Forms of government

Anything that is not directly related to the game or its community.

Which form of government do you think is best?

Direct Democracy
6
17%
Representative Democracy
16
46%
Semi-Direct Democracy (think Switzerland)
7
20%
Dictatorship
3
9%
No government
1
3%
Other
2
6%
 
Total votes : 35

Forms of government

Postby Hrafn » Wed Jan 11, 2017 9:52 am

I touched upon this in another topic, and I realized that there has not been a thread about this AFAIK.

I'm kind-of in a hurry right now, but I'll try to elaborate on my thoughts on this later.
Last edited by Hrafn on Fri Jan 27, 2017 6:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Direct vs Representative Democracy

Postby MarkWill » Wed Jan 11, 2017 8:44 pm

I support representative democracy provided there is ranked choice voting. The first-past-the-post system doesn't allow voters to choose the candidate they actually support, and oftentimes results in candidates winning with only a plurality, and not a majority, of the vote. With ranked choice voting, which I believe is similar, if not the same thing, as instant runoff voting, then voters can rank their candidates by choice and no winner emerges until they have gotten over 50% of the vote.
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Re: Direct vs Representative Democracy

Postby Warlock » Wed Jan 11, 2017 9:34 pm

Something in the lines of a Tribal Democracy. I have some kind of romantic vision of the Shire in Middle Earth - probably it's because I've lived in a big city all my life (lol). :mrgreen:

Ideally people should be making the decisions that affect them and the politicians should be representatives of not "the" but their people and should exist for their sake - not the other way around. Elaborating on what is the wishes of "the people" when there are millions or even tens of thousands of them rapidly gets very "arcane" and becomes the job of an elite group of people in the major cities who live in their own bubble. Ideally, if the ruling body of a natural community cannot make a decision alone because it not only affects them, they delegate it up to a body with dito from other communities like their own. Some decisions that affect the entire nation will thus be made on a national level, but not stuff like "we politicians decide how much time you parents should spend with your kids because Basic Values™".

Now I'm talking about how things could be ideally - of course a system like that requires a society with the right kind of mentality as well, and a country as ravaged by social engineering as ours in particular doesn't have that currently. A good first step would probably be removing all the public funds that go to various Good™ organizations so we can have a proper civil society again (paying for services from private dealers like free schools is another matter - but that's a different discussion).
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Re: Direct vs Representative Democracy

Postby jamescfm » Wed Jan 11, 2017 10:14 pm

.
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Re: Direct vs Representative Democracy

Postby MarkWill » Thu Jan 12, 2017 6:43 am

jamescfm wrote:
MarkWill wrote:The first-past-the-post system doesn't allow voters to choose the candidate they actually support, and oftentimes results in candidates winning with only a plurality, and not a majority, of the vote.


A noteworthy point. Representative democracy which actually represents the desires of the population is a necessity. First-past-the-post will never achieve that and I actually disagree that even ranked-choice voting can.


It is nonetheless an improvement. Here in the U.S., where the two-party system has been taken to the extremes, voters have no choice but to vote for a Democrat or a Republican since the spoiler effect is often invoked to scare voters.

I believe Elon Musk suggested some form of direct democracy fused with technology on the planet Mars, if and when it is colonized. That leads me to something I've always thought about: why wouldn't you want to devolve power to artificial intelligence or technology if it made the best decisions for the largest number of people? I can understand the fear behind such a system, but if you got the results you wanted, does it really matter who's governing?
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Re: Direct vs Representative Democracy

Postby Aquinas » Thu Jan 12, 2017 1:42 pm

In the main, I prefer representative democracy, the reason being that elected representatives will (hopefully!) have the time and expertise to seriously focus on the issues they have to deal with. The average citizen would simply not have the time, interest or expertise in examining each and every piece of legislation that is proposed. A lot of the business of law making is actually very tedious, technical, boring and time-consuming...and that's what we need representatives for.

That said, on certain very important issues, I do think direct democracy (ie. referendums) can play a useful role.

However, to be honest, recent experience has cooled my enthusiasm for referendum, since the last two referendums in the UK (one on EU membership, the other on electoral reform) were not very reassuring affairs. I suppose you could call me an elitist who's bitter about being on the losing side in both of those referendums (and perhaps that's true to an extent!)...but the point I would make is that the referendums were not great exercises in genuine public consultation, the reason being there was a huge amount of misrepresentation, misinformation, media bias and general public ignorance.
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Re: Direct vs Representative Democracy

Postby Reddy » Fri Jan 13, 2017 3:53 pm

As someone in favour of a technocracy operating within an illiberal democratic system, direct democracy is hardly my favourite thing. However if we have to have it, I think it works best on the local government level. Something about local government creates petty, hyperactive and corrupt tyrants and nothing like a bit of mobocracy to reign them in. I can give a few examples in the city where I live when City officials have been assaulted or harassed while in the process of terrorising residents with whatever silly or impractical regulation they have come up with. Not a fan of political violence but sometimes there's no alternative.
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Re: Direct vs Representative Democracy

Postby Hrafn » Sun Jan 15, 2017 7:41 pm

Disclaimer: I got drunk half-way through editing this post. Now I'm off headbanging. Bye!

jamescfm wrote:In a utopian society, it would be difficult to argue against direct democracy. People should make the decisions that affect them. Nonetheless, we live in a far from utopian society and as a result, I struggle to believe that direct democracy would be beneficial. Consider, for example, the extremely asymmetric distribution of information and education prevalent in every country in the world. Ultimately, the individual with a degree in economics is in a much better decision to make decisions about monetary and fiscal policy than the individual who dropped out of the education system before puberty. That isn't to say that the first individual is any more capable, it's often just that they have been more fortunate. Realistically, we will never reach a position where every member of society is well-informed enough to make decisions on the vast plethora of issues which governments have to legislate upon thus I feel representative democracy is preferable.

Aquinas wrote:In the main, I prefer representative democracy, the reason being that elected representatives will (hopefully!) have the time and expertise to seriously focus on the issues they have to deal with. The average citizen would simply not have the time, interest or expertise in examining each and every piece of legislation that is proposed. A lot of the business of law making is actually very tedious, technical, boring and time-consuming...and that's what we need representatives for.

Fair points, but if the average voter is too incompetent to vote directly on the issues, how can he be competent to decide which politician is most qualified to do so? In a direct democracy, you simply need to read up on, say, the advantages and disadvantages of various energy sources, and then vote according to that, a simple matter for anyone who has an interest in energy. Representative democracy adds additional layers of difficulty, since you have to not only be well-read on the issue - you also have to find out which party/candidate's policy is closest to the "correct" one, as well as look into their history to see whether or not they are trustworthy. And even then there is still no guarantee that they will actually deliver, since they will have to make deals with other parties, so you have to do a lot of tactics and strategy.

Worse yet, even if you manage to find a party/candidate that will implement a good energy policy, they will have positions on dozens of other issues that you either disagree with or don't care about. For this reason I don't think that representative democracy compensates for the ignorance of the general public, but rather it exacerbates it by forcing people to vote for "package deals", most of which they may be clueless about, and this encourages groupthink. A direct democracy does not guarantee that people will stay away from things they know nothing about, but at least it gives them the option to do so.

Basically, representative democracy is a popularity contest combined with large elements of trickery.

Of course, putting every single issue to referendum would be impractical for several reasons, so we do need law makers. (I also happen to think that government should be involved with a lot less stuff than it currently is, but that's just me.) That's why I like the Swiss system, where elected representatives do most of the running of things, but where the people can demand a referendum whenever they want. It's not perfect, but it does reduce the inherent problems with representative democracy, I think.
I know that some people criticise the Swiss system because it has a low voter turnout, but in my opinion this is a feature and not a bug - for every issue, there will be a portion of the voters who don't care either way, either because it doesn't affect them, or because they have no knowledge about the issue. These people are supposed to shut up!

Aquinas wrote:However, to be honest, recent experience has cooled my enthusiasm for referendum, since the last two referendums in the UK (one on EU membership, the other on electoral reform) were not very reassuring affairs. I suppose you could call me an elitist who's bitter about being on the losing side in both of those referendums (and perhaps that's true to an extent!)...but the point I would make is that the referendums were not great exercises in genuine public consultation, the reason being there was a huge amount of misrepresentation, misinformation, media bias and general public ignorance.

I think that the major problem with the Brexit referendum is that it was a backlash against the establishment as much as it was about the merits of EU-membership as such. Again, a problem with the representative system! In a direct democracy, there wouldn't be an establishment to lash out against.

jamescfm wrote:Ultimately, the individual with a degree in economics is in a much better decision to make decisions about monetary and fiscal policy than the individual who dropped out of the education system before puberty.

Too bad that there are so many politicians without qualifications! I guess the system would be vastly improved if ministers were required to have appropriate degrees. Is there any country that has such a system?
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Re: Direct vs Representative Democracy

Postby Aquinas » Sat Jan 21, 2017 10:26 pm

Hrafn wrote:Fair points, but if the average voter is too incompetent to vote directly on the issues, how can he be competent to decide which politician is most qualified to do so? In a direct democracy, you simply need to read up on, say, the advantages and disadvantages of various energy sources, and then vote according to that, a simple matter for anyone who has an interest in energy. Representative democracy adds additional layers of difficulty, since you have to not only be well-read on the issue - you also have to find out which party/candidate's policy is closest to the "correct" one, as well as look into their history to see whether or not they are trustworthy. And even then there is still no guarantee that they will actually deliver, since they will have to make deals with other parties, so you have to do a lot of tactics and strategy.

Worse yet, even if you manage to find a party/candidate that will implement a good energy policy, they will have positions on dozens of other issues that you either disagree with or don't care about. For this reason I don't think that representative democracy compensates for the ignorance of the general public, but rather it exacerbates it by forcing people to vote for "package deals", most of which they may be clueless about, and this encourages groupthink. A direct democracy does not guarantee that people will stay away from things they know nothing about, but at least it gives them the option to do so.


You make some valid points here, but I would argue that when citizens vote for their political representatives, they tend to vote on the broad basis of their principles/political perspective/"ideology". A conservative will vote for a conservative, a liberal will vote for a liberal, a socialist will vote for a socialist and so on. ie. I don't get to vote individually on every single issue, but I do get the chance to vote for the candidate who I think will represent my wishes in a broad sense.

Hrafn wrote:Basically, representative democracy is a popularity contest combined with large elements of trickery.


:lol: To a greater or lesser extent, this is probably true of every election that has ever been held. However, on the whole, I would say representative democracy tends to work better than either dictatorship or direct democracy.

Hrafn wrote:I know that some people criticise the Swiss system because it has a low voter turnout, but in my opinion this is a feature and not a bug - for every issue, there will be a portion of the voters who don't care either way, either because it doesn't affect them, or because they have no knowledge about the issue. These people are supposed to shut up!


That's an interesting view, but I'm not sure I agree, because the risk of having frequent referendums with low turnouts is that the minority "special interests" end up wielding too much influence, and decisions end up being made which do not reflect the general interests of the citizenry.

Hrafn wrote:I think that the major problem with the Brexit referendum is that it was a backlash against the establishment as much as it was about the merits of EU-membership as such. Again, a problem with the representative system! In a direct democracy, there wouldn't be an establishment to lash out against.


I would say it is probably overly-idealistic to imagine there could ever be any system of government where there wasn't an "establishment" to lash out against! Even in a "pure" direct democracy where everybody voted on everything, you would still have an "establishment", you would still have influential opinion formers, political leaders, pressure groups, bankrollers of political campaigns etc. etc..

Hrafn wrote:
jamescfm wrote:Ultimately, the individual with a degree in economics is in a much better decision to make decisions about monetary and fiscal policy than the individual who dropped out of the education system before puberty.

Too bad that there are so many politicians without qualifications! I guess the system would be vastly improved if ministers were required to have appropriate degrees. Is there any country that has such a system?


I'm not convinced that would be a good idea, but I would point out that at least in the UK, most government ministers tend to have degrees, and you'll find a lot of them went to the top private schools and to the most prestigious universities. For example, see the table in this article: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/po ... 38116.html
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Re: Direct vs Representative Democracy

Postby Siggon Kristov » Sun Jan 22, 2017 2:33 am

I believe in having a technocratic executive body with a democratic legislative framework. It sounds geared up for conflict, but I can elaborate on the specifics of the system I'm imagining.
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