|
|||||||
|
|
|
|||||
|
|
|||||||
|
|||||||
|
|
|
|||||
|
|
|||||||
Specialized Legislatures
As some of you may know, I used to be a member of the Democratic Underground (my username was Redeye), until I was banned in early September for an unknown reason. Before I got banned, I had a discussion with another DUer – arendt – spanning two different forums, one private messaging system, and in my estimate a 5-figure number of words, about the nature of government. More precisely, it was mainly but not only about a construction arendt introduced that I call the Specialized Legislature.
The current situation in every democracy and semi-democracy now is that there is a single legislature, which can be unicameral or bicameral, which has supreme legislative authority in unitary states and supreme legislative authority on federal issues only in federal states. This legislature legislates on everything the constitution allows it to: defense, foreign policy, fiscal policy, labor, education…
This creates several problems. First, the legislators are often ignorant of the subjects they legislate on; after all, what can people who are mostly lawyers and businesspeople understand about a national policy of scientific research, or about environmental issues, or about health care, or about electoral systems? Next to nothing, in most cases. And since there are many fields of such specialization, there are bound to exist important issues on which few legislators understand. Second, there is a substantial tradeoff between legislature size, which should ideally be in the 100-200 range (below that the legislature is insufficiently representative; above that the legislature is too impersonal), and voters-per-representative ratio; granted, this tradeoff exists in every country whose population is above about a million, but the higher the population a legislature serves, the worse this constraint becomes. Third, elections become less on real issues and more on general “legislative agendas,” which often differ only on three or four important issues, if that many; and anyway, voters don’t get a chance to express their views about other issues (who should I vote for if I’m pro-trade, pro-space exploration, pro-choice, anti-war, and anti-tax cut?). Wrote arendt:
Here is the conventional rationality explanation of how society is governed: government is in the hands of the people. Our elected representatives merely reflect our desires. The citizens analyze the situation, decide what is important, and tell their elected representatives how to vote. In an era of 500-page Congressional omnibus bills and 10,000 page tax codes with 40,000 lobbyists dispensing hundreds of millions of dollars of PAC money, it is a complete fantasy.
Here is what is really going on. The mass media decide what issues will be given coverage. The mass media, by the amount of time or column inches, decide what weight will be given to each issue. (Of course, the concentrated mass media are owned by the richest segment of our society and reflect their opinions faithfully, and often manipulatively and deceptively). Once every couple of years, the voter gets to pick a representative on the basis of summing (i.e., turning the rationalist crank) all the media-determined issues that have occurred during the intervening years. Throughout, the voter is bombarded by a bunch of partisan-sponsored polls and focus group-based advertisements which are crafted to appeal to the emotions. Sound-bite and factoid media coverage further obscure the true issues and prevent anything resembling true rational analysis.
Arendt’s proposal, which I then developed a bit more, was to split the legislature, more or less. “Specialized citizens vote for specialized Congressmen, just like the corporations do today,” he wrote. If Congress is split into a few tens of Specialized Legislatures (SL’s), one on each issue, with some SL’s sharing responsibilities for some issues (e.g. the SL’s dealing with the budget and taxation will obviously have to work together). This alone will enable people to express their full preferences on issues, because even if sometimes two issues are fused together in one SL, proportional representation can handle a split into two independent issues.
Further, voters won’t be able to vote for all SL’s – rather, they will have a choice of a small number of SL’s, for instance five. This will create “specialized citizens,” in arendt’s words, and also considerably reduce the voters-per-representative ratio (assuming 50 SL’s of 200 members each and 5 SL’s per voter, we get a ratio that is almost five times smaller than the current ratio in the House of Representatives). On top of these SL’s, there will still be a Congress – preferably unicameral and elected by proportional representation, but a bicameral one is still easily acceptable – which will be responsible to coordinating the SL’s, connecting the legislature to the executive, vetoing SL laws, and balancing majority rule with consensual rule. While the idea of voting only for one tenth or so of the SL’s may seem repugnant, it will force relatively few people to forego voting on one issue (and remember – everyone still votes for Congress), with most people voting straight-party or nearly exclusively on five or fewer issues.
In a way, SL’s are an elected bureaucracy that combines the accountability of an elected body and the expertise and knowledge of a bureaucracy. Under the current system, there is an elected body, Congress, and a bureaucracy, PACs and interest groups, but they are disjoint; hence, the act of voting hardly matters anymore (and if it did, there would be chaos as policy would be decided by people who barely knew what they were doing). Congress will continue to be dominated by lawyers and businesspeople for the time being, and perhaps this will turn out to be good because of these groups’ expertise in understanding and interpreting laws and coordinating groups respectively; SL’s, however, will be dominated by experts such as scientists, economists, military strategists, and so on, who will be accountable to a few interest groups each and to voters who know relatively a lot about their issues.
Congress, of course, should still retain some exclusive powers. SL’s under no circumstances will be allowed to amend the Constitution, although they might have the right to initiate legislation on a constitutional amendment in Congress; this is because the Constitution is supposed to be a document everyone agrees on, as opposed to the experts in each field. It will be preferable if only Congress has the right to run deficits, because otherwise there will be rampant deficits as SL’s with spending powers will race to spend more or even start pork barrel projects for their voters’ most likely occupations. Congress will retain the right to amend, repeal, or veto SL legislation at will; this will not give Congress too much power over the SL’s, as Congress will likely only be able to decide on policy and not have time to go thru the details (think of Yes, Minister: Sir Humphrey has power over Hacker because he had the expertise, information, and seniority, which Hacker lacks).
The final question here is how the SL’s will be determined. There are three answers I can think of. One is to fix the SL’s constitutionally (reshuffling the legislature this way will anyway require a constitutional amendment as SL’s are in direct violation of Article 1 Section 1 of the United States Constitution), according to both the contemporary issues and division of specialization and some degree of anticipation of what will be needed in the future. Two is to let Congress decide, i.e. write the SL’s with general responsibilities into the Constitution but let Congress change the SL’s and their responsibilities at will or almost at will. Three is to make some sort of census every so-and-so years (2 is an absolute minimum, 10 an absolute maximum), using some method to determine how to divide issues into SL’s.
Note that while some SL’s will get many more votes than others, people won’t necessarily be disenfranchised. This is for two reasons: one, people can opt out of the popular SL’s, such as taxation and defense, and choose less popular SL’s in which they can exert more power, such as scientific research and administrative affairs; and two, using rational choice theory, the number of voters in each SL will be proportional to the importance of the issues it deals with, so in the end every voter will have the same power regardless of which SL’s he or she votes for.
The entire discussion thread between arendt and me can be found here.
This site has gotten
hits since 2003-12-25.