In the current political system in the US, everything is based on voting for a representative. It’s useless to vote for someone with no chance of winning, so you always end up with two parties that give their candidates.
If you allow people to vote for parties, and give congress representatives in proportion to the number of votes, you still end up with parties, but you can have many more of them, so they don’t have to be as powerful. I know there are countries that do this, but I don’t know which ones. Can someone from such a country tell about this?
One possibility that occurred to me a while back is to just make congress a random sample of the population. Nobody outside of congress will vote, so they won’t form any sort of political party until their chosen. There will still be some party effects. For example, if congress has to appoint someone, and they vote on it, it will go back to the first case.
Parties will still be caused by normal human biases. If you get a hundred people together, they will form groups. It can at least be improved from the US system, which forces the adoption of parties.
A random-sample Congress might work, but there’s two major problems:
-The expert problem: Running a government is not easy. There’s a whole slew of problems (including the organization and nuances of the bureaucracy, for instance) that require extensive knowledge to make informed decisions about. “Professional” politicians alleviate this somewhat, since they can (ideally) devote all their time to learning about these issues, over the course of several terms if necessary. (That’s at least one good reason why freshmen members of Congress usually aren’t committee chairs.) Without the benefit of experience, the de jure decision makers would have to rely (even more than they do now) on lobbyists, meaning government would be even more in the hands of those with the most money. Longer terms or more stringent selection would help with this, but then that runs into the second problem.
-The civil rights problem: Random selection may work for composing juries, but running a government is a full-time job that would take several years to become acquainted with (see above). Not only are people going to be rather unhappy to be pulled from their lives to do something they may not be suited for, but from a purely economic standpoint, you’re removing productive members of society from their places. (Imagine if, say, Steve Jobs was chosen—suddenly a major corporation has lost the leader it has been taking a significant amount of its direction from.) Exemptions based on various circumstances might help, but that would at the same time result in a lower quality of legislator.
To be fair, this is part of how the original Athenian democracy worked, which functioned well enough. Perhaps in an entirely new government, where society would then grow based around the expectation of being randomly selected as a legislator, it might work, but I can’t see this functioning in the U.S. system without major concurrent overhauls.
The biggest issue I see is the “lawmakers end up getting seriously owned by lobbyists” issue. I think that limiting, at the very least, to people who actively WANTED to be a lawmaker would solve several of your problems.
There are potential issues with the education requirements I outlined in my post (the question of “who controls the education requirements” leaves open possible corruption, a la literacy tests). But I think it’s worth considering.
I agree that this would work better for a new government than retrofitting an existing one.
The biggest issue I see is the “lawmakers end up getting seriously owned by lobbyists” issue. I think that limiting, at the very least, to people who actively WANTED to be a lawmaker would solve several of your problems.
One of the main advantages of the random congress is that it doesn’t favor people who want to be lawmakers. See HHGTTG.
I think that limiting, at the very least, to people who actively WANTED to be a lawmaker would solve several of your problems.
This, however, leads to the tragedy of the commons problem that it’s in each faction’s interest to increase the number of it’s members who WANT to be lawmakers to increase the chance that one of them is selected.
One possibility that occurred to me a while back is to just make congress a random sample of the population.
Huh. This is an interesting idea. I think I’d be okay with this if it were coupled with some kind of mandatory high school course(s) that ensure some minimal understanding of how the legislature worked. (Congress could be sampled from people who have a high school diploma).
Edit: Maybe a better idea—government provides a free/and/or/discounted college level degree, available to anyone. (or “degree-segment”, which can be applied toward general ed for regular Bachelor’s Degrees). The courses include economics, logic, public speaking, at least some sciences, etc.
People who do well (“well” being relative, of course, let’s say at least B+ish) are entered into the Congressional Draft. I think this would do a decent (at least as good as current system) of ensuring that Congress consists of people who have SOME idea of what they’re doing, don’t need to spend money or time on campaigning, and actually want to be there.
Do people think this would increase or decrease the quality of the U.S. Congress?
(If it’s a concern for you, for the time being assume the funding for the free college courses comes by removing funding from another program you don’t like)
Edit Again: Nvm, it was pointed out to me that with no long term accountability, new congresspeople would almost instantly be owned by wealthy interests, at least as badly as they are now.
I think anything that starts to go down the ‘intelligent/educated have more power’ route is missing the most important elements of democracy. Not only are you cutting out large parts of the population, but these would inevitably have locality/race/income correlations that made the whole thing even uglier. Probably even gender correlations.
Not to mention the problem that people have to choose to take it, and I’m not convinced that wanting to have that power is a good sign that you should. You might have a disproportionate number of ideologues/slight megalomaniacs. Not to mention the ‘tragedy of the commons’ issue mentioned elsewhere.
Parties will still be caused by normal human biases. If you get a hundred people together, they will form groups. It can at least be improved from the US system, which forces the adoption of parties.
For the random members of the population thing, they can just hire advisers. There’s no reason they have to come up with the laws. It’s sort of like how in the US, there are several bills that the President comes up with, even though the constitution gives him no power to do so.
[The president] shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper
If you allow people to vote for parties, and give congress representatives in proportion to the number of votes, you still end up with parties, but you can have many more of them, so they don’t have to be as powerful. I know there are countries that do this, but I don’t know which ones. Can someone from such a country tell about this?
We (Czech Republic) have usually four to six parties, the two strongest getting between 20% and 40% of votes. As it seems, the weaker parties are chosen mainly by voters dissatisfied by the strong parties and the political system in general. Consequently the rhetoric of the small parties focuses on “change” and “morality”; after they prove to be incapable of making any substantial change and no more moral than the average, they fall out of favour. Each term the voters select a new party which claims to finally bring the change. The practice in the parliament is probably no different from what you know, perhaps with some added extortion and power balancing within the coalition government. What beneficial effects did you expect?
You still have four to six proponents of what the change should be. In the US, you have two. Half the population thinks we should close the borders, give tax cuts to the rich, illegalize abortion, ignore unions, etc., and the other half thinks we should open the borders, give tax cuts to the poor, legalize abortion, listen to unions, etc. This doesn’t produce very many people who want to close the borders, give tax cuts to the poor, illegalize abortion, and listen to trade unions, for example.
Also, if the weaker parties keep getting replaced, the replacements are likely different, so people have to have their own opinion to figure out which new one to go with.
You have primaries, we don’t. When the parties are weak and small, they cannot afford primaries open to public, since their opponents would choose candidates who oppose the party’s policies. Therefore the primaries are open only to party members and you can’t be a member of more than one party (the parties exclude the possibility in their statutes). Even if you are a party member, the primaries are extremely indirect and opaque: e.g. in the Social Democratic Party (one of the big two) the process is basically as such:
The members of each Local Organisation (the basic unit, usually less than few dozen people) choose among themselves a member of a District Executive Committee.
The District Executive Committee elects members of a Regional Executive Committee.
The Regional Executive Committee composes a candidate list for the administrative region they represent. The candidates should be chosen from the set nominated by the Local Organisations, but the Regional Committee and also the Central Executive Committee has the right to add their own (that happens sometimes, although not as a rule).
The Local Organisation elects few delegates from among themselves to take part in the District Conference.
The delegates of the District Conference elect delegates of a Regional Conference.
The Regional Conference votes about the candidate list and may reject it, if it happens, then they may vote for single candidates on the list and change their ordering. In principle, more candidates may be rejected altogether and then the Regional Executive Committee has to compose a new list. (Normally the delegates accept any list they are given, for they don’t want to spend hours by the subsequent procedures.)
The candidates don’t make clear to party members what policy they want to pursue, since there is no point in it.
Also, the weaker parties rarely insist on realisation of their own programmes. Once they make it into the coalition government (and whether they do depends mostly on personal relations between the politicians rather than the similarities of party programmes), they start to engage in power games whose main goal is to implant certain people into the state bureaucracy. The weak parties rarely even have a clear distinct programme. Their campaigns usually stress such banalities as “fighting corruption”, “new style”, “responsibility”.
On the ‘random members of the population’ thing, I think this could make a very interesting ‘second house’ (so as far as I understand it, Senate for US and House of Lords for UK). So the detail of bills would still be crafted by a house that knew what it was doing, but then a sort of super-jury would check the bills and challenge things they didn’t like. One of the main benefits would be that it would reduce the feeling of ‘these crazy decisions, only politicians would make them, no common sense’ and ensure that there was a clear sense of what a random bunch of people would do.
With a bit less power/responsibility this isn’t quite as vulnerable to the various problems identified: but it could still be very easy to directly or indirectly bribe these people, and you’d still get the ’12 men too unimaginative or unimportant to avoid serving on a jury’ problem: lots of the most interesting people to have there would have good arguments to not do so
In the current political system in the US, everything is based on voting for a representative. It’s useless to vote for someone with no chance of winning, so you always end up with two parties that give their candidates.
If you allow people to vote for parties, and give congress representatives in proportion to the number of votes, you still end up with parties, but you can have many more of them, so they don’t have to be as powerful. I know there are countries that do this, but I don’t know which ones. Can someone from such a country tell about this?
One possibility that occurred to me a while back is to just make congress a random sample of the population. Nobody outside of congress will vote, so they won’t form any sort of political party until their chosen. There will still be some party effects. For example, if congress has to appoint someone, and they vote on it, it will go back to the first case.
Parties will still be caused by normal human biases. If you get a hundred people together, they will form groups. It can at least be improved from the US system, which forces the adoption of parties.
A random-sample Congress might work, but there’s two major problems: -The expert problem: Running a government is not easy. There’s a whole slew of problems (including the organization and nuances of the bureaucracy, for instance) that require extensive knowledge to make informed decisions about. “Professional” politicians alleviate this somewhat, since they can (ideally) devote all their time to learning about these issues, over the course of several terms if necessary. (That’s at least one good reason why freshmen members of Congress usually aren’t committee chairs.) Without the benefit of experience, the de jure decision makers would have to rely (even more than they do now) on lobbyists, meaning government would be even more in the hands of those with the most money. Longer terms or more stringent selection would help with this, but then that runs into the second problem. -The civil rights problem: Random selection may work for composing juries, but running a government is a full-time job that would take several years to become acquainted with (see above). Not only are people going to be rather unhappy to be pulled from their lives to do something they may not be suited for, but from a purely economic standpoint, you’re removing productive members of society from their places. (Imagine if, say, Steve Jobs was chosen—suddenly a major corporation has lost the leader it has been taking a significant amount of its direction from.) Exemptions based on various circumstances might help, but that would at the same time result in a lower quality of legislator.
To be fair, this is part of how the original Athenian democracy worked, which functioned well enough. Perhaps in an entirely new government, where society would then grow based around the expectation of being randomly selected as a legislator, it might work, but I can’t see this functioning in the U.S. system without major concurrent overhauls.
The biggest issue I see is the “lawmakers end up getting seriously owned by lobbyists” issue. I think that limiting, at the very least, to people who actively WANTED to be a lawmaker would solve several of your problems.
There are potential issues with the education requirements I outlined in my post (the question of “who controls the education requirements” leaves open possible corruption, a la literacy tests). But I think it’s worth considering.
I agree that this would work better for a new government than retrofitting an existing one.
One of the main advantages of the random congress is that it doesn’t favor people who want to be lawmakers. See HHGTTG.
This, however, leads to the tragedy of the commons problem that it’s in each faction’s interest to increase the number of it’s members who WANT to be lawmakers to increase the chance that one of them is selected.
Huh. This is an interesting idea. I think I’d be okay with this if it were coupled with some kind of mandatory high school course(s) that ensure some minimal understanding of how the legislature worked. (Congress could be sampled from people who have a high school diploma).
Edit: Maybe a better idea—government provides a free/and/or/discounted college level degree, available to anyone. (or “degree-segment”, which can be applied toward general ed for regular Bachelor’s Degrees). The courses include economics, logic, public speaking, at least some sciences, etc.
People who do well (“well” being relative, of course, let’s say at least B+ish) are entered into the Congressional Draft. I think this would do a decent (at least as good as current system) of ensuring that Congress consists of people who have SOME idea of what they’re doing, don’t need to spend money or time on campaigning, and actually want to be there.
Do people think this would increase or decrease the quality of the U.S. Congress?
(If it’s a concern for you, for the time being assume the funding for the free college courses comes by removing funding from another program you don’t like)
Edit Again: Nvm, it was pointed out to me that with no long term accountability, new congresspeople would almost instantly be owned by wealthy interests, at least as badly as they are now.
Upvote for “Decrease”
Upvote for “Increase”
I think anything that starts to go down the ‘intelligent/educated have more power’ route is missing the most important elements of democracy. Not only are you cutting out large parts of the population, but these would inevitably have locality/race/income correlations that made the whole thing even uglier. Probably even gender correlations.
Not to mention the problem that people have to choose to take it, and I’m not convinced that wanting to have that power is a good sign that you should. You might have a disproportionate number of ideologues/slight megalomaniacs. Not to mention the ‘tragedy of the commons’ issue mentioned elsewhere.
Downvote for Karma Balance
Did you even read the post?
For the random members of the population thing, they can just hire advisers. There’s no reason they have to come up with the laws. It’s sort of like how in the US, there are several bills that the President comes up with, even though the constitution gives him no power to do so.
The Constitution expressly give him this power.
Article II Section. 3.
[The president] shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper
We (Czech Republic) have usually four to six parties, the two strongest getting between 20% and 40% of votes. As it seems, the weaker parties are chosen mainly by voters dissatisfied by the strong parties and the political system in general. Consequently the rhetoric of the small parties focuses on “change” and “morality”; after they prove to be incapable of making any substantial change and no more moral than the average, they fall out of favour. Each term the voters select a new party which claims to finally bring the change. The practice in the parliament is probably no different from what you know, perhaps with some added extortion and power balancing within the coalition government. What beneficial effects did you expect?
You still have four to six proponents of what the change should be. In the US, you have two. Half the population thinks we should close the borders, give tax cuts to the rich, illegalize abortion, ignore unions, etc., and the other half thinks we should open the borders, give tax cuts to the poor, legalize abortion, listen to unions, etc. This doesn’t produce very many people who want to close the borders, give tax cuts to the poor, illegalize abortion, and listen to trade unions, for example.
Also, if the weaker parties keep getting replaced, the replacements are likely different, so people have to have their own opinion to figure out which new one to go with.
You have primaries, we don’t. When the parties are weak and small, they cannot afford primaries open to public, since their opponents would choose candidates who oppose the party’s policies. Therefore the primaries are open only to party members and you can’t be a member of more than one party (the parties exclude the possibility in their statutes). Even if you are a party member, the primaries are extremely indirect and opaque: e.g. in the Social Democratic Party (one of the big two) the process is basically as such:
The members of each Local Organisation (the basic unit, usually less than few dozen people) choose among themselves a member of a District Executive Committee.
The District Executive Committee elects members of a Regional Executive Committee.
The Regional Executive Committee composes a candidate list for the administrative region they represent. The candidates should be chosen from the set nominated by the Local Organisations, but the Regional Committee and also the Central Executive Committee has the right to add their own (that happens sometimes, although not as a rule).
The Local Organisation elects few delegates from among themselves to take part in the District Conference.
The delegates of the District Conference elect delegates of a Regional Conference.
The Regional Conference votes about the candidate list and may reject it, if it happens, then they may vote for single candidates on the list and change their ordering. In principle, more candidates may be rejected altogether and then the Regional Executive Committee has to compose a new list. (Normally the delegates accept any list they are given, for they don’t want to spend hours by the subsequent procedures.)
The candidates don’t make clear to party members what policy they want to pursue, since there is no point in it.
Also, the weaker parties rarely insist on realisation of their own programmes. Once they make it into the coalition government (and whether they do depends mostly on personal relations between the politicians rather than the similarities of party programmes), they start to engage in power games whose main goal is to implant certain people into the state bureaucracy. The weak parties rarely even have a clear distinct programme. Their campaigns usually stress such banalities as “fighting corruption”, “new style”, “responsibility”.
On the ‘random members of the population’ thing, I think this could make a very interesting ‘second house’ (so as far as I understand it, Senate for US and House of Lords for UK). So the detail of bills would still be crafted by a house that knew what it was doing, but then a sort of super-jury would check the bills and challenge things they didn’t like. One of the main benefits would be that it would reduce the feeling of ‘these crazy decisions, only politicians would make them, no common sense’ and ensure that there was a clear sense of what a random bunch of people would do.
With a bit less power/responsibility this isn’t quite as vulnerable to the various problems identified: but it could still be very easy to directly or indirectly bribe these people, and you’d still get the ’12 men too unimaginative or unimportant to avoid serving on a jury’ problem: lots of the most interesting people to have there would have good arguments to not do so