Crowdsourcing The Best Ideas for Structural Democratic Reforms

Hi, thanks for this! As someone who's very interested in social choice and mechanism design, I'll make more suggestions on the submissions form later. Social choice and mechanism design are the branches of economics that ask "How can we extend decision theory to society as a whole, to make rational social decisions?" and "How do we do that if people can lie?", respectively.

Here's one very important recommendation I will make explicitly here, though: TALK TO PEOPLE IN MECHANISM DESIGN AND SOCIAL CHOICE OR EVERYTHING WILL EXPLODE AND YOU CAN MAKE EVERYTHING WAY WORSE IF YOU MESS UP EVEN MINOR DETAILS.

If you don't believe me, here's an example: how you handle equal-ranked candidates in the Borda count can take it from "top-tier voting rule" to "complete disaster". With Borda's original truncation rule (candidates not listed on a ballot get 0 points), the Borda count is pretty good! But if you require a complete ranking, i.e. every voter has to list all the candidates going from best to worst, your rule ends up having the candidates chosen basically at random. That's because the optimal strategy involves finding the best candidates and putting them all at the bottom of your ballot, with the worst candidates you can find taking up all of the middle ranks. If everyone realizes this, the winner is effectively chosen at random, and can even end up being a candidate who everyone agrees is the absolute worst option.

Sorry if I am being unfair, but itseems to me a bit naïve to base all of your Structural Democratic Reforms project solely on election theory, and ignore other institutions that are extremely impactful, but more neglected by and less accountable to the wide public, such as Supreme Courts, Central Banks and regulatory authorities (and even Audit Institutions).

Before the Hamas's attack, Israel was in political turmoil because a sort of constitutional crisis between its Supreme Court and the government regarding the 2023 Israeli judicial reform. Current US Supreme Court not only struck Roe v. Wade this year, but it also decided that, while the Head of the Executive is immune against prosecution for any official act (Trump v. U.S.), regulatory authorities (that ultimately respond to the President) have no power to issue binding interpretations of statutory law (Loper Bright Enterprises et al.), thus ending four decades of the Chevron deference doctrine. Now consider that Supreme Courts allegedly have a longevity problem - they used to serve for an average 17 years, and are now predicted to serve for 35 years. Other jurisdictions face similar issues (e.g.: Brazilian judiciary has had a tremendous political impact in the last 10 years, and now legislators want to restrict Supreme Court judges powers).
An obvious fix would be adopting term limits, but, though I am a passionate defender of judicial review, I think that centralizing so much power on such a small body is a mechanism design nightmare.

And Central Banks face political scrutiny everywhere; yet, while Open Philanthropy did fund research on macroeconomics and there's a consensus that monetary authorities must be insulated from the Executive, I am unaware of anyone in EA-space currently doing research on Central Bank politics (though, here, I would say it's probably not a neglected topic - it's just that the public tends to ignore it, and maybe crypto-friendly EAs just despise central bankers).