Talbott Quadrant government and parliament...

TheMonster wrote:

hanuman wrote:That will make a first-past-the-post electoral district system possible - and much more preferable, because there are some distinct disadvantages to a party-list system (for example, if a MIP knows that his/her position depends on the favour of his/her party's power brokers' back home, he/she will be far less inclined to go against the party bosses' wishes, and instead of representing the interests of the citizenry will likely opt to act in the interests of those party bosses).

It's possible to do proportional representation via party list without that problem: In addition to voting for a list, the voter votes for a particular name on the list. Within the list, the names are ranked in descending order of votes received, and the seats are awarded in that order.

The party leadership will tend to put their people at the top of the list, which will undoubtedly lead some voters to just automatically vote for them, but someone who makes a name for himself as standing on principle might well command more votes than the nominal top of the ticket.

Not saying this is the way it will happen, or that I have any intention of using the party list method, but another approach is to hold primaries for each party before the general election. If you select your candidates in rank order of votes received during the primary, then fight the general election, you simply go down your list until you've filled all the seats allocated to you. So lets say that your Talbott Unity Front Federation holds a primary in which a total of 20 candidates (because there are 20 seats up for election this cycle) will be selected from a field of sixty. The votes are tallied, and anyone who didn't make the top 20 is dropped from consideration. The party then fights the general election with everyone in the electorate knowing who the TUFF's candidates are, rather than simply what the party platform is. The votes are tallied and it's discovered that the TUFF's scored a landside victory with 75% of the vote, enough to seat the first 15 of its 20 candidates.

Under this system, you have proportional allocation of the seats by party, you know what the party's platform is, and you know which candidates will receive seats in the event of a win (and what those candidates' actual records are). The party leadership can certainly attempt to influence the primary, probably with a fair degree of success, given the reality of party-based politics, but the actual candidates are beholding to the entire party membership, not just the leaders, and members of other parties (or who are unaffiliated with any party) have specific faces (and records) in front of them for the general election.

I will just add that the travel times involved in reaching the Imperial Parliament are unlikely to preclude more traditional forms of elections and electoral campaigns at the local level. They will preclude the sort of 24-hour news cycle, intensive, sound bite campaigning with which we are currently familiar in developed countries. They won't preclude the sort of elections (with electronic message recording capability added in) which characterized 19th and early 20th century elections in, for example, the US. And because this is a parliamentary form of government, there will be no equivalent of a presidential election in which all citizens of the SEM are voting for the same office holder. That is, there really won't be any "national level" elections for the SEM as such; there will be scores of local elections which will select the members of a national government. Obviously the local candidates won't be running in complete isolation from the Empire-wide issues of the day, but the entire "flavor" of the process will be different from anything in the experience of most present day electorates.

runsforcelery wrote:

TheMonster wrote:It's possible to do proportional representation via party list without that problem: In addition to voting for a list, the voter votes for a particular name on the list. Within the list, the names are ranked in descending order of votes received, and the seats are awarded in that order.

The party leadership will tend to put their people at the top of the list, which will undoubtedly lead some voters to just automatically vote for them, but someone who makes a name for himself as standing on principle might well command more votes than the nominal top of the ticket.

Not saying this is the way it will happen, or that I have any intention of using the party list method, but another approach is to hold primaries for each party before the general election. If you select your candidates in rank order of votes received during the primary, then fight the general election, you simply go down your list until you've filled all the seats allocated to you. So lets say that your Talbott Unity Front Federation holds a primary in which a total of 20 candidates (because there are 20 seats up for election this cycle) will be selected from a field of sixty. The votes are tallied, and anyone who didn't make the top 20 is dropped from consideration. The party then fights the general election with everyone in the electorate knowing who the TUFF's candidates are, rather than simply what the party platform is. The votes are tallied and it's discovered that the TUFF's scored a landside victory with 75% of the vote, enough to seat the first 15 of its 20 candidates.

Under this system, you have proportional allocation of the seats by party, you know what the party's platform is, and you know which candidates will receive seats in the event of a win (and what those candidates' actual records are). The party leadership can certainly attempt to influence the primary, probably with a fair degree of success, given the reality of party-based politics, but the actual candidates are beholding to the entire party membership, not just the leaders, and members of other parties (or who are unaffiliated with any party) have specific faces (and records) in front of them for the general election.

I will just add that the travel times involved in reaching the Imperial Parliament are unlikely to preclude more traditional forms of elections and electoral campaigns at the local level. They will preclude the sort of 24-hour news cycle, intensive, sound bite campaigning with which we are currently familiar in developed countries. They won't preclude the sort of elections (with electronic message recording capability added in) which characterized 19th and early 20th century elections in, for example, the US. And because this is a parliamentary form of government, there will be no equivalent of a presidential election in which all citizens of the SEM are voting for the same office holder. That is, there really won't be any "national level" elections for the SEM as such; there will be scores of local elections which will select the members of a national government. Obviously the local candidates won't be running in complete isolation from the Empire-wide issues of the day, but the entire "flavor" of the process will be different from anything in the experience of most present day electorates.

Come to think of it, travel times aren't THAT bad, are they? I mean, with the Talbott Quadrant government essentially acting independently from the Imperial government (according to its general directives, of course), the immediate off-world focus of the Quadrant's population will be on Spindle, not Manticore. After all, except for those general directives from the Imperial government, it is the Quadrant government that serves as the Queen's government in the Quadrant, not the government in Landing.

The problems with party lists are
1. The decision on who can be elected is decided by the party leadership.
2. If you want to candidate for parliament and want changes which are outside of the partyline you have to found a new party, which is quite complicated.
3. In Germany for example the new party has to be admitted. The decision makers for this are members of the existing parties.
4. If you want a policy that is popular with the voters, you are a "populist", which is a REAL BAD THING.
5. There is no chance for independents.
6. If you manage to overcome these hurdles, you can be certain that the old parties will do everything to treat you as a pariah (there are some interesting examples of that in the new European parliament).

Our system has two houses. The lower house is comprised of directly elected representatives from defined districts (I believe somewhat similar to US congress). The Prime Minister is appointed from the ranks of the biggest party in this house, and has some of the attributes of a President. The Queen of England through a Governor General is technically our head of state, but has very little true power.

The Senate or upper house has 12 representatives from each of 6 states, and 2 each from 2 territories. By a complicated preferential formulae this leads to the election of a small but pivotal number of independent or small party senators, along with the two main parties. At the moment a ragged few hold the balance of power so we expect an interesting political time ahead.

Fortunately the Courts (under the Westminster System) and the federal bureaucracy are able to exert a moderating influence on the nutters we elect so they can't generally do too much harm.

Hornblower wrote:The problems with party lists are
1. The decision on who can be elected is decided by the party leadership.
2. If you want to candidate for parliament and want changes which are outside of the partyline you have to found a new party, which is quite complicated.
3. In Germany for example the new party has to be admitted. The decision makers for this are members of the existing parties.
4. If you want a policy that is popular with the voters, you are a "populist", which is a REAL BAD THING.
5. There is no chance for independents.
6. If you manage to overcome these hurdles, you can be certain that the old parties will do everything to treat you as a pariah (there are some interesting examples of that in the new European parliament).

Hornblower, I do NOT like party-list systems, for a number of reasons, the most important of which is that it makes parliamentarians accountable to party bosses instead of the electorate. It essentially prepares the ground for an oligarchical system of government.

However, there ARE some benefits to such systems, and if the proper mechanisms are installed, the disadvantages can for the most part be circumvented.

One way, like Mr Weber said, is to hold party primaries to select a party's candidates, instead of leaving that selection process up to the party bosses.

Another way is to hold double-elections - letting voters cast a vote for both a party and a particular candidate, like The Monster explained.

A third way is to have a mixed electoral system, in which half of the seats are contested in electoral districts, on a first-past-the-post basis (as they do in the US and UK) and the other half on a party-list system. In such a system, if for instance 20 seats in the Imperial Parliament are reserved for Montana, half will be filled by way of electoral districts. Should the Montana Radical Ranchers receive 40% of the vote, but win only 3 of the 10 electoral districts, that'd mean that the MRR will be entitled to 5 of the party-list seats, so that its TOTAL number of seats reflect its proportion of the final vote tally. If, however, the MRR wins 6 of the electoral districts, it only gets 2 of the party-list seats.

That way, at least, half of the parliamentary seats are directly accountable to the electorate.

All kinds of permutations are possible, some more practicable than others, but at the end of the day, none really completely eradicate the potential for political power to become monopolised by party bosses.

A first-past-the-post electoral district system has its own disadvantages, but at least it ensures that parliamentarians will always remain accountable to the electorate.

Daryl wrote:Our system has two houses. The lower house is comprised of directly elected representatives from defined districts (I believe somewhat similar to US congress). The Prime Minister is appointed from the ranks of the biggest party in this house, and has some of the attributes of a President. The Queen of England through a Governor General is technically our head of state, but has very little true power.

The Senate or upper house has 12 representatives from each of 6 states, and 2 each from 2 territories. By a complicated preferential formulae this leads to the election of a small but pivotal number of independent or small party senators, along with the two main parties. At the moment a ragged few hold the balance of power so we expect an interesting political time ahead.

Fortunately the Courts (under the Westminster System) and the federal bureaucracy are able to exert a moderating influence on the nutters we elect so they can't generally do too much harm.

Australia? Yes, your lower house is elected in precisely the same manner as the US House of Representatives. One thing I don't know, do you have a constitutional provision for popular plebiscites (referenda)?

hanuman wrote:

Daryl wrote:Our system has two houses. The lower house is comprised of directly elected representatives from defined districts (I believe somewhat similar to US congress). The Prime Minister is appointed from the ranks of the biggest party in this house, and has some of the attributes of a President. The Queen of England through a Governor General is technically our head of state, but has very little true power.

The Senate or upper house has 12 representatives from each of 6 states, and 2 each from 2 territories. By a complicated preferential formulae this leads to the election of a small but pivotal number of independent or small party senators, along with the two main parties. At the moment a ragged few hold the balance of power so we expect an interesting political time ahead.

Fortunately the Courts (under the Westminster System) and the federal bureaucracy are able to exert a moderating influence on the nutters we elect so they can't generally do too much harm.

Australia? Yes, your lower house is elected in precisely the same manner as the US House of Representatives. One thing I don't know, do you have a constitutional provision for popular plebiscites (referenda)?

A referendum is held only during general elections (triennially) and only address changes to the constitution. This does not occur at every election and is in fact quite rare. The most recent one was over a decade ago and asked the electorate whether Australia should become a republic (rather than a constitutional monarchy) with a government appointed head of state, Australia said no.

BobfromSydney wrote:

hanuman wrote:Australia? Yes, your lower house is elected in precisely the same manner as the US House of Representatives. One thing I don't know, do you have a constitutional provision for popular plebiscites (referenda)?

A referendum is held only during general elections (triennially) and only address changes to the constitution. This does not occur at every election and is in fact quite rare. The most recent one was over a decade ago and asked the electorate whether Australia should become a republic (rather than a constitutional monarchy) with a government appointed head of state, Australia said no.

I remember that one. Can't remember the margin, though.

Hah, one of the proposals during our constitutional negotiations in 1993/94 was to establish a Malaysia-style constitutional monarchy, with a Council of Kings consisting of all our indigenous peoples' rulers. Each would assume the throne for a year long, on a rotational basis.

There were three main objections to such a system. First, no one could agree on exactly WHAT constituted a ruling monarch. Second, although we have only nine major indigenous languages, we have around a hundred or so distinct indigenous peoples. And third, the Afrikaners, Anglo-Africans, various Coloured (mixed race) and Asian groups would have been excluded.

It was finally decided to retain our republican system, but to establish a House of Traditional Leaders, in which all the leaders of our various indigenous peoples would be seated - kind of like the British House of Lords before the recent reforms, except that instead of being a formal House of Parliament it'd be a separate body outside of Parliament. It was given an advisory function only, to advise both the Government and Parliament on cultural matters pertaining to the indigenous peoples.

IN the talbott quadrant, there is an empty habitable planet that needs some advanced bio technologies to properly colonise. We know the quadrant have a very high population, do any of hte planets have over population, with imperial backing, people from with in the empire could immigrate to this planet and creat a new home. SInce it is in the same system as anoth inhabited planet, it would be easy to develop. It would help with any over population as well as act as a place to draw new comers. as well as unify the local region.

SYED wrote:IN the talbott quadrant, there is an empty habitable planet that needs some advanced bio technologies to properly colonise. We know the quadrant have a very high population, do any of hte planets have over population, with imperial backing, people from with in the empire could immigrate to this planet and creat a new home. SInce it is in the same system as anoth inhabited planet, it would be easy to develop. It would help with any over population as well as act as a place to draw new comers. as well as unify the local region.

Basilica officially belongs to the Nuncio system government - it will have to approve any move to open the planet up for colonisation. However, Nuncio itself has a very low population, while most of the others have populations that fall well short of the two billion mark, if I remember correctly. There's still LOTS of space for population growth on the already inhabited worlds.

Basilica's attraction is its near-perfect physical beauty.