This is not the most pressing or amusing thing I have to share. Those are collected notes I jotted down over the years. Only concept. Everybody’s got to clear the desk once in a while.

The key motivations for an electoral reform should be:

(1) the sense of abandonment. (Does the government care about us?)
(2) uneducated elites
(3) responsibility pooling. (Who’s accountable for what? Deep state/The blob)
(4) inability to decouple the jobs of the government
(5) the Neonazi paranoia
(6) expertism – the reliance on real and fake experts, over-participation of the uninformed and a felt obligation to partake in every election
(7) breaking media power
(8) demagoguery

A first look at the problems

The sense of abandonment

While US Americans react to erratic government intrusions with a resounding ‘Leave me alone!’ cry, Germans feel alone already. Our problems are habitually ignored and hand outs are not a fulfilling sedative. People want to advance their ambitions, mainly their professional ones, and not be shut down or exhausted on bureaucratic grounds while the elites occupy themselves with their genitals and the rainbow flag. A discussion about the appropriate size of the government cannot be entertained until people have any sense of agency, unless your average citizen knows that his individual rights are guaranteed while he seeks to organise a majority in his interest.

As of now Germany has got no substantial racism problem, but a loss of control poses the question who’s in charge while our unaccountable elites occupy themselves with self-interests and childish infighting, perfectly ignorant of the concerns of the population. Historically those sentiments gave rise to hostilities to foreign nations and towards Jews. Scapegoats are a shortcut to research. And people who wake up in large numbers to politics because of a crisis are likely to be unfamiliar with the self-interests, the obsessions, the sub-clinical mental disorders and the psychological group-think dynamics that explain reality. Some hostile, rational profiteer in the background is an easy answer that can pop through any crisis window. At the same time elites historically showed to be happy about such witch-hunts because they distract from their actual decisions and the actual consequences of such.

Uneducated elites

In the face of the upcoming crises it is also likely for our elites to lose their own sense of control. One of the reasons why our elites and the mainstream media aren’t in a crisis mode and are not having honest unfettered discussions is that they still operate in their silly fake-it-until-you-make-it mode. The Dunning-Kruger effect lets them drag more and more responsibilities onto their desks. You must be smart to note the complexity of an issue. If you think a triangle is just a triangle anyway, you are not Archimedes.

In Germany there’s popular proposal to bar candidates with no professional background from running for elected offices. This is based on the observation that a lot of our leading politicians entered parliament during or after some academic efforts and hold neither degrees nor professional merits. Since this is not nearly as extreme in any other Western country, literally any change to the election system does already solve the problem. The downside of this proposal is that it gives political power to whatever group is supposed to certify the work and opens unnecessary discussions about the work of housewives, artists, novelists, part-time versus full-time, pseudo-employments from interest groups among other contentions.

Responsibility pooling

I coin the phrase ‘responsibility pooling’ because I noted a deliberate design of our government bodies to cover their tracks. Responsibility pooling is when citizens cannot trace who made what decision, when ominous committees or bureaucracies rule and you don’t know how to affect their governance. The underlying problem is the gradual loss of legitimacy of delegates. Delegation is the institutional equivalent of the game ‘Chinese whispers.’ Administrations consist of chains of positions in which one assigns the job of the next. The further down the chain a position is, the more remote it is from a direct election and the less clout an official should have over the public. Responsibility pooling makes individuals unaccountable and causes the mounting wrath to wear down institutions as a whole.

Decoupling problems

We will soon face an avalanche of crises. Energy becomes scarce, inflation shoots through the roof, production sites will be shut, mass unemployment will ensue and European countries will admit bankruptcy. As the unresolved problems underneath those crises persist, they become more and more intertwined. It is in our human nature to assume that a complex problem needs a single complex solution, a man, a program, a remedy, that can fix this. In reality complex problems are solved by tackling parts of them at a time. Elected offices should be as independent as possible from party headquarters and other offices. Cooperation must be based on individual initiative. Instead of assigning the best experts to a public office we move all-round generalists into these positions. And this is driven by our tribal occupation with party ideologies. The goal is not to find the best man for a job. The unspoken goal has become to cast the influence of a party and its leadership over as many institutions as possible. The party leaders and the public officials base their legitimacy not on competence but on the number of votes. Their campaigns and the affiliated “independent” media rally as many people to all available poll stations as possible. They moralise on the supposed importance of everybody’s constant participation in everything which forces citizens to rely on real and fake experts.

Neonazi paranoia

The Neonazi paranoia or ‘woke’ is particularly effective when you have this attitude that either your party foists its generalists across all public offices or evil people will do it instead. If the election system does not allow the wholesale sweeping of offices for this or that ideology, the scare of extremism would be more easily countered. As of now the German system is designed such that a peaceful transition of power in various independent areas of government cannot occur independently. To substantially reduce immigration the AfD (if even competent enough …) would need more than half of the seats of both chambers of parliament, assign new judges and fend off sanctions from the EU, the UN and other international bodies. Alternatively, they can bargain a deal with a left-wing party. There is no option but to sweep ALL institutions with supporters of one policy until it gets implemented. Interestingly, those who engage in the everybody-is-a-Nazi scare don’t find that prospect scary enough to grant other options to the public. For whatever reason they decided that unfiltered mass immigration is so important to them that they designated it the hill they desperately want to die on.

Expertism

The corona pandemic has illustrated how the powerful can further almost every policy proposal when they come to select the experts who talk to the public. In a specialised society we are used to consult experts. We try different doctors until we know to trust and then we blindly trust them. And if its not the doctor, it’s the lawyer, the accountant or somebody else. There is a limit of what one can be knowledgeable about. When it comes to everyday experts chances are high that they have your interest at heart. When a society as a whole becomes reliant on the expertise of others, it falls pray to manipulative ideologues. This reliance is created by the assumed obligation of your average citizen to have to be part of every decision. If you cannot decide all these complex matters on your own, you blindly go by trust and this is largely the evolutionary basis for group-think behavior.

Media power

The current system allows a handful of chief editors to rally masses of poorly informed citizens to the defense of one group or the attack of another. Instead of providing people with the most essential information to understand current affairs and to present both sides of a given conflict in a fair manner, they are usually party of various conflicts and rather distract than sharpen people’s focus and attention on the unfolding events.

How Germans talk about the election system so far

Most proposals from mainstream parties on election reforms in Germany circle around the voting procedure of the ‘Bundestag.’ The current method is so arcane that I have yet to meet a single German who actually knows where which parliamentarian came from and how to vote him out of office or defend him against what competitors. In what constituency is one supposed to organise any majority to get what policy supporter into the chamber? This undermines the very idea of a representative democracy. Citizens don’t know how to effect what change. More than half of the seats are alotted by party lists. How these lists are composed is a mystery to most voters and a substantial participation fence against the public. They tend to be combinations of ‘state lists’ (Länderliste), but the ‘hows’ and ‘whats’ of those details are a matter of party statutes. Most people only know that they don’t know where what parliamentarian exactly came from and how to get somebody more representative in his place. But without transparency democracy is a farce. Either people know how to determine their destiny or they don’t. Influence, determination and representation of interests are not the goals that are publicly discussed. And the underlying reason is that the years of responsibility pooling have led to the idea that delegation does not take away from the legitimacy granted by the voters. The party-list-derived larger half of the Bundestag is seen as delegations of the parties.

According to the constitution Grundgesetz a member of parliament is only subject to his own conscience. In everyday practice they are treated as if they owe their seat to the party. The fear of being isolated from the parties causes the chambers behavior to be highly predictable. The quality of speeches are extremely low because they don’t matter. No “representative” votes according to his conscience, the feedback of his constituency or the insights from the debate. Speakers follow theatrical ambitions and react only homeopathically to questions from peers. Why should they care when the results of the sessions are known in advance? The bills are mostly drafted in the ministries or by external business consultants and are only flushed through the institution that was once thought of as the heart of our democracy.

When the election system is discussed the only metric of interest to the media is whether it establishes more fairness between party leaders. A reform is sold to the public as an attempt to create the perfect representative composition of set-in-stone ideologies who supposedly have a right to blindly run down their agendas no matter what happens to the country. What matters to them is that the parties get as many delegates into public and administrative positions as possibles. And it is the fairness between those networks depending on the party headquarters that is the exclusive concern. Not only do I care little about this, I hold that it is not even a legitimate interest at all. If democracy were simply about replacing one fanatic king with another, we wouldn’t need the entire parliamentarian system at all. We could just grant some time of monarchical power to one party leader and exchange him for another thereafter. There are good reasons for the structures of Western democracy and voting is the exercise by which we render judgement on our officials so that we remain in charge of our destiny in the face of dynamically changing times.

Proposal

The representative should be answerable to a local community and organising majorities in that constituency for a given interest is how that interest is cared for in the chamber. A clear, normal first-past-the-post selection is the first part of the solution, removing party names from the ballot sheets is the second.

In the discussion how to establish fairness between the leaders, first-past-the-post gets brushed under the ominous ‘lost votes’ argument. Isn’t it unfair that my voters did not see their candidate take any seat or office at all even though they are also support of my party leader just like those who live in constituencies replete with his fans? To outsiders it is hard to believe that this is an actual argument in Germany and an unchallenged one. Nobody actually says, ‘No, you lost! Suck it up!’ The “lost votes” are still supposed to count somehow. The whole point of a decision is that one thing happens and the other thing DOES NOT HAPPEN! If the other thing also happens, you haven’t made a decision. And foiling the decision-making disempowers the sovereign, the voter.

There are voting systems that do this to a smaller degree like the Australian “instant run-off system”. In Australia the second choices of the least popular candidates are added. But why should people who have made an unpopular first choice have more weight? Those voters are actually supposed to ‘lose their vote.’ Another argument is that the candidates with fewer votes may still be closer to the overall intent of the electorate than the winning candidate. They still have lost. If candidates feel close to each other in their skills and ambitions, they are free to hold primary elections between them. There is no reason why the official election set-up should take care of bundling forces. Losing voters should continue their public debate efforts and maybe in a future election their space-shuttle parking lot will make the day. There is no system in which everybody will always get his way and be the monarch over everybody else. In Australia the decisions are still felt clearly enough, but the bundle-choice system in Germany disenfranchises the voters entirely.

The major reason why politics all across the West is so terribly tribal along party lines is that some people actually profit from it. The media can only rally against a party when low-information voters identify members en masse on their ballot sheets. High-information voters will find their candidates by name and independent of media recommendations. It is the masses of people who need the orientation with party labels that can be manipulated. Requiring voters to know the name of the candidate that represents them best in a public office reduces the participation.

The question over whether or not participation grants democratic legitimacy is hotly debated. The prevailing sense of abandonment in Germany leads to election abstention as a last signal of defiance. It is the idea that the elites would see their legitimacy shrink when voters abstain. After all this is what they say. If elites constantly try to lower the voting age, try to get immigrants who don’t understand the language and what’s going on to vote and overall drive up the participation rate with their rhetoric, they really must care about those numbers, right? Wrong. They care about drowning the informed with the uninformed. Of course, they wouldn’t admit it and so the original argument for political legitimacy as a function of participation is usually that democracy (δημοκρατία) simply means the rule of the people and that is just as many as you get. In the United States this meets the popular contention that the country is a republic (res publica) and not a democracy by which Americans mean that its’s not a mob rule (ochlocracy, ochlocratia, ὀχλοκρατία). The ancient Greek saw the danger of a kyklos (κύκλος), a cycle of government models. The best developed kyklos idea was described by the historian Polybios (Πολύβιος). In his view the natural next stage after a democracy is the descent into a mob. Powerful people in control of the means to manipulate can stir up masses to serve their interests under the guise of expressing the interest of the vast majority.
In antiquity the power of the demagogues (δημαγωγός) was based on their rhetorical tactics. Instead of presenting logical arguments they improved their own standing by supporting already popular ideas independent from their match with reality. We observe the exact same dynamics in our media. The difference is that those low-integrity speakers today also deny attention to counter-arguments, a depravity the demagogues of ancient Athens usually didn’t engaged in. The folly of the masses is the reason why representation matters and referenda alone – albeit a welcome addition to the political process – will not solve the core problems. It is not a design problem when representatives will occasionally act differently from what they promised during their campaigns. They are supposed to work their way into complex problems and it is likely that they realise something they did not know before. Contrary to popular wisdom this is not always a sign of a lack of integrity. It is the duty of a representative to explain why he was mistaken before. He is not supposed to blindly follow polls and hide behind a consent. However, he is neither supposed to place the responsibility for his diverging behavior on the complexity of an issue if he does not deign to explain any of that complexity.

In order to reverse the descend into a mob society we have to find criteria of legitimacy outside of a blind quantification of mobilisation and support. Reducing participation is historically associated with barring people from it. Thus the idea causes visceral discomfort. Occasionally people annoyed by the current mass craze and its downstream political effects bite the bullet and propose outright bans like limiting election rights to taxpayers. Where ever you want to set the axe, however, you will meet a lot of resistance. You can achieve what you seek to achieve without the friction by simply raising the cognitive bar. Ballots should only be available in the main administrative language of a country, i.e. in German, and people should remember the names of the candidates they hope to be best represented by. This is also the more palatable option simply because all of us would at the same time be included and excluded from elections; indeed, each of us would be excluded from most elections. If the legitimacy of a public office is derived from the support of people who care about it and not by the sheer number of cast votes, elections in a representative democracy become an ordinary human resources decision. This requires unprecedented humbleness in an age of narcissism. But if you imagine to run a business you would never hire somebody whose name you cannot remember. You would neither choose a craftsman based on his looks or how close his believes are to those of somebody else. Why would you choose a public representative that way? If you can desist from partaking in every election, you will also become less reliant on experts, real and fake ones. Experts can err, too, and they also have their own set of interest. You either know on your own who would be your best representative for a given public office or nobody does. If you cannot delegate decisions to other voting peers, you ultimately delegate it to a manipulative authority like the media, influential billionaires and (pseudo-)experts.

Not every official of the sprawling administration of our government can be elected. Even if we expand the number of electable offices (which we should do), we don’t want to strain the public with constant calls to the ballots. But administrations should be answerable to a ministry, a state or a federal one. And there is no reason why the entire executive branch should pend on only one single elected office. Ministers can be and should be entirely independent offices. It is the nature of executive bodies to be responsive to the changing circumstances. As such ministries are often created or reorganised. The establishment, budgeting and discontinuation of them can be placed in the hands of the parliament. When a new ministry is created, it should be the right of the people to elect its leader. As of now the responsibilities of the cabinet members are still pooled. Ministers should cooperate, but they should not work primarily on other ministries’ affairs or shed responsibility when matters in their domain go out of hand.

In a number of American states judges are elected. The European Union slammed its member nation Poland as supposedly undemocratic when the Poles considered a system of judicial oversight to punish misbehavior on the benches. Who does check the courts? The public, a committee or nobody? Courts like any institutions can corrupt and they are also as susceptible to ideological fashions as any of the others.

A German saying goes, “On the sea and in the court we are left in the hand of the Lord.”(Auf See und vor Gericht ist man in Gottes Hand.) Germany appoints her judges by parliament decision. The main argument for appointments over elections is that the courts are supposed to apply the law stoically and not ideologically. The saying suggests, though, that many Germans don’t feel that way. They feel that, for instance, foreigners are given more lenient sentences than citizens.

My proposal to scrap all party information from ballot sheets entirely is called ‘nonpartisan elections’ in the context of US judicial elections. These elections exist in Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Kentucky, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, North Dakota, Oregon, Washington, West Virginia, and Wisconsin. The quality of elected judges versus appointed judges is difficult to measure. In a paper of the University of Chicago Law School with the title ‘Professionals or Politicians: The Uncertain Empirical Case for an Elected Rather Than Appointed Judiciary’ the authors tried to create measurements for skill, effort and independence, anyway. The result was that they did not find a superiority by any metric for one group or the other, but they noted that the appointed judges were more likely to leave a legacy behind in the form of high quality opinions while elected judges write more of them. Whenever I read the verdicts of German courts I am shocked by the low quality of the reasoning. It’s safe to say that elections, at least, wouldn’t do harm. What speaks for elections is that ideologies are often pushed down top-down corrupting all institutions in their way and elections provide one of only few options to reverse dangerous trends. The usual counter-argument is that courts are pressured and influenced by the fickle masses. But this has always been the case. The musical ‘Chicago’ is actually based on a real-life observation. What drives malleable judges into dubious verdicts is media frenzy and not voters. Citizens who take part in judicial elections are less likely to be the uninformed outrage mob that are whipped up by the press.