Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

Much of the US's governance relies on politeness, the assumption of good faith, and adherence to norms. It was a system destined to fail as soon as defectors realize the power they stand to gain by deliberately bringing the system to its needs (and then blaming their opponents for it, trusting that their own constituents are too gormless to realize or care).

In contrast, here's how the old Venetians elected the Doge, in a process so complex that it was presumably impossible to game to anyone's advantage:

"First, thirty members of the Great Council were chosen at random. Then nine of those thirty were chosen, again randomly. Those nine members picked the next set: forty people from the Great Council. And those forty? Twelve, randomly picked from their number, moved on to the next step. Those twelve chose twenty-five; those twenty-five were randomly pared down to just nine. Having fun yet? This set of nine members chose forty-five more; eleven were picked – again at random – from those forty-five. The eleven chose forty-one members. Those forty-one (finally!) voted for the doge. There were some additional checks against skulduggery. Each noble family couldn’t have more than one member in each group, and members couldn’t vote for their own relatives. Every time a set of members voted for the next group, more than a simple majority was required: around three quarters of the voting group had to agree. (For the final election, just 25 of the 41 had to agree.)"

https://generalist.academy/2020/11/06/the-election-of-the-do...

> In contrast, here's how the old Venetians elected the Doge, in a process so complex that it was presumably impossible to game to anyone's advantage:

It's not particularly complex. The numbers may seem arbitrary (there's actually a deep logic to them, although they may have been found by trial and error) but you don't need to understand the numbers to understand the process: each jury elects a set of people for its successor, and then a random subset of the elected people are picked to actually form the next jury, and there are several rounds of this until the final jury elects the Doge himself.

It's not immune to negotiation and horse-trading, but it makes it harder; probabilistic systems aren't vulnerable to Arrow's theorem, so tactical voting is much rarer. In practice it diffused power from any individual or jury, and acted to preserve a stable oligopoly; it ensured there were enough noble families to fill out a jury, but not much more than that (and getting functioning government from them absolutely relied on politeness and good faith and all that). Whether that's better or worse than a two-party system is open to debate.

Yes, the point is not to advocate for Venetian rules themselves, but rather to demonstrate a set of rules that seem to have been at least somewhat designed for the properly adversarial context that is politics.

> Much of the US's governance relies on politeness, the assumption of good faith, and adherence to norms

This is more a post-War (or post-New Deal) problem. If the federal government shuts down, towns and states still function.

The problem is so much more, today, is interstate and global. As a result, the tendency towards gridlock absent consensus, previously more a feature than a nuisance, is now careening towards something existential.

It's worth considering how old the US version of democracy is, and how many systems came after.

Americans have a deep reverence for their personal brand, but it's worth considering they don't install their government model on countries they conquer. Japan, Iraq, Germany, etc are all Parliamentary.

This often had more to do with adopting a system that has some familiarity to the conquered country. In the example of Japan, allowing an emperor as a more permanent figurehead.

That’s not the reason that we spent the 20th century installing governments that look conspicuously unlike our own: it’s that the US model has been known to have several severe, practically irreparable flaws for more than a hundred years, among the kinds of people who study governments, and those same sorts of people had some say in how we set up new governments, and evidently not a lot of pressure on them to make those look like ours.

We can’t fix ours in-place—technically, yes, but practically, no, largely for game-theoretical reasons—so we’re stuck with, effectively, an obsolete constitution. Fortunately, those who’ve set up new states in our name haven’t been forced to install that same known-bad model, so they’ve done better.

> the US model has been known to have several severe, practically irreparable flaws

It's also a different context. The problem with presidential systems is they become despots. That historically hasn't been a problem in America, because it's a big country with multiple power centers.

> Japan, Iraq, Germany, etc are all Parliamentary

Not relevant. The House behaves like a parliament. It's currently hung.

A typical characteristic of a parliamentary system is that there's a system to trigger a snap election if nobody can command the confidence of the parliament. Unless the parliament you're copying is Norway's, which apparently serves fixed four year terms no matter what, this kind of nonsense wouldn't go on for long.

Except in most parliamentary systems (any that I'm aware of), this kind of impasse would trigger an election. In the US you just get unending gridlock.

> his kind of impasse would trigger an election. In the US you just get unending gridlock.

True. Would not help us before November 17th, though.

Also, parliamentary democracies do fall into the trap of back-to-back snap elections. Given the current situation is likely to change within thirteen months, I'm not seeing a fundamental advantage to a parliamentary system with respect to this dynamic.

That's fair. Israel's parliamentary system is famously dysfunctional (perhaps because they don't have a solid constitution) and systems like the UK and Japan are also moribund in many important respects, partly by design.

The UK is a bad example of a parliamentary system, because it's even older than the US and even more systemically broken. Can you believe it, the US actually learned from the UK's system and didn't make all of its mistakes (though it did make some bold new mistakes).

Agreed, a parliamentary system alone wouldn't fix the overall zero-sum dynamic of two parties. IMO that's why the most stable parliamentary democracies also tend to have proportional representation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com