Democracy 2.0: Why we need to become specialized voters - Part 2 of 2

[arendt]

Obviously, you should read "PART ONE: THE PROBLEM" before you read this!

--------------------------


DEMOCRACY 2.0: WHY WE MUST BECOME SPECIALIZED VOTERS
by arendt

PART TWO: THE SOLUTION

1. Solving the 30k Problem by Specializing

As mentioned above, in spite of candidate bundling, most voters wind up choosing based on only one, or a few, issues. In fact, this behavior makes a lot of sense. It is exactly how corporations behave. Each company has issues important to it. That company's or industry's lobbyists are only interested in legislation on those issues. So, the telephone companies don't care about mineral rights on Federal lands, and the mining companies don't care about long-distance competition. The corporations are reducing the dimensionality of their problem. Collectively, they solve the multi-dimensional optimization problem of getting the Congress to maximize the sum of corporate satisfaction by "patching" their lobbying efforts according to industry issues, and, by focussing those efforts on the relevant Congressional staffers.

Currently, it is impossible for individual voters to play this game. But, single-issue voters have created corporate-like lobbying efforts in the form of "interest groups", such as the Environmental Defense Fund, or the Christian Coalition, or Americans for Tax Justice. That is, voters who are really committed to a cause and paying attention to how to get things done in politics are already "patching".

But, if corporations and interest groups (i.e., the bulk of political movers and shakers) are already circumventing the high-dimensionality caused by candidate bundling and gerrymandering, why don't we just be honest and get rid of these two impediments to fair representation? Why? Because the status quo does not want fair representation. Its clear to any thinking person that corporations are getting what they want from the system (They are literally writing the laws these days.), and have no incentive to change the system. It falls to us, the disenfranchised, unrepresented voters to bootstrap a new system that can eventually displace or tame the "failed state" that is Corporate Democracy 1.0.

2. The Internet and the Dis-intermediation of Politics

...."Due to deep changes in technology, demographics, business, the economy, and the world, we are entering a new age
....where people participate in the (economy) government like never before. This new participation has reached a tipping
....point where new forms of mass collaboration are changing how (goods and services) laws and regulations are invented,
....produced, marketed, and distributed on a global basis...Most people were confined to relatively limited (economic) political
....roles, whether as passive consumers of mass-produced (products) candidates or (employees) civil servants trapped
....deep within organizational bureaucracies where the boss told them what to do...In all, too many people were bypassed in the
....circulation of knowledge, power, and capital, and thus participated at the (economy's) government's margin."

....D. Tapscott and A. Williams, "Wikinomics - How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything" (strikeouts mine!)

So far, this essay has been providing background and motivation. Finally, we have come to the proposal itself. This is not a new proposal. I made the same proposal four years ago at DU, but I used a highly technical presentation, which only attracted a few responders, albeit of very high quality. Also, four years ago, the Bush administration and its flunkies in Congress and the courts had not thoroughly trashed almost every aspect of our Constitution, so people weren't ready to face up to the fact that we needed to create a new one.

But today, we have seen that the Internet provided the only means of organizing political opposition, and of disseminating the honest news needed to run a real democracy, in the face of corporate-dominated media and corporate fifth-columnists in the Democratic Party (i.e., Joe Lieberman and the DLC). We have seen the power of the Internet to combine individual contributions to provide national-level funding (e.g., $50 M for Howard Dean in a few months.) In short, we have seen the power of the Net to "dis-intermediate" (a big, important 'digerati' word) the conventional political middlemen. And, those middlemen are now terrified. Case in point, the tired hack and catspaw of Hillary Clinton, James Carville, is desperate enough to try to steal credit for Howard Dean's "50 state strategy".

So, point number one is that the Internet can easily support 7,000 or 70,000 forums for electing individual staff-level legislators, provided only that the resulting legislatures (plural is very important) are properly organized. I will come back to how to organize multiple legislatures later. How the reorganized legislatures relate to the Executive Branch will be considered in a separate essay, later.

3. Elected Bureaucracy: Specialized Voters Elect Specialized (staff-less) Legislators

Having decided to implement direct election of Congressional staff, we must confront the organizational issue that has, to date, blocked any consideration of a larger number of elected officials. The solution to the problem is to turn the "limited rationality" of voters into part of the solution, instead of part of the problem. We need to get voters to agree to formally limit their voting rights to a few, self-chosen specialized topics. At the same time, we redefine the meaning of "representative" to allow direct election of Congressional staff-level representatives who are, likewise, limited to legislating only on specialized topics. That is, we elect what has hitherto been "the unelected bureacrats". The price for this is that we, the electorate, are ourselves forced to specialize. (Note: I am grateful to a tombstoned DUer, "redeye" for taking my earlier proposal seriously enough to invent the term "elected bureaucracy".)

"Wait", you will probably say. "I am giving up my right to vote on all those other issues! I am being disenfranchised." But if you have read this essay from the beginning, you must admit that we are already disenfranchised. So what are we losing? In today's complex era, the right to vote on everything is a monkey trap. Besides, many voters today are already single-issue voters. Very few track as many as five issues seriously. Why not formalize the information-overload situation that is the de facto reality? Why not acknowledge that everything-to-everything connectivity doesn't work as a model of neural information processing? Information overload wasn't even a concept three hundred years ago, when Democracy 1.0 was being booted.

What we need to make this work is that these various specializations can be connected together into a coherent governmental information processing algorithm. That is, we need a new theory of government based on 20th century knowledge of self-organizing learning systems, just as the 17th century system of checks and balances was based on the best mechanical knowledge of that day.

4. A Numerically Imprecise Outline of Specialized Legislatures

Political scientists and social psychologists recognize that groups larger than a few hundred people are unwieldy. Therefore, we need to divide our roughly 10,000 legislators into groups of about 100 people. This gives us about one hundred specialized legislatures. These specializations are to be continually adapted on a multi-year basis, sort of like the census. (A good place to start is the existing Congressional sub-committee specializations.) Voters get to sign up to vote in, somewhere between three and ten specializations only. Then, we need to reorganize the elections so that (at least the lowest level) Congressmen specialize in one of the specializations. (The rough numbers for all of this are in the Appendix below.) Specialized citizens vote for specialized Congressmen, just like the corporations do today. Citizens could change their specializations whenever there is an election. So could Congressmen. But both would lose some seniority.

There will probably need to be some mechanics to prevent everyone from specializing in the currently hot topic. (Although, there are enough military/intelligence/veterans and budget sub-committees that it might not be an issue.) Overall, it makes sense if a trucker specializes in transportation legislation, and a telecommunications engineer specializes in telecommunications legislation. This problem could be solved by a seniority and quota system for voters - something akin to the seniority system for committee appointments in Congress. Each voter submits a rank-ordered list of requests. Software randomly picks among the all lists, in decreasing order of rank and voter "seniority". Also, the hot topics problem may decrease as people realize they have more relative influence in less-popular groups. Some may opt for enfranchisement above relevance, just as some scientists work on obscure but safe topics rather than get involved in the high-risk, high-reward hot topics like cancer research.

It is most important to emphasize that the representative assemblies (i.e., legislatures) of these specializations would be voted for on the national level. This kind of voting, with a 5% or 10% cutoff to get a representative, is quite common in all advanced country democracies except the US. It is called proportional representation. It works something like the brain, which suppresses low-amplitude signals, but allows medium amplitude signals to co-exist and cross-stimulate.

Each specialization gets its own internet bulletin board. Legislation must be displayed for all to see for a certain amount of time prior to Congressional debate and voting. This period allows specialized citizens to organize and have their say via the same network, perhaps even actually voting. The time to accomplish work is a critical factor in closing feedback loops effectively. It will be discussed at length in a later essay.

Notice that Democracy 2.0 is not a simple-minded electronic townhall, or the digitization of the current dysfunctional bureaucracy. Those two models, to my limited googling, are the only concepts of "e-government" that people have. Probably because corporations don't want citizens to realize that any idea that e-commerce can use, e-government can too. It is historically surprising that business activism has out-organized political activism, with horrible results for our democracy. The good news is that we can cherry-pick proven ideas out of what business has already done, the same way the right wing has ripped off and "re-purposed" the entire 1960s "government is the enemy" rhetoric of the radical left.

Democracy 2.0 is not a mindless, unfocussed, feels-good-to-get-that-off-my-chest gripe session. The participants are all specialists. There is a formalism or algorithm. Information is displayed and acted upon in some kind of set of bulletin boards, where it may also be cross-posted to related bulletin boards.

4.1 The Benefits of Specialization

Specialization cures the arbitrary bundling of political issues, because a representative's area of power is clearly circumscribed. It also eliminates arbitrary committee assignments because representatives choose which legislature to run for themselves.

Notice that I said the specialized representatives are voted for nationally. This makes perfect sense. The federal government is concerned with abstract matters of regulation. The issues of how to arrange the details of your locality should be handled in local legislatures, just as with the states today.

Another good feature of national, proportional representation is that it is much harder to intimidate or silence a distributed, nationwide constituency either, by moving factories out of the state or cutting off government pork. It also gives activists a place to meet and communicate with un-challengable legitimacy.

To return power closer to the citizen, we need to decentralize as much as possible; but, destoying federal oversight without destroying multinational corporate power would result in local corporate feudalism. So, can we decentralize without disarming? Today, nationwide mass media destroy the intermediate layers of calculation necessary for citizens not to be cut out of the governmental process, while corporations destroy the small businesses and communities that used to be the environmental niches for citizen activism. That is, while corporations have implemented there own version of political disintermediation, the current situation for citizens is effective disenfranchisment, not disintermediation.

4.1.1 Specialized Legislatures

Specialized legislatures, elected by national proportional representation and mediated via the Internet, would begin the process of decentralization. Suppose we have one hundred specialized legislatures. There are fifty states (not a bad number from an organizational point of view; but not cast in concrete); so the national government could convene two physical legislatures in each state. If done sensibly, the legislature for an industry or an issue would be placed in a part of the country most impacted by that industry or problem. For example, you might put the specialized legislature for "mining & environment" in Denver; while you might put "urban development" in New York City. This immediately gives many more people the opportunity to physically interact with their representatives. It puts the representatives out in the real world, instead of inside the beltway. It breaks up the giant aircraft carrier that K Street has become for lobbying.

Creating large numbers of specialized legislators can prevent corporate control simply because the cost of lobbying fifty times the number of representatives and funding fifty times as many campaigns at the current level would bankrupt them. That is, there would be one hundred different sets of very specific issues (one for each legislature) in an election cycle. The simple-minded, one-size-fits-all "mom, apple pie, and Jesus versus child molester" campaign adds would need to be re-worked for each legislature, at great expense and with dubious effectiveness. What difference does it really make if a man is for gay marriage if his legislative authority is limited to mining issues?

CLOSING THOUGHTS

I tried to focus this essay on the single concept of specialization. That is, the idea that we need to create a large number of different pieces making up a more complicated, but more effective form of government. The next essay will describe exactly how these legislatures connect together and relate to the other branches of government. Separation of Powers was a far-sighted concept that is still at the heart of a sustainable democracy. It must be restored. Just because I did not have time to mention the other branches does not mean I intend to ignore them. The same is true for local governments.

-------------------------------------------------------------

APPENDIX: A NUMEROLOGY OF SPECIALIZATION

In order to give any quantitative insight into how specialization might be feasible, it is necessary to give a preview of the organization of specialized legislatures. That organization will be motivated in detail in the next essay. For now, I will not be addressing these details, other than to expose them.

----

It is a historical fact that the British administered India with very few men, organized into a very flat hierarchy of no more than three levels. Neuroscience so far can only roughly trace the wiring diagram of the brain, but it also tells us that cells inside any given cortical region are organized into a flat hierarchy, and that there is massive communication between brain regions via white matter. The vision system is the one most studied. Basically, the brain areas for vision form a feedback hierarchy. The lower parts of the hierarchy do the simple analysis - this is a line, that is a circle. The next level up creates objects, and separates figure from ground - it produces what the Gestalt psychologists understood seventy years ago. Higher than that, and you get object tracking. At each level, the spatial resolution goes down and the level of abstraction goes up.

What is newly understood is that this is not just a feedforward hierarchy. It is also a feedback hierarchy. For example, have you ever looked at a trick picture or an optical illusion? You can focus your attention and force your brain to see the image in a completely different way. Basically, the higher levels are laying down a template and telling the lower levels: connect these lines, ignore that feature, this goes in front of that. When all the levels are in equilibrium, we have a stable picture of the world. This is the science that drives the model proposed below.

A.1 Sizing the hierarchy

Let's examine the current "levels" of governmental information processing. If we sum up the number of Representatives, Senators, and Cabinet Officers, we have: 435 + 100 + 15 = 550. They are divided into levels as follows:

........435/550 = 79.0% are Representatives (Level 0 for my purposes)
........100/550 = 18.2% are Senators (Level 1)
..........15/550 = 2.7% are Cabinet Officers (Level 2)

This is roughly a "power of four" pyramid, a data structure quite common in image processing, and other computer disciplines.

Suppose I have 10 cabinet deparments and two layers of four-fold pyramidal legislatures under each department. If each legislature has 100 members, then the total number of legislatures is: 160 + 40 + 10 = 210 legislatures; and the total number of legislators is: 210 x 100 = 21,000. The distribution of the levels of this rationally designed pyramid are:

........16,000/21,000 = 76% sub-committe staff (Level 0)
..........4,000/21,000 = 19% committee staff (Level 1)
..........1,000/21,000 = 4.76% cabinet level staff (Level 2)

Notice that 21,000 is roughly the current number of Congressional staff, and that the current and proposed staff levels are within a few percentage points of each other, across the board!

Notice that the 40 Level 1 legislatures corresponds roughly to the 20 + 17 = 37 current committees of the House and Senate. But also note that those committees are largely duplicate in function .

Notice that the 160 Level 0 legislatures corresponds roughly to the 96 + 71 = 167 sub-committees of the House and Senate, again with massive duplication.

The number of 21,000 total elected officials needs to be explained. In the essay, we estimated

........ ~210 M eligible voters / 30,000 voters per representative = ~7,000 representatives

So, the numbers here give each voter one vote in each of THREE specialized legislatures. That is, there are 100 open seats in each legislature. Each voter gets to cast each vote for one particular candidate in one of his three chosen specialties. Because of the 'seniority' system described in the essay, there are 30,000 votes cast for each of 100 seats, or 3 million votes cast per legislature. We have 210 legislatures, so 630 million votes are cast. This is 3 x 210 million eligible voters. The numbers add up correctly.

Whereas each citizen gets to vote only in a few specialized legislatures, he does get to cast a vote for more cabinet members than legislators. For example, if he gets to cast three legislative votes, he might get to cast five cabinet member votes. Once again, including cabinet members in the vote is another dis-intermediation - another victory for open government. Today, a lot of Cabinet Secretaries are nothing but the incompetent and venal political or ideological cronies of the elected President.

A.2 The implications of electing cabinet officers

Generating a reasonable "flat hierarchy" that does not pyramid all the way up to a single executive officer has led us to elect cabinet officials. This will definitely create situations that have historically not existed in the U.S. However, these kinds of situations are an everyday occurrence in parliamentary democracies; they are called "forming a coalition government".

We have ten independently elected Cabinet Secretaries. At this level, Democracy 2.0 proposes that those Secretaries should play by parliamentary rules and "form a government" by electing one of their number the actual and true "president". When a coalition is formed and a president selected, he resigns his cabinet position and appoints his successor. Then he occupies the office of President.

Only, he is more like prime minister. The highest level of the legislature (i.e., the 1,000 Level 2 representatives) would have "votes of confidence" so that presidents that are awful can be removed immediately. Yet, the people doing the removing are elected. The cabinet secretaries and legislators would have removal by impeachment and/or censure, just like the U.S. today.

If a lowest level legislature concerns itself with one task, like a subcommittee today, a second level legislature would coordinate tasks of related subcommittees, and work out the division of budget allocations between them. A top level legislature is doing the executive work of a cabinet department. It is setting policy, etc.

Based on the brain hierarchy, it can be deduced that lower level legislatures do more of the scut work. Most importantly, they compute the budget. One of the things neuroscientists say about the lowest level of the hierarchy is that, because it has the highest spatial resolution, it is the "blackboard" that all the hierarchy uses to write down and expand the entire comprehension. In Democracy 2.0, the budget resolution process gets done only at Level 0. The placement of this important function at the lowest level provides the budgetary "blackboard" that binds together all the other legislative functions. So, Democracy 2.0 doesn't have a hierarchy just to avoid unicamerality. It has a hierarchy to divide complex tasks into simpler ones - to unbundle and to dis-intermediate.

There are rules about being elected to these hierarchical legislatures. Except at startup of this Constitutional government, you can't jump in from nowhere and become cabinet secretary. First you have to be elected to a Level 0 (bottom) legislature for X terms. Then you have to be elected to Level 1 legislature, etc. This means no more dilletantes, celebrities, and rich boys. They gotta do the work.

A.2.1 The relationship between legislatures

We have talked about intra-legislature hierarchies, but what about inter-legislature communication. Today, when new legislation is introduced, unelected staff of the Congress, called "parliamentarians" decide to which committee or committees a bill is referred. There is a long history of precedent that the parliamentarians must obey in deciding upon referrals. Bills can be sent to multiple committees, either in serial or in parallel. All this is at the discretion of these powerful unelected officials, but they are bound by very strong precedents.

As a result of a long history, committees obtain long-standing jurisdictions over certain parts of the law, and have long-standing correspondences with other committees. These interactions form the basis for a different kind of system of checks and balances.

Complexity theory teaches that, to contain complexity, the dimensionality of bundles should be kept to roughly three. More than this can be accommodated, but only if the extra dimensions have nothing more than veto power.

The idea, to be fleshed out in the next essay, is for the network of legislative interactions to be formalized into a network. The inputs to a given legislature from networked legislatures form checks and balances upon its interests.

A.3 What is left for the Executive Branch?

What rights and duties does the President have vis-a-vis the elected cabinet secretaries?

To use a neuroscience term, the President directs the "spotlight of consciousness". There are several options for how to do that:
........1) He might be given power to introduce legislation in Level 2 legislatures?
........2) Cabinet secs might need to get his permission to introduce legislation?

At this point, Democracy 2.0 is mostly concerned with reviving a decayed Legislative Branch, and repelling the over-reach of the Executive Branch. Historically, dictatorial executives have caused much more trouble than weak executives. The United States has a strong executive. Gerrymandering and candidate bundling must be removed to restore control to the citizenry. It is inevitable that new structures must be set up to contain the power of the Executive and keep him accountable to the citizenry.

[Selah]

1. ?

[arendt]

2. Perhaps, if I had titled this "I want to steal your voting rights", someone would've reply

I notice that this half of the essay was read by only about 2/3 of the people who read the first half.

I can understand the "my eyes glaze over" factor here. But this half is making some pretty far out proposals. I would have expected at least some outraged defenders of the Constitution to respond. Was it the arithmetic in the appendix that scared people away? Its hardly heavy duty math.

Perhaps the whole premise that the Constitution, in its current ossified and crippled form, is toast and that we need to start over is simply too scary for most people to contemplate. They would rather continue to stare at their broken TV set than go outside and see that WW3 just rolled through their town and smashed it all to hell.

What's the story, anyway?

arendt

[renie408]

3. It seems a little bit self-aggrandizing. And your theory has been done.

Listen, I am no slouch in the reading comprehension department. My mommy still has the certificates from high school to prove it. And I got about a third of the way through part one and felt like I would have rather rammed an icepick through my hand than finish it. The first thing to remember about writing is that unless you are doing it for the pleasure of dredging up every single five syllable word you know and making the absolutely MOST obscure references possible, you might want to keep it more accessible.

And, I disagree with you. I am not sure I completely disagree with you due to the aforementioned icepick thing. I skimmed a lot. But I don't think the solution here is to pick a single issue to vote on. That might get the Dems WINNING more elections because it is the same strategy that Rove uses and it does seem to work to get people elected. But the solution seems to me to be to vote of the total package candidate that isn't going to defend your gun rights at the same time that they rape the environment.

As for chucking the Constitution and starting over, good luck with that.

In the end, if the whole thing had resembled intellectual jacking off less and a workable political plan more, it might have gotten more play.

[arendt]

4. Your response is a classic example of what passes for argument in today's politics

Several points:

1. I warned you it was long. You read it.

2. Please name the "references" you fround obscure. I only gave one formal citation (30k.org). If you mean that I used terms from neuroscience and complexity theory, tough luck. The next generation of government will either be based on cognitive science/complexity; or it will be cavemen with sticks.

3.I wrote this to be somewhat "bulletproof" to someone who might want to dispute details. Clearly, you found this style, which is quite common in academic journals, to be boring. I will have my spell-checker count the actual number of five syllable words. I can assure you that I did not exhaust my list of them. Again, tough luck. My style is my style. I've been posting here for five years.

> As for chucking the Constitution and starting over, good luck with that.

4. You just blew off the entire premise of the essay. No wonder you found it boring. Guess what, Bush and his gang have already chucked the Constituion; and I doubt the Democrats will get 10% of it back - especially with turncoats like Lieberman on-board.

> But the solution seems to me to be to vote of the total package candidate that isn't going to defend your gun rights at the same time that they rape the environment.
>...I don't think the solution here is to pick a single issue to vote on.

5. You just misrepresented and blew off the main argument of what I wrote. I didn't say to reduce all of politics to one issue. I said individuals can't handle more than a few issues; but collectively, with good organization, we can handle them all much better than today. Then, you reject the entire essay with "I don't think...".

6. Your response is a classic example of what passes for argument in today's politics. Assertion, misrepresntation, sneering, and condescension.

Thanks for proving my point about how pathetic today's politics is.

arendt

[arendt]

5. Give me a cite for "Your theory has already been done" n/t