[EM] Public parties: a Trojan Horse in the party system

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

On 07/13/2012 10:01 AM, Michael Allan wrote:
> To Metagov, (cc Election Methods) [WIK]
>
> This is a proposal to the Metagovernment community to organize, fund
> and equip a network of public parties.  A public party is a decision
> body that issues decisions in the same *form* as a political party,
> but with the content, instead, of public opinion.  Like a political
> party, it runs candidates for office; but because those candidates are
> actually chosen by the public at large, they tend always to win.  I
> propose using this argument of inevitable success to leverage the
> resources needed to make it happen. [ACK]
>
> Form
> ----
> A public party has two formal mechanisms that it shares in common with
> political parties.  Like all parties, it has both a primary electoral
> system and a primary legislative system.  The primary electoral system
> is the mechanism that decides which candidates to place on the ballot
> (single winner) or on the party list (multi-winner); while the primary
> legislative system is the mechanism that decides which bills to floor
> in the assembly.

It might be of interest to know that a Norwegian joke party had a 
platform somewhat like this. While it would not put the selection of 
candidates in the hands of the public, all the candidates (both of them) 
pledged to follow the public's will. Now, that might sound like what any 
politician would say, but they had a very precise definition in mind: 
they would put up a web poll about each parliamentary decision-to-be and 
then follow the people's decision according to that poll.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Political_Party_(Norway) for more 
information.