Cyber Constituency - The Bare Bones

K. Sankaran

This site is for examining the idea of Cyber Constituencies (or CC for short). The idea is very much in its embryonic (or pre-embryonic!) stage and the purpose of this blog is to tease out the idea so that an adequate level of dialogue is achieved so that we can decide whether it is worth considering this for further inquiry.

CC is a way to send a person to a legislative body who would truly and entirely represent the aspiration of a proportionate number of eligible voters.

Let us take the case our own Lok Sabha in India. Lok Sabha is the highest legislative body that represents people at the central (or federal level). The Lok Sabha in its entirety is meant to represent all the eligible voters in the country. Each of the Lok Sabha member would represent a proportionate number of eligible voters.

For the sake of argument, if there are 600 million eligible voters in the country and if the full house of Lok Sabha would consist of 600 representatives, then each member would be representing a million eligible voters.

With advances in IT the question is why not have 1 million persons endorse an individual and carve out a “cyber constituency” for a certain time frame (say between 2010 – 2015)? Next time around (during 2015 – 2020) this constituency will not hold because a new constituency would have been formed with the existing members having chosen to endorse different persons.

The process of selecting the person will not be through “election”. It will be through some form of “endorsement”.

This forum is created to discuss the following themes

1) Benefits of CC

2) Downside of CC; whether these can be overcome if benefits outweigh these

3) Issues of rights, justice and other jurisprudential issues

4) Issues of legality, constitutional provisions, legal hurdles

5) Sociological issues of exclusion and inclusion

6) Impact on institutions and institutional impediments

7) Impact on national integration (and search for collective good) on the one hand and autonomy of individuals on the other

8) Impact on quality of decision making in the legislative body

9) Information Technology; whether the endorsement can be realistically done with the IT infrastructure in the short and medium term.

10) How we can take this to the next level with proper academic research

11) Or any other relevant matter

Here are eleven themes we could discuss. If you think there are other themes, please point it out through comments in the blog.

For the time being, if you will, treat this as a mental toy to play with. Later, if successful, we can elevate this to an academic level when mental toying would lead to some serious research.

Please do respond if you would like to comment on any of the above themes. In fact it will nice if this cyber-conversation throws up some experts (or groups) who can work on each of the eleven or more themes. Thanks.