Reforming Democracy via Corrective Democracy

At the FEE.org, Chapman University law professor Tom W. Bell posits of how to reform democracy: Corrective Democracy

A corrective democracy allows voters to do only one thing: Strike down a specified rule. Voters would get a fair shot at any law, regulation, ordinance, or order that offends them. If it failed the corrective vote, the rule would get removed from the books. Think of it as the electoral equivalent of jury nullification.

Corrective democracy qualifies as a type of “disapproval voting,” the general name applied to systems that allow only votes against certain choices. Disapproval voting has seen use in a number of contexts, most famously on reality game shows where participants can vote each other off but also, and more conventionally, in recall elections and no-confidence votes. (Disapproval voting has not evidently attracted much formal study, however, or been put to the broad political use advocated here.)

A corrective democracy could not be used to create a government agency or program; creating new institutions would require the passage of new laws. Corrective democracy thus comes with a powerful built-in limitation. Even if the lazy and vicious outnumber the industrious and virtuous—a tragic but unlikely situation—they could not use a corrective democracy to give themselves bread and circuses.

Legislative bodies hardly ever attempt to assess on whether the rules or edicts they pass have been effective or not. Yet most of them have been designed to have short term impact meant to generate votes.

And in the absence or dearth of sunset provision, mounting number of legislation leads to increasing politicization of the marketplace, thus economic repression and lesser civil liberties. 

Corrective democracy comes with a “skin on the game”, again Professor Bell

How to provide open access to corrective democracy without wasting time on futile votes? Let anyone call an election on any rule, but make losers pay the costs. Apart from perhaps requiring that challengers post bond, this system would let anyone target any law, regulation, ordinance, or order. Elections in a corrective democracy could thus arise directly from voters themselves, the popular will unmediated by party politics, electoral commissions, or arcane devices like the Electoral College.

Corrective democracy as a check on government.

Corrective democracy offers democracy, corrected. Because it operates only to trim back government excesses, corrective democracy runs little risk of degenerating into mob rule. It thus gives voters a more direct say in their government without giving them direct access to power. 

Corrective democracy is not a lesser form of democracy, however. To the contrary, it affords a safe means to broaden the voting franchise and open up public access to the initiative process. Corrective democracy does not solve every problem of governance—somebody still has to write the rules, for instance—but it does improve on current political mechanisms. Corrective democracy turns voting from a blunt scepter for wielding political power into a sharp sword for defending individual rights.

Quote of the Day: How Insiders Use Democracy to Pick on Your Pockets

Napoleon Bonaparte himself was an outsider. He was not French, but Corsican. He didn’t even speak French when he arrived in Toulon as a boy. But there never is one fixed group of people who are always insiders. Instead, the insider group has a porous membrane separating it from the rest of the population. Some people enter. Some are expelled. The group swells. And shrinks. Potential rivals are brought in and bought off. Weak members are pushed out. Sometimes, a military defeat brings a whole new group of insiders into power. Elections, too, can change the make-up of the core group.

The genius of modern representative government is that it allows the masses to believe that they are insiders too. They are encouraged to vote…and to believe that their vote really matters. Of course, it matters not at all. Generally, the voters have no idea what or whom they are voting for. Often, they get the opposite of what they thought they had voted for anyway.

The common man likes the idea that he is running things. And he pays dearly for it. After the insiders brought him into the voting booth, his taxes soared…

In short, the insiders pulled a fast one. They allowed the rube to feel that he had a solemn responsibility to set the course of government. And while the fellow was dazzled by his own power…they picked his pocket!..

By the 20th century, developed countries could afford the cost of maintaining an expensive level of military preparedness, even when there was not really very much to be prepared for. But the common man was skinned again. Not only was he expected to pay for it, still under the delusion that he was in charge, he also was made to believe that he had a patriotic duty to defend the homeland insiders! That is the real reason that the modern democratic system has spread all over the world. It allows the insiders to mobilize more of the resources and energy of the country on their behalf. Nothing can compete with it.

This is from the Daily Reckoning’s Bill Bonner

Libertarians are Thinkers, Not Feelers

Our adapted political ideology have not only been shaped by our life’s circumstances, orientation and other influences but importantly from our personality.

And from the psychological framework, libertarians are said to be thinkers and not impulsive and emotional chumps.

That’s according to a study cited by the prolific author Matthew Ridley at the Wall Street Journal

The study collated the results of 16 personality surveys and experiments completed by nearly 12,000 self-identified libertarians who visited YourMorals.org. The researchers compared the libertarians to tens of thousands of self-identified liberals and conservatives. It was hardly surprising that the team found that libertarians strongly value liberty, especially the "negative liberty" of freedom from interference by others. Given the philosophy of their heroes, from John Locke and John Stuart Mill to Ayn Rand and Ron Paul, it also comes as no surprise that libertarians are also individualistic, stressing the right and the need for people to stand on their own two feet, rather than the duty of others, or government, to care for people.

Perhaps more intriguingly, when libertarians reacted to moral dilemmas and in other tests, they displayed less emotion, less empathy and less disgust than either conservatives or liberals. They appeared to use "cold" calculation to reach utilitarian conclusions about whether (for instance) to save lives by sacrificing fewer lives. They reached correct, rather than intuitive, answers to math and logic problems, and they enjoyed "effortful and thoughtful cognitive tasks" more than others do.

The researchers found that libertarians had the most "masculine" psychological profile, while liberals had the most feminine, and these results held up even when they examined each gender separately, which "may explain why libertarianism appeals to men more than women."

All Americans value liberty, but libertarians seem to value it more. For social conservatives, liberty is often a means to the end of rolling back the welfare state, with its lax morals and redistributive taxation, so liberty can be infringed in the bedroom. For liberals, liberty is a way to extend rights to groups perceived to be oppressed, so liberty can be infringed in the boardroom. But for libertarians, liberty is an end in itself, trumping all other moral values.

Just a clarification: libertarianism is a political theory which according to Mr. Libertarian, Murray N. Rothbard is “an important subset of moral theory that deals with the proper role of violence in social life” and that while libertarians agree with Lord Acton "liberty is the highest political end", it is “not necessarily the highest end on everyone's personal scale of values”.  

In short, in terms of politics yes "liberty is an end", but politics is just one of the many aspects of a person’s life.

Distinguishing Political Indentity From Ideology

This is excellent stuff from Brink Lindsey on Partisanship published at the Cato Unbound. (Pointer to Bryan Caplan of Econlog).

Here, Mr. Lindsey observes that partisanship is much about identity more than ideology.

Here is an excerpt: (bold highlights mine)

``It’s not just that partisans are vulnerable to believing fatuous nonsense. It’s that their beliefs, whether sensible or otherwise, about a whole range of empirical questions are determined by their political identity. There’s no epistemologically sound reason why one’s opinion about, say, the effects of gun control should predict one’s opinion about whether humans have contributed to climate change or how well Mexican immigrants are assimilating — these things have absolutely nothing to do with each other. Yet the fact is that views on these and a host of other matters are indeed highly correlated with each other. And the reason is that people start with political identities and then move to opinions about how the world works, not vice versa."

``So yes, most partisans are “better informed” than most independents, because they have a political identity that motivates them to have opinions and then tells them which ones to have as well as the reasons for having them. Consequently, partisans may have more information in their heads, but their partisanship ensures that this information is riddled with biases and errors and then shields those biases and errors from scrutiny. This is not a state of affairs worth defending.

``Virtue as well as truth is a casualty of partisan zeal. Even when partisans know what the score is, they’re constantly tempted to shade the truth, or at least keep silent, in order to be a good team player. Recall, for example, the fury unleashed this past fall on the handful of conservative commentators who were willing to admit the obvious: Sarah Palin was obviously, embarrassingly unprepared for the office she was seeking. In coalitional psychology, the only thing worse than an infidel is a heretic, and that fact ensures that most partisans keep their heterodox opinions to themselves. Good for the team, perhaps, but bad for the soul — and the republic."

My comment:

Mr. Lindsey' observation, in my opinion is spot on.

In the Philippines, the partisan crowd think that they argue about issues, but all the while their arguments revolve around identity or personality. Definitely not ideology. That's why I call this Personality Based politics, where leadership preferences are based mainly on popularity, symbolism or connections.

For example, the public's impression of corruption appears mainly a moral issue. Lost in the argument is the interrelationship between regulatory structure and how these affects behavior of affected agents, the bloated bureaucracy, the quality and web of laws, the incentives governing the officials and the bureaucracy, patronage system, election spending, restrictions, and many more.

And it's why the elixir of "clean" government won't happen. Not when the critical decisions affecting the economy are determined politically.

It's just that democracy allows people to vent changes in terms of hope-even when they are false hopes.

In addition, it is also true that highly partisan people engage in analysis that are highly biased and full of logical errors. Although this would seem like economic creed, perhaps identity indeed is more the culprit for such incoherence. The confusion perhaps stems from forcing to fit data mined facts to the belief adhered to by the leaders.

Mr. Lindsey sees a change in the shape of politics as a sign of hope,

``In America until relatively recently, and in less developed democracies today, the predominant form of partisanship has been a concrete, personal loyalty to specific leaders and comrades. This is the partisanship of patronage and clientelism — of the Jacksonian spoils system, Tammany Hall, and the Chicago machine. In the twilight of this phase of American democracy, 64-year-old Illinois state legislator John G. Fary won a seat to Congress and made this statement of his plans: “I will go to Washington to help represent Mayor Daley. For twenty-one years, I represented the mayor in the legislature, and he was always right.”

``In the newer style of partisanship, which has emerged with a richer and better educated electorate, loyalty has grown more abstract. Now shared allegiance to broad principles of public policy is the defining element of party ID. Parties have grown more ideological, and so have partisans. Polarization is the name we’ve given to this development.

``I regard the shift toward a more ideological politics as progress. Broadly speaking, we have been moving away from politics as an amoral struggle between rival gangs and in the direction of politics as a contest of competing values. Because people have differing values, and assign different weights to the values they share, there can never be an end to politics. Accordingly, even in an ideal world where all citizens are completely rational and equally public-spirited, a politics and thus a partisanship of values would still be necessary. Here, then, in the realm of values, is the purest and most durable source of political identity."

My comment: Somehow, the web should be able to amplify on such shift as people learn more about ideals and form groups 'tribes' that eventually command the public's attention, draw a larger following and eventually acquire political heft.

Albeit perhaps, this would take longer to happen in the Philippines. Nevertheless, as a Confucian saying goes, a journey of a thousand miles begin with a single step.