Tag: Democracy
The Political Compass – More than Just a Meme

The Political Compass – More than Just a Meme

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Epistemic Status: 2/4 - Speculative

Despite its designers’ hopes that it might beckon in a new era of more nuanced political discourse, the political compass has largely been reduced to meme-fodder.

This popularised version of the political compass has now been around for over 20 years, and by that metric, this post is a bit late to the party, however the concept of expressing political alignment using 2 dimensions is far older than this.

The American libertarian David Nolan came up with his “Nolan Chart” way back in 1969. It is very US-centric, and was created specifically with the goal of converting people to libertarianism, however I can’t help but feel that despite this, it is just more elegant than the political compass.

The more popular incarnation, that is the subject of so many political memes, has plenty of its own limitations and biases, but it also completely fails to be memorable too (“Authoritarian-Left” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue). Thankfully John Nerst at EverythingStudies wrote a pair of posts back in 2019 that reformulate the whole idea, addressing many of the limitations, and it is his “tilted political compass” that I want to build on…

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Voting Systems IV – Procedural Voting

Voting Systems IV – Procedural Voting

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Epistemic Status: 2/4 - Speculative

This post is part of a series of posts on Voting Systems.

As well as the general public voting for politicians or directly for policies, voting is also used by politicians themselves to decide on issues and pass laws.

Rather than being a “once every few years” phenomenon, this voting is part of the day-to-day workings of government. The standard operating procedure for many politicians.

This means that whilst some sort of formal procedure is needed, even the previously mentioned voting systems of Approval Voting, Score Voting, Evaluative Voting and SPAV are still far to rigid to permit the kind of nuance that is necessary in navigating the complex issues of the day. Rather like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, too simplistic an approach leads to a broken system. Legislators and governments tend to eventually find ways around a procedure if it is too restrictive, but these loopholes are accidental and therefore do not necessarily yield the best outcomes…

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Voting Systems III – Representatives

Voting Systems III – Representatives

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Epistemic Status: 3/4 - Considered Opinion

This post is part of a series of posts on Voting Systems.

Now we move out of the simple realm of single offices and single issues. Appointing multiple politicians to represent a population is fundamental to the way in which most modern democracies work, but it is fraught with difficulty.

Proportional Representation (PR) refers to a government whose composition reflects the proportions of the population that support each party. The idea is that if 20% of the population support party A, roughly 20% of the government should be party A, etc.

That proportional representation is a desirable quality in a body of representatives shouldn’t be a controversial statement. Any particular demographic being underrepresented within the government will lead to a feeling of disenfranchisement and a loss of faith in the efficacy of a democracy. Alas, there are still a few arguments that are used to try to convince people that unrepresentative governments are somehow a good thing…

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Voting Systems II – Referenda

Voting Systems II – Referenda

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Epistemic Status: 3/4 - Considered Opinion

This post is part of a series of posts on Voting Systems.

Leaders usually have a significant amount of power, so it is fairly easy to convince people that such elections are important, giving these elections a higher turnout than other elections (for example US Presidential Elections almost always have higher turnout than Midterm Elections). This means that we didn’t need to worry too much about low turnouts in the previous section.

This is no longer the case for referenda. Voting has a cost – at a bare minimum, it costs voters the time and effort needed to cast their ballot, and it can cost even more time and effort if a voter wants to become well informed about the issue being voted on. There are therefore several reasons why a large number of people might not vote in a particular referendum…

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Voting Systems – Electing Leaders

Voting Systems – Electing Leaders

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Epistemic Status: 3/4 - Considered Opinion

Getting the general public’s input on how a country should be run is a fundamental tenet of democracy. This has to be done in a way that is both systematic and able to be considered fair, which is difficult to achieve without incorporating voting in some way, shape or form.

Perhaps in very small groups, consensus building can be used to bypass the need for voting, but as groups of people get larger, the number of possible disagreements to resolve and compromises required to reach consensus grow rapidly. This is one of the reasons why teams within a company are generally recommended to be smaller than 20 people, with 5-7 often being considered ideal.

Given that no country is this small, the need to implement a system of voting is something of an inevitability. Unfortunately, there are many ways in which voting systems can introduce issues that stand in the way of the democratic process. Issues such as gerrymandering, hyper-partisanship and voter apathy are often a direct result of the system that is used…

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Legibility and Democracy

Legibility and Democracy

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Epistemic Status: 3/4 - Considered Opinion

I. The Importance of Legibility

Legibility in the context I am using it here refers fundamentally to the understandability of a system.

It might seem obvious that more understandability is better, but understandability also implies simplicity, and simplicity is not necessarily always good.  For example, with governmental policy, as addressed in James C. Scott’s book “Seeing Like a State” (Archive), a drive for legibility can result in adverse situations such as city planners neglecting important complexities that are necessary for a healthy society, or agricultural reforms that promote monocultures and deplete the soil.  This idea of legibility can be applied more widely, to cover any kind of system, process or theory – there is a balance between a theory being legible enough that it can be understood, and being nuanced enough that it gets the correct answers…

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Why We Should Vote

Why We Should Vote

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Epistemic Status: 3/4 - Considered Opinion

I have recently been rather vexed by intelligent people making arguments against participating in the democratic process. After having several conversations, and reading several articles espousing the benefits of voter apathy, I can contain myself no longer, and must write down my counter argument for the benefit of my own sanity. For those who already agree that voting is important, hopefully this serves as a useful range of perspectives, but for anyone that disagrees, I hope that my frustration with the arguments against voting does not seep through too much, and put people off…

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