Quote:
Originally Posted by Luke Bunyip
Public service akin to jury duty, or doing one's time when conscripted for military service. I like it (the idea), but the checks and balances to make it work would be interesting.
It could prevent the establishment or maintenance of a ' patrician' class of professional politician. |
The most likely tendency would be to transfer practical power from the jury-officials to the permanent bureaucracy that supposedly serves them. (Term limits have something of the same issue.) You could try to make the bureaucracy likewise random-chosen, but then you'd get
really amateurish government.
It's a variation on the 'agency problem'. I could imagine various ways a society might try to compensate. Imagine a large society which chooses its policy-making body by jury-lot, and has them served by
separate regional bureaucracies, with separate chains of command and training and so on. It would be inefficient, but you might set it up to get branches of the bureaucrats fighting each other for power instead of working as a body against their supposed employers.
Another approach might be to have private (in a sense) contractors who do the bureaucratic administration, competing to get this 5-year 'contract' from the policy-making body. Members of the policy-making body can never be employed by these companies.
No approach is going to be perfectly effective, though, any human-made and human-run system can at least potentially be gamed.