Description

Whereby positions in an organisation are filled according to the outcome of Voting.

This is an Appointment pattern.

Motivation and Discussion

An Election is a means of aggregating the opinions of individuals in the electorate to appoint positions.  The positions may range across organisations or government, and involve differing degrees of judgement, decisiveness, or advocacy.  Regardless of the position, the mechanism is such that the individual is seen as representing their electorate.  This representation is what gives elected officials popular legitimacy.  

Perceptions of legitimacy are largely limited to the electorate; the extent of the electorate across the population as a whole is described by the Suffrage pattern.  Use of Voting also results in the formation of organisations for winning votes, particularly the Party.

The precise algorithm used for elections has a significant effect on the nature of appointments.  There are many variations, summarised here in three dimensions - preference, rounds and members.  The main difference within a dimension is between single and multiple instances.

Preference .  Voting is expressing a preference among options.  Systems which accept a single preference are known as plurality or first past the post.  As the largest aggregate vote wins, single preference systems favour the faction that can garner the widest possible consensus support for a single candidate, often across differing constituencies.  Factions thus have a broad range of ideas and personalities, some mutually incompatible, rather than a more coherent vision.  In multi-preference elections voters may select multiple candidates or rank them in order.  More and more diverse candidates hence compete on the ballot before the voters.  In multi-preference, there are more factions, each more ideologically coherent, but stricter intra-party discipline.

Rounds .  Single round elections determine the outcome as the result of a single act of voting.  This requires faith from the voter in the robustness of that single round of voting.  Multi-round voting results in more factional trading, deals, and repositioning between rounds.  Such greasy politics promotes backroom compromises, but also requires an explicit final commitment to the appointee by a greater portion of the electorate.  This final round commitment can strengthen the popular mandate of the appointee.

Members .  Single member electorates tend to elect candidates from major factions.  The more members of an electorate there are, the more factions are represented in government positions.  This can be viewed by the electorate as more representative and hence legitimate.  Multi-member electorates tend to increase the job security of those periodically re-elected, as major factions are likely to receive sufficient votes.

More complicated compound structures, such as separate single- and multi-member electorates being elected from a single vote, also exist.

Examples

The Athenian democracy appointed its strategoi , commanders in chief of the military, by Election.  After Periclean reforms this became the only elected position.

Venice, The Serene Republic, appointed its supreme executive, the Doge, using a combination of Election and Sortition.  German kings and the Holy Roman Emperor were appointed by small elite electorate of nobles.  Under the Polish 'Elective Monarchy' the king was appointed by a parliament of greater and lesser aristocrats.

Board members of public companies are appointed by Election, with the electorate determined by the control of issued shares.  Votes are weighted according to the control of voting stock.

Some districts in the United States appoint judges and district attorneys by Election.

Many governments use first past the post elections for government appointments, for example representatives to the lower houses of parliament in Britain, Canada and the United States are appointed in concurrent elections from geographically generated electorates.  These are single member elections.  The US has a very strong two-party duopoly.  Britain and Canada have regional two-party duopolies with occassionally competitive three-cornered contests.

Multi-preference voting - Instant Runnoff Voting, specifically - is used for elections to Australian parliament, including both the lower and upper Federal parliaments.  Australian politics is a frayed duopoly of two major parties, with a few minor also winning parliamentary seats.  Voters for European Parliament express two preferences for multi-seat regional electorates.

The vast majority of large-scale elections are single-round elections, for instance in Indian and EU parliamentary elections, and many other polities across the world.

The French presidential election consists of two rounds - a first round  with an unlimited number of candidates, and a second round where only the two most popular candidates compete directly for an identical electorate.  Both rounds are single preference elections.  US Senate seats for Louisiana are also filled this way.  Multi-round elections are common for internal party elections in parliamentary democracies such as Britain.  The appointment of the head of the Catholic Church, the Pope, is made by a multi-round election where the electorate is made up of Cardinals.  In both the latter cases election rounds continue until a single candidate commands a majority of votes.

As only one person can be president at a time, the appointment of an American President by the electoral college is a single member election.  The election itself is a compound process of simultaneous state elections appoint members of the electoral college, followed by the voting of the electoral college.  Similarly other executive roles such as the appointment of the Prime Minister in parliamentary government, the Secretary General of the UN, or the Pope, are necessarily single member elections.  

Parliaments in Australia, Germany, the Netherlands and Japan include multi-member electorates.  These are appointed by proportional representation, where seats are allocated according to the proportion of votes cast.  Britain historically had multi-member electorates, where n seats were won by the first n candidates ranked by a count of single preference votes.  These were abolished in 19th century reforms.

Related Patterns

Voting, Parliament

Related Anti-Patterns

Rotten Borough

Description

Whereby power nominally vested in one individual or organisation is in practice exercised by another, by virtue of their control of resources.

Motivation and Discussion

Control of resources is a fundamental source of power, and organisations tend to gather power to themselves over time.  The Paymaster pattern arises when the practical use of that power is out of synch with its formal institutional context. It describes circumstances where, according to the formal or nominal arrangement, the Paymaster organisation should defer to the Payee, but in practice the reverse, or more complicated horsetrading, occurs.

The Paymaster pattern in itself is neither good nor bad - that depends on the organisations in question - but it can be symptomatic of a lack of plurality, and shifts in the balance of powers that leave the Paymaster organisation unusually free of constraint.

Once power has transitioned completely to the Paymaster organisation, the Payee may be made a Figurehead.

Examples

English parliaments of the period leading up to the civil war and revolution of 1642-51 acted as Paymasters to the English monarch.  Through the control of taxes these parliaments exercised an authority contrary to the theoretically absolute rule of the king.  The revolution and civil war led to a period under Cromwell where Parliament was the sole sovereign authority, but after the Restoration of Charles II the Paymaster relationship between Parliament and crown was restored and to a degree formalised.  From the Restoration to the beginning of the 20th century practical power continued to leak slowly away from the monarch and towards Parliament, finally establishing the Figurehead monarchy of today.

The Federal Government of the United States of America was, as its name implies, established as a union of sovereign states, and the US constitution nominally places power not allocated to the federal government to states and individual citizens.  Over time, the Federal Government has increased its revenue both in absolute terms and relative to the revenue of the states.  It has then used this power to tie legislative outcomes in State Congresses to federal funding.  Raising the legal drinking age to 21 by tying it to federal highway funds is but one relatively recent example.  A similar trend can be seen in other political federations such as Australia, Canada, Germany and India.

Great power politics is often marked with struggles over resources.  When these struggles between nominal peers become drastically uneven Paymaster patterns arise.  One example is the approach of the 19th century Austrian Empire, which would tie nearby Balkan states into arms agreements, forcing natural antagonists to be allies, as any war between them would result in an immediate cessation of supply to Payee state.

Related Patterns

Figurehead, Federation

Irfan Yusuf has an interesting article on Liberal factionalism . Which raises the question, does party organisation at a state and national level, induce factionalism within the party? Might be one for Scrymarch's government design patterns . It also appears that Liberal and Labor now have identical political organizations that are dependant upon either the power of government, or a Presidential leader to keep the factions in line.

From the article;

The New Right's major source of strength is the NSW Young Liberal Movement. This was also the main power base of the Group during its days in power. Many of those same young Groupers are current factional warriors in the New Right, holding positions on the NSW Young Liberal executive and the State Executive of the Party.

Irf argues that the Young Liberals have been a major source of on the ground campaigning and warm bodies at election time, and have used that ability to mobilise supporters to punish candidates who were not from their faction.

The extreme factionalism within the Young Liberals has infected the Party and has made it near-impossible for the Party to maintain a hold on many of its own seats, let alone win seats from the ALP and independents. With the retirement of Bob Carr and with the mistakes of his government costing more than a block of flats in Lane Cove, the Liberals should have been able to capitalise on ALP mistakes.

The ALP has been able to organise its factions and manage its internal bickering. Unless the NSW Liberals can do the same, they can look forward to many more terms in opposition and losing many more of its safe seats to independents.

In a previous article, The Cost Of Opposition , I largely blamed the media for ensuring there was the constant perception of inner turmoil in parties, and that only a party in government could fend it off through their control of the executive, and hence control of government, taxpayer money and to an extent by dictating the public agenda and policy.

Irf has a different view. He is arguing that factions in a party out of power are the source of inferior electoral results. But both of us seem to support Judith Brett's thesis from "Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class" that a strong leader quells the factions, but only if they can prove they can win elections. The leaders legitimacy amongst factions only comes with the strength and power of control of the Executive Cabinet. This appears to be true for Labor, despite their caucus structure, as much as the Liberals who have traditionally relied on this style of organization.

The problem for Australian democracy is, that while this self-organisation is great for keeping government once elected, it is an inferior form of organization when in opposition. This leads to "drover's dog" elections and "small target" election campaigns where the opposition cannot win government, but only hope that the incumbent will lose it.

cam

Description

A group of organisations, without ending their independant existence, create a new common institution to advance their common interests.

Motivation and Discussion

In government, as in other parts of life, great advantages can be gained by scale. Federation is an attempt to gain the benefits of scale without surrendering the identity or idiosyncratic power of the component organisations. War is one of the most obvious areas where scale is advantageous and mutual interest is greatly similar. By contrast with a simple merger or takeover of organisations, Federations are formed on a a principle of subsidiarity, where powers are held by default at the smallest and most individual scale.  

Federations are plastic and high maintenance institutions, prone to deform over time under the many forces acting on them. The new central organisation brought into being by a federation will, like all institutions, tend to draw power to itself. Over time a successful central government can take over more and more responsibilities originally assigned to the component organisations. This is often given philosophical support by appealling to the shared values and economies of scale that initially brought the component organisations together.  As popular allegiance to the central institution grows, the division of power to unevenly sized component organisations may increasingly seem unfair.

Federations involve multiple executives, at the central and component level. They therefore have higher maintenance costs and involve more officials than either a single central institution, or the several component organisations which preceded the Federation. These costs increase as the central institution draws power to itself, duplicating responsibilities nominally vested in the component organisations.  Avoiding an entropic collapse to the centre requires continual revision of the terms of Federation.  

By contrast, when the central institution is trusted with few responsibilities, its capability for advancing the common interest is diminished, and its reason for existence decreases. Where a common interest is no longer apparent, Federations dissolve with unpredictable violence back to their originating organisations.

Examples

Switzerland has been an evolving and enduring federation from 1291 to today, excepting a 5 year interruption under French republican occupation. The original confederacy of three cantons was formed to make common military cause against the Holy Roman Empire, and to manage trade and other shared interests. This fairly lightweight original alliance expanded over time, and under external pressure, to include eight canton communities and more territory under a patchwork of individual treaties. Cities such as Zürich and Berne continued to pursue their own interests including similar alliances with their other neighbours. In 1529 and 1531 inter-cantonal religious civil wars broke out, though due in part to the reputation of Swiss mercenaries Swiss territory was never a major battlefield of the Thirty Years War.  A Switzerland of thirteen cantons achieved formal legal independence at the end of that war with the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648. This regime endured until Switzerland was engulfed by French revolutionary forces in 1798; the occupying army established a centralized Helvetic Republic.

The Helvetic Republic was hugely unpopular, and a political and economic failure. Intervention by Napoleon in 1803 restored some power to the cantons, and Swiss independence was fully restored at the 1815 Congress of Vienna, along with a last expansion of the included cantons, and formal guarantee of its (armed) neutrality by the Great Powers of the day. The political upheaval, tied up with other questions of reform such as the universality of suffrage and the role of the Church in the state, continued amongst domestic political parties until the outbreak of a brief and not particularly deadly Catholic/Protestant civil war in 1847. The victorious Protestant Free Democrat Party promulgated the first singular federal constitution in 1848; it was heavily influenced by the American and French constitutions. This constitution has since been periodically revised, including being wholly revised in 1874, the introduction of continual partial revision by voters in 1899, proportional appointment of the Federal Council in 1959, female suffrage in 1971, and another complete revision in 1999.

The United States of America was created in 1780 as a federation of geographically proximate colonies which declared independence from the British Empire. The initial version of this federation, the Continental Congress, was found to be powerless to the point of uselessness. The revised constitution gave more powers to the federal government, in return for explicit recognition of the rights of individuals within the founding document, as insurance against tyranny. Even then the resulting federation was on very loose, Swiss, lines. Over the two centuries since, a variety of internal and external shocks, including civil war, have seen the central government assume much more power at the expense of the states. Although the written constitution has had around 20 amendments, some as fundamental as banning slavery or alcohol, most of the assumption of power has been through evolutionary processes such as common law or Paymaster techniques.

Yugoslavia was a federation of Balkan states and ethnic communities united and shattered multiple times during the 20th century. The 19th century saw the Balkans be a violent playground for Great Powers, during the disintegration of the Ottoman and Austrian empires, and the expansion of Russian and other interests in the region. This competition culminated as World War I, and in its aftermath the constitutional monarchy, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, was established for mutual defence. This endured only until 1941 when it was invaded by Axis powers as part of WWII. They established a proxy government run by the sympathetic Ustase, extreme Croatian nationalists. At the end of WWII, and with the agreement amongst Great Powers that these states would be under a Soviet sphere of influence, Yugoslavia became a federation of communist republics. Although the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia retained the contempt for individual rights and market economics typical of communist regimes, regional and ethnic politics remained important, and useful elements of political leverage for the federal government. A potent example occurred in the early 1970s, during a resurgence of political liberalism. Marshall Tito supported greater regional autonomy as a way of stealing the liberals' most popular issue, then crushed the liberal movement using standard totalitarian techniques. Nevertheless, an extraordinarily complex constitution was amended in 1974 to include the right of republics to secede, and giving greater autonomy to regions such as Kosovo. This autonomy was expressed in practice even under Tito, and it later made legal secession easier for Croatia, Bosnia and Slovenia. After multi-party elections in 1990 following the collapse of Eastern European communism, these republics declared independence in 1991, though their legal right to do so didn't prevent those secessions sparking a violent civil war.

Other successful states such as Australia, Brazil, Canada and Malaysia have been also established along federal lines and without civil war amongst the constituent states.

Unions such as the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) or the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) have been created from smaller unions in order to gain benefits of scale in negotiations with employers and governments. Different trade unions have common interests in their members' working conditions, as well as ensuring the organisation itself plays a role in wage negotiations and setting conditions of work. Trade unions financially and organisationally support political causes, even having formal roles within major political parties in the case of the Labor parties in Britain and Australia. Federated trade unions also suffer from diseconomies of scale - for instance in 2005 several component trade unions threatened to withdraw from the AFL-CIO due to philosophical differences over which politicians to support.

Related Patterns

Suffrage, Paymaster

Current parliamentary systems provide legislative and executive capability but do not strike a perfect balance of representing the will of the people, while providing effective and efficient government.

Introduction

There has been an ebb and flow for generations in opinion about the forms and benefits of legislative bicameralism and the balance of power between the legislative and executive branches of government.

A parliamentary system should:

• Represent the will of the people by providing a forum in which the various views of the electorate can be presented with appropriate weight;
• Provide reasonable legislative review that resists arbitrary change and limits any tyranny;
• Deliver an effective Executive.

A solution has never been implemented that appropriately balances these interlocking requirements, here is a suggestion.

Legislative Review

A bicameral parliament is the only demonstrated mechanism that provides sufficient legislative review within a democracy. The composition, size and responsibilities of the two houses needs to be determined.

The Will of the People

The will of the people should be manifested through a legislative assembly that best represents the different and complex viewpoints of the electorate. To achieve this representation, the legislative assembly should be constructed utilising proportional representation and preferential balloting.

It is clear from Senate elections in Australia that 12 representatives in an electoral district is too few to overcome the inertia of the major parties, and from Knesset elections in Israel that 120 is far too many. A balance needs to be struck that permits minority viewpoints to be heard without paralysing the legislative process.

The Role of Women in the Political Process

Although universal suffrage swept most of the democratic world early last century, essentially every aspect of political process from pre-selection through election to the operation of parliament has been designed and developed by men competing with other men. When women run for public office they do not share a level playing field in this mans game, and the female public by and large only have the opportunity to vote for which male should represent them.

To fully enfranchise women I propose (a) that the legislative assembly consist of equal numbers of men and women; and (b) that election should be gender-specific - men should vote for men and women for women.

Executive Power

There is a valid line of logic that a government needs a mandate, and pretty much any mandate is better than no mandate at all. To achieve this, systems for electing executive positions typically disavow proportional representation and electorates have one member and may not provide preferential balloting.

If the legislative assembly inherently represents the will of the people through proportional representation, then executive power - the role of government (including opposition) - should be vested in the Senate, with an electoral system that ensures that at any given time it should be dominated by one of the major parties.

The Composition of the Legislative Assembly

The total electorate should be divided into five regions of equal population, divided as much as possible between dissimilar interests, such as urban versus rural and regional Australia; and haves versus have nots. The regions need not be physically contiguous.

Each electoral region should elect 30 representatives, 15 men and 15 women, for a total of 150. Voting should be by preferential balloting, providing the opportunity for minority viewpoints to be heard where they represent more than 6% of generally held opinion.

A Legislative Bill should obviously require a majority of votes to pass, however a discussion would be worthwhile to analyse if an absolute majority or a 60%-or-so super-majority would be an improvement over the more usual relative majority.

The Composition of the Senate

Each state and territory should divide their total electorate by the number of allocated Senate seats to elect one representative in each region. Preferential balloting should be utilised to allow for gradual change in the balance of power between several major parties.

To maximise effectiveness a Senate Bill would require a relative majority of 50% to pass.

Conclusion

This proposed political structure incorporates only a small number of subtle changes to the current Australian system, with significant potential benefits. Attempting to implement them at a federal level would require a constitutional amendment to be proposed by a Government and then accepted by the people through a referendum. With no established precedent that is virtually impossible.

State and territory legislatures offer a more suitable proving ground since, within some limits, changes can be instituted through legislation alone and have far less reaching effects.