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Democracy & separation of powers stand for something simple: Over long horizons, everyone is wrong. Take any governance system that is in power for too long. I
by whatever1 1y ago
Democracy & separation of powers stand for something simple: Over long horizons, everyone is wrong.
Take any governance system that is in power for too long. It becomes rotten and it serves its own purposes. Democracy breaks that downwards spiral.
It is not a stable system, it is not predictable, it is not cheap to operate, heck it’s not even guaranteed that it will work. But it prevents the certain path to self-destruction.
- mtsr 1y agoAnd there are actually more flavors of democracy that have been used to break this death spiral: - ostracism, where the people voted to ban a person who was too mighty or dangerous from the city of Athens for a period of 10 years; - random selection of (some kind of) representatives. This has predictable downsides, but ensures fair representation and prevents the existence of a political class.
- noduerme 1y agoDoes the Roman republic's tradition of appointing a dictator count? Do "illiberal democracies" with quasi-kings like Orban, Erdogan, Maduro, et al, still count as something comparable, or are these the downside of that spiral? Obviously everything that works, works until it doesn't.
- whatever1 1y agoThe longer a regime’s power is aligned with the establishment, the less democratic it becomes. There’s no clear-cut distinction between democracy or not democracy. However, if a leader remains in power for decades, it’s highly probable that the establishment has a firm grip on the reins and is unlikely to relinquish control.
- cjfd 1y agoAppointing a dictator for a period of a year in case of emergency is compatible with democracy. Appointing a dictator for life is not. Mainly because the dictator for the period of a year is, after that year, still accountable. Orban, Erdogan, and Maduro are on various stages of the road from democracy to non-democracy. Regarding the Romans another matter is of course that only a small part of the population has any influence on the senate, so it is in fact clearly not a democracy. If I have to judge what is a democracy, I am going back quite a while to what I learned in high school as the definition of a democracy. "A democracy is a form of government where the three branches of government, the legislative, the executive and the judicial branch are separated and the legislative branch is in the hands of representatives elected by the people."
- fragmede 1y agoDemocracy is more fundamental than that. It simply means rule by the people. The three branches of government was a later invention, and not all democracies feature it. Political theory surrounding the definition of democracy is more concerned with who has power and how they have it, and has less to do with how it is structured, as much as a US-centric definition may take it to be. Eg parliamentary systems are considered democratic despite a different structure.
- XorNot 1y agoThat sounds very American though. For example how does the Westminster style system fit into it? While the Prime Minister might be described as the executive, they're actually just the leader of the majority Legislative party.
- saghm 1y ago> "A democracy is a form of government where the three branches of government, the legislative, the executive and the judicial branch are separated and the legislative branch is in the hands of representatives elected by the people." This seems like it's overfitting quite a bit to the American political system; I've never heard of a definition of a democracy that required exactly these branches before, and it's hard for me to agree with the idea that something with two our four branches (or the division between the branches being slightly different) is somehow impossible to be a democracy by definition.
- GolfPopper 1y agoDr. Devereaux of A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry has a really nice overview of the position of Roman dictator over at his blog. [1] The very short version is that 'dictator' refers to two different things. One version is the dictator appointed by the Senate in the early Republic to solve a particular crisis, who had absolute power within their sphere of responsibility and who uniformly relinquished power when their job was done. The later dictators towards the end of the Republic were Sulla and Caesar. They seized Rome by force, then claimed the long-disused title of 'dictator' to give their actions an appearance of legitimacy. 1. https://acoup.blog/2022/03/18/collections-the-roman-dictatorship-how-did-it-work-did-it-work/ https://acoup.blog/2022/03/18/collections-the-roman-dictator...
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- dr_dshiv 1y agoBig fan of the second, which is called “Sortition.” Seems powerful https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
- thechao 1y agoA lot of people really kick back on sortition. I think a good compromise is this: everyone votes like normal. We then take the top K candidates who got more than some fraction of the votes. (Say: greater than 1/9th of the total votes.) The winner is selected, at random, proportional to the number of votes they received. Such a system would really really on having a large number of candidates on the ballot; my preference would be (in party ballots): top 2 (or 3!) candidates from each party, and any person who can get more than T signatures. (Where T is some number like “20000” or “5% VAP”.)
- roenxi 1y agoThat compromise has all the downsides of both systems without preserving the upsides - it creates a pool of candidates that will be biased towards narcissistic lunatics but no democratic checks so they can get in to office even if there is a consensus that their policies will be destructive. It isn't a terrible idea; I've long liked that sort of plan as a fallback in very tight elections to randomly decide between the candidates. But it isn't really a compromise with the sortition folk because it doesn't have the properties they're looking for.
- dr_dshiv 1y ago“Whenever the time came to elect a new doge of Venice, an official went to pray in St. Mark’s Basilica, grabbed the first boy he could find in the piazza, and took him back to the ducal palace. The boy’s job was to draw lots to choose an electoral college from the members of Venice’s grand families, which was the first step in a performance that has been called tortuous, ridiculous, and profound. Here is how it went, more or less unchanged, for five hundred years, from 1268 until the end of the Venetian Republic. Thirty electors were chosen by lot, and then a second lottery reduced them to nine, who nominated forty candidates in all, each of whom had to be approved by at least seven electors in order to pass to the next stage. The forty were pruned by lot to twelve, who nominated a total of twenty-five, who needed at least nine nominations each. The twenty-five were culled to nine, who picked an electoral college of forty-five, each with at least seven nominations. The forty-five became eleven, who chose a final college of forty-one. Each member proposed one candidate, all of whom were discussed and, if necessary, examined in person, whereupon each elector cast a vote for every candidate of whom he approved. The candidate with the most approvals was the winner, provided he had been endorsed by at least twenty-five of the forty-one.” https://www.theballotboy.com/electing-the-doge https://www.theballotboy.com/electing-the-doge
- Eextra953 1y agoI think random selection would be really cool. Imagine if some fraction of our representatives were chosen at random. Not enough to be the majority, maybe something like 1/3, but enough to have a real effect. The more I think about it, the more I like it. This would allow a sampling of all groups in a country to have access to power and decision making without the need to be exceptional in some way. It would also remove the self-selection bias of all elected officials.
- notahacker 1y ago> This has predictable downsides, but ensures fair representation and prevents the existence of a political class. This depends one whether you consider the existence of a political class to be purely negative. Seems like random selection of candidates who have no influence over what happens after their term selects for all the negative aspects of a political class (ability to enrich themselves and their friends at others expense, tendency to be ignorant of and ambivalent about issues that don't really affect them) and against the [at least arguably] positive aspects (institutional knowledge of how things operate, some sort of political philosophy which has some public support, some level of skill and drive to get things done, and the motivation to try to keep the public happy enough to reelect them or their compatriots)
- lurk2 1y ago> But it prevents the certain path to self-destruction. History presents us with far more examples of successful autocracies.
- actionfromafar 1y agoWhat is successful?
- heresie-dabord 1y agoFactually true, but this is like saying that history presents more examples of rotten teeth.
- lurk2 1y agoNo it isn’t.
- heresie-dabord 1y agoI enjoyed the article but it could be clearer and more concise. In TFA, the author wrote: Democracy, then, will be stable so long as the expectation of costs and the uncertainty of the future give the losers sufficient incentive to accept that they have lost. The essence is that all participants must be co-operative in their education, motives, and intentions. And this requires a system of reliable information and agreed laws. Democracy works within the tolerances of reliable information, demonstrable co-operation, and the rule of law. The US implosion is not yet irreparable, but it is a societal failure.
- amos-burton 1y agowe would not have this narrow vision of losers/winners IF the inequalities were reduced, it would not be as strong as it is today in our world view if this parameter was adjusted. In turns, "winners" would not feel like they are at the verge of loosing it all, constantly, because the wealth they generate would be stored into a living organism (a nation, or else). like having multiple bank accounts, with multiple currencies, that one being .... bio-economic i guess. democracy does not work. Or first, we should clarify the meaning of "it works". IMO, it did not prevented us from burning the world, this is sufficient to say that in a parallel universe i would bet differently.
- meristohm 1y agoCapitalism (control of land, labor, and money) has been on the rise since the 1600s[0]; to what degree has this economic model shaped Democracy? [0] according to Invisible Doctrine, a history of capitalism by Monbiot and Hutchison (2024)
- amos-burton 1y agoI have not read the book, i only read a short at editionsdufaubourg[.]fr/livre/la-doctrine-invisible it definitely speaks out to me. though, it looks likes another of those illusions to entertain you, us. You may want to consider that possibility some day, at least out of curiosity.
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- bazoom42 1y agoThis assumes ruling parties start out as “good” but becomes “bad” over time. A more pragmatic view is that different people and different interests have different ideas about what is good and what is bad, and politics is the stuggle between these viewpoints.
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- GolfPopper 1y agoMy understanding has always been that one of the "killer apps" of democracy as a system of government is peaceful transfer of power. It seems like one of those "nobody asks what the old software did well" questions; so many people (i.e. Americans) are so used to the idea of peaceful transfer of power that we don't ever think about what a major achievement it is, and how dependent on it everything we take for granted is.
- mitthrowaway2 1y agoAnother advantage of democracy is a source of popular legitimacy for the government, which helps prevent coups. Dictatorships struggle with this, and have to apply other countermeasures to prevent coups. Unless a dictator is some kind of super-popular national hero or has managed to convince everyone that they have a divine right to rule, they depend on the support of a group of elites to maintain their power, and have no choice but to prevent other ambitious people from concentrating power themselves. This means that even in cases where the dictator happens to be wise, skillful, and benevolent, their regime will suffer from corruption and fragility, because they have to keep doing favors for their support group to keep them loyal or else risk a coup. Being a dictator is a position that tends to invite well-grounded paranoia and suspicion, because you know that ambitious and bloodthirsty people want your job. So you need to keep files on people. They can't defer too much independent authority to talented bureaucrats or military generals or private business leaders, at least not without some guarantees on their loyalty, or else they run the risk of those people attempting to seize power. They can mitigate this by developing a cult of personality, but that makes it impossible to gracefully admit mistakes, and in conflict with maintaining a free press.
- int_19h 1y agoAnd the benefits derived from that. When the consequence for the elites of losing the fight for political power is being targeted personally, imprisoned, or even killed, it makes them cling to power using much more brutal and violent means to avoid this fate, which means more repression for the average folk as well - no dissent can be tolerated. In a modern liberal democracy, they know that they can lose an election cycle without losing their head. This is why things are so concerning in US - we've already lost this benefit, even though the elections are still genuinely free for now. I don't think they will remain so for long now that the stakes for their losers are so high.
- AnimalMuppet 1y agoIt prevents more than one path to destruction. "You either die a hero, or you live long enough to become the villain". Stay in power long enough and you are likely to become the villain, because power corrupts many people. So people who stay in power may have the wrong policy (because their approach quit working), or they may just become corrupt. Either way, there needs to be a way to get rid of them that is more peaceful than assassination or civil war.
- dragonwriter 1y ago> Democracy & separation of powers stand for something simple: Over long horizons, everyone is wrong. You could look at it that way if you believe that there is a unique right policy answer and government is the solution to finding it, but that's not what democracy and separation of powers are about, in terms og why they have historically been adopted. It can certainly be viewed as a reason to prefer democracy and separation of powers. But, really, democracy is about people having the right to make their own decisions and how to incorporate that into a collective government (or, more cynically, about people rebelling when they feel they have been deprived of that right and how to prevent it for the sake of domestic peace), and separation of powers is about protecting democracy by preventing the concentration of power in a particular institution within a representative democacy being leveraged to make a dictatorship.