What Would Democracy Look Like if it Were Invented Today?
elidourado.com
elidourado.com
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2936365
The reason we have representative democracy is not because of scaling factors.
It's because direct, voluntary democracy usually leads to utter failure. Our ancestors, who studied a tedious problem-domain subject called "History", could examine the case studies and draw this conclusion with some confidence.
There are better places to direct your attention if you don't like the outcome of the current system.
For example, should the power to create the laws and the power to appropriate funds be vested in the same body? Hayek wrote an interesting hypothetical Constitution based on this simple question.
My pet peeves are all around voting systems. For instance, voting in most countries is voluntary. That has well-understood failure modes.
And the UK and the USA have first-past-the-post voting. Which is ... just dreadful, actually. Arrow's Theorem shows that there is no "perfect" voting system possible, but some are definitely better than others. FPTP is not high on such lists.
Special footnote for the UK and other Parliamentary democracies -- winner-takes-all electorates are a feature, not a bug, because of the fused executive. Somebody has to govern, in Westminster systems, that somebody is the majority party in Parliament. Proportional Representation is terrible at forming stable governments that can get any time to focus on the purely administrative side. Ask the Kiwis.
New Zealand is vulnerable to it though: MMP makes it harder to form majorities, and encourages the election of "hacks" - abrasive party people who the system motivates to carve out a brand rather than inclusive electorate-centric members. This pattern also plays out in Gerrymandered electorate systems like California.
> The advantage is that parties like the Greens have a
> much fairer slice of the influence.
The Westminster system is fundamentally about responsible representatives for the purpose of governing. Members with electorates have an incentive to be mild and inclusive, to keep their electorate happy. Whereas parties have incentive to be abrasive to carve out brand. Electorate systems that favour parties have a jobs-for-the-boys culture.
Look at the US or Australian senate vs the lower houses. Or the UK upper house which is one of the most effective in the world for the purpose of performing quality review despite being not elected. It's also the only upper house I can think of that's not packed with teachers, lawyers and party hacks.
If anything, what we should be seeking is to reduce the reach of parties. For example, the Hare-Clarke system used in Tasmania doesn't have party names on the ballot papers and you're not allowed to hand out how-to-votes outside polling booths. (Tasmania multi-member electorates have a counter-effect to this though, and encourage party strength)
The continual pursuit of democracy for its own sake is not necessarily a positive force. Before the 1948 Australian senate reforms, the Australian senate was elected with each state being an electorate. This meant a high turnover of senators, giving more people a shorter role in public life, and it clearly defined them as reviewers. The role of the senate is murkier now: it entrenches the role of party in political life (through election and balance of power contests), senators have long political lives and it has become a place that otherwise unelectable powerbrokers go to sort out their superannuation (e.g. Graham Richardson, Noel Crichton-Browne).
That's a very good point. I wonder if it's possible to have a party-based system which does not encourage extreme brands?
> That's a very good point. I wonder if it's possible
> to have a party-based system which does not encourage
> extreme brands?
Two mechanisms: (1) compulsory voting, with (2) compulsory preferences for every candidate in the system.
Compulsory preferences. If you make people rank everyone, then they will tend to be harsher on groups they otherwise wouldn't bother with.
Compulsory voting. By making voting compulsory, you get input from people who are apathetic, but likely to be scathing towards people who are obsessed with a particular ideology.
I thought about negative votes as well, but went hard against it - it leads to intrigue and strategic voting, which rewards ingenuine behaviour and gaming.
Another mad option I've thought about: have an upper house, and make parties nominate five people for every upper house position. If the position is won, then the person to fill it must be randomly selected from the pool of nominations (by a computer or similar). I still have some attraction to this.
I feel like maybe there is too much power given to kingmakers, like the anti-smacking bill for example - the vast majority of the population didn't want it, neither National nor Labour really wanted it, but it got rammed through by the Greens because Labour needed their support to govern. But overall, I think it's still better than the arrangement here (the UK) where the Lib Dems got piles of popular support at the last election but retained relatively little power from it.
I'd agree that compulsory voting is good though. In Australia we also tend to vote on the weekend, which I think is also important and probably overlooked.
I'd fiddle with the Senate formula to allow more minority parties into the mix (for the past few decades it's settled into a stable tripartite pattern, 2 majors and a minor).
Also, given that Germany is the main engine-room that's keeping Europe financially afloat, it's clear that it's working there as well.
It is absolutely possible to govern from a minority party. But it's rare, and such governments tend not to be considered very good. In the pathological case, negotiations can leave you without a government for years. In jurisdictions where the executive is separate, that's not really a problem. In fused jurisdictions, it is.
But you've highlighted an excellent point - you're making it sound like parliament is ineffective, when they've passed more bills in 2012 than any other year in the last decade. In 2012 they passed 207 bills. In 2011 it was 188, and for the rest of the prior decade it hovered between 140ish and 180ish. Despite being a minority government, they are passing a lot of legislation - more than ever before. Hardly paralysed by 'endless negotiation'.
http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Statistics/stat...
2011 and 2012 are outliers for a simple reason: the Carbon tax was being first passed into law and then frequently amended.
The Australian Constitution requires that legislation dealing with appropriations / taxation only deal with that subject. Historical judgements by the High Court mean that every new tax is broken down into lots of little interlocking Acts with very narrow purposes, to prevent a whole scheme being knocked out in a High Court ruling.
You'll find a bump in 1999 Acts because of the GST, for example.
Looking at the list in my link, you'd have to be extremely one-eyed to call that list biased towards carbon tax bills. But even if you do carve out those bills (though I'm not sure why they don't count as work), the year is still on the high end of the normal range.
In Australia we do it by having a bicameral Parliament. The Reps is winner-takes-all and the Senate is PR per-state.
It's the short term that really hamstrings the ability of parliament to go through a thorough, protracted legislative review process and pass high-quality new acts. A lot of legislation-in-progress gets shelved as election year approaches, and when the new term rolls round, and the new parliament gets settled in, conditions have changed and the process needs to be started afresh. And legislation that does get passed is often rushed and quickly becomes obvious that as needing revision. The result is in my understanding a recurrent self-reinforcing cycle of low-quality legislation.
Most Australian states have 4-year terms, some of them are fixed by legislation. Whether or not it improves matters is obscured by the problem that anybody with talent is trying to get into the Commonwealth Parliament. Our State governments are traditionally fantastically inept and frequently corrupt, regardless of party.
It's from the Wednesday before the Saturday of the election, until and including that Saturday.
http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/bsa1992214...
EDIT: rereading your link, it looks like it's 33 days at the local council level, but at the federal level it's 'when the election date is called', which works out to being a similar thing (as it's usually a similar amount of time): the years between elections are free of electioneering.
"relevant period" , in relation to an election, means the period that commences at the end of the Wednesday before the polling day for the election and ends at the close of the poll on that polling day.
3A (2), (3) and (4) all include this language:
the broadcaster must not broadcast under the licence an election advertisement in relation to the election during the relevant period.
They vary only to cover different sorts of broadcasters.
I quoted it to show that the blackout period is created by the "must not broadcast" phrases. So ... you're agreeing with me? I'm confused.
> Australia also has a law preventing electioneering more than 30 days out from the election.
There isn't such a law. (And I misread you, thinking you said that there was a low against election ads within 30 days of an election).
You can campaign your heart out up until the blackout period.
My apologies.
I'd contend that voting itself has failure modes, and that making it mandatory is asking for disappointment. I'm not accusing you of this, but I find that many who call for coerced voting expect that this will turn elections towards the results that they'd prefer (their favoured party, in particular). In the end, I'd say that the right to not cast a vote can be as meaningful, if not more so than wasting the time to go cast an actual vote. For many, it is the closest that one can come to a "none of the above" option that they might otherwise prefer.
It has failure modes, for sure. There are no systems that meet all the objectives we want.
However compulsory voting tends to moderate politics towards the "median voter". In voluntary voting, only the most motivated voters turn out. Who are they? People with a burning, righteous indignation. Are their policy obsessions going to be about boring, middle-of-the-road administration and policy?
Experience says: not really.
> I'm not accusing you of this, but I find that many who call for coerced voting expect that this will turn elections towards the results that they'd prefer (their favoured party, in particular).
Definitely! In Australia the new Queensland government is proposing to drop the compulsory requirement. A cynic might suggest that this is because younger voters, who turn out at a much lower rate under voluntary schemes, vote for the opposition party.
> For many, it is the closest that one can come to a "none of the above" option that they might otherwise prefer.
In Australia this is done by casting an "informal" ballot. The main problem with NOTA is that you need rules to decide how to count NOTA ballots -- and what happens if NOTA gets a clear majority.
As for a 'none of the above', on a paper ballot, you can write what you want.
Of course, we have voting well organised - here you won't see queues of eight hours to vote like the debacle in Florida. This is despite mandatory voter turnout and paper ballots.
It's nice though, that you put an evil spin on mandatory voting by labelling it 'coerced'. I wonder if you call traffic lights 'coercion'? I personally think of it more as a citizen's responsibility, but I wouldn't try to colour it by calling it 'responsible voting'.
<blockquote> Post-Hayek and algorithmic information theory, we recognize that information-bearing codes can be computed (and in particular, ideas evolved from the interaction of people with each other over many lifetimes), which are
(a) not feasibly rederivable from first principles, (b) not feasibly and accurately refutable (given the existence of the code to be refuted) (c) not even feasibly and accurately justifiable (given the existence of the code to justify) </blockquote>
Mind you, I don't think any electoral system can paper over such an intransigent cultural division in a country. It'd be like trying to build an electoral system for a combined Israel / Iran government.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/21/facebook-site-governance-vo...
most people didn't know or didn't care
Imagine people vote to construct a bridge, and the vote passes by a narrow margin. Then, 3 months later when people first get hit with the tax that pays for it, many of them decide that's it's more money than they want to be spending, and they change their position on the matter. Now we have a partially constructed bridge that sits because the people who voted for it changed their mind.
Part of the reason that periodic voting works for us is that it allows a block of time for the new policies and projects to be executed without interruption. If voting happened continuously, no one would ever be able to develop a flow, and the system would feel a lot like an old man driving a car. jerk forward, stop, jerk forward, stop, jerk forward....
Either way, the point stands.
Allowing votes to be explicitly sold would be even worse. It would lead to much more control by special interests and the powerful. For someone who is poor, selling their votes as a package deal for a chunk of change in the short term would seem like a great deal. In the long term, they've probably just made their future even worse. Who knows what the end-game would be in this system, but it's almost guaranteed to be miserable for almost everyone.
So the specifics can be discussed, but I think in principle we need to get a lot closer to the direct democracy spectrum (while still preserving representatives and allowing them to have the final word, legally, to maintain the idea of the republic - but have a much more democratic republic).
I also think that campaign donations are basically an alternative "voting system", and it's currently extremely skewed towards the people with a lot of money. We have the "equal vote" system, but the "money voting" system is not equal at all, and I think it should be, to equalize the influence one person can have on a certain politician. Therefore donations should be limited to say $100 per person, and only people can donate. Companies can not.
I don't buy the idea that a company needs free speech. When a company uses its wealth to buy elections, it's not really the idea of all the people working in that company - only of its bosses. But besides, only people should vote - not entities. This should be a fundamental principle in any democracy. If most people in the company would actually agree with their boss - then they should just donate their $100, and vote for that politician. There's no reason to have people as a group or as an entity vote directly, or vote indirectly through money.
This is by design. Bodies politic which begin as "100% direct democracy" tend to transform themselves into "100% dictatorship" with alarming regularity.
That this is a common historical pattern was already old hat in Plato's time.
This is a really broken argument. These companies (more often unions, or public interest groups, or advocacy groups) are not buying the election by speaking. They are participating in public debate. They are trying to change people's minds, which is a hard thing to do. Ultimately, people choose in their best interest, so the last thing you want is for the government to pick and choose what ideas or speakers can make their points. In no other area of law is this permitted.
The First Amendment prevents the government from abridging speech at all. It doesn't matter whether it's a person or a group of people (or even a state, which also has free speech), or a faceless organization, or a union. "Campaign finance" laws only accomplishing providing politicians (the official campaigns) with a monopoly on advocacy for a candidate before an election, at the expense of preventing, say, the ACLU from running their own advertisements.
Companies tend to avoid marginalizing the public (their customers) by attaching themselves to a political cause. Unions and advocacy groups have a greater amount of freedom in spending member's money on changing people's minds. Turns out, it's not as easy as advertising on TV more than your opponent anyway.
Try to extend that logic toward books and blogs and you'll see the problem.
There is an implementation of it: http://liquidfeedback.org/ and it is used by many Pirate Parties (mostly informally but - I've heard the Italian Pirate Party uses it as the sole governing body).
Not necessarily the case. The problem even has a name: "Tyranny of the majority" [1].
I'd argue that decisions in government should be made by a majority vote, with each person's vote being weighted by the impact the decision will have on them. Currently, we have the idea that everyone should have an equal vote. Yes, determining the weightings verges on the impossible, but is there someway the Internet might make it possible?
Note that such a scheme would make the concept of "nation" and other levels of government irrelevant. Local decisions would automatically be make by a local cluster of people, whilst decisions with a global impact would be determined by a larger group.
Proposal: the government should take $1 from every person and give to me.
Determining the weightings is straightforward: I get 300 million votes, each individual besides me gets 1 vote (since the impact on me is 300 million x greater than the impact on them).
An exaggerated example to be sure, but your proposal will drastically increase the power of special interests.
Democracy appears to be the least worst system we have, with varying implementations of it (as with Communism, varying implementations existed or exist each with their pros and cons).
If a system looks great on paper, chances are we've missed something.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegative_democracy
So what do we need government of cities, etc. to really do?
I guess I'm going to suggest more of a minarchist vision with government playing the role of fulfilling the minimum expectations of the people.
Suppose the entire population really needs something (clean water, education, medical insurance, housing etc.)
Then the government should be able to pay for the basic amount of it (primary education, basic nationalized health insurance, etc.) through a single payer system. By using their collective bargaining power, the country's consumers could form a monopsony to achieve really affordable prices for these basic goods and services for everyone.
But, this would only be subsidized up to a point. For example, the first $10k per year of education per child would HAVE to be bought by the government. If you wanted more, you could simply buy it on the private market.
In a sense, this is the basic welfare state which leverages the power of collective bargaining through a single payer. But everything is out in the open, including the budgets. Everything we value as a society would be openly budgeted and justified on the internet.
The other part of what government does is regulations. Here we have a question of whether they need to force businesses to not do something. For example, if a building is not built up to code, should the government just condemn it and not allow anyone to use it, or should it simply require the building to advertise its shortcomings and let people decide whether to use it anyway? If a workplace has unsafe conditions, should the government force a shutdown or force advertising of the unsafe conditions?
Any system we where we give power to the government to expand its powers on our behalf, use could be hijacked by swaying the majority of voters little by little -- which is different from the majority of the people, because not everyone votes. The problem for example if very few people vote to close a particular program, or are even aware of its existence, but many people can motivate the expansion of a program by giving it new things to do.
In a sense, it becomes more and more costly to operate a democratic government over time, and we don't have effective systems to scale it back.
Australia has managed to get a monopsony for many pharmaceuticals via the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. It costs the taxpayer an enormous amount of money, but it's cheaper in terms of percentage of GDP spent on pharmaceuticals.
But if you look at pharmaceuticals as a percentage of GDP, it's cheaper for Australians to pay for the PBS through tax than for pharmaceuticals to be bought directly. That's because the Commonwealth has enormous purchasing power. It can and does alter the bottom line of multinationals by tens or hundreds of millions of dollars by including or excluding drugs from the scheme.
https://bitbucket.org/djarvis/world-politics/wiki/Interests%...
Feel free to contribute your ideas to the wiki.
They even have an explicit constitution:
"The Constitution states that 'the happiness of its members' is the Partnership's ultimate purpose, recognising that such happiness depends on having a satisfying job in a successful business. It establishes a system of 'rights and responsibilities', which places on all Partners the obligation to work for the improvement of our business in the knowledge that we share the rewards of success."
http://www.johnlewispartnership.co.uk/about/our-constitution...
[I particularly enjoy the irony of a retailer famed for being the favourite of the upper middle class being a workers co-operative].
In practice, management is a sufficiently specific and tedious job that it gets delegated. Indeed the concept of share ownership creates such a division by default.
Seems pretty good, I'd be interested in ideas in how you could game this system.
> An even more intriguing possibility would be to allow any and all side payments and let the market determine compensation. Citizens could pay politicians directly for their services, or politicians could pay citizens to be allowed to represent them. Proxies could have a policy of negotiating a price for their votes and then distributing the proceeds to their principals
This strikes me as a horrible idea, especially allowing politicians to pay citizens to be allowed to represent them. Where do they get that money besides lobbyists? It couldn't be from their proportional salary or the payment would be too tiny for anyone to care. There are way too many people who would happily sell their votes to whoever payed the most. This is unfortunate but it's precisely the problem a republic is supposed to balance.
This is the same reason you wouldn't want citizens to pay politicians for their "services". Too many people wouldn't care about anything but paying nothing or as little as possible. A modern updated democracy should strive to be about giving citizens equal democratic power with no bias towards class.
One issue not really addressed here is that you can't invent a system like this as if all actors are rational and self interested. You have to assume that a large percentage are completely apathetic, will act against their own self interest and the interested and powerful use every manipulative and dishonest tactic possible to game the system.
Another is how you would stop political parties from dominating the landscape, which is likely closely tied to access to television airtime. You would need some system of free airtime (and no privately paid political advertising allowed) for politicians with a minimum percentage of public support (who else is singing the Bulworth rap in their head now?).
You still probably wouldn't stop big political parties from emerging and using a common brand to succeed, especially with apathetic voters.
And I'm fairly confident that too much proportional representation would quickly result in a tragedy of the commons effect for a lot of things. Taxation policy would get interesting really fast. Unpopular minority groups would be in constant danger without a very strong court system. You're entire society would be much much less stable.
Other than that the whole idea of using proxies to implement a republic where citizens can directly vote on those issues they care about and let a representative proxy vote for those they don't (or don't understand) is fascinating.
Then again, I also find systems where you elect only a local representative and those representatives elect the next level and those elect the next, etc. to also be fascinating and that's nearly the opposite of a system like this.
It doesn't strike me as completely horrible. Lots of people all making small contributions is basically the kickstarter model. Prospective politicians could pitch thier platform on kickstarter or the like.
> Where do they get that money besides lobbyists?
But if politicians are perceived to be captured by lobbyists, they'll get fewer votes delegated to them, and then will be of less interest to these lobbyists. I don't see this as worse than the current, quite similar, lobbying setup. Maybe not much better though.
> how you would stop political parties from dominating the landscape
Maybe, but that doesn't make this proposal worse than the current setup where political parties dominate the landscape. Nor does it show that this is always something to be avoided.
It would work for some, and kickstarter is good proof of that, but what about all those who don't give a shit? Everyone has to pick a proxy (or all those who want to vote anyway) so the field will be dominated by the free options. If there are no free options allowed then this is basically a poll tax and is truly awful for a democracy.
> But if politicians are perceived to be captured by lobbyists, they'll get fewer votes delegated to them
Will they? Why would people act differently than they do now?. The results of a large scale test called every democracy tried so far has shown that that's not the case. You are assuming rational self interested actors participating in this system rather than human beings.
> Nor does it show that this is always something to be avoided
True, I was taking that as a given in any new system since it's a well discussed problem. A lot of the discussion around this idea assumes having a lot of politician/proxies competing for votes, but the party system has been shown to be the perfect method of keeping competition to a minimum, so I assumed you would need to limit party power in some way in order to get competition. But you are absolutely correct that it is not really related to this post except tangentially.