Exotic Governmental/Legal Systems

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by ericthered

20: Elections are lotteries, but instead of directly picking citizens, each citizen submits a proxy and one citizen's proxy is chosen at random.

Note that any scheme that involves voting can be converted into one or more random systems by replacing any or all of the votes with a random generator. Pick the king at random (from any of a variety of pools of candidates), pick legislators at random, elect legislators and let them compose and debate bills and then decide if they pass by flipping a coin....

OK some replacements seem less ridiculous than others, though I could see that last in a less degenerate case where you let the legislators votes count for something, but add some number of additional random votes to give the gods a voice in the outcome.

[malloyd]

A bit more generally it seems there are a few possible approaches

You can make decisions in an exotic way (flipping a coin, reading entrails, whatever). These tend to be doomed - coming up with a system that reliably makes *better* decisions than people thinking about the issues and picking what seems the best answer to them is tough.

You can select the decision makers in an exotic way. This will usually work well enough provided there is a way for those with ambition or actual power groups to influence or control some of those selections somehow.

Or you can divide authority among several decision-makers in an unfamiliar way (the Red King commands the army and decides cases where the defendant is a woman, the Blue King makes laws the apply when the moon is up and sets taxes in years that are not prime numbers, the Green king makes the laws for when the moon is below the horizon and decides the rest of the cases, The Purple king sets the prime number taxes and picks the clergy...)

[The Colonel]

Have we had demarcy yet? Specifically the pattern where being a parliamentarian is like jury duty to which you are drafted for a year (or even a specific bill)? Perhaps you have a non-voting house of experts - selected as pre-eminent in their fields - who prepare legislation, which is then voted on by the demarchs - thus giving the state both technical expertise and popular consent without developing a professional political class...

#3 has been demonstrated to a degree prior to the evolution of political parties - certainly in the English parliament there were MPs whilst "parties" were mostly defined by which club you dined at and lacked any official structure (and frankly, whilst it wasn't illegal to form an official party, you'd likely attract considerable adverse attention from whoever's job it was to stamp out conspiracies if you did...).

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by The Colonel

Have we had demarcy yet? Specifically the pattern where being a parliamentarian is like jury duty to which you are drafted for a year (or even a specific bill)? Perhaps you have a non-voting house of experts - selected as pre-eminent in their fields - who prepare legislation, which is then voted on by the demarchs - thus giving the state both technical expertise and popular consent without developing a professional political class...

#1 isn't so dissimilar from that. Though appointing them to specific bills is a new twist, and the proposing house of experts is interesting. You still need someone to explain the bills to the jurors though. Otherwise they become nothing but a rubber stamp. Your professional political class might end up looking like lawyers who argue the merits of passing or not passing a bill against one another. Which is still a cool setup.

30: The reigning monarch adopts an heir who he trains to the position. This was very common among the roman emperors.

[David Johnston2]

31. A monarchy in which one becomes king by marrying the daughter of the previous queen (who selects one of her daughters to be the next queen, often as her husband tells her to).

32. A democracy in which only women have the franchise.

33. A tricameral legislature in which two of the houses are voted for by the two ethnic groups while the third covers everyone else.

34. A system of men and not laws. Community judges (who are the only elected officials) are elected for a term that ends with death or a community vote in which 2/3s of the community vote to remove them. There are no codified laws, although judges usually take precedent and tradition into account when making rulings. Other decisions that don't involve criminalizing things are made by majority vote of the community.

[ericthered]

35. Executive power rests with a small odd number of men (three, five or seven, historically), so that while one man cannot hold all power, decisions can still be made quickly. Historical reference: the Directorates of the first french republic.

36. Rotating Kingship: several states have a single "Great King" who speaks for all of them on matters we modern folks would consider "Federal". This spot may be by seniority, or it may rotate in a fixed order. If its elected, we're right back to #15

[Anthony]

Non-contiguous districts: you have a representative democracy, but instead of your district being determined by your place of residence, it's determined in some other way (say, a number assigned when you are born or reach adulthood -- e.g. the last two digits of your social security number).

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Non-contiguous districts: you have a representative democracy, but instead of your district being determined by your place of residence, it's determined in some other way (say, a number assigned when you are born or reach adulthood -- e.g. the last two digits of your social security number).

What do they call gerrymandering? That's an awesome idea with great opportunities for corruption and conspiracy.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Irish Wolf

Note that in Heinlein, "federal service" =/= "military service", and in fact it's pointed out that most people who sign up for Federal Service wind up processing paperwork in some back room or something equally unglamorous for their two-year term.

Heinlein certainly asserted as much in an essay he wrote for Expanded Universe in 1980. But if it's pointed out in the 1958 novel I'd like you to indicate the relevant passage.

For the controversy, see James Gifford's [url=https://www.nitrosyncretic.com/pdfs/nature_of_fedsvc_1996.pdf]The Nature of “Federal Service”in Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers[url].

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Non-contiguous districts: you have a representative democracy, but instead of your district being determined by your place of residence, it's determined in some other way (say, a number assigned when you are born or reach adulthood -- e.g. the last two digits of your social security number).

I think you would need some basis to think that your constituency actually has some common interests. Like for example sharing the same or related professions