Dust Dome Democracy

Governing the Red Planet

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When the time comes for Martian colonists to govern themselves, what kind will they choose? Will they learn from terrestrial trial and error? Earlier, I looked at some challenges facing Western-style representative democracy in the 21st Century. While it has served us well, it is time for us to consider better and more effective approaches to governance. With this question, I pose a thought experiment; if we could begin from a clean slate on Mars, how would we best design an effective pro-progress government?

Parliamentary or Presidential?

A recurring question that frames discussions surrounding institutional design is the debate between parliamentary and presidential governments. In a prior essay, I noted that the latter splits democratic legitimacy between the executive and legislative branches, leading to fragmentation. Is there empirical evidence that parliamentary systems, where the executive and legislative branches are fused, are a superior design worthy of Martian colonists? To answer this, researchers John Gerring, Strom Thacker, and Carola Moreno, looked at 14 key performance indicators that gauge government effectiveness across three broad areas; political, economic, and human development. They gathered data from countries worldwide, controlling for confounding variables that might skew the results. They then compared nations with presidential systems to those with parliamentary governments.

Parliamentarism appears associated with better overall political development, though the relationship is not very robust in some areas. Parliaments foster more effective bureaucracies and institutions. This corresponds with my thesis that presidential governments create a fracture in legitimacy that can ‘hollow out’ the functions of the state. Parliamentarism shines most, however, in economics; it is associated with better infrastructure, lower tariffs, lower trade barriers, and a higher GDP per capita.  Parliamentarism is also associated with lower levels of infant mortality, longer life expectancies, and other KPIs for general human development. Some research suggests that presidential governments are also less fiscally disciplined; the inherent fragmentation makes it harder to gain consensus, thus bills need to be packed with more “pork” for holdout politicians. 

The research concludes that while parliamentarianism doesn’t guarantee better governance in all instances, it does appear to do no harm relative to a presidential one. Since government is a means of solving coordination problems between individuals and society, parliamentary systems provide a more unified and straightforward means of achieving this. It should come as no surprise that Denmark, considered the ‘gold standard’ for effective governance, is a parliamentary system; a single point where social coordination problems are resolved.

Notably, Denmark also features proportional representation (PR) in its parliament, where the number of seats allocated to representatives reflects the proportion of people who voted for a particular party. This contrasts America’s plurality voting system, where candidates compete for office in winner-take-all districts. With PR, more people have their voices represented. PR also functionally eliminates the possibility of gerrymandering, where incumbent officials redraw their districts to choose the voters (instead of vice versa).

Less or More Democracy?

Perhaps though, the problems facing democracy are not merely of coordination and aggregation of public will, maybe we also have too much democracy. This is the argument made by Garett Jones in his book, 10 Percent Less Democracy. He makes the case that there is an ‘optimal’ amount of democracy; too little can be just as problematic as too much. He presents some compelling data to illustrate this point. For example, he notes that elected officials behave differently when they are up for reelection. Senators in America, for instance, tend to support counterproductive protectionist policies in the last two years of their term, when they know the public is watching them closely.

Jones adds that some government roles require making tough and unpopular decisions; those appear best left to officials who are not under direct public pressure. Central bankers, for example, have the unenviable task of controlling the money supply to balance the business cycle; often requiring unpopular interest rate hikes. The data shows that independent central bankers average 4 percent lower inflation, yet maintain about the same unemployment and economic growth rates as captive bankers. New Zealand is a natural experiment, until 1989 it had among the least independent central banks, it also had a stubborn inflation problem that averaged 10 percent per year. Within two years of giving its central bank independence, inflation fell to just 1 percent and has averaged around 2 percent annually ever since.

Jones highlights a similar advantage with unelected city treasurers. Alexander Whalley of the University of Calgary examined the interest rate on debt issued by cities with elected and appointed city treasurers. Interest rates are a good indicator of financial health; high rates mean lenders feel less confident lending to you. He finds that cities with elected treasurers tend to pay higher interest rates than those with appointed experts; over half a percent higher on average. Over time, half a percent amounts to significant savings for cities that utilize appointed experts.

Jones argues that highly technical exercises are best left to these appointed experts. Take tax policy, for instance, the US has a highly convoluted tax code that runs thousands of pages in length. Part of the reason for this complexity is that elected officials had to fill it with loopholes, carve-outs, exemptions, and deductions for their donors and constituents. The result is a tax code that exacerbates wealth inequality and depresses growth. We would all be better off if we allowed experts to draft these rules independently. Jones proposes the creation of a “Federal Tax Board” comprised of economists and experts to write the law instead. Congress’s role would be to draft a charter of general aims, and the experts would find the best way to implement them.

Jones also makes the intriguing suggestion that we allow government bondholders a voice in policymaking. The price and yield of a bond, like the value of a share in a company, is valuable information about the overall health of a state. As lenders to that state, from large banks to individual investors, bondholders have a keen interest in its long-term economic and financial performance. Arguably, bondholders have better information than the public about how well that government is functioning and how a particular new policy might impact its future performance. Therefore, Jones argues, it would benefit everyone to give bondholders some voice in parliament.

Jones acknowledges the role and importance of democratically elected representatives, who typically sit in the “lower house” of a legislature but suggests they be balanced by an upper house of “wisdom,” which he calls the Sapientum. This upper house would require substantially higher levels of education to join and may allocate some seats to bondholders who hold the nation’s debt. The goal, he says, is still democracy, just less of it. While Denmark is often held up as the ‘gold standard’ for good governance, Jones says we should instead look to Singapore. Singapore is a semi-democracy with a strong rule of law and an independent judiciary. Since independence in 1960, Singapore went from a relatively poor backwater to having an 80 percent higher GDP per capita than Denmark.

On the other hand, political scientist Helen Landemore comes to the opposite conclusion. In her book, Open Democracy, she argues that the problems of modern democracy are not too much of it, but too little. The process of selecting candidates through the filters of parties, fundraising, and campaigning, has created an “enclosure of power” around wealthy and connected elites. She argues that modern democracies are better described as “elected oligarchies.” A true democracy, she says, would maximize representation through cognitive diversity in parliament and the best way to achieve this is to remove the “filter” of the election system entirely; to return to sortition.

Sortition, where individuals are randomly selected for office, has its merits. We could build parliaments that are more representative and reflective of the people. Officeholders would rotate frequently, would not need to campaign or fundraise, would lack “tribal” party affiliation, and therefore would be much harder to influence by special interest groups. Direct democracy through sortition, she hopes, would result in a truly “Epistemic democracy” that gives the people the power to set the agenda and deliberate. Presumably, an open democracy would be more stable; polarization would ease as opposing viewpoints could no longer hide behind the curtain dividing the ballot box, and instead would have to share the room.

Are They Both Right?

What does this mean for our Martian colony? At first glance, it appears that Landemore and Jones disagree. After all, one calls for more democracy, the other, for less, but I do not view their thinking as mutually exclusive. They both agree, for example, that influence from special interest groups can be corrosive and often leads to poor policymaking. They both also acknowledge the value of experts. Landemore promotes direct democracy but carefully notes that this does not mean that experts have no role to play, she recommends that experts serve in an advisory capacity. Jones, of course, also calls for an “upper” house of wisdom, which plays a similar role

Perhaps the ideal government fuses more democracy with less; a parliamentary system where representatives are selected via sortition, empowered to set the agenda, deliberate with experts, and pass “charters” or laws. The goal is to maximize cognitive diversity and make sound decisions. Achieving cognitive diversity representative of a large population is less challenging than it would appear. The number of people, or “sample size,” we would need to represent a population is dictated by the law of large numbers and does not grow linearly with population. At a 95% confidence level, we would need only 385 randomly selected individuals to represent a population of 500 million people. Of course, more is better.

Multibody Sortition

In our fictional government, the question becomes whether an “upper house” of parliament is needed and if so, what powers it may have. Perhaps the upper house can be advisory only, filled with bondholders and other experts with a long-term stake in the colony’s financial, economic, and political health. One concern I have, however, where the people set the agenda and pass laws, is that there may not be enough gridlock. Too much, as we saw in the Presidential and Parliamentary debate, can lead to a “vetocracy,” but too little can also present a problem. The factors of progress are often counterintuitive; the most effective policies are often unpopular, and the most popular are often counterproductive. Thus, there could be some merit to limited gridlock. In Rational Gridlock, authors Michael D. Gilbert and Scott Baker conclude that the optimal lawmaking design is two polarized institutions that must find common ground. So perhaps the best legislature design is a bicameral parliament, of sorts.

One intriguing approach to sortition, suggested by Terrill G. Bouricius, is multi-body sortition. He suggests a separation of powers, with one body setting the agenda, another drafting proposals, and another empowered to pass them. The agenda-setting counsel, for example, would be a “meta legislative body” similar in function to the Athenian Council of 500. The agenda council could be petitioned by outsiders and/or have issues raised by its members. In my view, Quadratic Voting may be ideal for this function. Sortition-selected members would be given X number of voting credits which they can expend by ranking the relative importance of issues placed on the agenda. Once their credits are used, they must leave.

Agenda-setting is easy enough, the problem with sortition comes with drafting charters or laws; large groups of people cannot effectively coordinate and laypeople may lack sufficient knowledge and skill to opine on policy matters. Bouricius’s solution is the creation of various “interest panels,” tasked with tackling agenda items. Each panel would consist of roughly a dozen volunteers willing to lend their insights and draft proposals. Volunteers would be a self-selecting group; presumably, they would have an active interest in and likely above-average knowledge of the agenda topic. Interest panels could be assembled in many ways, but to prevent groupthink and ensure maximum cognitive diversity, I suggest that ~60 individuals be selected from the volunteer group and randomly assigned to panels.

As many as 5 interest panels would be assembled to tackle every agenda topic, recognizing that at least some of them will draft poor proposals. In my spin on this idea, I would invite interest panels to seek outside expert advice as they work to draft their proposals. Perhaps these experts can be selected by government bondholders. The aim is to optimize policy design by leveraging the wisdom of experts with the knowledge of randomly selected, albeit highly motivated, laypeople. Further, as interest panels lack the power to pass laws, they would know that their proposal is in direct competition with others for selection. This “filter” should keep proposals from veering too far into extremism. I view the interest panels as the “upper house” of parliament.

Finally, a sortition selected “citizen jury” of ~500 (the “lower house” of parliament) would listen to the pros and cons of the various proposals delivered to them by the interest panels. This would resemble a large “jury trial” but with 500 members, we have a representative sample of the demos (the people), achieving true cognitive diversity. Unlike a jury trial, however, voting would commence without debate and via secret ballot. This is intended to maximize the “wisdom of the crowd,” to allow people to vote entirely free from outside coercion. Indeed, research from James Fishkin’s experiments with deliberative pollings found that “sortition-selected” individuals are more inclined to favor long-term and community interests than their elected counterparts. Elected reps feel compelled to vote for “popular” decisions, which taints their ability to vote their minds.

Once a charter or law is passed, the executive (which is fused with the legislative,) is tasked with implementation. If done right, we could split management from leadership. In the words of Peter Drucker, “Management is doing things right, leadership is doing the right things.” Here, the people would be the masters of their destiny, setting the agenda and passing laws, but leaving the finer points of implementation to knowledgeable, semi-independent, highly compensated staffers.

Finally, I also envision a third branch, loosely modeled after the Nomothetai in ancient Athens, which was tasked with reviewing and editing law. Via this third branch, anyone could challenge an existing law, take it before a ‘court’ of appointed experts and laymen, and make their case about why it should be abolished or revised. The third branch would not be empowered to undertake these edits or deletions, but only to make recommendations and punt them back to the legislature or agenda council. This third branch would be paired with my earlier suggestion that all laws and regulations come with automatic sunset provisions. The aim is to build a government that defaults to subtraction rather than addition.

This multi-body sortition approach achieves several objectives. First, there is a separation of powers that prevents abuse of authority, but because there are no elections, there is no fracture in legitimacy. Second, we leverage the wisdom of expert advice with the knowledge of laypeople. Third, through sortition, we achieve maximum cognitive diversity; a demos that truly reflects the public’s will (we will discuss voting systems and how to best aggregate the public’s will next.) Fourth, we have a built-in mechanism to delete or revise existing laws, defaulting to minimal coercion instead of ceaseless expansion. Fifth, we have built a scaleable system that operates equally well at the national, state/province, and local levels, allowing for maximum adherence to the subsidiarity principle.

My view on this topic is ever-evolving as the research gradually illuminates the best path forward. We can only hope that the framers of our Martian colonial government learn from the trials, tribulations, and errors made here on Earth. Lucky for them, we now have decades of experimental data to work with. Building a ‘protopian’ society requires that we ask ourselves, what is and is not working. With the courage to ask these questions and the wisdom to find the answers, we can begin the task of building a better and more prosperous future, one that will hopefully be realized both on Mars and on Earth.

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