Parliaments without the Parties

Fundamentally, politicians are going to spend more attention to the mechanisms of legislation and information that impacts re-election than most members of the populace.  They're going to be more strategic than voters about open or hidden coalitions, and more strategic about whether voters like to categorize them as party members or as independent (aka rogue) agents.

If coalitions and parties are not part of the system, it's hard to see the point in representatives at all - why not just direct voting on issues?

In some ways it seems the question "So how could you stop this happening?" is quite a bit like the jailer in the Prisoner's Dilemma story was answering. The problem was getting the prisoner's not to cooperate in their silence but rat each other out. What type of payoff matrix would be needed to induce political representatives to act in the public interests rather than party interests? Clearly you don't get that from the parties so it would need to be operationalized within some Constitutional and Congressional structure. 

Perhaps one thing that might also help in thinking through potential solutions would be trying to segregate legislation into a few different types of buckets to see if certain types of legislation (or the underlying class of problem the legislation is attempting to address) are more prone to generating such behavior. 

I had the thought occur to me (some time ago) that we are in the 21st Century and in many ways it still seems a lot like the 18th, 19th and 20th Centuries.  Government is still very much an actor within society and still very much being a pain in the ass as often as it s being helpful. Could it be possible that in the 21st Century government could evolve into some general infrastructure that efficiently allows the interested people solve their own problems? Clearly that could not be all but the idea that government functioning as a tool that largely eliminated the organizational and informational cost asymmetries could allow a good number of things government now does be "delegated" to the people. I suspect certain classes of problems we currently see government's creating legislation (and playing party politics with) could fall into that type of bucket. 

If we also learned that those types of problems are actually where we see the highest incidence of the undesired political behavior....

In the 21st century, it seems arbitrary to elect representatives by happenstance of geography.

Also, there is the problem that currently we combine a bunch of skills into one job called "politician":

1. Raising money
2. Hiring staff
3. Campaigning (giving speeches, appearing in commercials)
4. Voting (and deciding which way to vote)
5. Drafting legislation (and understanding legislation)

And then we select who wins mostly based on 4, with a dash of 2 and 3, with 1 being a "you must be this successful to compete" barrier.

Parties help de-couple those skills, so the people who campaign can pick a Party based on 4, and focus on 3, and let the Party handle 1, 2, and 5.

I suspect that something like political parties are just too useful of a tool for them to not organically form in most any legislature, absent measures that would crush other important freedoms like speech/assembly/association.

The biggest obstacle to your idea is, I think, the executive. In parlamentary systems the government answers to the parliament, and needs MPs support to continue - indeed, the Israeli maneuvering that you cite is related to making the government collapse, not to political parties. So as a first thing, you need a presidential system. But even then, MPs would probably organize as for or against the president - I imagine that the president's role in drafting and proposing legislation would be even higher than in present day US, as the coordination of MPs via the parties would be missing.

The second factor is the actual parties, i.e. the organisation of people that want to be politically active (in the current system these people select, support, control and in a few cases eventually become MPs, but that is only part of what the do). A lot of this activity will always be there and is important - what makes the party is members and of some political ideology, the MPs are not in principle needed. You want to separate these orgs from what happens in parliament, but it's not clear if it's possible - many candidates are always internal, people who have participated to party activity for years before running and continue to discuss their views with other members on a regular basis.

Personally, I think if we eliminated the parties we would probably be worse off, because they would be replaced by worse (less transparent) coalition building. But I would be curious to see you flesh out your ideas!

I read the first paragraph of this post, and before reading the rest I said to myself, "I sure hope this person has a good model for why parties exist in the first place so they can ensure that their replacement actually works." Unfortunately, the rest of the post didn't pan out.

I'm very sympathetic to your goals here, but without a better model for the behavior of political coalitions, I strongly suspect that these proposed solution will either fail or make things worse. In particular we need to consider both the intra-parliamentary function of parties (allowing representatives to coordinate with each other), but also the public, communicative function of parties to allow voters to choose a candidate and have a good model for his behavior without having to invest tons of time.

Well Australia tried not to have parties - they weren't recognized by the constitution till 1977 - but they happened anyway. Getting agreement on a piece of legislation is very much about the art compromise unless you have a direct democracy. Compromises like, if you vote for this, then I will vote for that. This builds the electoral platform that people actually vote on and naturally give rise to parties. A lot of parliament's strength come from parties - especially the opposition being effectively a shadow government and able to make a smooth transition to power. That's not to say it cant be improved on, but I doubt you can get a away from parties forming either formally or informally. Also, dont forget that in many westminister parliaments, the house debates and voting are public grandstanding, while the real work (and the important compromises) happen in select committee.

I think the most obvious thing is to just abolish representative democracy and replace it with direct democracy. We have more than enough technology to do this. Store votes on a blockchain, etc. Nobody can really "represent" anyone else, after all. Not everyone will want to vote on every problem, but that's a feature, not a bug: only people who care will vote, and the decision will be made by those who are actually affected by it.

I am not sure about other countries, but I think in US, the low-hanging fruit is to require all [non-emergency] legislation to be published in its final form well before the vote (say, a week or two). Currently we have way too much stuff being "snuck in" at the last moment, and for important legislation there is not enough time for the public to influence the text (while lobbyists are successful sneaking things in at the last moment).

I like your idea too - perhaps having a 1 month "cool off" period before votes become public would be enough to reduce the power of parties a bit.

But at least in US the first-past-the-post system is what keeps the two parties in power the most - introducing any sort of run-off system would probably be the lowest hanging fruit for that problem.

P.S. For my prepublication proposal - emergency legislation would need to still be allowed, but something like requiring a high (e.g. 2/3) votes threshold and automatic 6 months sunset on emergency legislation would prevent most abuse.