At 05:41 AM 7/26/2008, Michael Allan wrote:
This is true recursively. As D and E acquire more vote flow, the formal stucture of the sub-branches will elaborate the finer details of their own interest positions. (Was it Abd who called this a fractal?)
Yes, I called it, in fact, "fractal democracy."
They will then be under pressure from formal vote shifts in these structures, shifts that reflect the dynamics of interest. None of the details of this can be known in advance, nor can the overall pattern be predicted - it can only be revealed moment by moment as the election proceeds.
Note, however, that while it's interesting to consider how "elections" would function, I don't see, in the near future, the use of delegable proxy as an actual election method, with possibly some experimental applications. Rather, it is a device for negotiating and measuring consensus. In Free Associations, because the organization does not collect power for application by vote, there is no special power in "majority," rather, there is an increase of real power (i.e., power outside the organization resulting from agreement discovered within it), steadily, with an increase in the degree of real consensus found.
If some issue is being considered and there is 51% on one side and 49% on the other, and then this is going to affect some outside process, such as a political campaign, and if the measurement was accurate, we might see 51% of members, following the recommendation of their proxies, supporting the campaign of A, and 49% supporting the campaign of B. The net effect of this is actually pretty low, a net weight of 2% in favor of the election of A, which would show up as a 2% differential in campaign financing, other factors being equal, and 2% in numbers of volunteers available, etc. However, if a higher level of consensus can be found, the power differential rapidly becomes heavily one-sides. An increase in support from 51% to 67%, or only 16%, for A, would mean that the funding for A coming from organization members is now double that of the funding for B. We could say that in the first example, 98% of the effort going into the election is wasted, because it is simply spent in opposition. In the second, that is reduced to two-thirds. Still quite wasteful, but much less so than the bare majority. And we wouldn't stop there, I think. The goal would be to find very substantial consensus. How possible this is with major political issues is unknown. I do know that in small organizations, what can seem like intractable differences can disappear if there is sufficient effort put into finding consensus. Organizations of twenty to thirty individuals are, under some conditions, able to function with full consensus rule. It's tedious, often, and for that reason isn't necessarily stable over decades. But that problem can be solved. With delegable proxy, which works not just for large organizations, but which should help small ones as well.
FA/DP creates a structure which rewards consensus. It doesn't require consensus, individuals remain free to act on their own or in groups. (The DP structure makes organizing action groups trivial: any natural caucus can become an action group, with likely high agreement within the group. But the structure is fail-safe: if the internal agreement of a caucus is a false agreement, there will be little actual power exerted. The chief will ask for the action and the Indians will scatter. Another reason why I wouldn't want clients who did not actually trust me. Waste of time. We tend to think of power as being something collected, but FA/DP turns that on its head. Power exists out at the periphery, with each member, and most power is actually exercised by clients who don't have, necessarily, any incoming proxies at all. They are the ultimate arbiters; they accept suggestions coming from their proxies or they don't.
The structure is often described as bottom-up, but it really can be seen from both directions. Information flows in both directions. Proxies, toward the center, negotiate broad consensus and their votes are deemed to roughly represent the votes of their nonvoting clients. It doesn't have to be exact. The consensus, when negotiated, to whatever extent is going to be found, goes back out to the periphery, through the proxy network. It gets passed on personally, not merely by some organizational publication. You get a phone call.
I lived in a small town in Western Massachusetts when the beyond politics web site was set up. I tried to start a Cummington Free Association. Probably the single most influential person in town was very interested. However, turns out, that doesn't necessarily mean much. Anyway, one of the things I had noticed was that the town had a vote to implement a tax override. It's a Town Meeting town, and Town Meeting had voted to put this on the ballot, because tax overrides, by Massachusetts law, must be submitted to the voters in a regular secret ballot election. Town Meeting, of course, isn't secret, it is a deliberative body. Anyway, the override failed. There was a big gap between what Town Meeting decided and what the voters decided. Why? Isn't that an interesting question? Oddly enough, I didn't see anyone asking it! The Town of Amherst has a specially-chartered "Town Meeting." It's really not a Town Meeting at all, rather it is a huge representative assembly, individual small neighborhoods elect representatives. (They don't seem to get it, that this *really* is not Town Meeting, it is something quite different. But many Amherst residents are fierce about preserving their Town Meeting, even though, as a body of several hundred residents, it is unwieldy and famously contentious. Anyway, there were two elections in recent years where an initiative to abolish Town Meeting was on the ballot. In both elections, it failed, by a tiny percentage, truly close. Town Meeting supporters breathed a sign of relief. But didn't they notice that this supposed bastion of democracy wasn't supported by *half* of the voting electorate? Something is wrong, and who was looking at it? Really, I looked. Nobody is looking at it.
In Cummington, Town Meeting functions quite well, actually, it is rarely highly contentious, people are friendly and open, and newcomers are welcomed into the Town governmental structure. Moving in, we were asked if we wanted to serve on Town Committees. There is always a shortage of people willing to serve. It kind of turns your idea of politics on its head to realize that small towns often have a shortage of people willing to run for office, particularly the minor offices. There were opposed elections there. Sometimes.
Why did the tax override fail? Well, I can say why I didn't vote for it. As it happened, I did not vote against it either, I realized that I really didn't know whether it was a good idea or not. There were some problems with the proposal (a new safety complex), it seemed overblown, and I knew that a friend active in town government, much more than I -- she had become a town officer -- was opposed. So I simply abstained. I'm sure, though, that a lot of people would simply vote against a tax increase, unless they actually favored it. Bottom line: nobody called me to tell me that I should vote for it. Or against it, for that matter. Why not? Small town, about 600 registered voters. Now, some volunteer could have called me, easily. But what if I'd gotten a call from my proxy, the person I'd designated to represent me -- informally, in a Free Association, not officially -- explaining to me why the proposal was worthwhile? Would I have voted for it. I'm sure I would have. Unless the argument seemed totally bogus, in which case I'd be wondering why I'd chosen this person, and would probably change the proxy assignment. But it's highly unlikely it would be totally bogus.
More to the point, when the safety complex proposal was the subject of hearings, etc., my proxy would have kept me informed, would have asked me if I had any input to give, would have discussed with me any question I had, would generally have seen that my ideas were part of the process, and I'd know that. It wouldn't have been a mystery. Even if I didn't have time to go to the hearings or vote at Town Meeting, Town Meeting would have a sense of what I and other participating townspeople felt about the proposal, and they wouldn't have wasted time and money on a tax override that wasn't going to pass.
The communication is the point, not the voting in the Free Association, and a great deal would happen with no voting at all. When Town Meeting was ready to decide whether or not to put a proposal on the ballot, I'd assume that someone would request a vote within the Free Association, and the results would be available to Town Meeting. The Meeting could choose to disregard the vote. But I doubt that, if the FA were substantial, with more than 10% of the Town participating, that they would simply dismiss it. And one could hope for much higher extended participation than that.
And the whole point of an FA/DP organization is that, in theory, it is extremely simple to join and participate to whatever level one wishes. In most organizations, if you simply joined and did almost nothing, there wouldn't be much benefit, either. In an FA/DP organization, though, simply naming a proxy establishes a communications link. It costs very little (just enough lookabout to identify someone you think might have a good head or good heart, or, preferably, both). The present problem, of course, is that nobody believes that. It really takes some wrapping of one's head around some new perspectives to get it. Once FA/DP organizations are operating, people will be able to see it. It will be obvious, it's not actually complicated, it's merely hard to see when one hasn't seen it before....
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