The classical European democracy in Athens assumed a mass participation by rotating officials due to their selection by lot, which was abandoned in modern times. Instead, officials are now either elected or appointed, which created a class of “democratic aristocracy” (B.Manin) — professional politicians who have often their own objectives and values. We suggest a way to combine randomness inherent in ancient democracies with the electoral approach of modernity. It applies the considerations of the Antiquity enriched with statistical models and information technologies.
Recall that several countries, following the Netherlands, implemented official internet sites aimed at helping voters to locate themselves in the political landscape and to prompt the best-fitting party. Its German version is called "Wahl-O-Mat". It suggests a questionnaire on several policy issues, such as `Introduce nation-wide minimum wage' (Yes/No), `Privatize railways' (Yes/No), etc., compares the user answers with the party positions, and ranks them regarding their match to the user profile.
Our research extends the individual-to-party match to the society-to-party match. For this purpose, internet polls of public opinion are used. The computational results are applied to test the representativeness of five leading German parties and their coalitions. It is shown that the current governing coalition is the least representative among all eligible coalitions.
Correspondingly, an election method which incorporates a statistical approach (remounting to the use of lot in ancient democracies), bridging the electoral approach of representative democracy with the probabilistic approach of direct democracy – a kind of sample referenda as a direct democracy test – is proposed. An application based on 32 internet referenda and party manifestos is done for German Bundestag with recalculated number of seats for the eligible parties.
