[EM] language/framing quibble

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

Fred Gohlke wrote:
> Good Morning, Kristofer

I'm finding steadily less to comment on; we seem to be reaching a 
convergence of sorts, where we either agree, or we disagree but have 
found that the only real way to find out which of us is right is to run 
this thing in practice. Thus, I've been a bit slow at replying, because 
I've simply been using the time to find out what to say.

> re: "... would be good for the petition to include information
>      about the level of the person who originated it."
> 
> My initial reaction to this suggestion was unfavorable, oddly, for the 
> very reason you thought it worthwhile; fear that petitions coming from 
> the lower levels of the 'pyramid' would be considered less important. On 
> further thought, though, I agree with you.  As you point out, it is 
> likely the distribution of petitions will be simplified by including the 
> petitioner's level.  In addition, those who rose to higher levels were 
> deemed more representative of the views of their peers than those at 
> lower levels.  It is reasonable to give their opinions greater weight. 
> One additional factor is that it may aid discourse among those who met 
> to make selections.

It also acknowledges that the structure is recursive; a pyramid is made 
up of many small pyramids, which are made up of many small pyramids. 
Instead of having to go all the way to the top, you may find some who 
are higher up yet willing to listen to you, but if those have been 
corrupted, you still have the option of going straight to the top (only 
that you have to informally organize many others for your message to 
hold the same weight).

> re: "The assumption here is that if someone high up in the
>      pyramid petitions the official, he has the support of many
>      below him."
> 
> I agree this is a reasonable assumption in terms of how an elected 
> official initially evaluates a petition.  However, the ease with which 
> constituents may support or oppose petitions provides a means of 
> confirming the assumption.  Since it is easy for constituents to support 
> or oppose a petition, official performance will be better judged by 
> actual support than by implied support.
> 
> Beyond performance evaluation, though, is the impact of petitions on an 
> official's biases.  Petitions represent ideas and convictions.  They may 
> counter ideas and convictions held by the elected official or reinforce 
> them.  They may achieve merit on the breadth of their support or on the 
> force of their reason.  Thus, the bidirectionality of the system not 
> only provides a means of sanctioning, it also serves to influence 
> elected officials' attitudes.  As you've pointed out, when participants 
> move to higher levels they can not represent all the views of all the 
> people who elevated them.  Petitions provide a means of energizing views 
> which are commonly held but which are 'lost in transit', so to speak.

Yes, that is true, and it's what I meant by that the bidirectionality 
would not only correct, but also provide information to guide. 
Hopefully, the councilmembers higher up (including those that have been 
selected for the public body) will choose to heed those words instead of 
thinking their own ways trump them. In some sense, they have been 
selected not to jump on the latest complaint and wildly swing back and 
forth on the opinion scale, but they've also been selected not to ignore 
the people. In any case, if worst comes to worst, there's the ultimate 
counter of initiative and referendum. But that, also, can be a guide, 
not just a sanction; if a selected official just forgets about a certain 
issue, not out of malice, but of simply being limited (as we all are), 
and the messages don't nudge him in the right direction, the option of 
referendum will work as a crude steering mechanism.

I use the term "selected", since elected doesn't really fit. There's no 
public election, there's simply a whole lot of mini-elections that come 
together.

> re: "... the pyramids exist ... and their composition is known to
>      (at least) the public officials ..."
> 
> In my view, the composition of the pyramids and all petitions should be 
> public information.  It is true this will make those who achieve the 
> higher levels targets for influence peddlers but I don't believe such 
> corruption will be as easy to achieve as it is at present.  Here's why:
> 
> Our political landscape is dominated by political parties and political 
> parties are conduits for corruption.  Corruption occurs in static 
> conditions and party professionals are like apples in barrels, 
> susceptible to rot.  The Practical Democracy electoral method is 
> dynamic; is has no organization or fund raiser to provide a corrupting 
> influence.  Those who would corrupt our elected representatives can not 
> do so en bloc, as they do with parties, they have to corrupt each 
> elected official, individually.
> 
> There is an enormous difference between telling a party fund-raiser what 
> laws you want in return for your 'contribution' and trying to corrupt 
> individuals who have no need of campaign funds and who are selected by 
> their peers for their intellect and integrity.  In addition to the risk 
> of exposure, which is always a threat when approaching a target, there's 
> the problem of effectiveness; corrupting a single official does not 
> ensure enactment of a law in the way contributing to a party does.  This 
> method may not completely forestall corruption, but it will certainly 
> make it more difficult and less effective than it is now.

Given what you've said, how might the selected officials be corrupted? 
There's implicit corruption and explicit corruption. Let's take explicit 
corruption first. A party, or something being a mix of a party and a 
gathering of lobbyists, might arrange deals to "mutual benefit": I give 
you something, you give me something. As a large organization, they 
would have the power to influence many at once, even those that would be 
hard to influence individually. An analogous situation to this might be 
the machine politics of the earlier United States, where the extensions 
of political parties effectively paid off voters with their power; not 
individually, but their supporters as a group.
Then we have implicit corruption. First, if it's true that voters will 
prefer people who are of a special kind to be selected, and that special 
kind is a minority, then that minority may have a bias that is not 
advantageous to the people; for instance, politicians would usually 
think that politicians should be well paid. Those who are elected become 
a community, and like any other, they mind their own interests. This can 
lead to representation problems, because if a majority of politicians 
are more centrist (or radical, for that matter) than the people, there 
are some points of view that will be heard less. This kind of implicit 
corruption, I think, could be weakened on one hand by paying attention 
to representation (part of why I think PR would be good), and on the 
other by free entry, which in this context means that if you have the 
skills sought by the people, you should be able to displace others who 
are not corrupt, whoever you as a person are. The randomization helps 
with this.
Second, voters may be tricked to select people that they know only on a 
surface level. This is a sort of "advertisement" on the political level, 
where organizations would run campaigns in favor of some person, hoping 
that sufficiently many triad members would approve of this candidate 
just because he's "someone well known". It doesn't even have to be 
formal; there could be a bias towards well known people for this reason 
(the triad version of a Reagan or Schwarzenegger). There's no mechanical 
solution to this, but your determined randomization idea, where the same 
triads are prevented from reoccuring, could diminish the problem. Also, 
higher level councilmembers may simply be too capable to be swayed by 
references of this kind.

Now, these forms of corruption may be minor in comparison to what we're 
already seen, but it never hurts to know what their forms may take, so 
that we can be prepared for them. If we find a way of weakening their 
influence further through tweaks to the method, that would be still 
better, and to know what to defend against, we have to know the nature 
of the weaknesses of the current solution and of those who'd seek to 
exploit it, in any case.

> re: "My broad idea is that since the pyramid is exponential in
>      nature, with a fixed chance of petition from each at the
>      bottom, the number of petitions would increase exponentially
>      as well, and so in order to sift through the mass, there has
>      to be some sort of method for finding what's truly
>      important, some sort of information aggregation and
>      selection."
> 
> The constituents' ability to support or oppose petitions will probably 
> have two effects:
> 
> 1) It will increase public participation because those who would be 
> unlikely to 'write a letter to their Congressman' may (and, in my view, 
> probably will) support or oppose the petitions of others ... if it's 
> easy to do so.
> 
> 2) It will reduce the number of petitions because those who are likely 
> to 'write a letter to their Congressman' may find that someone else has 
> already done so.  Of course, in this case, pride of authorship may 
> inspire parallel petitions, and that could lead to the murky waters of 
> petition amendment.  I'll pass on examining that eventuality, for the 
> moment.
> 
> Are statistics available to show how frequently citizens 'write their 
> Congressmen' and can that data can be extrapolated to guesstimate the 
> severity of the problem?  I'm not sure how helpful that will be, though, 
> because events may cause a flurry of petitions that can not be anticipated.

I don't know of any such statistics. Besides, they may not be 
applicable. The situation is a bit like that with Plurality; simply 
moving the statistics over to a different model may not work since the 
incentives are different. For Plurality, claiming (for instance) that 
there's no need for an alternate election method because a great 
majority votes for one of the two parties disregards the effect of 
voting strategy. Similarly, participation could be low because people 
don't bother to write "if it isn't going to make any difference anyway".

> re: turnover of elected officials
> 
> This is not directly responsive to your letter, but I'd like to mention 
> that one of the provisions of the Sefton Petition is that "the random 
> grouping mechanism must insure that no two people are assigned to a 
> triad if they served together in a triad in any of the five most recent 
> elections.  This provision not only makes it unlikely that a given 
> individual will be returned to office repeatedly, it also ensures the 
> ideologies of our elected officials are constantly refreshed.
> 
> In two-party systems, particularly, there is a periodic wrenching from 
> one side of the political spectrum to another.  Neither side ever 
> correctly reflects the true will of the people (which is, of course, the 
> feedstock for the demand for additional parties and proportional 
> representation).  The method we are discussing will elevate those who 
> best reflect the attitudes and aspirations of all the people.  They will 
> create a government that moves inexorably in response to the people's 
> wishes.

Yes. In a way, having only two parties (even when they're responsive) is 
a bit like driving on a complex road with only two settings - full right 
and full left. The left-wing party is elected - veer left. It goes too 
far to the left, and the right-wing party is elected - veer right. 
That's not a very good way to drive, as anybody would know.

You may say that parties, wanting to be re-elected, would stay in 
center, but I think that all parties are susceptible to oversteering, 
simply because they compare themselves to their supporters, who will 
naturally be more aligned with their interests than is the people at large