Why are elections only every 4 years?

[cedivad]

Just a Sunday's night thought.

If you could communicate to your government your political preferences continuously and not only 15 times during your useful life, politics would be continuously compelled into getting your vote, and there would be a really competitive environment for them to survive. You throw a BS at your electors once and you lose your seat forever, the exact opposite of what happens nowadays.

Stupid idea? If not, when will it happen? ()

[Lethn]

I'd love to see that happen, here in the UK we have general elections every 5 years and even when we told them to fuck off in the most obvious way possible by having an extremely low turnout they went and made a coalition then declared a victory anyway. I want the swiss form of Democracy, at least we can stop them from making stupid laws then even if we can't stop them from getting in office.

[painlord2k]

The big problem is not the frequency, but the fact so many voters are net recipient of taxes or just stupid and ignorant.
So they vote for every fad and smiling idiots there pumped by journals.

The US people made a revolution about taxation without representation.
The big problem, today, is representation without taxation. So many public employees vote for the government to give them what others work hard to produce.
The solution should be to prevent people receiving any money from the government to vote (even if they receive it indirectly).

People voting will pay taxes and will not vote to increase them without a good reason and people receiving taxes is prevented to voting to keeping and increasing them.

[pawel7777]

There would be a major risk of delaying any not popular but necessary decisions. It would be constant popularity contest with the goal of pleasing the voters right here, right now. It'd be close to impossible to implement any long-term plan.

It could only work, when the majority of voters is well educated (meaning they got a good grasp of political/economical knowledge etc).