To begin, referring to a “theoretical nation” constantly is awkward and produces awkward sentences. To that end, I will refer to our theoretical society as Plicity.
So how is Plicity governed? Well, the government of Plicity needs to be fair and it needs to respect the liberty of its citizens. There are numerous ways to organize a society to meet those criterions. However, Plicity is a democracy. Democratic governance allows all citizens to participate in the political process and ideally have equal sway in determining how their nation is governed.
While an anarchic society would increase the liberty of its citizens and allowing for free association may produce various societal goods, it may not be sustainable long-term. Historical precedent suggests that power tends to coalesce around individuals and we transition from collections of equal individuals into bands with leaders.
Modern attempts at democracy have also proved to be flawed however. Various rich and powerful individuals have been caught bribing politicians. In first past the post democracies, society trends towards a two party system. This occurs because when alternative parties emerge, voters who abandon their traditional party to support the new party weaken their traditional party increasing the chances of victory by the party they traditionally oppose.
Furthermore, political parties frequently fail to capture all of a given voters preferences. For example: citizen A might support gay marriage and social welfare programs and her choices might include a party that supports gay marriage and social welfare or a party that opposes gay marriage and social welfare. Thus citizen A is forced to choose between two non-ideal options who both fail to capture her views.
In Plicity these problems are solved by taking principles from direct democracies. We now live in an era where information be capture and transformed almost as fast as we can send it. As Plicity is a modern nation with stable internet connections available to its citizens, Plicity’s government can take advantage of internet voting to more accurately represent its citizen’s desires.
How exactly is Plicity’s government structured? Plicity, like many democracies, is based on the tripartite system. Plicity has an executive branch a legislative branch and a judiciary branch. However these branches operate differently than they do in many of our modern democracies. All legislation begins with the legislative branch. In Plicity the legislative branch is essentially all of the citizens. Once a year all citizens are granted a one-week leave of absence from their work. During this time, all citizens are eligible to vote online directly on a variety of issues. During the course of the year citizens draft policy suggestions which are accumulated and placed online. After assessment by the executive branch to determine if the proposal is constitutional. (The constitution of Plicity will be addressed in another post.) For each issue, the pertinent details of all related policies are presented and citizens rank the policies. These votes are tabulated and the policy, which has the most support, is implemented. Included in every vote in the option to vote for none of the above policies or abstain. Support is calculated by weighting the ranks that citizens give to the policies. Ie. Their top choice is more heavily weighted than their bottom choice (which is negatively weighted). The ranks are summed up at the policy with the highest total is implemented. If none of the above wins, the issue is left until, new policies are drafted. This allows citizens to directly choose which policies are most meaningful to them, for each issue up for debate.
During the voting period, voters also elect the members of a three-member executive council. This council forms one part of the executive branch. The executive council has extremely limited legislative authority, which is vested in them for addressing immediate concerns that arise over the course of a year. For example, responding to wars, international crises and other issues that cannot wait for the annual vote. For these issues the council of three must decide to act by a 2/3rd majority. Because the executive council has such limited authority, they run on set of principles for which they will guide their decision-making. The council also handles meetings between nation states.
The second branch of the executive is the bureaucracy. They are not elected and are required to implement the policies chosen during the voting period.
This system has a number of benefits compared to current democratic systems. In particular, it allows consistent policy to develop over a number of years and long term plans to be made, as the electorate changes slowly. Whereas radical changes in government can occur in most modern democracies resulting in bills set by the previous government to be scrapped. Making consistent long term plans longer than the 4-year election cycle nearly impossible. Additionally, this system allows voters to chose policies a la carte rather than being forced to accepted packages of policy in the form of political parties or individual politicians. Finally, this system removes the cost of politicians from the equation making government cheaper and increasing the ability of the government to fund important programs.
This system of voting allows all citizens the right to determine the path of Plicity and where they exist encourage compromise options which are moderately ranked by extremists on both sides. This allows all citizens to directly impact their government and reduces the role of lobbyists to near zero. As lobbyists need to lobby the citizens directly. Thus it is a very fair system. The system is also more sustainable than our current system as it more difficult for special interests to gain undue representation in the government and it allows for long term policy to be written, which improves the ability of everyone to rely on consistent funding from government and to plan ahead. These benefits could provide a moderate quality of life boost but quality of life will be addressed more fully when I describe some of the specific policies of Plicity’s government. Finally, as we have not addressed the limitations on the power of the legislative branch in this post it is difficult to speak to liberty in the next post I’ll address the role of the judiciary and the constitution and describe how this form of government protects the liberty of its citizens, despite the natural restriction on their liberty imposed by the very existence of a government.
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