A perfect democracy

What would it take to make sure that the people actually rule?

Democracy is, by definition, the rule of the people, that is ALL of the people, rather than some or even most of them. Therefore, in a perfect world, any truly democratic political decision would be a product of a total consensus between all the people (or at least their representatives), but alas, that’s hardly realistic. Consensus is possible in science, where the truth is determined by fact, logic, and experiment. Even so, it takes decades to reach a consensus (if not more), and there are always fringe scientists who resist the established consensus even against the most overwhelming evidence. In politics things are much worse, because politics generally deals with matters on which scientific consensus doesn’t exist, and might not be possible at all. In short, pure consensus in politics is untenable.

The next best thing can be called “proportional compromise” (aka “PC”), in which all parties deliberate on a given issue and reach a decision, which takes all sides and positions into account, but larger parties receive proportionally more than the smaller ones. For example, a 20% minority would get its way 20% of the time and so on. This principle is not without problems (more on this below), but at least everybody would have some realistic chance to “win”, and that’s all the point of a democracy, isn’t it? To give everyone a chance to make a difference?

Unfortunately, many, if not all democracies seem to degenerate into a sort of political arm wrestling, where whoever has more votes, even by a smallest margin, always wins. This principle can be called “tyranny of the majority” (aka “TM”). The following chart helps visualize the difference between different approaches:

In many democracies such degeneration happens almost by design, by using the “first-past-the-post” or “winner takes all” voting mechanisms, but even perfectly proportional parliaments can (and do) easily devolve into TM due to political polarization (more on this in a future article). Of course, TM is still, technically, a democracy (monarchy looks very different), but that’s not enough, if only from a purely utilitarian point of view. When a 51-49 split is practically the same as 100-0, it raises the stakes of the elections, because a tiny difference in votes can have enormous significance. This may actually help increase the voter turnout a bit, but it also gives each side an overwhelming incentive to cheat, using tried-and-true methods like gerrymandering (for district-based elections), asymmetrical voter suppression, extreme populism, disinformation, dirt-digging, and more. At best, this could lead to a ridiculous “tyranny of the minority” situation, where 45–49% minority assumes total control by being a more successful cheater (this is already happening in US). But in the long run, the likeliest outcome is that the people, especially the disenfranchised 49%, will realize that they don’t matter, that democracy doesn’t work for them anymore, and decide to utilize alternative approaches to get their way, including terrorism, separatism, and coup d’etat.

Ironically, another (albeit smaller) problem of TM is that it can give disproportional power to small parties. Suppose that a parliament is split 49–49–2% between 3 parties, and the 2% party has no preference whom to join. Such a party (often called a “kingmaker”) would have a huge extortion power over the 98% majority, because it alone can decide the outcome of any polarized vote or even whether governments live or die. Both sides would be forced to offer this “kingmaker“ almost anything to get its support, certainly much more than 2% should be entitled to. One might say that this compensates for the TM problem by giving minorities more power, but this approach works best, if not exclusively, for “ideologically challenged” parties that don’t really care about principles or the people, only about themselves. And that’s hardly good for democracy.

Many democratic systems recognize this problem and try to address it by giving the parliamentary minority tools to make it less helpless, usually in a form of a hard or soft veto power. Hard veto can come in a form of a super-majority condition, by which certain decisions require more than 50%+1 of the votes to pass (typically 2/3). A soft veto can come in a form of a filibuster rule, which gives the 40–49% minority a chance to disrupt a vote, though with considerable effort. But all these solutions have a marginal effect at best:

So, how can we ensure an ideal PC approach? Is it even possible? Well, in theory, it’s actually very easy. Here’s a crazy idea: instead of the real voting in a parliament, let’s just run a lottery, where each side has a chance to “win”, proportional to the number of seats they have. For example, if we have a 60–40 split in seats between “red” and “blue” party, then lets put 60 red and 40 blue balls in a box, pull out one ball at random, and whoever’s color this ball is wins the “vote”. Given enough voting rounds, this method should yield the perfect straight line in the above chart, or, more precisely, something asymptotically close to it. (By the way, this method could apply not only to parliamentary decision-making, but to elections as well, but that probably wouldn’t end well.)

However, such a method, while mathematically perfect, is far from optimal in practice and has many issues: it could cause chaos, if conflicting laws are passed due to mindless randomness; it’s unpredictable, and modern markets hate political uncertainty; any lottery can potentially be rigged and the losing side would be hugely tempted to make such an accusation in hopes of a do-over, because they’d have nothing to lose and everything to gain. But perhaps the greatest disadvantage of a lottery voting is that a reasonable compromise between different propositions can satisfy more people than both propositions could individually, no matter how one of them is chosen. This is because different issues have different importance to different sides, so each side can compromise by giving up less important issues, thereby creating a win-win situation for all parties, or at least something that could be “sold” as a win-win to the electorate, thus keeping it from becoming disappointed in the democracy.

The question is, how can we ensure that politicians come together and negotiate the best compromise in good faith instead of using scorched-earth tactics to get one seat more than the other side in elections and “win” using brute force? Obviously we can’t rely on them acting in good faith voluntarily anymore, not after what happened in recent years in many democratic countries. So what can be done?

Well, what if we do use the lottery approach described above, but only as a last resort, and coupled with some kind of penalty (for all sides involved) for allowing the situation to get to this last resort in the first place? The possibility alone might incentivize the politicians to be nicer to each other, because even the smallest minority could get its way simply by chance, but not too nice to have to suck up to extremists or shameless opportunists, because their chances are still small enough to take the chance with the lottery.

But again, this is just the last resort at best, a “nuclear option” of sorts. There may be a better way to protect the system against the “tyranny of the majority”, a more natural and effective one. But that deserves a separate article.