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In my mind, an unelected Lords is far preferable to an elected one for the simple reason that both houses will make mistakes. If the houses are both selected o
by regularfry 14y ago
In my mind, an unelected Lords is far preferable to an elected one for the simple reason that both houses will make mistakes. If the houses are both selected on the same basis, their mistakes will be correlated, rather than cancelling out. Given that the Lords is there precisely to hold the Commons in check by stopping its mistakes as early as possible, you don't want the Lords and the Commons to have the same biases.
I don't know that hereditary peerage is a good idea, but I'm pretty certain that an elected peerage would be worse.
- alain94040 14y agoThat's why in most countries, the second house is elected on a different rythmn than the main one. So you get balance. Interestingly, I have never seen anyone theorize about this. Everyone understands why democracy and elections are related. Parliament is a snapshot of public opinion at a given time. By using two snapshots taken at different time intervals, you get better reliability. Sounds obvious to IT engineers :-)
- gaius 14y agoElected politicans think as far ahead as the next election, be it 5 years or 5 weeks away. Hereditary peers think as far ahead as their own grandchildren, who will need to clean up and mess they make.
- regularfry 14y agoIt's still the same fundamental selection method, though. It's less bad if elections are staggered, but it's still skewed by the the same forces - for instance, public opinion can be consistently wrong about a lot of things. A purely random selection process would be better, but I've got no idea how that would work in practice.