asking for is the party politic talking points they already publish and never actually vote for? We already have a party that says one thing and have voted consistently against their entire published position for a good 40+ years. I don’t see much changing there.
I think a better solution is to hold politicians feet to the fire. When they have debates play the clip of them from a rally stating they want to X horrible thing or where they just negated their previous statement. “You claim to he for a working wage but lets play the clip from CSPAN where you are against increasing minimum wage and call people working in fast food ‘lazy and dumb’”.
Unfortunately a huge portion of voters dont care about actual facts and vote purely by ideology or religious views or are easily swept up in the propaganda l. We should be outlawing ads that are obvious false statements or try and bend the situation to look drastically different.
I’m asking for the individual candidates to lay out their specific political goals. The party can continue to publish its platform and planks.
Then people vote based on whether they want to see those goals met. When those politicians are up for re-election, it’s fairly easy for someone to tabulate whether or not those goals were met. If there are extenuating circumstances (overwhelming opposition, for example), then they can use that to defend themselves. This would help hold their feet to the fire.
As for voting ideologically, I attribute that mostly to FPTP - people feel as though they cannot do anything but vote ideologically because there are no real alternatives. That’s why RCV is extremely important.