It’s a much simpler idea to just have citizens vote for what they want their tax money spent on, by voting for candidates who will represent their interests.
It's a term from "Democracy for Realists", written by some democratic theorists. They disassembled the argument for it in the first half of chapter 1, and then spent the rest of the book refuting pretty much all the other competing academic theories that other democratic theorists actually believe in (scholars of democracy absolutely do not believe in the folk theory).
EDIT: Which is just to say that we need to improve the incentive structures (which QF takes a stab at doing, though there are other approaches). We need these experiments because we need to learn what actually works -- the old theories never actually did, and the prior assumptions that made this disconnect negligible are starting to fail.
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I think your comment is operating under the assumption that the "folk theory of democracy" works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_theory_of_democracy
It's a term from "Democracy for Realists", written by some democratic theorists. They disassembled the argument for it in the first half of chapter 1, and then spent the rest of the book refuting pretty much all the other competing academic theories that other democratic theorists actually believe in (scholars of democracy absolutely do not believe in the folk theory).
EDIT: Which is just to say that we need to improve the incentive structures (which QF takes a stab at doing, though there are other approaches). We need these experiments because we need to learn what actually works -- the old theories never actually did, and the prior assumptions that made this disconnect negligible are starting to fail.