Political Science super blog The Monkey Cage introduced me to a book by Josiah Ober, a Political Scientist at Stanford entitled Democracy and Knowledge that provides a defense of Athenian Democracy on the grounds that it’s participatory rule-making processes (for example, the Athenian Council of 500 were chosen by random lot rather than election) provided a greater breadth of perspectives on social issues than our current representative democracy.  The argument is that citizens can provide the local knowledge needed to make effective decisions and that social networking technologies might help organize citizen input in effective ways.

Here’s a sample chapter of the book.