The Nonlinear Library LW - The Worst Form Of Government (Except For Everything Else We've Tried) by johnswentworth
Mar 17, 2024
06:19
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The Worst Form Of Government (Except For Everything Else We've Tried), published by johnswentworth on March 17, 2024 on LessWrong.
Churchill
famously called democracy "the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time" - referring presumably to the relative success of his native Britain, the US, and more generally Western Europe and today most of the first world.
I claim that Churchill was importantly wrong. Not (necessarily) wrong about the relative success of Britain/US/etc, but about those countries' governments being well-described as simple democracy. Rather, I claim, the formula which has worked well in e.g.
Britain and the US diverges from pure democracy in a crucial load-bearing way; that formula works better than pure democracy both in theory and in practice, and when thinking about good governance structures we should emulate the full formula rather than pure democracy.
Specifically, the actual governance formula which is "worst except for everything else we've tried" is:
Give a de-facto veto to each major faction
Within each major faction, do pure democracy.
A Stylized Tale of Democracy
Let's start with the obvious failure mode of pure democracy: suppose a country consists of 51% group A, 49% group B, and both groups hate each other and have centuries-long blood feuds. Some first world country decides to invade, topple the local dictator, and hold democratic elections for a new government. Group A extremist candidate wins with a 51% majority, promising to enact divine vengeance upon the B's for their centuries of evil deeds.
Group B promptly rebels, and the country descends into civil war.
This is obviously a stylized, oversimplified picture, but… well, according to wikipedia the three largest ethnic groups in Iraq are the Shiites (14 million), Sunni arabs (9 million), and Sunni Kurds (4.7 million), which would make the Shiites just over 50% (excluding the various smaller groups)[1]. In the 2005 elections, the Shiites claimed 48% of the seats - not quite a majority but close enough to dominate political decisions in practice. Before long, the government was led by
a highly sectarian Shiite, who generally tried to limit the power of Sunnis and Kurds. In response, around 2013/2014, outright Sunni rebellion coalesced around ISIL and Iraq plunged into civil war.
Now, I'm not about to claim that this was democracy at its purest - the US presumably put its thumb on the scales, the elections were presumably less than ideal, Iraq's political groups presumably don't perfectly cleave into two camps, etc. But the outcome matches the prediction of the oversimplified model well enough that I expect the oversimplified model captures the main drivers basically-correctly.
So what formula should have been applied in Iraq, instead?
The Recipe Which Works In Practice
In its infancy, the US certainly had a large minority which was politically at odds with the majority: the old North/South split. The solution was a two-house Congress. Both houses of Congress were democratically elected, but the votes were differently weighted (one population-weighted, one a fixed number of votes per state), in such a way that both groups would have a de-facto veto on new legislation. In other words: each major faction received a de-facto veto.
That was the key to preventing the obvious failure mode.
Particularly strong evidence for this model came later on in US history. As new states were added, the Southern states were at risk of losing their de-facto veto. This came to a head with Kansas: by late 1860 it became clear that Kansas was likely to be added as a state and would align with the Northern faction, fully eliminating the Southern veto.
In response, South Carolina formally seceded in December 1860, followed by five more Southern states ...
Churchill
famously called democracy "the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time" - referring presumably to the relative success of his native Britain, the US, and more generally Western Europe and today most of the first world.
I claim that Churchill was importantly wrong. Not (necessarily) wrong about the relative success of Britain/US/etc, but about those countries' governments being well-described as simple democracy. Rather, I claim, the formula which has worked well in e.g.
Britain and the US diverges from pure democracy in a crucial load-bearing way; that formula works better than pure democracy both in theory and in practice, and when thinking about good governance structures we should emulate the full formula rather than pure democracy.
Specifically, the actual governance formula which is "worst except for everything else we've tried" is:
Give a de-facto veto to each major faction
Within each major faction, do pure democracy.
A Stylized Tale of Democracy
Let's start with the obvious failure mode of pure democracy: suppose a country consists of 51% group A, 49% group B, and both groups hate each other and have centuries-long blood feuds. Some first world country decides to invade, topple the local dictator, and hold democratic elections for a new government. Group A extremist candidate wins with a 51% majority, promising to enact divine vengeance upon the B's for their centuries of evil deeds.
Group B promptly rebels, and the country descends into civil war.
This is obviously a stylized, oversimplified picture, but… well, according to wikipedia the three largest ethnic groups in Iraq are the Shiites (14 million), Sunni arabs (9 million), and Sunni Kurds (4.7 million), which would make the Shiites just over 50% (excluding the various smaller groups)[1]. In the 2005 elections, the Shiites claimed 48% of the seats - not quite a majority but close enough to dominate political decisions in practice. Before long, the government was led by
a highly sectarian Shiite, who generally tried to limit the power of Sunnis and Kurds. In response, around 2013/2014, outright Sunni rebellion coalesced around ISIL and Iraq plunged into civil war.
Now, I'm not about to claim that this was democracy at its purest - the US presumably put its thumb on the scales, the elections were presumably less than ideal, Iraq's political groups presumably don't perfectly cleave into two camps, etc. But the outcome matches the prediction of the oversimplified model well enough that I expect the oversimplified model captures the main drivers basically-correctly.
So what formula should have been applied in Iraq, instead?
The Recipe Which Works In Practice
In its infancy, the US certainly had a large minority which was politically at odds with the majority: the old North/South split. The solution was a two-house Congress. Both houses of Congress were democratically elected, but the votes were differently weighted (one population-weighted, one a fixed number of votes per state), in such a way that both groups would have a de-facto veto on new legislation. In other words: each major faction received a de-facto veto.
That was the key to preventing the obvious failure mode.
Particularly strong evidence for this model came later on in US history. As new states were added, the Southern states were at risk of losing their de-facto veto. This came to a head with Kansas: by late 1860 it became clear that Kansas was likely to be added as a state and would align with the Northern faction, fully eliminating the Southern veto.
In response, South Carolina formally seceded in December 1860, followed by five more Southern states ...