Imagining a more perfect democracy
Less personalism, more citizen review
Here we are at Inauguration Day: day of squalid spectacle, day of dread and disgust… day of takes. I cannot improve on
‘s bracing repeated admonition that “the status quo isn’t worth protecting”, nor on her experience-driven insight into the need for institutional reform. But I may hope to complement her reform program with some ideas on solving a different set of structural problems.I’ve argued before that elections are bad and an ideal liberal society would replace them entirely with sortition-based mechanisms. But it’s hard to imagine how we’d get to a full sortition-based system without entirely rethinking how every aspect of governance works. Could we realize most of the benefits with a much more incremental reform program?
I think so. If you say that’s wishcasting escapism driven by a desire not to think about our daily-devolving reality… then I can’t be too sure you’re wrong. We all have our copium.
But if you’re curious anyway, consider a few ways we might address the structural problems said daily-devolving reality has exposed.
Executive councils
Vesting executive authority in a single elected official is a particularly terrible idea: an open invitation to personality cultism and self-dealing, an obvious weak point in case of mental and/or physical degeneration. Allowing that executive to run for re-election makes these problems worse. Our sorry recent presidential history is far from the only evidence for this: in country after country, generation after generation, bad executives continue to blight humanity.
We could have a triumvirate or quinquavirate1 instead: a co-presidency with one new member elected every two years, serving non-renewable six- or ten-year terms, and the decisions the President now makes made by majority vote of the co-presidents instead. All the reasons most leadership jobs should be shared apply a fortiori to this case. And triumvirates have worked before, limited in their effectiveness largely by their lack of formalization.
There are important details to work out— tiebreaking rules in case a co-president is incapacitated or unreachable in an emergency, for example. But it’s hard to believe it wouldn’t be worth working those out, given the shameful and vastly damaging history of unitary executives. And electing a new co-president every two years would help standardize and moderate election stakes, as discussed more below.
A citizens’ Senate
Today’s US Senate has utterly bungled its central “advise and consent” function. Its rigid partisanship, coupled with the filibuster rules, means that it often blocks legislation it arguably ought not block, and routinely confirms nominees it definitely ought not confirm. Here is an opportunity for sortition to show most of its strengths with minimal downside.
Suppose that instead of having an elected Senate, we amended the Constitution to say that legislation introduced in the House, and appointees nominated by the President or co-presidents, had to be ratified by an up-or-down majority vote of a randomly chosen assembly of ordinary citizens. The assembly might be chosen in overlapping tranches similarly to today’s Senate, or all at once like a jury. And like a jury, but unlike elected assemblies, it could deliberate and vote in secret, allowing members to vote their consciences without fear. It would have subpoena power, like the Senate, to hold public hearings on whatever its members considered the important issues of the day. It could also try impeachments of elected officials, probably still with a supermajority vote requirement to remove them from office— but that supermajority would be much easier to achieve in high-stakes cases with a secret ballot (very likely if the Senators in January 2021 had voted in secret, they’d have mustered a 2/3 majority to remove and disqualify Trump, for example).
Again, there are lots of details to work out around just how to choose the members, but the idea offers benefits large enough to be worth that work. A citizens’ Senate would be a much better check and balance than the current Senate provides, and arguably more closely approximate the originally intended purposes of the institution. Randomly chosen citizens wouldn’t typically be well qualified to write legislation or make nominations for office; but they are perfectly well qualified to decide whether the nominees and laws elected politicians come up with are reasonable or not, and whether official misconduct is severe enough to deserve removal. This would go double if the citizens were chosen only from a pool of those who had served at a lower level— which leads us to the most plausible path to this reform: trying it out at the municipal and state levels.
Laboratories of better democracy
While less radical than an all-sortition government selection process, the above changes would still be huge and rightly require validation before instituting at the national level. States, counties, and/or cities could all provide that validation. You’d need something a bit bigger than, say, a small town; but there are plenty of polities in the US with 100K+ residents that currently have a unitary executive and either an unchecked unicameral legislature or a bicameral legislature with both houses elected. Any such polity could benefit from these reorganizations.
State and local reforms of this type wouldn’t just provide assurance that the federal version could work and be worthwhile; they would create a pool of people experienced with the new, better processes, and in particular with citizen assembly service. You could even require that the federal assembly— the Senate replacement— be chosen only from the ranks of people who had already served at local or state levels.
Moreover, at the state and local level, those reorganizations could be coupled to further useful simplifications. There are now numerous independently elected state and local positions that are often either (a) chosen in off years by weird subsets of the electorate that are very poorly informed about the candidates and their roles, or (b) chosen by partisan proxy contests even though nominally nonpartisan. Think of elected judges, DAs, school boards, and so on.
The rationale for those independent elections is much weaker if they have to be nominated by a majority vote of co-presidents and confirmed by a secret-ballot citizens’ assembly. So these reorganizations could also help make ballots smaller and more consistent, which is a better use of busy voters’ limited cognitive and informational resources.
Streamlined, standardized electoral decisions
At all levels of American government, the tremendous variation in stakes between different years’ (or, sometimes, even months’) elections distorts democracy. Off-year elections are typically too low-turnout to give a really representative sample of public opinion; presidential elections are existential social conflicts, vastly expensive all-important exhausting megabattles that draw in the lowest-information voters to vote for the worst of reasons; state and local election cycle calendars often don’t match the federal calendar, creating more weird ebbs and flows of voter interest.
The above reforms point the way to a much saner electoral picture. The goal is that every two years there’s another election with exactly the same stakes:
for each level of government, you choose a new member of the executive council, significantly changing but not totally overturning its composition;
and elect or re-elect, term limits permitting, a new legislator for your district (or a new slate of legislators, for multi-member districts);
and maybe vote on some state and local ballot initiatives;
and that’s it. No off-year or off-month elections, no weird separate offices.
At the federal level, this would mesh very nicely with the often-proposed reform of giving Supreme Court justices 18-year terms, overlapping so that a new one is chosen like clockwork every two years.
Imagine how much better suited such election regularity would be to the real-world circumstances of most voters, how much simpler it would be to understand and inform oneself about the options and consequences. Imagine too how much more sanely elected officials would have to act in order to get their key decisions past a secret ballot of an ordinary-citizen jury. Imagine how much better democracy could work in practice with such reforms… and may that imagination be a source of hope through whatever darkness is coming.
Yes, I had to look that one up. Thanks, Gemini.