Just speaking for myself, sometimes I lack information, as you say. Sometimes I don't have a strong opinion on a matter either way. But thinking of legislators, there are a lot of maneuvers that the ruling parties can come up with to force you to vote on something, where you don't really oppose it, but the ruling party wants you to put yourself on the record as supporting them.
Voting for or against says something about you, and so does abstaining.
Hopefully if we forced legislators to vote in a similar way to guilty/not guilty where the No is a lot more broad we could blur the lines enough that it would be harder to pressure people into a yes vote.
If a No vote can mean anything from "I don't agree with the policy" to "I have misgivings about how x paragraph is written" it would become far more unclear what a person voting No is actually saying.
This is probably too much into wishful thinking territory but I would like to see how it would play out in that kind of system. And if we lose some politicians along the way even better, at least around here (seriously 230 leeches for a country the size of Portugal is insane)
Just speaking for myself, sometimes I lack information, as you say. Sometimes I don't have a strong opinion on a matter either way. But thinking of legislators, there are a lot of maneuvers that the ruling parties can come up with to force you to vote on something, where you don't really oppose it, but the ruling party wants you to put yourself on the record as supporting them.
Voting for or against says something about you, and so does abstaining.
Hopefully if we forced legislators to vote in a similar way to guilty/not guilty where the No is a lot more broad we could blur the lines enough that it would be harder to pressure people into a yes vote.
If a No vote can mean anything from "I don't agree with the policy" to "I have misgivings about how x paragraph is written" it would become far more unclear what a person voting No is actually saying.
This is probably too much into wishful thinking territory but I would like to see how it would play out in that kind of system. And if we lose some politicians along the way even better, at least around here (seriously 230 leeches for a country the size of Portugal is insane)