Election of the LRA and direct election of the Chancellor

[Cindy Ecksol]

Jamie is *not* operating under the same rules that I was. That was one of the main points I was making. The LRA no longer sets the agenda (except in a formulaic way based on when bills were proposed and what business was left over from previous meetings). The RA changed the rules of procedure. That has changed the balance between the LRA elected as leader of the most popular faction and the RA. Could you address this point please?

Pat, I don't believe this is true. As we've touched on a month or two ago in this forum, the perception of the other members of the RA was that you were not abiding by the rules as they existed. Specifically, you did not publish the agenda early enough for other RA members to comment, and you did not seem to give their agenda proposals adequate consideration. I'm not saying that this is how _I_ perceive what happened or that _you_ perceive it this way either, but that is how other RA members perceived it.

The rules have not changed. Jamie has considerable control over the agenda in terms of subject, sequence and timing and uses it skillfully. But he handles requests from other RA members to make changes to his proposed agenda in what is PERCEIVED to be an even-handed way, finding ways to deal with conflicts of timing and personal matters rather than insisting on his prerogative. What he understands is that the other RA members have invested him with "agenda power" and he is confident enough in this grant of power that he is willing to share it when necessary.

You did not have that same "power grant" from the other RA members. Instead, you perceived your power as coming from "the people" with no need to give anything to the other RA members. Unfortunately, it was the RA you needed to use that power with, not "the people" and "people power" doesn't work with the RA. Since they had not ceded you any power, they worked directly against you when you would not share yours, and the result was an entirely unruly process. Not that personalities didn't play into it -- they always do. But it was not the RULES that were different for you vs. Jamie. It was the power relationships that were different, and the only process difference was in the way the RA was selected.

Secondly, what is wrong with a majority vote of the citizens resulting in a majority of the seats in a legislature? That's the way democracy is supposed to work. Democracy is a system whereby the majority get to take decisions, not the minority. Obfuscating about 'winning' and 'participating' just misses the point. Majority rule is a major principle of democracy. Do you accept that?

Well, there's NOTHING wrong with a majority vote of the citizens resulting in a majority of the seats. My point is that that's just not how the CDS system works except in the case where there are only two factions contending for the seats. So as a community we have two choices. We can change our system completely. Or we can understand the dynamics of the system we have and learn both as individuals and factions how to maximize our effectiveness within those unusual dynamics.

My personal preference is to understand the dynamics of the existing system and learn to work with them. There are many "majority rules" kinds of systems out there in the real world and we understand how they work (or not) pretty clearly. There are very few democratic systems that really encourage consensus. For me this is the more interesting experiment, to understand how a system like the one we've set up here in CDS really works and what it takes to get stuff done. Or maybe we'll find out that it's a system for angels, practical only in a perfect world

Time will certainly tell if we give it a chance. In the meantime, I have to admit that I greatly enjoyed the by-election campaign process, not only the formal process, but also the informal interactions that created such an interesting result. Running as a nuCARE candidate while advocating for DPU certainly was a unique strategy, but I think that the resulting RA will turn out to be a much more manageable entity than it would have been if I had either won a third seat for nuCARE or allowed a 2-faction contest to take place. It certainly sparked some fascinating conversations along the way about the nature of our system, and I look forward to seeing some of those conversations bear fruit in the long term.

Cindy

[Justice Soothsayer]

Seeing as how this thread started life as being about the proposed changes in selection of the LRA and Chancellor, Cindy's comment is thought-provoking:

So as a community we have two choices. We can change our system completely. Or we can understand the dynamics of the system we have and learn both as individuals and factions how to maximize our effectiveness within those unusual dynamics.

I see the CDS as a laboratory of democracy where we can work well outside our individual comfort zones in a different environment, so as a US-resident citizen of CDS, I would like to see us continue to work with a Chancellor selected by, and responsible to, our elected representatives. I'm willing to continue on as a representative democracy, though with some direct democracy touches such as referrenda, at least for now. While the factional tug-of-war over the Chancellorship might be unseemly to some, one person's unseemliness is another person's principled compromise.

I disagree with Jon, though, on the notion that ours is a "minority rule" democracy. There is an important balance between honoring the decisions of the majority and protecting the rights of the minorty, and our current system tries to keep the two in balance. Since it takes a two-thirds vote (i.e. 5 of 7 in the current RA) to amend the Constitution, under our current configuration it takes THREE of four factions to support a constitutional change. Maybe we should be debating which changes in our government should be made with by a simple majority and which should require a supermajority.

[Patroklus Murakami]

Cindy

You're just not getting it. You want it to be "Pat=bad LRA: Jamie=good LRA" and put everything down to that. I'm done with arguing with you about that. You quote other RA members 'perceptions' and ascribe views to me which I don't hold. Actually, you're indulging in 'ad hominem' arguments in their truest sense; you attempt to undermine my argument not through the production of evidence and logical argument but through an attack on my conduct as LRA and an attempt to mischaracterise me as authoritarian.

You're ignoring the fact that the RA changed it's rules of procedure. If you still have any doubt about that go back and read the threads and the RA transcripts, the RA voted for a new set of rules. That shifted the balance between the LRA and the RA and removed any incentive or benefit from winning an election. And election's are won! The people vote, they make a choice, the majority get to make decisions - that's how it works.

You're right about one thing - we do have choices. The majority have the right to demand that the electoral system turns their votes into a reasonably proportional outcome.

[Jamie Palisades]

I agree with Pat that the rules under which I'm operating as LRA are substantially different than those applying during his term. The rules he enjoyed permitted him to exercise much more control over the RA agenda than I have.

But I agree with Cindy that the significant phenomena primarily are social. I have a few tricks left to me, too, to influence RA outcomes. Fewer, but still, some. The results any leader gets probably are more a result of how they *use* their powers. To put it in extreme, hypothetical terms: A presiding officer who is perceived generally to be fair is likely to get some degree of cooperation from members ... even when they disagree ... and a presiding officer who is perceived to be biased in promoting her or his own agenda is likely to face revolt eventually ... regardless of the rules.

Our system makes that revolt easy, as originally written, because even a faction with a substantial vote plurality may yield an LRA whose faction has only 2 or 3 of the 7 RA seats. (In which case the other 4 or 5 always can drag their feet if they become too riled.)

Regards Jamie

[Cindy Ecksol]

Cindy

You're just not getting it. You want it to be "Pat=bad LRA: Jamie=good LRA" and put everything down to that. I'm done with arguing with you about that. You quote other RA members 'perceptions' and ascribe views to me which I don't hold. Actually, you're indulging in 'ad hominem' arguments in their truest sense; you attempt to undermine my argument not through the production of evidence and logical argument but through an attack on my conduct as LRA and an attempt to mischaracterise me as authoritarian.

I guess I am not being as clear as I could be about what I perceive. This is not about your CONDUCT as LRA, it's about the difficulty that you had working with the RA. Surely you cannot say that you found it easy? My contention is not that you are "bad" but that (1) the source of the power that you did have came from "the people" while the job requires the LRA to work with the RA members and (2) because your power was not granted to you by those who you needed to control, you found it extremely difficult to get the job done. You had to do the best you could with the power you had, but because it came from the wrong source, your job was far more difficult than it could have been. Jamie has not exactly had an easy time, but because his power was ceded directly to him from the RA members, they have generally been more willing to go along with him than they were when you were LRA.

You're ignoring the fact that the RA changed it's rules of procedure. If you still have any doubt about that go back and read the threads and the RA transcripts, the RA voted for a new set of rules. That shifted the balance between the LRA and the RA and removed any incentive or benefit from winning an election. And election's are won! The people vote, they make a choice, the majority get to make decisions - that's how it works.

The rule change was minor compared to the power source shift. It simply codified something that was implied already but that you were choosing not to allow. Had you allowed RA members to amend the agenda as the Constitution suggested (but did not insist) they should be able to, my guess is that no one would have felt a need to clarify and codify those "new rules." It simply never would have been an issue.

You're right about one thing - we do have choices. The majority have the right to demand that the electoral system turns their votes into a reasonably proportional outcome.

Wow, if that were true, then in my country we'd have had a different president for the last eight years, and we'd already know who the Democratic Party's candidate for president was going to be! Perhaps the system you live under is different, but that's the way it is in the US. And in CDS too: the system is structured to temper the majority towards consensus. That's how it was set up, and as I said before, we can either understand that and explore the possibilities, or we can change it to a more directly-representative system. But if you become a citizen of a country where consensus rules, you should be complaining when the system fails and the majority DOES take over! That's how it is in CDS -- if we ever devolve into a situation where there is a persistent majority running things, the system as currently defined will have failed.

So which is it? Are we going to discuss scrapping the current system in favor of some as-yet-unspecified model, or shall we continue with the one we have and see if we can maximize its effectiveness?

Cindy
<thinking that it's time for a poll>