Thread by @davidboxenhorn

Thoughts on creating robust democracy in countries with no democratic traditions

A few years ago I wrote this:

facebook.com/notes/david-bo…

I am going to try to copy it into Twitter. Let's see how it goes...

1/18

How can we construct a democracy so that it will be robust, even in countries that don't have deep democratic traditions? For example, if you could write the constitution of Egypt (and impose it) what would it look like?

2/18

I was thinking of a system based on the following principles:

3/18

1. Multiple centers of power. Power should not be concentrated in one institution. There should be multiple, competing institutions, for which it would be in their best interests to find a way of cooperating peacefully, rather than compete to dominate one another.

4/18

2. Inward focus of centers of power. The primary focus of the institutions should be inward. Inward focus greatly increases the stability of the system because each institution gains power more though internal policies than policies directed at dominating their neighbors.

5/18

3. Not too many centers of power at each level. When there are too many centers of power, people become apathetic, have little reason to educate themselves about, pay attention to, or involve themselves in politics.

6/18

The result is that those who do so can manipulate the system for their own benefit. Dunbar's number ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27… ) is a possible guide to the upper limit of the number of competing institutions at each level.

7/18

So let's apply these principles to the example of Egypt. It turns out that Egypt already has five levels of government:

1. National
2. Governorates
3. Regions
4. Villages and Cities
5. Districts (of cities)

( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subdivisi… )

8/18

These are enough levels to create condition #3 (if it doesn't already exist).

9/18

Unfortunately, the flow of power in Egypt is top-down not bottom-up. So, even if there are elections in Egypt for the top level of government, things don't work out well because the people don't really understand what is going on at that level, and so make bad choices.

10/18

But, these same people probably understand things quite well at the village and district level. So, my solution is based on two principles:

11/18

1. Indirect voting. Voting should only take place between levels, with the elected leaders of each institution serving as proxies for those who elected them. Thus, people vote directly only for leaders of villages and districts.

12/18

District leaders vote for city leaders, city and village leaders vote for regional leaders, regional leaders vote for governors, governors vote for national leaders. At each level, the leaders carry the votes of the number of people they represent.

13/18

2. Push power downward. At each level, power should be pushed downward as much as possible. Including military and police power. For example, regular police power can be pushed down to the lowest level. Governates should be allowed to have militias.

14/18

There should be courts at every level, with an appeals process to higher levels. Social and economic decision making should be at the lowest level.

15/18

In general, it should be more important to leaders at each level to preserve their downward power than to seek to impose their power on others.

16/18

3. Representatives should have (downward) executive power. It is critically important that the functions of executive power and representation should not be separated. This is what makes representatives downward-focused rather than upward-focused.

17/18

If representatives are leaders with downward power, they will be incentivized to preserve it. In contrast, if representatives have no downward power, their incentives will be to use their legislative ability to impose on institutions with executive power.

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