What’s the use of a Parliament?
I won’t tell you what I was looking for, but here’s my amazing founding: a scientific paper by a Bulgarian mathematician proving that… a Parliament that has a voting majority is either “oligarchic”, or… inconsistent!
The paper can be found on Vladimir Sotirov’s website, either here or here. Direct link to the PDF editions: main, mirror.
Understanding the mathematical proofs contained in the paper “The Majority Voting Parliament is Either Oligarchic or Inconsistent” is not easy if the last time you used the set theory was 20 years ago. Should you have ever been able to understand those concept and notations (beware, you might not know the English equivalent if you only knew them in your native language other than English), you could do what I did, i.e. use Wikipedia to refresh your memory: Table of mathematical symbols; ISO 31-11; Iff; Set theory; Set of all sets; Basic concepts in set theory; Power set; Partially ordered set; Filter; Ultrafilter.
I already know a couple of readers who won’t need any mathematical help to understand the paper.
Outside mathematics, you ought to know about the Social choice theory and Kenneth Arrow’s impossibility theorem.
This is a terribly fascinating area of thinking (I hate the term research), because is shows how futile is this binary approach. Unfortunately, our societies are strongly using this 1-byte way of organizing things, even in countries where there are more than 2 major political parties and more possible “shades of truth”.
Majority voting is probably the key mistake we’re making. If you’re not aware of the Condorcet paradox, nor of the Condorcet criterion, you should then know at least that the Debian Project Leader is elected by using a modified Condorcet method, namely the Schwartz Sequential Dropping.
For the most simple situations, you should probably check first the Instant-runoff voting (“”IRV is also referred to as preferential voting in Australia, the preferential ballot in Canada, alternative voting (AV) in the United Kingdom, and sometimes ranked choice voting in the U.S. [...] At a national level IRV is used to elect the Australian House of Representatives, the President of Ireland, the national parliament of Papua New Guinea and the Fijian House of Representatives. [...] Since 2002, Instant Runoff Voting has been adopted in a number of U.S. cities.”) and the Borda count.
Try to understand their fictitious elections involving Memphis, Nashville, Knoxville, and Chattanooga. You’ll be surprised. Reasonable compromises can exist, but then…
As long as the methodology used to elect the members of the Parliament is flawed throughout the world, and the same majority voting system is used by the MPs when they vote the bills, how would we expect this kind of “the winner takes it all” approach not to lead to a de facto dictatorship, being it the “oligarchic” structure putting all the power in the hands of the Speaker of the parliamentary majority or of the head of the majority party?
Of course, if the Parliament is “inconsistent” (most assemblies are so), then it’s even less fulfilling the meaning it was created for!
As long as it is impossible to find a choice function satisfying all the “good” conditions — at least when you deal with at least three alternatives, as Arrow shows —, and as long as the supposed solution of the majority voting — for the case of two alternatives — was proven by Sotirov as leading to a de facto dictatorship, what’s the use of attempting to avoid a dictatorship?!
The best you can get is inconsistency at all levels. Be happy with that.
Now that we know that voting doesn’t work (at least in practice), nor would consensus be any more feasible, how about an idea of Brian Martin, presented in an older post, which involves something called… DEMARCHY?
Demarchy is based on random selection of individuals to serve in decision-making groups which deal with particular functions or services, such as roads or education. Forget the state and forget bureaucracies. In a full-fledged demarchy, all this is replaced by a network of groups whose members are randomly selected, each of which deals with a particular function in a particular area.
Is this a mixture of democracy and anarchy, or rather democracy and… what? The randomness couldn’t lead to a situation any worse than what we’re currently experiencing on Planet Earth, right?
However, for demarchy to work, at least one adjustment has to be done IMHO, to avoid it only be “yet another so-called democracy, only with a pinch of randomness”: instead of randomly-chosen members of decision-making groups, why not having randomly-chosen local dictators, each having the authority over a very specific function in a particular area?
In some fields, such local dictators might be as well technocrats, but technocracy is a an abused concept that needs further theoretical exploration.
I personally believe in the efficiency of the authoritarianism and in the utility of the “benevolent and enlightened dictators”, but the problem is that most dictators are just dictators and nothing more…
In the meantime, I am looking forward to obtain a copy of a book with problems from the Soviet magazine Kvant (Quantum), translated into Romanian and published in 1983. If my memory serves me well, the very first problem is about a practical example of… gerrymandering. Majority voting, right…
