Parties arose in the nineteenth century to aggregate interests at a time when voters had no way of gathering information. Today every voter carries a telephone with more knowledge than a minister in 1950. Yet we still vote for blocs that hold positions on a hundred subjects at once — as if someone who thinks carefully about healthcare automatically thinks carefully about nuclear energy.

The three ailments of party politics

Package voting. You receive ten things you did not ask for in order to get two things you want. A voter who supports stricter asylum policy and green energy will find no party that combines both. He must choose which part of his convictions to discard.

Loyalty over substance. A party member who dissents is punished, even when he is right. Politicians know that the party whip can make or break a career. So they vote not what they think, but what the party thinks.

The four-year illusion. Policy pitched at the horizon of the next election, not the next generation. A minister who takes difficult decisions in his fourth year loses. So the difficult decisions are deferred.

What Nova Democratia proposes

Nova Democratia is a system of government in which decisions are made issue by issue, by people who have demonstrated competence and legitimacy on that particular issue. No parties, but 24 policy domains (healthcare, energy, education, justice, spatial planning, defence, infrastructure, and so on), each with its own cycle of proposals, scrutiny and decision.

The three core principles:

• Cost-benefit accountability. Every proposed rule must demonstrate what it costs and what it delivers. No cost-benefit analysis, no decision. This sounds dry but is revolutionary: it forces politicians to reduce their proposals to numbers.
• Spot-check oversight. An independent body randomly verifies whether rules are being observed, and whether those who drafted them carry undisclosed interests. In the event of sabotage or improper influence: multi-year or permanent bans from working in that policy domain.
• Prosperity as the primary goal. Not equality for equality's sake, not growth for growth's sake, but growth that actually reaches people as purchasing power and human dignity. That means: respect and self-worth count, not only money.

An example from real life

Suppose a proposal is on the table to lower the motorway speed limit. Under the current system, parties vote for or against on the basis of their general profile. The road-safety party for, the motorists' party against.

Under Nova Democratia the question would be broken down:

• What does it deliver in lives saved? (Measurable — research yields 50–70 fewer deaths per year.)
• What does it cost in travel time? (Measurable — a total of 12 million additional hours of travel per year.)
• What does it cost in fuel and CO₂? (Measurable.)
• Who has an interest in its adoption or rejection? (Verifiable via the interests register.)

Only when these figures are in place do the citizens in that policy domain decide. No party discipline, no ideology, but a fair weighing of measurable grounds.

Honest about the objections

This is not a utopia. The greatest risks:

• Who guards the guardians? Who determines whether a spot check was conducted fairly?
• Fragmentation. If every issue is decided separately, how does the whole remain coherent? Someone must oversee the connections — otherwise you get policy that is logical domain by domain but impossible as a whole.
• Time. Citizens do not have time to engage with 24 issues. How do you prevent only lobbyists and hobby politicians from voting?

I believe AI offers a partial answer here: not as the decision-maker, but as summariser, translator and guardian of consistency. AI can produce a personalised briefing for each citizen matched to their expertise and interest. But that is precisely a question for you, the reader.

Why this aligns with the 7D framework

In the 7D model, a society is a system with multiple axes simultaneously. Prosperity (a W-axis) depends on scale (G): what works at municipal level can fail at national level. And multiplicity (N) — the freedom for different countries and regions to make different choices — is not a luxury but a field of experiment. Party politics erases that multiplicity, because a party holds the same position everywhere. Nova Democratia restores it.