Living Democracy from Australia, Taiwan to Switzerland

I’ve cast ballots in three countries. Each time, the process felt totally different, and not just in the mechanics, but in the whole philosophy behind it. After years of switching between democratic cultures, I’ve come to believe that democracy isn’t a single thing. It’s more like a living practice that each society shapes differently over time.

Here’s what each of mine taught me.

Australia: design and moderation

Australia was where I cast my first vote, and it remains one of the world’s most fascinating electoral experiments. Voting is mandatory. You rank candidates instead of picking just one. The Senate uses proportional representation.

This mix of rules produces something interesting: a system that tends to reward compromise over extremism. It showed me early on that the way we design voting systems is not neutral. The rules of aggregation shape what kind of politics feels possible. That realisation stuck with me and later fed directly into my research on fair allocation and collective decision-making.

Taiwan: adaptation and resilience

I grew up in Taiwan in the 2000s, as the country was still working out what democracy meant after decades of martial law. I remember watching the Sunflower Movement in 2014, when students occupied parliament to protest opaque trade negotiations with China. It was one of those moments that changes everything.

What emerged from that period was something genuinely unusual. The g0v community started reimagining government transparency through open data and civic tech. The Presidential Hackathon turned civic innovation into a state-supported practice. And through vTaiwan, citizens used tools like Pol.is to deliberate on real policy, not to force consensus, but to surface areas of shared understanding.

Audrey Tang once described this as “finding the commonality in differences.” Simple, but it captures something deep. Technology can help democracy by revealing what connects us, not just what divides us.

I later joined and contributed to these communities. It changed how I think about the relationship between technology and governance. When civic tech is built around democratic values rather than engagement metrics, it can actually strengthen participation.

Switzerland: deliberation and patience

Now I live in Wädenswil, a small town on Lake Zurich. Democracy here looks completely different again. It’s slow, deliberate, and deeply local. Power starts in the communes and only reaches the federal level after passing through layers of consultation.

The Federal Council, a seven-member executive shared across multiple parties, reflects this philosophy pretty well. There’s no winner-takes-all. Decisions get negotiated until broad agreement is reached, even if that takes time.

Working on projects like Stadtidee Aarau and Kultur Komitee Winterthur has given me a close-up view of how this plays out in practice. Citizens propose, deliberate, and actually allocate public budgets. It’s messy and slow and real in a way that formal voting rarely captures.

There’s also something fitting about where I’m doing this work. Wädenswil’s reading societies in the 1790s collected evidence of local rights against urban control before joining the Bockenkrieg uprising of 1804. Self-governance here has deep roots.

Democracy as an evolving dialogue

Living across these three places has convinced me that democracy is not a finished product. Each system I’ve been part of represents a different take on the same basic challenge: how do you turn diverse individual preferences into legitimate collective decisions in a way people can trust?

Australia leans into institutional design. Taiwan bets on civic imagination and technology. Switzerland relies on deliberation and decentralisation. None of them has figured it out perfectly, but together they show that democracy is more of an evolving dialogue than a fixed destination.

The algorithmic frontier

What worries me now is that a new layer is being added to this dialogue, and we barely notice it happening. Algorithms increasingly shape what information we see, what choices feel available to us, and how we form opinions. These systems make real decisions about participation, yet they’re almost never treated as political.

Democracy has always been algorithmic in a loose sense: it aggregates preferences to produce collective outcomes. The difference now is that this aggregation is moving into technical systems that most people have no visibility into, let alone control over.

Building technology that serves democracy

I don’t think the choice is between embracing technology and resisting it. The more useful question is how we design it with democratic values in mind. That means being transparent about how algorithmic systems work, and being deliberate about what fairness, representation, and participation mean when we build them.

Democracy has always been both a technical system and a lived experience. The task right now is not to protect it from technological change but to make sure it evolves through that change in a way we actually chose, together.