Why Democracies Don't Work

[kamino]

Why Democracies Don't Work

A Paper

By Kamino

08 OCTOBER 2009

I am probably one of the very few people on bob that have any actual experience in a direct democracy, so I can adequately say I am some what of an expert on the subject, as opposed to those who only theorize about it. I have been in a Direct Democracy for four months or so and have been very actively involved in its molding.

When I at first entered Planet Bob I had many misunderstandings of the way of things. I thought that a nation was a nation, and an alliance was an alliance. But I had discovered that in fact a nation was more of a state (by American understanding) and that an alliance was a nation or a republic of sorts (much like the U.S.A. or the U.K). So when I first entered into the world I was an isolationist nation, not wanting to join into any alliance for fear of war and foreign influence into Akira's society. But as we all know the out come of that type of ideal, I was attacked by raiders on a regular basis. Oh sure, the First war I fought I had won, even caused my enemy to re roll. I had fought for my peace and was proud of my accomplishment further cementing in my mind that isolationism could work. But it was not to last. I was raided over and over by other nations. Eventually I was overcome by the hostilities.

When I re rolled I decided to join an alliance to ensure my security, a hard learned lesson. I joined the United Blue Directorate (UBD) and was quickly upset by learning that in an alliance I was not to be allowed to be involved in any political decision making. That I was no more than a commoner. I had joined Planet Bob to run things the way I saw fit, to be a leader, a politician. So when I was denied this, I left the UBD in seek of something more to my liking. I eventually found a new and small alliance called the Democratic Open Community (DOC). It was a system where every member was a member of the legislative process, every member was a Senator if you will. We could create, debate, negotiate and pass legislation with out the the approval of an Emperor. I had found my home, or so I thought.

After roughly two months or so things changed. I have learned that there are several reasons a Direct Democracy can not survive on Planet Bob, and there not the common reasons that people say i.e. it's to slow etc, etc... The DOC was, or should I say is, dying. There are several reasons for this, and I will try to cover each as best as possible.

The first was no accountability, or better yet no sense of responsibility or obligation. In a direct democracy members would eventually grow tired of long debates about legislation, treaties and our constitution. It would sometimes take weeks for someone to respond to a new piece of legislation. Members would start to gain the attitude of "some one else will do it". Because they were not elected to that position and were not bestowed with a title and privilege, they had no obligation to do anything. The duties of the legislative process could be passed on to someone else. Unfortunately, when to many people think this way the system falls. It was set up to where those who wanted to be active could be and those who did not, would not have to. Sadly in the end the only person I was debating with, was myself, that type of democracy does not get very far. So while the actual legislative process may have indeed been slow like others theorized, there was no danger to the DOC because of this from aggressors, because it did find a way to supersede this problem with an emergency powers clause, that could be granted to the Prime Minister in desperate times.

The Second problem was that the spirit of a democratic society can not last. Individual interests would cause such a deformity in the society by creating to many programs and laws that individuals would support out of apathy or clever sales pitches. Over the course of a democratic societies life, more and more legislation, programs and allies would grow to such an exponential level without a real clear cut goal or ideal of what the alliance was to become, there was in fact, a lack of direction. Alliances do not grow by piling more and more programs that they can not support, they grow slowly with a carefully thought out plan and vision of what the alliance is to one day become. Gradually and carefully creating new legislation, programs and allies that support the architecture of the plan to be put into play, and growing with the alliance as its ACTIVE members grow.

The next problem was corruption. A fully democratic society is at risk of corruption from every direction. I myself, while with the best of intentions, was single handily able to alienate a member who was of high caliber and bringing myself to unimaginable popularity. I was gaining political power by popularist support at unimaginable speeds, I was very well on my way to becoming Emperor. I had been able to create multiple changes in government with almost no question and ultimately damaging the system by having to many people in to many positions that could not be filled.

Next was the constant change of government. Every one was so concerned about what was fair in terms of term lengths and every one wanted a shot at the big seat that the current government would not be in office long enough to provide any real direction. So once again we come to the problem of a constant change of direction and no real end goal in place by any power long enough to satisfactorily implement it.

Lastly, was that it would be very difficult to change once it had set down a certain course. Members would become so attached or dependent upon the system that removing programs would be greatly feared. Members could think of more reasons to keep a cancer in there society rather than removing it. Also on that note, once you have a problem, who is held accountable for the failure? In a dictatorship, the emperor is held accountable and can be removed from power to fix the problem and install a new emperor to provide new direction, but in a democracy, who do you remove? Every one is a part of the problem. The only way to fix it is to remove those who were responsible, namely everyone, which would in turn bring about revolution (changing the type of government structure) or dissolution.

As we can all see, other forms of government do not have these problems. They are lasting (provided the leadership is not ignorant), secure and destined to greatness. Other governments weather they be dictatorships, Councils or representative democracies, have a far better chance at survival.

Overall democracies are not at risk because they are to slow like popularly thought, but rather they are at risk of failure because they have no real obligation, lack of direction, special interests and difficulty changing.

[Delta1212]

Autocracies and Representative Democracies both have pros and cons. Direct democracy is just not a good system for running an effective alliance.

[Sylar]

Republics work best period

[Syan Wilmont]

Every government has it's flaws. Government can never be perfect because it is run by people, who are all imperfect.

[Duncan King]

I think direct democracy can work if it's under slightly controlled conditions. LSF has been a direct democracy for two years now and they seem to be doing all right. I think part of DoC's problem was that it was a new alliance with a very flexible government. Governments with a bit more structure are probably better early on and once you see what does and doesn't work, you can relax things a bit.

Zenith started out semi dictatorial then became a bicameral legislature. We're actually in the process of converting to a direct democracy. I do think it can work if drafted properly, but if our charter changes very quickly, you'll know it didn't work for us.

Edited October 9, 2009 by Duncan King

[Nintenderek]

Democracies can work, they just require that people put more effort into them. Direct democracy will never work in CN, because there's nobody to start the polls or anything like that.

[janax]

Any method works, if you have the members making it work.

[LegendoftheSkies]

TYR's a democracy and we have yet to run into any of those problems. Though perhaps we might when we get bigger and there are more candidates to choose from.

[Delta1212]

TYR's a democracy and we have yet to run into any of those problems. Though perhaps we might when we get bigger and there are more candidates to choose from.

Candidates means it's not a direct democracy.

[Erwin Schrodinger]

This is why most agree monarchy is the best government setting, despite the happiness bonus loss.

fake edit: oh, didn't read thread. Yea, alliance democracy is simply too slow, inefficient, etc. as already stated. I personally enjoy Triumvirates, as they keep one person from becoming really stupid, or inactive and thus inefficient, yet the alliance doesn't have to wait too long for a response.

Better yet, the point you brought up about corruption. Democracy is sort of in place to try avoiding corruption. One corrupt person can't ruin the fun of a whole bunch of people. Yet, in voting for someone, they choose the person they like and perhaps not exactly the person most qualified. This also happens due to the common member not being fully educated in the situation or what exactly is going on. Ask members what they want to do, yet, they don't know what the government knows.... a decision is made, and the gov is like.... oh... crap.... well, have to do it. And they get screwed over.

[Essenia]

This is why most agree monarchy is the best government setting, despite the happiness bonus loss.

In 2006, yes.

Also, even with elite members, direct democracy is pretty awful. When every member has access to the decision on whether or not to go to war, your opsec will go down the drain.

[Sunstar]

GATO and the ODN are still here after almost 4 years. Dozens - if not hundreds - more are still around after some reasonable length of time.

It is not democracies which don't work; it is your democracy that doesn't work.

[WorldConqueror]

I agree that democracies are terribly slow and inefficient. How can decisions be made quickly and effectively if every member has to vote on the issue? Plus, with government being changed so regularly, it becomes harder to maintain policies as different leaders have different views.

[Tygaland]

The trouble is that people try to bring their vision of an ideal real world government system to a game. A game in which people from different time zones and with differing levels of activity are expect to act like people in a RL political situation.

When you have a direct democracy (and this applies as much in RL as it does in CN) you have large numbers of people with no clue about what they are voting about influencing the direction and policy of the alliance as a whole. Those people are also the ones who'll clear off the moment the !@#$ty decision they voted for blows up in the alliance's face because they have no investment in the alliance. Unlike RL where if you have direct vote to go to war and you vote "lol war" without bothering to read up on who the war is with and why, you can't just quit your country like you can quit your alliance. Direct democracy will never work when people with no interest and no investment are charged with deciding the direction of the alliance.

Representative democracy is slightly better with regards to those elected to represent the general membership have some investment by way of the position they have sought and won by election. However, it also suffers from similar weaknesses to direct democracy. Representative democracy again relies on people with no investment and often no interest in the political direction of the alliance choosing people to represent them. In my experience, representative democracies in alliances tend to become popularity contests the larger an alliance gets. Either popular by way of a member holding a position in the alliance already and being known and re-elected or people voting for the member that makes the most noise on the forum without and consideration as to whether the spam crapper has any clue how to do the job at all. Lastly, a number of people who win elections then go inactive after attaining the title they sought because when they realise there is actually some work involved they lose interest.

Now, my opinion is probably considered cynical and maybe it is. Some alliances are happy with forms of democracy and have kept them for a long time. Good luck to them, whatever you think works for you is fine. But, to me, alliances in this game need a set leader and a group of people under them that are active, aware and willing to put in some work to further the alliance. This system provides some consistency to the alliance, its government and its policies. The only real flaw with it is that often people in the alliance get frustrated by not "going anywhere" in the alliance and a lot of the time it is a fair criticism. But, to me, it is a good thing because people should earn a place in a leadership role in an alliance and not expect it because they have been in an alliance a long time or come from another alliance where they had a role in the alliance.

[Myzebedeeistaken]

Interesting OP. Although I must say that democracy is a wide term, and the failures inherent in one form do not transfer to the entire term 'democracy'. Likewise, one must remember that dysfunctional government of any type will have serious flaws which transcend democratic/totalitarian divisions.

Edited October 9, 2009 by Myzebedeeistaken

[Qaianna]

The trouble is that people try to bring their vision of an ideal real world government system to a game. A game in which people from different time zones and with differing levels of activity are expect to act like people in a RL political situation.

When you have a direct democracy (and this applies as much in RL as it does in CN) you have large numbers of people with no clue about what they are voting about influencing the direction and policy of the alliance as a whole. Those people are also the ones who'll clear off the moment the !@#$ty decision they voted for blows up in the alliance's face because they have no investment in the alliance. Unlike RL where if you have direct vote to go to war and you vote "lol war" without bothering to read up on who the war is with and why, you can't just quit your country like you can quit your alliance. Direct democracy will never work when people with no interest and no investment are charged with deciding the direction of the alliance.

Representative democracy is slightly better with regards to those elected to represent the general membership have some investment by way of the position they have sought and won by election. However, it also suffers from similar weaknesses to direct democracy. Representative democracy again relies on people with no investment and often no interest in the political direction of the alliance choosing people to represent them. In my experience, representative democracies in alliances tend to become popularity contests the larger an alliance gets. Either popular by way of a member holding a position in the alliance already and being known and re-elected or people voting for the member that makes the most noise on the forum without and consideration as to whether the spam crapper has any clue how to do the job at all. Lastly, a number of people who win elections then go inactive after attaining the title they sought because when they realise there is actually some work involved they lose interest.

Now, my opinion is probably considered cynical and maybe it is. Some alliances are happy with forms of democracy and have kept them for a long time. Good luck to them, whatever you think works for you is fine. But, to me, alliances in this game need a set leader and a group of people under them that are active, aware and willing to put in some work to further the alliance. This system provides some consistency to the alliance, its government and its policies. The only real flaw with it is that often people in the alliance get frustrated by not "going anywhere" in the alliance and a lot of the time it is a fair criticism. But, to me, it is a good thing because people should earn a place in a leadership role in an alliance and not expect it because they have been in an alliance a long time or come from another alliance where they had a role in the alliance.

Hey, Tyga, this is meant to discuss democracies in CyberNations, not democracies and republics RL. Wait, why are you looking at me that way?

And yeah, trust me--consistency in government can be a good thing to establish.

And of course you should find out what your members want--the ones who are driven to learn and participate are good to have as an electorate. The ones who prefer growing pixels and staying off the boards? As long as they still feel like they belong, good for them, but don't forget the old joke: 'We tried democracy, but it was voted down.'

[Ch33kY]

I don't think Democracy is such a bad thing. You get +1 evironment and national happiness, and the +8% solider efficiency which isn't such a bad thing. But I agree with others that Monarchy is better for buying infrastructure.

[Telchar]

Why they work? Check TOP.

/thread

Edit: How about renaming the misleading title to: Why Direct Democracies Don't Work

Edited October 9, 2009 by Telchar

[polisofboy]

Sadly in the end the only person I was debating with, was myself

i think this is the only true you say

[Arcturus Jefferson]

Direct democracies can work. The LSF is pretty close, as far as I know. The old FCC was very close to it and did fine. And there are plenty of smaller alliances that get along without copy-pasting boilerplate charters.

And the flaws you cited are all present in other forms of alliance government, but nobody's writing uninteresting papers about that.

Edited October 9, 2009 by Arcturus Jefferson

[thaone]

Direct democracies can work. The LSF is pretty close, as far as I know. The old FCC was very close to it and did fine. And there are plenty of smaller alliances that get along without copy-pasting boilerplate charters.

How often went those alliances to war? Direct democracy does work perfectly if you never want to communicate as an alliance with other alliances, but you can probably also stay in peacemode on NONE for that.

And the flaws you cited are all present in other forms of alliance government, but nobody's writing uninteresting papers about that.

Representative Democracy has often been examined in these kind of essays, recently the system by which NPO is governed has been the subject of a long discussion.

[Arcturus Jefferson]

How often went those alliances to war?

What does that have to do with anything?

Direct democracy does work perfectly if you never want to communicate as an alliance with other alliances, but you can probably also stay in peacemode on NONE for that.

I'm pretty sure all of the examples I've given have/had plenty of communication with outside alliances.

Representative Democracy has often been examined in these kind of essays, recently the system by which NPO is governed has been the subject of a long discussion.

Well good, then we've expanded our repertoire of uninteresting papers to include other forms of government. It only took three years.

[warlordnazrag]

Representative democracy works just fine in UPN, and has done so for over 2 years now.

[adolf45]

Any method works, if you have the members making it work.

This. ^

Ultimately, if the government system is among the things the alliance's theme centers around, it will attract people who support and believe in that system. Secondly, no matter what kind of a system there is, a somewhat clear purpose for existence and a direction to head towards are important. These directions have to be defined while you're laying the foundations for the alliance, unless it's a dictatorship. Obviously though, even so the system will not necessarily be stable if the community is young and large, instead of having been built brick by brick from the tiny foundations to a large, truly experienced community. Direct democracies work with people like OP who feel that a direct democracy provides opportunities, free discussion and generates experience, knowledge and responsibility among all the people over a longer period of time, given that the bunch of them are still enthusiastic about striving for whichever goals; on the journey towards those goals, mistakes will be made and learned from.

[Lusitan]

You do realize you're a strange guy, don't you? No more of the sovereign right of the people to take a decision over anything? What about the hours you spent arguing with my exasperated self on how protectorates attacked the sovereign right of the members of an alliance to govern themselves?

The change you took is so 180º that for a moment I wondered if this wasn't an initiation prank for joining NpO

Anyway, let me show you why almost all the problems you mentioned on democracies are endemic of any dictatorship you might find:

Lack of Accountability. There's no greater example of Lack of Accountability than a dictatorship where the entire alliance relies on a handful of members to control every move, frequently without providing explanations on the reasons and the envolvents of said moves. The alliance is nothing but a bunch of sheep. Of course, lack of accountability is more dramatic in democracy.. but at least they try to do something about it.

Incidentally I agree with you on the second problem, but only for Direct Democracies.

Corruption. No other alliance risks more being hit by corruption than a dictatorship. Reasonable democracies usually have systems of checks and balances installed to avoid corruption. Not sure that is the case with DOC, but that's how most democracies operate. At a dictatorship level however it is much worse. In first place because nothing obliges the leader to inform the membership of how he proceeds. And even if the charter said so, the members have no way to protest about the direction the alliance other than leaving the alliance itself. Essentially the alliance became the Leader's alliance. And that leads me to the next point. People become biased. Their perspective gets clouted. And that leads to making mistakes, mistakes that either no one knows or no one can do anything about. There's no greater possible victim of corruption than a dictatorship or an oligarchy with dominant members. I think Z'hadum's logs showed quite a bit of it the other day.

Constant Change of Government. No Idea if that's a Direct Democracy problem, but regular democracies don't have such issue regularly.. or at least no more regularly than any dictatorship would have. I believe you only became Minister of Foreign Affairs because the original Minister resigned and you were his Deputy. No offence, but that was a big mistake. You weren't ready in any accounts.

Lastly, was that it would be very difficult to change once it had set down a certain course. Even better, in dictatorship it's not in your hands to decide what course and if you want to change. It's all in the hands of one person. And if the person is stubborn enough, it won't change the course either. Either way, this perspective you have is mostly based on ignorance of successful cases of alliances who actually change their course rather than personal experience - because you don't have that many.

Overall this paper, albeit nicely written, fails because the person who wrote it has little to no experience or understanding on how anything in CN works. Your vision of Foreign Affairs was non-existent and this schizophrenic change of political views and how an alliance should be ruled only shows your immaturity in political and alliance leadership ways.

Don't get me wrong, you have good potential, you're dedicated and you try hard. That's what was earning you position within DOC. But you're jumping quite a bit of steps ahead. New people first sit, watch and learn and only then start talking.

In my honest opinion, any method of government works as long as there are committed people to execute it, regardless of the political formation.