Democracy: The Threefold Way

Democracy: The Threefold Way

To make Democracy work as well as possible we need to get three things right:

• The Head of State should be the umpire of politics, not a player;

• The main (lower) house of parliament should have parties from the whole political spectrum, not two parties riven with internal divisions.

• Misinformation and disinformation are poison to democratic decision making. The second (upper) house should have the job of responding to these with open enquiries and using its powers to identify the sources of disinformation campaigns.

Head of State

The Head of State needs to combine ceremonial roles with acting as the umpire of the political process. This is the way the Governor-General acts in Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Having a Head of State with political power is a recipe for demagoguery which can easily tip over into dictatorship. Instead we want the political leader to be first among equals in a Cabinet drawn from and supported by the elected legislature which can change the leader quickly when necessary.

The failed attempt to make Australia a republic showed that the politicians were well aware that an elected President would be impossible to constrain to the ceremonial and umpiring roles of the Governor-General. However the voters were not interested in any other way of choosing a President. This proved to me that a monarchy is a valuable thing if a country has it. They do the ceremonial bit better, and they have the respect that an umpire needs. A remote monarch with a local representative has worked well in Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

We can add some needed democracy to monarchy. When voters are at the polls it is a convenient moment to allow them to vote to remove people from the succession, or even to request a vote on the removal of the current monarch.

The Main House of Parliament

The main (Lower) House of Parliament should be the main source of power, both legislative and administrative. Separating the two leads to endless difficulty. Single seat electorates lead to the 2 party system we see in most places. Instead we need to get the extremists out of the main parties and let them be represented in Parliament by small parties that accurately reflect their views. This allows sane centre parties to govern, and allows the majority to directly and personally confront extremist views on the floor of Parliament.

The government is formed by the Umpire (Head of State) speaking privately to those elected and finding a Prime Minister most likely to be supported by the House. The Prime Minister builds a Cabinet of senior ministers, who are constrained to resign if they wish to publicly disagree with Cabinet decisions. The Head of State should not dismiss the government unless it receives a vote of no confidence in the House.

The House of Review

In a democracy the people are the government. Even though it seems they act rarely and only through representatives, in fact the politicians are constantly aware of the voters feelings and beliefs.

To act wisely the voters need, as far as possible, to be well and accurately informed. We admit that sometimes the people want to be misinformed, and it will be hard to prevent that. The Constitution should clearly state the importance of correcting misinformation and identifying and calling out people creating and spreading disinformation.

The second (Upper) House of Parliament should be specifically tasked with pursuing the truth in open enquiries. It should be independently funded to support teams of well qualified researchers to support investigations into the correct information relevant to public policy, and into the sources of deliberate disinformation. It should be able to hold up legislation which does not contain adequate or correct justification.

Addendum

Compulsory voting impresses on people that voting is a duty, not some optional right. It has various advantages. It makes it hard to exclude groups through voter suppression. The processes that search for people who don't vote would also find people who vote more than once, if that were to ever become a problem. 

Preferential voting, also called "Single Transferable Vote", requires the voter to number the candidates in order. It isn't perfect and it is easy to prove that there is no perfect voting system. What it does do is allow people to vote for who they actually support without wasting their vote. The importance of this is consistently understated by those who think they are advantaged by first past the post voting.

I note my previous blog post on how to count votes in multicandidate elections with optional preferential voting: Gramp's Grumps: Counting votes in optional preferential.

There is also confusion in democracies because sometimes we vote for individuals and sometimes we feel we are voting for parties and feel betrayed when the winning candidate leaves the party but remains in Parliament. I have a post on addressing that: Gramp's Grumps: How to integrate political parties into the electoral process.

I have a proposal for a social media platform designed to resemble parliament in some ways. It's a bit nutty: Gramp's Grumps: AutoParliament.