Scorecard: Presidential Democracy
This post on Best Of A Great Lot is a part of a series on the subject of designing a new form of governance. Each piece aims to stand alone, but fits together on the Table of Contents.
All good engineering starts with an understanding of the actual problems to be solved. I’m reviewing some common proposals for governance reform, but want to wrap up those discussions in a shorthand form. So I plan to present a scorecard for each one, a shorthand for what improvements (or worsenings) they would cause to our current system. First, though, here is a scorecard for our current system (Presidential Democracy, or Presidential Republican Democracy, if you want a longer name). Scores out of 5.
% of citizens who have a representative they prefer: 2/51
Representatives accountable to the people: 2/52
Bundled Governance: 2/5
Independence of Evaluation: 1/53
Legitimacy of Governance: 3/54
Self-governance: 3/55
Between First Past the Post voting and the fact that Congress has a job approval rating in the 20s, we don’t seem to be doing very well here.
The quote “we don’t need term limits, that’s what elections are for” would be a lot more plausible if we consistently had good candidates running against incumbents. But even with historic low approval ratings for Congress, at least 85% of incumbents win each cycle.
There’s a whole blogpost in this topic, and I hope to get to it. The short version: both Congress and the regulatory agencies regularly decide how bad the problem they seek to control is, how well their own behaviors are going, and what the best path forward is.
This form of governance is clearly more legitimate than monarchy. But many people argue that we actually live in an oligarchy, that the rich have more access and power, that their votes are performative.
This could be a 4, perhaps. We certainly have people being elected as representative who didn’t come from money, for example, but then they rapidly become wealthy. And overall, the sense that the people who run the country are a different set of people, disconnected from the citizenry at large is pretty strong for many people, especially society’s discontented.