At 12:03 AM 6/29/2006, Damien Morton wrote: >I had a revelation recently about a new kind of political party that >might well have a chance of succeeding in a two-party democracy.
You have seen something that resembles what some others have seen, in certain ways, and not in others. Some of what you propose has actually been tried. >Whilst representative democracy was an excelent choice in a time when >communication and travel were measured in days, weeks and months, >participatory democracy is enabled by communications measured in >milliseconds and travel in hours. I.e., direct democracy. However, the big problem with direct democracy is *not* travel time at all. It is scale, what might be called the noise problem. If you have a large enough group, and if everyone in the group has equal access to the "floor," the space fills with communication, far too much communication. Meeting time expands. It is this that has led many Town Meeting towns to abandon Town Meeting as the population expanded. And where Town Meeting still exists, it often functions simply because most people don't go. If they *did* go, the meeting would be completely bogged down. A solution to this has existed for hundreds of years if not more. It is the institution of the proxy; proxy representation is a form of representative democracy that does not involve elections. Rather, proxies are chosen. More about this below. >Over the last few years, I have been refining an idea for a third house >of government, ive been calling it the "jury house", which is formed >from a large number (10000+) of randomly selected people who sit for >random, but short, periods of time. The idea being, to inject an element >of participatory democracy into the representatorship that now prevails >in most western democracies. You should take a look at Warren Smith's DDJ proposals. http://www.math.temple.edu/~wds/homepage/dirdem.pdf >I thought about forming up the jury house as an unofficial political >body, but it would be completely ignored, and getting people to >participate in a body with no power or money is somewhat futile. It might seem that way. Actually, some of the most effective organizations meet this description, and they are far from futile. *Its members would not ignore it.* But you are getting close.... >But then I was reading how some of the larger states in the US were >going to do an end-run around the electoral college system by pledging >to give their votes to the popular winner. Pledge systems. I proposed something like that here, actually, certainly before I saw this in the media about the electoral college system. Note that electors are not legally bound by how they pledged to vote. Vote switches are rare, but they do occur. >I realized then, that you could quite easily start a participatory >democracy party, Bingo! If you want to reform the system, i.e., the form of organization we have, one way of approach, almost universally neglected, is to create the desired organization outside the system, i.e., voluntarily. Instead, reformers almost always try to implement change in the official system, but for their own organization, they use something other than democracy. After all, it is thought, democracy is inefficient and can't be controlled. So if I want to improve our democracy, I'd better not let anyone else mess with my program.... It's the elephant in the living room. > whose elected officials are contractually bound to vote >according to how their members vote on each and every single issue. Terrible idea, actually. A very good idea at the base, but our coercive habits arise quickly. "Bound." The elected official is no longer a free agent, chosen for trustworthiness, but, essentially, a slave. Not merely a proxy, who generally has the freedom to interpret instructions and to change plans according to new and immediate conditions, but an automaton, controlled by the outcome of votes from others. Yes, it looks like democracy, but the true foundation of democracy is deliberation. Not voting, as such. Anyway, it has been tried. Last time I looked, the experiment was still running. It's called Demoex, for Democracy Experiment, I think, and it is a political party active in a town in Sweden. They got a rep elected to the Town Council who is pledged to vote according to Demoex votes. They even started with delegable proxy (the only known DP experiment.) However, they ran straight into a serious problem, the strong opposition of the other council members, who were, in my opinion, quite rightfully offended at a fellow councilperson who was not voting her conscience. How that is working out now, I don't know. But the idea of a party which *advises* its representative, that is completely different. It was the *control* that was offensive. At one meeting, the chair asked the Demoex rep, "Do you support this motion you made?" When she said, "Not personally," he ruled that the motion had no support and was void. (Or something like that. The story is on the Demoex web site, which, last I looked, had an English language page.) > No >horse trading, no being influenced by lobbyists, nothing. Attempts at >bribery would have to be directed at a significant portion of the >membership population. General immunity to bribery would be a characteristic of Delegable Proxy systems if the number of direct clients per proxy were limited. Some proposals have suggested specific limits, but it is my opinion that in operating DP systems, once people understand what good service from a proxy would be, and they come to expect it, there will be natural limits. Good service means that your client can call you and talk to you, or if they leave a message, you call them back.... >Such a party might even appeal to all kinds of people, no matter what >their political leanings were, especially if the party presented itself >as a scrupulously neutral organisation dedicated to the concept direct >participatory democracy only, encouraging members of all walks of >political life to voice themselves through the system. "Scrupulously neutral." This concept is rare in political organizations. Take a look at metaparty.beyondpolitics.org, as well as beyondpolitics.org itself and the wiki, http://beyondpolitics.org/wiki. >Its hard to argue against it, and its kind of infectious. It takes a >structure that is in place and improves it by adding another layer. Yes. I've been writing about this here for something like a year. Look at the archives. There are two concepts: the Free Association concept, which I first encountered with Alcoholics Anonymous. Essentially, the organization never takes a controversial position. Its function is communication, not control. Control, if control is going to happen, happens through the direct and voluntarily coordinated action of members. But AA went further down this road: a Free Association does not, for example, collect property. As soon as you have property, you have decisions which must be made, and something to fight over. AA meetings, quite simply, don't fight over turf. (Well, I'm sure just about everything possible happens in AA, people will fight even if it is silly. But why is it silly? Because meetings don't own anything. Don't agree with how a meeting is conducted? Start your own, invite people to come -- you can go to any AA meeting and personally invite them.... It is said that all it takes to start an AA meeting is a resentment and a coffee pot. AA actually converted resentment into growth. Astonishing growth, if you look at the history of AA, which is far larger than non-members usually would think. It is *everywhere*. In spite of common belief, AA has no dogma. There are ideas which are common, so common that they are practically a consensus in AA, but they are not enforced, AA members are completely free to disagree with them, and often do. However, in AA, when members disagree with a consensus which has been hammered out through hard experience of millions of members, they have a disturbing tendency not to stay sober.... not because of AA, but because they are resisting (and often misunderstanding) good advice.... Anyway, Free Associations can be *quite* powerful and effective, *if* they can generate a consensus of their members. If not, they aren't powerful, which is exactly as it should be.... And then the other element is Delegable Proxy, which is new and largely untried. And it has many implications, I recommend looking at the beyondpolitics wiki. >Some thoughts: political parties in a representatorship gain power >through solidarity. Should a participatory democracy party split its >votes in congress/senate proportionally based on its members votes, or >should it direct all of its votes according to the winning block. My >inclination is that it should split its votes. My inclination is that it doesn't have any votes. It doesn't have any representatives in Congress. It merely advises its members how to vote. Because it advises them back through the DP system, rather than by taking official positions, it does not need to come to an agreement. However, the more it can come to agreement, the more powerful will be the effect, so there is strong motivation to seek consensus. This is the result of leaving all the power with the members, instead of trying to concentrate it in the organization. In order to have substantial power, you have to convince the members to exert it. Strictly speaking, "it," i.e., the organization, does not advise its members. The proxies advise those who chose them. (In the European proposals for delegable proxy, the proxy is called the Advisor, which emphasizes that role.) What happens in the DP structure is that deliberation can take place at a high level, including negotiation, compromise, exchange of information, and so forth, between people who have the trust of their constituencies. (We call these constituencies "natural caucuses. Note that while the FA does not take controversial positions, caucuses can. A caucus can act completely independently, if it wishes.) >On membership: What rules should govern membership, if any? $100 to >join, $1 per vote you cast (max one vote per person)? Free. However, proxies are also free to charge fees. You don't have to name a proxy to vote in FA polls, all members can vote directly. Some proxies, especially low-level proxies, will not charge a fee, others may. A lot of people, looking at DP at first, think of the proxies as equivalent to today's politicians.... but when a client pays a proxy, the client is precisely paying the proxy for service. The proxy is *expected* to vote in the client's interest, though the way we envision the system generally functioning is that proxies will be free to vote their own conscience and, indeed, I would not encourage setting up systems where proxies cast multiple votes. Rather, they cast one vote in polls, and the votes of all their clients who do not vote directly are added in the analysis. Who does the analysis? Anyone who cares to, it is trivial given a proxy list, which is what the organization would maintain. Some have taken the idea further and have suggested special proxy lists, where, for some special purpose, members may designate a special proxy, someone they trust to handle *that* topic or area of activity. Initially, I did not like the idea; but then I came around: of course, anyone may create a proxy list for any purpose they like. My suggestion is that whenever a special proxy is not named, the general proxy would serve. >Some questions: Can a member of the house of Representatives be >contractually bound in how they vote? No. I'm pretty certain about that. > Could the be contractually bound >to resign under certain circumstances? Probably not. They might sign the contract, but I'm pretty certain that it would be unenforceable. Bottom line: choose people you trust to represent you. Don't choose them based on their promise to do this or that. Such promises are often foolish: wouldn't you want your representative to vote what they actually think best, in the immediate circumstances, and with all the information at hand, with full staff support, etc., instead of what they promised a year before? If you don't like the fixed-term system, then change it. But in order to change it, you will first have to have the power to do so. If you can create the public organization you have somewhat envisioned, you can have that power. Well, *you* won't have it, but the members will. Proxies should be revocable at any time. No engineer worth his or her salt would design the fixed-term control system that we have. The hysteresis is deadly. >What do you guys think? Quite a bit, how about you? One Brazilian supporter of the Beyond Politics concept has been interested in how rural villages could be represented in national politics. Delegable proxy could easily serve to help with this problem: it is not required that the village name one proxy, but there are economic benefits of doing so. Essentially, if this system were in place, any village member could travel to national meetings, but, of course, most could not afford to do so. A village might end up naming one or a few proxies. Those might travel occasionally, but at other times, would have trusted proxies elsewhere, perhaps proxies from other villages. It's a chaotic system, in that there is no precise, neat, structure set up in advance. However, the human nervous system is organized pretty much like this, from the ground up. How about joining Metaparty? (And you can be sure that most of us will support other efforts that follow similar principles. One thing about Free Associations: they could fracture easily, but they tend not to, because they don't need to, unless the FA principles have been corrupted, and they can merge, even more easily, because all it takes is for communication to start up.) This revolution *will* happen, almost certainly, in my opinion, unless the conditions disappear (i.e., most essentially, freedom of association). It is too simple an idea. I think that once it is tried on a significant scale, that will be all she wrote. The real question is how long it will take. It *could* be quite rapid. And, then again..... At this point, however, support for the idea is too diffuse. This is changing. DP was independently invented in about four different places around the world, over the last decade (I haven't seen anything older than that -- I was working on it before then, but didn't write it down....) ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info