Robert's Rules of Order (1876)
gutenberg.org
gutenberg.org
I'm not sure what the Indian government uses but I suspect Robert's Rules are state of the art.
Similar to First Past the Post voting where there are probably some easy wins tweaks that could be made based on the current academic literature - but the sheer number of popular "sound good, don't work" ideas floating around make change highly risky because it will have to run the political process and still be a good idea when it makes it through. In practice everyone wants their pet topic to be able to bypass normal procedure.
I was also in a "consensus-based" meeting with a couple dozen people. It was dominated by one person who just kept insisting on getting their way, until everybody else got tired and "agreed."
Sounds like a manifestation of Nassim Taleb's "Dictatorship of the Small [Intransigent] Minority"[1]
[1]https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
I've been brought up to "always leave something on the table", but I understand that other societies hold the opposite.
It is far from perfect, but I feel it works.
I have been in many RRO meetings, and a few "CBDM" meetings.
I worked for a Japanese corporation for a long time, and saw their consensus system, which was painful, but worked. It was completely different from the "CBDM" meetings I've attended.
I once wrote up a very complete presentation and paper on real CBDM, but no one was ever interested in learning about it.
In my experience, most CBDM meetings aren't actually designed for "consensus." They are designed to let "the people that matter" accelerate the process of getting what they want.
It's pretty damn complete. It's actually a multi-hour class.
The US House of Representatives uses a set of rules based on Jefferson's Manual. Bill flow is a bit different than Roberts Rules of Order, but the concepts are very similar.
Been awhile since I read it. It’s not light reading.
Also, most folks use modern versions (copyrighted, so not open-sourced) of RRO.
RRO based off us/common practice but Congress, Senate and the House of Commons do a lot a "naughty shit" that are outside RRO / Citrine.
Amending a motion with non related things should really be ruled out of order.
The "naughty shit" is a direct quote from a former whip.
Might be similar for UK Parliament.
But you guys have the most downright entertaining government in the world.
It is online at https://erskinemay.parliament.uk/
But the executive has far to much power in the UK in my opinion - you can see why thye went after John Bercow as he was pushing back.
Dominated by "drunken yahoos" was her comment, I believe this is where Guido Fawkes cut his teeth.
I heard somewhere about a variant that would be interesting to try: everyone specifies a favorite option and a consensus option. If the consensus option eventually attains a supermajority, it wins, otherwise you choose a member at random and his/her favorite option wins.
Because random is fair but usually bad, there's an incentive to reach a consensus. Anyone who blocks the discussion is gambling with the risk of getting a bad favorite option.
You could probably fix the most egregious risks by say choosing at random from the options that a supermajority don't object to. (E.g. choose an option at random, if a supermajority has marked "definitely not this", then loop to the beginning and pick another one at random.)
When they have a big decision to make, he puts the division heads in a room, says "so, what are we going to do?", lets them bluff and bicker in their usual way, and then proposes in all seriousness the worst possible and least effective way to technically accomplish what has to be done. It's a gift, really.
It's effectiveness in unifying them through their desperation to make sure it never comes to pass is unparalleled.
He also had those same people give each other researched introductions to his leadership, which is every bit as brilliant and trollish as it sounds.
On the other hand, many other decision making procedures (such as many alternatives to the U.S. first-past-the-post voting schemes for elections) might sound good in theory, but in practice could fail utterly.
Even in the US, non-FPTP voting is starting to happen here and there. San Fran's mayoral elections used a ranked choice system if I'm not mistaken.
Item 14 is pretty interesting too. "Is the legislature the supreme political body, with a clear supremacy over other branches of government?" That's probably a no for the US, but who knows. The "experts" who make the determination are not revealed, so the whole index is really based on trusting what The Economist says.
Item 18, "Do special economic, religious or other powerful domestic groups exercise significant political power, parallel to democratic institutions?". I can't imagine how that can be fairly scored: the only realistic possibility is that the "experts" vote on how much they like the interest groups in this or that country.
There are lots of items like that. Even if they make sense for a democracy index, you can easily see how different people might give completely different answers.
In item 40, "Alternatively, % of people who think that punishing criminals is an essential characteristic of democracy", where you get the full score if that is over 80%. Wouldn't most people say that punishing criminals is an essential function of _any_ government, not having anything to do with democracy in particular? On the other hand, many dislike the very notion of punishment. In the US, this waxes and wanes; does the country really become more democratic during the "tough on crime" phases of the cycle? The index seems to say so!
Regarding item 10, the UK has FPTP but political parties other than the biggest two are nevertheless able to wield significant political power. Even if that weren't the case I wouldn't call it a tautology. Rather I'd say that the tendency of FPTP to lead to a two-party systems is one of its democratic flaws.
Regarding item 40, yes: most people would say that preventing crime is an essential function of government, but many countries value rehabilitation over punishment. You're correct though that there's some ambiguity about the meaning of "punishment". Without delving into the World Values Survey itself it's hard to say much more.
I can't put my finger on it but there's something about US culture that leads to sharp polarisation in social, racial, religious and political spheres.
You right its unique its more prevalent in PR systems its only rare cases where governments don't have a working majority in the UK
From a global perspective, the UK and US are currently undergoing existential crises - arguably due to people feeling politically underrepresented - whilst many countries with a strong PR such as Finland or Switzerland seem to be functioning better.
Most nonprofit membership organizations in the US were run that way at one time. But since the 1960s, there are more self-perpetuating boards and other schemes for taking control away from the members. So people don't get practice at running a democracy. Which is a problem.
Strictly speaking, this could be a subset of the group, so long as that subset is quorate. For some groups this quorate level is going to be a surprisingly small number of people.
Each was pathologically mismanaged to the point of embezzlement (literally) using consensus rules. I managed to force Roberts rules to be adopted in two of them.
The end result was that the user group that didn't adopt them stagnated and no new members have stayed for longer than three months in the last 5 years. The other two grew to the point where they were self sustaining. The coop managed to negotiate a 50 year lease on a property from the city council at $1 a year, the hacker space ended up expelling the whole board for mismanagement and reduced the monthly fees to a quarter of what they were because we were drowning in cash.
Consensus is a way to run therapy groups, if you want to get anything done peoples feelings only get in the way.
I thereby will suggest people take a look at Rosenberg's Rules of Order--which its author, Judge Dave Rosenberg, subtitles "Simple Rules of Parliamentary Procedure for the 21st Century"--which is what many smaller governments in California have been standardizing on using (and so if nothing else, maybe you now need to know both, as these are actively being used ;P).
https://www.cacities.org/Resources/Open-Government/Rosenberg...
That's usually not the case, esoteric questions of the rules usually arise because parties have read the rules and at least one of them thinks they have found a clever exploit, and at least one disagrees.
> people go asking the lawyer
The parliamentarian, who may or may not be a lawyer (and when they are, very often so are a lot of the members, and anyhow, while there is a similarity to the roles, they aren't, at least relevant to the task at hand, being employed to practice law per se, except to the extent that the body is one whose rules have legal force.)
Most of the time people stick to some subset of the rules they have seen used before, but every now and then they get annoyed when someone else seems to be taking some liberty and they challenge it; at best this is because they have some vague memory of that being wrong, but more often it is because it feels like it should be wrong.
(My favorite example of this was one time I saw an eight hour long meeting get ground to a halt as the chair of a student government asked the supporting staff member to "do me (her) a solid" and search their old minutes to see what they did the last time they had this same argument, as they had all determined later that whatever they had done was wrong.)
On the "parliamentarian"... if you even have a "parliamentarian" (omg lol) you probably are in the category of group where Robert's Rules of Order might have even been designed. Most governments (not by area serves but by count; these are all the small districts and cities) are at most five elected or appointed board members, and they have access to a city/general manager and maybe (if they can afford the luxury), a lawyer. (My government decided we can afford access to a lawyer every other meeting. I have seen many governments that never have lawyers available during meetings.) The idea that any of the governments I am a part of would have access to a "parliamentarian" feels just absurd to me... :(.
("Source": I am an elected government official who was further elected by all of the local special districts to serve on the meta-government that creates, modifies, and destroys other governments; and I am further the kind of person who then--with glee--attended both the big annual conferences for my kind of government as well as of all of the meta-governments to talk about all of the different kinds of government ;P. I work with a lot of governments, and I'm seeing everyone migrating to Rosenberg's Rules of Order.)
In a well-run meeting, this sort of dispute should be dealt with by the chair simply taking a decision— The chair’s rule is final, unless overturned by an immediate vote of appeal.
Everything else is about making things go smoothly by setting everyone’s expectations about what the chair’s rulings will be.
Exactly this.
And to add on: if the members (in aggregate) do not trust the chair, then it really doesn't matter what rules you use (or don't use)—you're going to have a bad time.
For small or less formal organizations, trust in the chair may be all that you need. For others, condensing those expectations into a set of written rules helps maintain organizational transparency and coherency.
Here's a funny clip of Barney Frank filtering them. You can tell all the participants are fully aware of the effort to game the system:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Standard_Code_of_Parliam...
Not so sure these are actually very useful a quick read finds this gem
"There can be up to three motions on the floor at the same time"
Some people have come up with variations as well:
“The [Grateful] Dead still meet about once a month in a boardroom to discuss their projects. Initially, the meetings were free-for-alls, Garcia says, but somebody dug up a copy of ‘Robert’s Rules of Order,’ and they riffed on it until they had devised their own warped version of parliamentary procedure.”
Bill Barich, “Still Truckin’,” The New Yorker, October 4, 1993, p. 98.
> (so large that you would rather do anything than separately ask everyone for their opinion or even their vote on a matter... the "voice vote" mechanisms are thereby designed to try to shortcut real votes)
My brief time as a parliamentarian for college meetings suggested the opposite is true: voice votes (yea/nay) on the question are a great shortcut for small meetings when you can trust volume is count rather than emotion (and only need to ask "all those in favor? [aye]" and "all those opposed? [nay]"), but gets unwieldy fast in larger meetings where you either have to the ask the question individually to each member in a voice count one at a time or switch to a hand or ballot count.
RRO, from my reading, was built to cover the gamut of small meetings and large meetings, it wasn't focused on one or the other, and most procedures (especially in later versions) are as much about splitting large meetings into smaller sub-meetings as anything else because smaller meetings will always be easier to manage and faster to run.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21157398 - related from last year.
Like most of my gamer geek friends, I grew up stubbornly apolitical.
But if we had known about Robert's Rules, we likely would have become junkies. After all, half the fun of board games is arguing about the rules.
I'm very fond of having a well defined organization system that can be `imported` without having to reinvent the wheel.
https://www.usace.army.mil/About/History/Historical-Vignette...
The Roberts family has been editing it since “the beginning,” and still do. Presumably the next editor will be the current editor child.
This presents small problems in terms of continuity.
The real reasons RRO is popular is because RRO is popular. There’s no way to replace it.
Not a huge problem now, and unlikely to be a huge problem in the future. I’m not worried, and I don’t think anyone else should be either.
Maybe family fiefdom isn’t always a bad thing?