Fred Gohlke wrote:
Good Morning, Kristofer
I'm finding steadily less to comment on; we seem to be reaching a
convergence of sorts, where we either agree, or we disagree but have
found that the only real way to find out which of us is right is to run
this thing in practice. Thus, I've been a bit slow at replying, because
I've simply been using the time to find out what to say.
re: "... would be good for the petition to include information
about the level of the person who originated it."
My initial reaction to this suggestion was unfavorable, oddly, for the
very reason you thought it worthwhile; fear that petitions coming from
the lower levels of the 'pyramid' would be considered less important. On
further thought, though, I agree with you. As you point out, it is
likely the distribution of petitions will be simplified by including the
petitioner's level. In addition, those who rose to higher levels were
deemed more representative of the views of their peers than those at
lower levels. It is reasonable to give their opinions greater weight.
One additional factor is that it may aid discourse among those who met
to make selections.
It also acknowledges that the structure is recursive; a pyramid is made
up of many small pyramids, which are made up of many small pyramids.
Instead of having to go all the way to the top, you may find some who
are higher up yet willing to listen to you, but if those have been
corrupted, you still have the option of going straight to the top (only
that you have to informally organize many others for your message to
hold the same weight).
re: "The assumption here is that if someone high up in the
pyramid petitions the official, he has the support of many
below him."
I agree this is a reasonable assumption in terms of how an elected
official initially evaluates a petition. However, the ease with which
constituents may support or oppose petitions provides a means of
confirming the assumption. Since it is easy for constituents to support
or oppose a petition, official performance will be better judged by
actual support than by implied support.
Beyond performance evaluation, though, is the impact of petitions on an
official's biases. Petitions represent ideas and convictions. They may
counter ideas and convictions held by the elected official or reinforce
them. They may achieve merit on the breadth of their support or on the
force of their reason. Thus, the bidirectionality of the system not
only provides a means of sanctioning, it also serves to influence
elected officials' attitudes. As you've pointed out, when participants
move to higher levels they can not represent all the views of all the
people who elevated them. Petitions provide a means of energizing views
which are commonly held but which are 'lost in transit', so to speak.
Yes, that is true, and it's what I meant by that the bidirectionality
would not only correct, but also provide information to guide.
Hopefully, the councilmembers higher up (including those that have been
selected for the public body) will choose to heed those words instead of
thinking their own ways trump them. In some sense, they have been
selected not to jump on the latest complaint and wildly swing back and
forth on the opinion scale, but they've also been selected not to ignore
the people. In any case, if worst comes to worst, there's the ultimate
counter of initiative and referendum. But that, also, can be a guide,
not just a sanction; if a selected official just forgets about a certain
issue, not out of malice, but of simply being limited (as we all are),
and the messages don't nudge him in the right direction, the option of
referendum will work as a crude steering mechanism.
I use the term "selected", since elected doesn't really fit. There's no
public election, there's simply a whole lot of mini-elections that come
together.
re: "... the pyramids exist ... and their composition is known to
(at least) the public officials ..."
In my view, the composition of the pyramids and all petitions should be
public information. It is true this will make those who achieve the
higher levels targets for influence peddlers but I don't believe such
corruption will be as easy to achieve as it is at present. Here's why:
Our political landscape is dominated by political parties and political
parties are conduits for corruption. Corruption occurs in static
conditions and party professionals are like apples in barrels,
susceptible to rot. The Practical Democracy electoral method is
dynamic; is has no organization or fund raiser to provide a corrupting
influence. Those who would corrupt our elected representatives can not
do so en bloc, as they do with parties, they have to corrupt each
elected official, individually.
There is an enormous difference between telling a party fund-raiser what
laws you want in return for your 'contribution' and trying to corrupt
individuals who have no need of campaign funds and who are selected by
their peers for their intellect and integrity. In addition to the risk
of exposure, which is always a threat when approaching a target, there's
the problem of effectiveness; corrupting a single official does not
ensure enactment of a law in the way contributing to a party does. This
method may not completely forestall corruption, but it will certainly
make it more difficult and less effective than it is now.
Given what you've said, how might the selected officials be corrupted?
There's implicit corruption and explicit corruption. Let's take explicit
corruption first. A party, or something being a mix of a party and a
gathering of lobbyists, might arrange deals to "mutual benefit": I give
you something, you give me something. As a large organization, they
would have the power to influence many at once, even those that would be
hard to influence individually. An analogous situation to this might be
the machine politics of the earlier United States, where the extensions
of political parties effectively paid off voters with their power; not
individually, but their supporters as a group.
Then we have implicit corruption. First, if it's true that voters will
prefer people who are of a special kind to be selected, and that special
kind is a minority, then that minority may have a bias that is not
advantageous to the people; for instance, politicians would usually
think that politicians should be well paid. Those who are elected become
a community, and like any other, they mind their own interests. This can
lead to representation problems, because if a majority of politicians
are more centrist (or radical, for that matter) than the people, there
are some points of view that will be heard less. This kind of implicit
corruption, I think, could be weakened on one hand by paying attention
to representation (part of why I think PR would be good), and on the
other by free entry, which in this context means that if you have the
skills sought by the people, you should be able to displace others who
are not corrupt, whoever you as a person are. The randomization helps
with this.
Second, voters may be tricked to select people that they know only on a
surface level. This is a sort of "advertisement" on the political level,
where organizations would run campaigns in favor of some person, hoping
that sufficiently many triad members would approve of this candidate
just because he's "someone well known". It doesn't even have to be
formal; there could be a bias towards well known people for this reason
(the triad version of a Reagan or Schwarzenegger). There's no mechanical
solution to this, but your determined randomization idea, where the same
triads are prevented from reoccuring, could diminish the problem. Also,
higher level councilmembers may simply be too capable to be swayed by
references of this kind.
Now, these forms of corruption may be minor in comparison to what we're
already seen, but it never hurts to know what their forms may take, so
that we can be prepared for them. If we find a way of weakening their
influence further through tweaks to the method, that would be still
better, and to know what to defend against, we have to know the nature
of the weaknesses of the current solution and of those who'd seek to
exploit it, in any case.
re: "My broad idea is that since the pyramid is exponential in
nature, with a fixed chance of petition from each at the
bottom, the number of petitions would increase exponentially
as well, and so in order to sift through the mass, there has
to be some sort of method for finding what's truly
important, some sort of information aggregation and
selection."
The constituents' ability to support or oppose petitions will probably
have two effects:
1) It will increase public participation because those who would be
unlikely to 'write a letter to their Congressman' may (and, in my view,
probably will) support or oppose the petitions of others ... if it's
easy to do so.
2) It will reduce the number of petitions because those who are likely
to 'write a letter to their Congressman' may find that someone else has
already done so. Of course, in this case, pride of authorship may
inspire parallel petitions, and that could lead to the murky waters of
petition amendment. I'll pass on examining that eventuality, for the
moment.
Are statistics available to show how frequently citizens 'write their
Congressmen' and can that data can be extrapolated to guesstimate the
severity of the problem? I'm not sure how helpful that will be, though,
because events may cause a flurry of petitions that can not be anticipated.
I don't know of any such statistics. Besides, they may not be
applicable. The situation is a bit like that with Plurality; simply
moving the statistics over to a different model may not work since the
incentives are different. For Plurality, claiming (for instance) that
there's no need for an alternate election method because a great
majority votes for one of the two parties disregards the effect of
voting strategy. Similarly, participation could be low because people
don't bother to write "if it isn't going to make any difference anyway".
re: turnover of elected officials
This is not directly responsive to your letter, but I'd like to mention
that one of the provisions of the Sefton Petition is that "the random
grouping mechanism must insure that no two people are assigned to a
triad if they served together in a triad in any of the five most recent
elections. This provision not only makes it unlikely that a given
individual will be returned to office repeatedly, it also ensures the
ideologies of our elected officials are constantly refreshed.
In two-party systems, particularly, there is a periodic wrenching from
one side of the political spectrum to another. Neither side ever
correctly reflects the true will of the people (which is, of course, the
feedstock for the demand for additional parties and proportional
representation). The method we are discussing will elevate those who
best reflect the attitudes and aspirations of all the people. They will
create a government that moves inexorably in response to the people's
wishes.
Yes. In a way, having only two parties (even when they're responsive) is
a bit like driving on a complex road with only two settings - full right
and full left. The left-wing party is elected - veer left. It goes too
far to the left, and the right-wing party is elected - veer right.
That's not a very good way to drive, as anybody would know.
You may say that parties, wanting to be re-elected, would stay in
center, but I think that all parties are susceptible to oversteering,
simply because they compare themselves to their supporters, who will
naturally be more aligned with their interests than is the people at large
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