Democratic Deficits (Tequilla fucking long)

I spent a lot of time reading up on EU law back in the 1990's.

One of the big criticisms of the EU from Euroskeptics and just plain old people who gave a shit about transparency and democratic political processes is that the EU's executive (the EU Commission) is not directly elected, and only the Commission can initiate legislation in the EU parliament. Commissioners are selected by the President of the Commission from of each of the 28 EU countries, from a field of candidates suggested by each country.


Lies, damned lies, and Brexit

Voters have responded by not voting for their EU Parliament MP's, because they don't really matter in the grand scheme of things. This has resulted in lots of silly fringe parties having far more representation at the EU level than the national level e.g. The Party Party from Germany and the irredentist Jobbik Party from Hungary. The EU Parliament has also become an incubation chamber from far-right neo-fascist groupings such as France's National Front, Britain's UKIP, and the Dutch Freedom Party.

EU voters turn out for EU elections at American rates - 43% of eligible voters as compared to 68% turnout across the EU for national elections. The EU government is seen as not having the same legitimacy, seriousness, or power as EU members' respective national governments.

Sound shitty? You bet!

Hence the term "democratic deficit."

At rock bottom, anyone should be concerned when elected representative bodies don't represent the actual will of the people they represent. There also tends to be a strong correlation with democratic deficits and low turnout and corruption. This used to be the case mostly in semi-free republics in Latin America and Southeast Asia.

Funny, those seem to be big problems in our Union these days.

Folks will tell you that the Electoral College is a feature, not a bug, and that the Founders wanted to ensure that smaller States' and lesser-populated States' voices were not drowned out by larger, more urban States.

Of course, the Founders also envisioned a republic of yeoman farmers living on the land, and not a post-industrial nation of city dwellers. They also thought slaves should count in the census, even though they couldn't vote (and the whole point of the census is determining how many electors a State gets at the Electoral College and in the House). Oh yeah, and only the top 6% of white males could even vote in 1789, due to property requirements

So, let's stop fetishizing the Founders a little bit. Yeah, the Constitution was great for 1789, but it is very archaic and hard to amend in 2017.

Besides more voters choosing Hillary last fall, more Americans chose Democratic candidates for Senate and the GOP gained about 20 more seats than their share of the national vote would net them if seats were allocated on a truly proportional basis, as the 14th Amendment seems to call for: "Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers".

So, an inherent small-state bias in the Electoral College and the Senate, combined with inaccurate apportionment and outright partisan gerrymandering in the House has led to a government with significant (small d) democratic deficits.

Now if you followed those links I put in the Senate popular vote and gerrymandering, you'll see that the Washington Post doesn't think much of the claims that the Dems got more Senate votes in 2016 and that compact legislative districts for the House are not necessarily the solution to our problems. And they have a point on both counts.

But none of that gets to my fundamental point - which is that at no point in the current iteration of American government is the principle of "one person, one vote" accurately reflected. Not even close.

Our system distorts the value of everyone's votes at every level of Federal government, and probably every state level as well. I'm willing to concede the value of inflating the voice of rural and smaller-state interests to serve the Republic as a whole - I'm just not willing to concede the franchise in toto.

Also, we tend to suffer three layers of distortion in the House. First, as people move, the census gets increasingly inaccurate. States which lose population over time have more power in the election years ending in 6, 8, 0 than the election years ending in 2 and 4. The second is the gerrymandering which happens within states after the census. And the third is the archaic first-part-the-post employed in almost every state, leaving most people to vote tactically for the "least bad" candidate rather than for a party, platform, or candidate which best aligns with their interest. If they vote at all. Non-Presidential election turnout is awful - only 36.4% turned out to vote in 2014, for a Congress that actually has power and stuff.

All of this encourages politicians to become creatures of K Street rather than their home states. Once elected, incumbency brings enormous power and clout, and incumbents are almost impossible to unseat.

The parties which dominate our political discourse don't actually stand for much. Instead each is a tent containing sub-groupings of interests and views that would probably be their own parties in other countries (the Tea Party, the Blue Dogs, the Berniecrats, the Christian Right, the Democratic Leadership Council).

The Swiss have a federal, multi-lingual system of government. Their system is very different from their neighbors, and their economy tends to be more free-market oriented than those of their neighbors. They also have a very large immigrant population, with 25%of the national population not being naturalized Swiss citizens, and many of them come from dirtbag Third World type countries (5.4% Kosovar Albanian, 3.3% Turkish, and so forth). Yet they have one of the highest per capita GDP of any country. Higher than the US, anyway.

Switzerland modeled a great deal of their constitution after the US Constitution in 1848. Both being federal states, the US made a good model for the Swiss who wanted to incorporate democratic principles to their country after an internecine war in 1847.

The Swiss federal system protects small cantons. For example, the canton of Glarus (pop. 40,028) has the same representation (2) in the Council of States (similar to the Senate) as the canton of Zurich (pop. 1,500,000). However, Zurich gets 35 seats in the National Council (similar to the House of Representin') while Glarus gets one. Some cantons, for historical reasons, are half-cantons (like Basel City). They only get one seat at the Council of States, but Basel City gets 5 seats in the National Council.


Now I understand everyone's shit is emotional right now

But the Swiss have added innovations that keep their politicians in line and subject to the will of the people. Members of the National Council are elected proportionally within the canton. The Swiss cantons probably have greater powers of self-government than US States, and smaller cantons are still probably slightly over-represented in the National Council, but not to a point where each voters' rights are significantly distorted or reduced.

Also, the structure of the Swiss government compels members to compromise. The executive branch is not run by an elected monarch, as the presidency in the US, but is a council of the leading parties in the parliament who share executive functions and rotate the (largely ceremonial) position of head-of-state.

Finally, if the Swiss parliament comes up with a terrible law, 50,000 voters can petition to have the law annulled. At that point a referendum must be held on the law. People will say that this is an invitation to chaos, but in practice very few parliamentary laws have been annulled. Likewise, while the Swiss people can also legislate via initiative at both the cantonal and federal levels, enactment of legislation via initiative is less common than in the US. In part I think that is because the Swiss are the highest rate of satisfaction with their government than any other developed country, certainly higher than most Americans.

What we're doing isn't working - the democratic deficit is higher in the US right now than virtually any other Western country, and those failures are encouraging "illiberal democracies" such as Hungary, Poland and Russia.

There are other models and systems that adapted/used in the American context. Otherwise we're gonna be Brazil with nukes.