The Worst Form Of Government (Except For Everything Else We've Tried)

I’m confused as to how the fits in with UK politics. I don’t think the minority party has any kind of veto?

I guess we have the House of Lords but this doesn’t really have a veto (at least not long term) and the House of Commons and House of Lords aren’t always or even usually controlled by different factions.

The argument given relies on a potted history of the US. It doesn't address the relative success of UK democracy - which even British constitutional scholars sometimes describe as an elective dictatorship that notoriously doesn't give a veto to minorities. It doesn't address the history of France, Germany, Italy, Canada, or any other large successful democracy, none of which use the US system, most of which aren't even presidential,

If you want to make a point about US history, fine. If you want to talk about democracy, please try drawing from a sample size larger than one.

I'm confused by the way people are engaging with this post. That well functioning and stable democracies need protections against a "tyranny of the majority" is not at all a new idea; this seems like basic common sense. The idea that the American civil war was precipitated by the South perceiving an end to their balance of power with the North also seems pretty well accepted. Furthermore, there are lots of other things that make democratic systems work well: e.g. a system of laws/conflict resolution or mechanisms for peaceful transfers of power.

Lebanon tried this "balancing different factions" thing. Their system probably won't survive a census: the last one was in 1932.

I like this post. It goes along with something I had noticed during the Trump presidency when there were a lot of claims that Trump was “destroying democracy”, which is that a lot of the things that people like about the US system is not democracy, but really separation of powers. A democratically elected populist imposing his will over other government institutions is not a breakdown of democracy (well, maybe in this specific case where he lost the popular vote, you could argue that), but a breakdown of the separation of powers.

It is not a happy coincidence that our government ended up this way. James Madison was very concerned that democracy could turn into mob rule and pushed for separation of powers as a way to protect the minority. It is perhaps the defining feature of the American system, and has helped preserved our government from a lot of possible excesses. Of course, it can cut both ways, as it makes it harder to pass both bad and good legislation.

I think it’s really important for people to think about the difference between these two ideals. They’re both important features of the American system, but clearly not the same and worth differentiating.

The Northen Ireland Assembly works this way, at least for some things.

But, in general, the U.K. does not work that way. A particular political party sometimes gets a big majority.

I think the veto thing you suggest is an ad-hoc patch that might be able to hold things together if they have already gone very wrong.

If you have one monolithic group of 51% who share a particular culture, religion, ethnicity, industry and class vs 49% who are different on every metric then I don't think any system (baring splitting the country in two) is going to deal with it well. But, if religion cuts the population in pieces. And so does ethnicity. And so does conservatism, and so does class and so does culture, but they are all uncorrelated, then there is little room for a tyranny of the majority. Nobody can build an election platform on any specific one of those splits, because there is someone else muddying the waters by trying to drive a wedge through a different one.

As a voter you set out into the demagogue market, the first person  tries to sell you on the idea of the Christian majority bashing up the rest. The second in your ethnicity sticking it to the others. The third says "Eat the rich, and take their money". You leave disappointed, as what you wanted was someone who would advance the interests of farmers, who after all, are 51% of the population. Each of these groups trips over the others.

The American civil war is a good example. The North and South were divided by the issue of slavery, but the North was also richer, more industrialised, more cosmopolitan and more urban. I imagine the troubles in Northern Ireland would have been much less violent if the Protestant - Catholic divide had been uncorrelated with the Unionist - Republican one.

I think this post aims at an important and true thing and misses in a subtle and interesting but important way.

Namely: I don't think the important thing is that one faction gets a veto. I think it's that you just need limitations on what the government can do that ensure that it isn't too exploitative/extractive. One way of creating these kinds of limitations is creating lots of veto points and coming up with various ways to make sure that different factions hold the different veto points. But, as other commenters have noted, the UK government does not have structural checks and balances. In my understanding, what they have instead is a bizarrely, miraculously strong respect for precedent and consensus about what "is constitutional" despite (or maybe because of?) the lack of a written constitution. For the UK, and maybe other, less-established democracies (i.e. all of them), I'm tempted to attribute this to the "repeated game" nature of politics: when your democracy has been around long enough, you come to expect that you and the other faction will share power (roughly at 50-50 for median voter theorem reasons), so voices within your own faction start saying "well, hold on, we actually do want to keep the norms around."

Also, re: the electoral college, can you say more about how this creates de facto vetos? The electoral college does not create checks and balances; you can win in the electoral college without appealing to all the big factions (indeed, see Abraham Lincoln's 1860 win), and the electoral college puts no restraints on the behavior of the president afterward. It just noisily empowers states that happen to have factional mixes close to the national average, and indeed can create paths to victory that route through doubling down on support within your own faction while alienating those outside it (e.g. Trump's 2016 and 2020 coalitions).

Representative democracy can only last so long as people prefer losing an election to fighting a civil war.

Some relevant details for the American government case:

Popular election of the Senate began in 1913. Before that each state’s Senators were elected by the state legislature. This means factional dominance of the Senate was screened off, and actually determined the state level.

This is because the dominant group analysis at the time the constitution was written was people, state government, and federal government, and the conversation was about how to prevent a single group from gaining control over all of government.

The slave vs free grouping played out at the state level. Continuing the group analysis, state level politics is viewed as having been largely between urban and rural interests. In the South the rural interests - plantation owners - usually won, and in the North, urban industrialists usually did. The canonical example of the legacy of this divide is that state capitols are rarely the largest city in the state. The capitols - and therefore the state capital - are normally a much smaller city.

This brings us down to the local level, which in the US is where most of the competition between traditional divisions like race, religion and ethnicity played out.

I think at least in the American case, I model the key development as the creation of more and different groupings through federalism, rather than a veto mechanism for traditional groups.

On the other hand, separately I have heard the idea that traditional groups were weaker in the US than in Europe because of the disruption caused by the US’ colonial structure and immigration, so I could be mislead by these peculiar circumstances. I would need a much better understanding of the democratization of other European countries and preferably some outside of Europe. Unfortunately the data is pretty sparse there, as these democracies are usually very young and don’t have many cycles of competition to compare.

Really interesting! In fact, I love how LW has a lot of posts in the same vein: written by people who – presumably – aren’t in fact specialists of their topic, and who engage little with the literature on the subject, but who nonetheless manage to have an interesting thing to say, and say it differently – often better – from how someone actually in the field would have said it.

I’ve only taken a few introductory political science courses in college, but in those classes, we learn that: 

• ‘Democracy’ originally referred to Athenes-style direct democracy, to the point where 18th c. philosophers explicitly said that what they wanted (which we now describe as a democracy) was not a democracy. 
• At this point, the ‘Polsci 101’ professor will say that the reason they didn’t want a ‘democracy’ was just because that’s massively easier to do when you‘re 40k people than when you’re 10 million. That definitely was one of the main reasons brought forward at the time. But the 18th c. revolutions were made by a social group (merchants and intellectuals who didn’t have the same rights as the nobility, or the same rights as their fellows on the other side of the Atlantic) who felt disenfranchised: they mostly wanted a fairer distribution of power in the sense that they wanted to have their fair share of it. 
• Also, they mostly took inspiration from the most important European country with a well-functioning parliament: England. And that parliament had always been established as an organ for the representation of the nobility and other factions in the decision-making process – just like the Magna Carta (≈bill of rights) had been forced upon the king by the nobility in 1215.
• Now, we’re already pretty close to what you describe, with democracy mostly being a way to give a platform to each major faction. But the most important part is the part where they get each a veto. And again, that had been done quite explicitly when the English parliament had gained more power, in the 1680s, and again when 18th c. philosophers were preparing our current political systems. A big reason for that was the religious wars between catholics and protestants in the 16-17th c. Just as Scott Alexander explains here, that’s when liberalism (respect the other guy’s freedom so they respect yours) started emerging: 18th c. philosophers were completely in that intellectual tradition, so they would definitely have agreed with you as to what they were trying to build – and intellectual tradition which imho we would do well not to toss overboard, since it’s such a great way to have a functioning society. 
   

Seems big if true and fairly plausible. I'd be interested in chipping in to pay for someone to come up with a methodology for investing this more and then running at it if the methodology seemed good.

(also it's occurring to me it'd be cool to have a "Dollars!/Unit of Caring" react)

Giving everyone a veto pushes the government too far into indecisiveness. 

You need to let the 49% stop bills they Really hate, but not bills they only mildly dislike. 

New system. 
 

Each faction has an official party. Voters choose a party. 

Parties each have 2 numbers, $v$ and $p$ the number of votes and points. These start proportional. 

(How about half the points from the previous election carry over??)

Each slot for new legislation is auctioned off (in points). Like every time the previous bill is dealt with, hold an auction to decide the next bill on the table. 

Then when voting on the bill, each party decides on a number $I$. This number can be any real (if they have the points) If the sum of all parties $I$ for the bill is positive, the bill passes.

Then each party gets a $J$, which is $J=I$ for the losers (ie parties that supported a failed bill, or opposed a successful one. ) But is a downscaled version of $I$ for the winners. $\sum J=0$.

Weighted quadratic voting. Each party pays $J^2/v$ points. The total number of points a party has can't go negative, which limits the $I$ they are allowed to vote.  

Also does this have any theoretical model that backs it up?

E.g. take N agents with preferred world-states W1, ... Wn

Does this system emerge naturally?

Why shouldn't this apply recursively?

E.g. imagine that within each of the two major factions, there is a 48%/52% split. Doesn't that imply civil war within the factions?

If your faction lacks the veto-mechanism but the opposing faction has it doesn't that mean that the opposing faction is stronger than you because you have a debilitating civil war, but they don't?

I'm not entirely sure the thesis quite captured exactly what was going on. It's true balancing the factions was a big deal to the founders and there were number of ways one can cast the USA into some dichotomous buckets -- North/South (which is largely industrial/agrarian) or the Federalist/Anit Federalist and probably some others. But the other point of the separation of powers and the nature of the bicameral struture was about checks and balaces both within the population and within government itself. In that sense I agree one can cast the position as some type of veto for the large minority but it was probably more about just increasing the costs of passing legislation at the federal level. 

An interesting compare/contrast here might be looking at the federal level and then looking at the States.

The idea probably also needs to be run through the lens of modern political economy (Public Choice/Social Choice) theory as many of the conclusion from that literature is that in general the majority is hardly ever really doing anything -- special interests and narrow factions are in more control.

I think it was Knut Wicksell that suggested the idea that Constitutions should have a rule whereby legislation didn't pass with just a simple majority but needed some higher level of approval, e.g., 60%. But he didn't stop there. The Constitution would then allow a smaller number of people repeal the law. So if once implemented and 15% of the legislature were getting ear fulls from their constituents they could force the repeal of the law with a vote and only need to meet that 15% theashold. I don't think that was ever implement and no idea just how seriously it was discussed but clearly is about providing that type of veto power to a minority that might be feeling abused.

The other thing to point at was the political and something of a constitutional crises that arose in the early 1830s in the Tarrifs of Abomination. The South hated that and I think it came close to Civil war. While true, this was after the addition of new states (I think there were 24 states during that period). So there may have been early warning signs of the imballance to any check on existing status quo powers for opposing change. Looking at some of the additions over time another interesting fact show up. More than a few new states were infact part of existing states rather than due to territorial expansion. Would looking into what might have been driving that result through the lens of significant minority lacking a veto help support the thesis? 

The following is a bit tangetal to John's point. It's also not well presented, but since we're talking about forms of government I'll toss the thought out. 

I've been mulling over the idea posing the question "What should a 21st Century Government look like?" The one's we have can all largely be called 18th Century forms (and likely earlier). In thinking about this I tent do contrast government and market -- two very significant social institutions. Unlike, say, David Friedman (_Machinery of Freedom_) I don't think they are interchangable. The exist to solve different social "problems". Both do involved exchanges and mediating diverse preference/interests. But a key difference is that government is nearly always seen as an "actor" while markets are an environment inwhich people act.

I wonder how much scope there might be for shifting things the government is actively doing into a government structure that is more like markets -- in that it provides an institutional setting that reduces organizational costs for collective action by various groups in the polity and even in some cases all people (in the 90% sense of "all" maybe). Two sources of discontent are not being able to get things done socially you are interested in seeing done and having things you don't want done done in your name -- i.e., you're footing the bill like it or not.

I'll kind of cherry-pick an example here: Social Welfare progams the government runs. I suspect there would still be a role here but not in the heavy handed way we currently have. Clearly with all the go-fundme and other crowd source funding that exists the technology is largely in place. I'm not 100% sure about this but trust the source of the comment (old professor of mine). Britain supposedly established government welfare programs because people of the time feared that too much money was being given away. It was difficult for any one person wanting to help to know just who else has been providing funding. If so, then perhaps government social programs were and are structued to reduce the total amount, not maximize or spend efficiently. Given the current state of things, in the US and probably elsewhere, the rally cry is that we need more spending. If government was not the active agent in delivering these social services would we perhaps see more (and possibly better) spending?

Clearly there are other areas where government is some type of informational and organizational cost reducing, passive strucure than the active agent in control won't work. Butit seems like the more we can collectively accomplish without having some central actor as opposed to some central insitutional environment within to act for ourselves. To the extent that can work it would seem to remove the need to have some veto mechanism other than the personal choice of each person. As there is no common pool of resources to desire, I suspect some of the factional fighting disappears and Peter never has to rob Paul to pay Patty as does happen in today's structure.

And so began the US civil war.

Despite the name, the war between the states bears little resemblance to the civil wars in your other examples; since you picked Iraq, the invasion of Kuwait is a closer analogy than the post-election Sunni rebellion (though any war of conquest would be apt). But your description of the causes of secession is sound.

Maybe the right word for this would be corporatism.

Presumably the factions (eg. Southern states) also have sub factions, so maybe a better system would be described with the recursive acronym DVDF:
Democracy with Veto for each faction, plus DVDF within Factions.

While considering this idea, it occurred to me that you might not want whatever factions exist at the time you create a government to remain permanently empowered, given that factions sometimes rise or fall if you wait long enough.

Then I started wondering if one could create a system that somehow dynamically identifies the current "major factions" and gives de-facto vetoes to them.

And then I said: "Wait, how is that different from just requiring some voting threshold higher than 50% in order to change policy?"

Having just finished reading Scott Garrabrant's sequence on geometric rationality: https://www.lesswrong.com/s/4hmf7rdfuXDJkxhfg [? · GW] 
These lines:
- Give a de-facto veto to each major faction
- Within each major faction, do pure democracy.
Remind me very much of additive expectations / maximization within coordinated objects and multiplicative expectations / maximization between adversarial ones. For example maximizing expectation of reward within a hypothesis, but sampling which hypothesis to listen to for a given action according to their expected utility rather than just taking the max.

I think this is an interesting point of view. The OP is interested in how this concept of checked democracy might work within a corporation. From a position of ignorance can I ask whether anyone familiar with German corporate governance recognises this mode of democracy within German organisations? I choose Germany because large German companies historically incorporate significant worker representation within their governance structures, and, historically, tend to  perform well.

The failure mode of having a lot of veto-holders is that  nothing ever gets done. Which is fine if you are happy with the default state of affairs, but not so fine if you prefer not to run your state on the default budget of zero. 

There are some international organizations heavily reliant on veto powers, the EU and the UN Security Council come to mind, and to a lesser degree NATO (as far as the admission of new members in concerned). 

None of these are unmitigated success stories. From my understanding, getting stuff done in the EU means bribing or threatening every state who does not particularly benefit from whatever you want to do. 

Likewise, getting Turkey to allow Sweden to join NATO was kind of difficult, from what I remember. Not very surprisingly, if you have to get 30 factions to agree on something, one will be likely to object for good or bad reasons. 

The UN Security Council with its five veto-bearing permanent members does not even make a pretense at democratic legitimation. The three states with the biggest nuclear arsenals, plus two nuclear countries which used to be colonial powers. The nicest thing one can say about that arrangement is that it failed to start WW III, and in a few cases passed a resolution against some war criminal who did not have the backing of any of the veto powers.

I think veto powers as part of a system of checks and balances are good in moderation, but add to many of them and you end up with a stalemate.

--

I also do not think that the civil war could have been prevented by stacking the deck even more in favor of the South. Sooner or later the industrial economy in the North would have overtaken the slave economy in the South. At best, the North might have seceded in disgust, resulting in the South on track to become some rural backwater.

I think this is similar to the governance arrangement in Northern Ireland that ended the troubles (for the most part). Both sides need to share power in order to govern. If one side is perceived to go too far then the other can resign from government, effectively vetoing the other.

The LessWrong Review [? · GW] runs every year to select the posts that have most stood the test of time. This post is not yet eligible for review, but will be at the end of 2025. The top fifty or so posts are featured prominently on the site throughout the year.

Hopefully, the review is better than karma at judging enduring value. If we have accurate prediction markets on the review results, maybe we can have better incentives on LessWrong today. Will this post make the top fifty?

I've never heard the US civil war described this way.
Thank you.

I think the success or failure of this model really depends on the nature and number of the factions. If interfactional competition gets too zero-sum (this might help us, but it helps them more, so we'll oppose it) then this just turns into stasis.

During ordinary times, vetocracy might be tolerable, but it will slowly degrade state capacity. During a crisis it can be fatal.

Even in America, we only see this factional veto in play in a subset of scenarios - legislation under divided government. Plenty of action at the executive level or in state governments don't have to worry about this.

Is the idea that "they seceded because we broke their veto" is more of a casus belli than "we can't break their veto"?

My reaction to the Churchill quote is: why don't we try more forms of government?

Of course we can't start with animal trials, but we can try with the American Antarctic base or a village then move up to city trials, state trials, and so on.