Semi-democracies in conworlds

[Nachtswalbe]

Do your conworlds have semi-democratic systems of governance where popular input through voting or polling exist, but the executive also has significant powers to veto legislation and much more?

My example (not my personal ideal) would be a technocratic system which is dominated by the nonpartisan Expert Structure. In the Structure, promotions are made through a nomination-from-below, appointment-from-above system and only the topmost layer gets to elect the next official leader when the previous one dies (kinda like the vatican). Multiple political parties exist, non-Experts can vote for them, and parties other than whichever the Structure favors at the moment are allowed to win in local elections, as a polling mechanism to see how popular the Structure's policies are, kind of like PAP elections in Singapore, and to serve as a sort of pressure valve. However, all parties are obligated to form a National Alliance on the well... national level to 1)avoid conflict in issues of National and Global importance and 2) to show the subordination of parties to Expert Conclusions.


tldr: Unelected Technocrats on top, parties only exist as a feedback/polling/advisory mechanism to help the Technocrats craft more appealing/less likely to piss the masses off policies

[Pabappa]

Ive been doing a lot of this lately .... i found a way to mix politics and writing, and realized that democracy could exist in a world with primitive technology.

Democracies are the most interesting form of government for me, since in a monarchy or military dictatorship, there is no question of "will this work?" there are power struggles, but with monarchies its more like a soap opera than anything, and with dictatorships, its just one coup after another.

although "soap opera" style conflicts are interesting, I dont think Im very good at writing them realistically.

given the primitive technology of my world, each democracy is essentially on its own, and though ideas are shared from one system to another, others disappear and are lost to time. thus they are all alternative democracies.

i've published bits and pieces online, but for the most part, i keep the details private. if i ever get to it, the Romania thing might be the best example of relating my ideas to real-world societies since it wont require the reader to know background details that i didnt bother to put online.

[Raphael]

In the more modern periods, my main conculture Péchkizhénk might be described as a kind of semi-democracy - there are elected representative assemblies - though, because of the basic structure of society, the minimum voting age is pretty high at 35 - but by long-standing convention, the position of Head of State alternates between a representative of the military and a leading politician from the elected representative assemblies. (The Head of State is appointed for a term of two years by a Council consisting of former Heads of State. Despite this, the Head of State is officially called a King or Queen, and Péchkizhénk is officially a Kingdom, because when it was founded, the language spoken by its founders contained next to no small-r republican vocabulary.)

[Pabappa]

East Germany's Parliament afforded seats not only to political parties, but also to organizations within their society, which were outside the party system and, so far as I know, their representatives were not elected by the people but rather by the organizations themselves.

I try to avoid borrowing ideas directly from our world into mine, but this one is tempting. What I do, typically, is try to find a way that people in my world could start from where they are at a given time, and naturally develop the idea I'm trying to work into the timeline. In this case it will be difficult, because political parties in my writing typically enroll the entire voting-eligible population, whereas in Europe traditionally you could support a political party without being a member, and therefore you could be a member of one of these organizations, but not of a traditional party.

One way I could make this work is to have people stand as representatives for the population that is NOT eligible to vote. For example, in both Play and Moonshine society, voting is restricted to adult females only, meaning that men and children are disenfranchised. There could be a group of women .... or even men .... who represent men's interests in the Parliament, though if they are women, I still have to answer the question of whether they're simultaneously members of the main party or if they are outside the party system. Theoretically they could even vote twice. Children would likely be represented by schoolteachers, who are all women, and so the question again arises. Therefore I might not be able to work this idea into my writing after all. But I think it's interesting in and of itself.

[hwhatting]

One way I could make this work is to have people stand as representatives for the population that is NOT eligible to vote. For example, in both Play and Moonshine society, voting is restricted to adult females only, meaning that men and children are disenfranchised. There could be a group of women .... or even men .... who represent men's interests in the Parliament, though if they are women, I still have to answer the question of whether they're simultaneously members of the main party or if they are outside the party system. Theoretically they could even vote twice. Children would likely be represented by schoolteachers, who are all women, and so the question again arises. Therefore I might not be able to work this idea into my writing after all. But I think it's interesting in and of itself.

Overlapping membership doesn't have to be an obstacle - e.g., in Eastern Bloc countries like the GDR you could be both a member of the Party and of the official trade union, but would than be elected as member of parliament based only on one of the memberships, i.e. through the Party list or the Trade Union list..

[Pabappa]

I want to add for the sake of contrast that it's common in my writing to have democracies where voting is done in blocs through the census. For example, suppose a neighborhood has 468 people. When the combined census-election happens, they send their representative, who gets 468 votes at the national level, meaning that the neighborhood must vote unanimously. Since most (though not all) nations using this electoral system include children in their census, children here can "vote" just as much as adults can, and neighborhoods with large child populations can swing elections. This is important because, in general, all societies on this planet have high fertility rates and high death rates, meaning that children make up a large fraction of any given society. The common understanding was that because neighborhoods were *required* to vote unanimously, they would come to a consensus on their own, regardless of whether the neighborhood's bloc vote came from an internal head-count vote or merely from the wishes of the most powerful land owner in that neighborhood. Young children thus typically had little input on this process.

However, the Play and Moonshine societies broke this tradition when they awarded voting rights to individuals. The Players realized that if they adopted individual voting rights, and yet allowed children to continue voting alongside their parents, their elections would be ruined by throngs of young children who understood nothing of the world around them, some so young that they would not be able to speak their choice aloud.

The Players needed different reasons for taking the vote away from men. At the time of their founding, they authored a constitution stating that all men were required to join and remain in the military for their entire adult lives, and that it would be a conflict of interest to allow soldiers to vote, since they could in theory vote themselves out of a war and leave the nation undefended. The Players continued fighting wars for roughly 150 years and never questioned this logic, but when they entered a period of peace, they realized they needed to either give men the right to vote, or come up with a new reason why they would not. (I haven't answered this question yet, but I may not need to think too deeply, as it would be no more strange to them as it is to us remembering societies on Earth that restricted the vote to men. It may come down to no more than the preexisting Player law requiring all men to obey their wives, and to obey other women if not married, meaning that they could not legally disagree with their wives, and thus had no reason to vote.)

In Moonshine the situation was similar but not so extreme, as they were less democratic in general.

Overlapping membership doesn't have to be an obstacle - e.g., in Eastern Bloc countries like the GDR you could be both a member of the Party and of the official trade union, but would than be elected as member of parliament based only on one of the memberships, i.e. through the Party list or the Trade Union list..

Thanks, ...this is good food for thought. I'll try to have a better response to this later, since I think it may actually help me, but I need to work with it for a while longer. e.g. youre saying (if Im reading you right) that the common people *did* vote for representatives from the trade union, as if it were an ordinary political party, whereas my idea makes more sense if it's deliberately anti-democratic, serving as a check on the power of the common people, even as it also served as a check on the ruling classes (since these organizations would be neither elected by the people nor controlled by the government).

[Pabappa]

these are screenshots because Im not on the Discord server where I typed them out at this time and can't easily get the text.

the first screenshot is already canon in my writing, while the second really has no place in my writing except for the idea that people can hold more than one title at the same time (and which i came up with indepdently long ago).

[hwhatting]

Overlapping membership doesn't have to be an obstacle - e.g., in Eastern Bloc countries like the GDR you could be both a member of the Party and of the official trade union, but would than be elected as member of parliament based only on one of the memberships, i.e. through the Party list or the Trade Union list..

Thanks, ...this is good food for thought. I'll try to have a better response to this later, since I think it may actually help me, but I need to work with it for a while longer. e.g. youre saying (if Im reading you right) that the common people *did* vote for representatives from the trade union, as if it were an ordinary political party, whereas my idea makes more sense if it's deliberately anti-democratic, serving as a check on the power of the common people, even as it also served as a check on the ruling classes (since these organizations would be neither elected by the people nor controlled by the government).

Well, depends on what you call "voting" - in the GDR, there was a unified list with a certain number of places reserved for the Socialist Unity Party, the puppet "Bloc" parties, the Trade Unions, the Youth orgainisation, the Women's assosciation. etc., etc. You could vote for or against the list as a whole, and the vote wasn't really secret, because if you wanted to vote against (cross out the whole list), you had to go to the polling booth, while if you wanted to vote "yes" you just would fold the list and throw it into the ballot box, which means that the officials could see whether you voted "yes" or "no". The system was similar in the other Socialist countries; IIRC, in the Soviet Union there also were constituency candidates (one per constituency) besides the list, which you could reject individually.

[Torco]

A great many premodern societies had characteristics of limited democracy, but I think it's important to distinguish democracy (the general principle that it's good if the ruled have a say in how they're ruled, or by whom) and Democracy (the concrete and historically specific system that emerged from the emergence of capitalism and liberalism as the dominant ideologies of europe in from the 1700s onwards). following that nomenclature, Democracy is boring: there's no such thing unless your conworld is the real world but in the future, or an alternate past or something: democracy, however, is fun, and a fun thing about it, methinks, is that you can actually implement it in many more ways that just "parties or relatively well off and middle class people put up candidates for people over 18 to vote on for the legislative and executive bodies, which are different because reasons". a few examples of less obvious ways to make systems democratic:

sortition, my favourite: voting doesn't *actually* ensure that rulers do what the ruled want, it just makes sure that the rulers are the people who the ruled elect, but often that's picked from such a small and internally similar pool of people that it doesn't actually matter much who gets elected: I've lived all my life in a country where you had two big coalitions of parties: the capitalist neoliberal conservative pro-business us-aligned conservatives that favour an economy where services and raw materials make up most of the economic activity and the job market is as flexible as possible on the one hand, and the the capitalist neoliberal lukewarmly progressive pro-business us-aligned conservatives that favour an economy where services and raw materials make up most of the economic activity and the job market is as flexible as possible on the other. if the rulers are, instead, just picked at random, it's statistically likely that -if you have enough rulers, of course- the views and priorities of the wider society are well represented amongst the rulers and, so, the government end up doing what the people want it to.

referenda. instead of voting for people, you can vote for things: the swiss do this a lot, and supposedly the americans do it too. this also does things well which liberal democracy doesn't do well, namely that in liberal democracy it's common for the society to be very much in agreement about a thing (say, in chile, that schools and unis ought be free) but that thing not to be the case because it's against the interest of any ruler that gets elected (for example, because most politicians own private schools and unis, and so they want them to be profitable).

multi level democracy. this is the idea behind the cuban, soviet and chinese systems, where you vote at the local level for a bunch of guys, and they send a representative to the province assembly, and those guys in turn elect amongst themselves who goes to the state assembly, and so on and so forth. this permits discussion and consensusbuilding at the lower levels and also, in theory, ensures that it ends up being fantastically unlikely that if everyone wants A, the assembly wants B: sure, the politicians end up being a class and making decisions based on their class interest, but you get that whenever there are politicians.

negative elections. you could, in principle, just have a ritualistic vote every year where the only choices are to oust the government or not to oust them: who is a legislator, politician or bureaucrat is up to some other system -say, aristocracy, or civil service exams, or heredity or whatever- and they're free to rule however they want, but if they do something that's too objectionable -or if someone can muster up enough popular outrage at the president cheating on his wife or whatever- then on the next election people will go and vote "oust" and boom, they're ousted. this seems like a very weak form of democracy, but i don't really think so: people want to keep their jobs, generally speaking.

some versions of communism are all about democracy. if you think about it, workplaces are the least democratic thing ever: in our own society, for example, business owners are basically absolute despots for life: they hire and fire who they want, their workes do what they want or they don't have a job anymore, and must only abstain from specifically named and legislated forms of abuse: anything else is their choice and their choice only and if you don't like it just leave: arguably they're much more powerful both individually in the lives of citizens and collectively as an interest group than the government, so making workplaces democratic, say stipulating that they're all cooperatives, or that there exists a company senate, or whatever, increased societal democracy.

many conservatives argue for the democratizing power of civil society and intermediate groups (I don't know if this is the formal term used internationally, but it's what the 1980 constitution of chile calls them): the idea is that if people organize themselves into interest groups, from community watches to churches to centers for concerned mothers to sports clubs to alcoholics anonymous leagues, then those groups can channel popular demands and bring them in force to the government. it hasn't worked here, but it could work elsewhere.

[Nachtswalbe]

many conservatives argue for the democratizing power of civil society and intermediate groups (I don't know if this is the formal term used internationally, but it's what the 1980 constitution of chile calls them): the idea is that if people organize themselves into interest groups, from community watches to churches to centers for concerned mothers to sports clubs to alcoholics anonymous leagues, then those groups can channel popular demands and bring them in force to the government. it hasn't worked here, but it could work elsewhere.

Expanding on this, a system where intermediate groups get a collective "vote" instead of individuals -- a mediocracy -- including all non-company/state actors could be interesting - there is the problem of fractional votes.
And in a country with castes, caste associations could collectively cast votes.

[Torco]

In a way, this is very common in premodern societies. I remember reading something about the ottoman government, for example, having some institutional method of giving representation to ethnic or religious groups, something like "the christians get a guy at court" kind of deal. the estates general were exactly this, and the city of london is based on this idea: if I remember correctly, companies vote there. Of course, this ends up being an aristocracy in practice, but at least it's one where different bits of the aristocracy are supposed to represent the economic interests of different bits of society.

[Pabappa]

Romania still does it .... they have seats reserved in their lower house of Parliament for all the recognized ethnic minorities in Romania. Which excludes the Hungarians, ... it seems they lost that privilege, though perhaps the rejection is mutual since the Parliament is such that size doesn't matter, and Hungarians would have only been allotted one seat, despite being far more numerous than many of the others.

Whether this system was set up by the Ottomans, the Soviets, or neither is something I've yet to find out. It didnt occur to me until now that it somewhat resembles the East German setup, since these seats are guaranteed wins for the "parties" who represent the minority groups .... it's just based on ethnicity instead of membership in an organization.

[Torco]

yeah! the soviets did a similar thing, and in chile we're kind of doing that as well: the guys writing our next constitution (the one we have is kinda shite, written by a pinochet colaborator and so on) is, as I understand it, the first constitutional assembly in modern history that's both gender paritary (half women by law) and has a bunch of seats reserved for the mapuche, diaguita, rapa nui and a few other originary peoples. I think it's a good system, though notably lacking in representation for workers. alas, capitalism gonna capitalism.

[Nachtswalbe]

In a way, this is very common in premodern societies. I remember reading something about the ottoman government, for example, having some institutional method of giving representation to ethnic or religious groups, something like "the christians get a guy at court" kind of deal. the estates general were exactly this, and the city of london is based on this idea: if I remember correctly, companies vote there. Of course, this ends up being an aristocracy in practice, but at least it's one where different bits of the aristocracy are supposed to represent the economic interests of different bits of society.

The latter example is called corporatism . Musso's Italy was theoretically organized like this

[evmdbm]

Does it count that the Emperor of Cheyaden in my conworld is commander-in-chief of the armed forces and security services. There are elections to a unicameral Parliament with political parties ranging from the right-wing National Party to the more left wing (social democratic really) Front for Democratic Rights competing to govern. Parliament has (in theory) the right to decide on domestic economic, social, criminal matters, subject to an absolute imperial veto on legislation (this isn't like the US presidential veto which can be overridden; it doesn't matter if the entire assembly vote for something if it's vetoed). I say in theory because Chief Ministers tend not to introduce legislation they know the imperial family might oppose, so there's a degree of soft control of the assembly and in any case all political parties and candidates are vetted to ensure loyalty to the system (or at least no disloyalty - it's not Hong Kong style "Are you patriotic?" vetting post their National Security Law).

That strikes me as semi-democratic.

[Pabappa]

Yes, that's a nice idea. I've always wanted to see a monarchy that falls in between the extremes we see in our world ..... absolute monarchy on the one hand, where the rest of the government hardly matters, and the more common modern setup on the other hand, where the monarch is but a figurehead. I think Thailand and Cambodia might be somewhere in the middle, but I dont know all that much about either one, and my impression is that the king was restored to Cambodia primarily just to have someone whose legitimacy couldn't easily be challenged, not because they believe monarchy is superior in and of itself.

[hwhatting]

Yes, that's a nice idea. I've always wanted to see a monarchy that falls in between the extremes we see in our world ..... absolute monarchy on the one hand, where the rest of the government hardly matters, and the more common modern setup on the other hand, where the monarch is but a figurehead. I think Thailand and Cambodia might be somewhere in the middle, but I dont know all that much about either one, and my impression is that the king was restored to Cambodia primarily just to have someone whose legitimacy couldn't easily be challenged, not because they believe monarchy is superior in and of itself.

evmdbm's setup looks like some of the European constitutional monarchies in the 19th / early 20th century. As we know, all of them subsequently went either to (almost) full figurehead parliamentary monarchy or were abolished (not counting mini-state oddities like Liechtenstein, Monaco, or the Vatican).
Concerning Cambodia and Thailand, in my understanding the Cambodian king is a pure figurehead; power resides theoretically with the parliament and actually currently with the Prime Minister strongman Hun Sen. Thailand is complicated; the king has a lot of reserve rights and is a source of legitimity; the country had stretches of democratic parliamentary rule, but there's an elite with links to the palace and the army, and when that elite feels threatened by democratically elected politicians, it can get the army to intervene with the support of the palace; currently Thailand is governed by such an army and palace-suppported government.

[Nachtswalbe]

Would Morocco’s crown-backed Istiqlal party and the minister-founded Authenticity and Modernity Party be considered an example of competitive semi-democratic party system?

[hwhatting]

I would consider that a good example.

[Pabappa]

Yeah, that's what I think I'm going to do .... I know my posting this right now looks like I basically just took the idea from your posts, but .... I believe this is still the logical outcome that I would have arrived at on my own since most of my countries either lack a single head of state or have irregular leaders such that I sometimes mention them and sometimes don;t.

So basically there is a founding party (i will try to make a better term) which forever retains rights that the others do not, even if they become a minority. For example, the Leapers were just a thin upper class in Baeba Swamp, but were able to eject the Matrixes (~70%) after ruling that the Matrixes had unilaterally started an illegal war. When the new majority party in their parliament immediately started another illegal war, the Leapers ignored it, because this time they supported that war.

Thus the Leapers have powers superficially similar to what one might find in a "strong king" constitutional monarchy, but I've never thought of them as a literal momarchy with kings and queens. The same is true of the Dolphin Riders, an enemy of the Leapers who nonetheless used the exact same system of government, as both considered themselves the rightful heir of the ancient Gold party, the original creators of the system.

However it's worth noting that the Goldies, the Leapers, the Dolphin Riders all had disadvantages built into the constitution as well. While the founding party (maybe i'll call them the titular party?) was able to eject other parties from the Parliament, and do many others things, they had restrictions that they could not merely vote away. For example, in all votes in the Parliament, the titular party was deliberately undercounted, meaning that if a particular issue was truly split down the middle ,the side with the titual party would lose. (However, as I originall wrote it, it was the *m ajority* party whose votes were undercounted, so i will need to decie whether it sticks with the majority or with the founding party.)_