I’ve heard the earmark thing before, is there a good writeup about it?
It feels like it should be worldview-quake-y to many people, if-true. (in that “get rid of earmark pork” might have seemed like an obvious thing to do to reduce corruption but alas turns out it was loadbearing)
It seems intuitively reasonable to get rid of earmark pork, to require all bills to address a “single issue”, and to grant the executive a line-item veto.
But actual result of all these practices is to make legislative bargains harder to strike. Pork was occasionally used to secure key votes. Single-issue bills make it harder for legislators to strike actually enforceable deals, where the entire deal is passed atomically or not at all (reducing “betrayal”). And a line-item veto allows removing key aspects of a legislative deal.
I’m not saying that any of these things are good or bad. (Personally, I think some are good and some are bad.) But if your legislature isn’t based on deal-making, you may instead get very tight party control. Again, tight party control might be good or bad. And true-multiparty parliaments often seem to have even tighter party control, despite having more parties.
Personally I suspect the most important reason democracy works is that if the public is broadly dissatisfied, elections provide a cheap change of leadership (relative to things like civil war). It’s worth trying to reform obvious corruption and empirical problems. But there are no guarantees, and the actual process of governance can be pretty messy.
So my inclination is to ask, “Is the current executive/legislative coalition/legislative rules clearly broken? Then let’s try to fix it, and gamble on something that sounds better.” TL;dr: Re-roll on a 1 or 2, but don’t hold out for a 6.
I’ve heard the earmark thing before, is there a good writeup about it?
It feels like it should be worldview-quake-y to many people, if-true. (in that “get rid of earmark pork” might have seemed like an obvious thing to do to reduce corruption but alas turns out it was loadbearing)
This is a good summary by Vox, which in turn points to a bunch of deeper writeups if helpful https://archive.is/o6qj8
It seems intuitively reasonable to get rid of earmark pork, to require all bills to address a “single issue”, and to grant the executive a line-item veto.
But actual result of all these practices is to make legislative bargains harder to strike. Pork was occasionally used to secure key votes. Single-issue bills make it harder for legislators to strike actually enforceable deals, where the entire deal is passed atomically or not at all (reducing “betrayal”). And a line-item veto allows removing key aspects of a legislative deal.
I’m not saying that any of these things are good or bad. (Personally, I think some are good and some are bad.) But if your legislature isn’t based on deal-making, you may instead get very tight party control. Again, tight party control might be good or bad. And true-multiparty parliaments often seem to have even tighter party control, despite having more parties.
Personally I suspect the most important reason democracy works is that if the public is broadly dissatisfied, elections provide a cheap change of leadership (relative to things like civil war). It’s worth trying to reform obvious corruption and empirical problems. But there are no guarantees, and the actual process of governance can be pretty messy.
So my inclination is to ask, “Is the current executive/legislative coalition/legislative rules clearly broken? Then let’s try to fix it, and gamble on something that sounds better.” TL;dr: Re-roll on a 1 or 2, but don’t hold out for a 6.