Rethinking citizenship & the legislature

General Archives Great Council
21

Loving all the responses! I definitely hoped this would generate some lively debate. I’m going to address some the topics I’ve seen pop up so far, without quoting/replying to anybody specific.

Fully elected legislature

The biggest issue I see with this route is that you have to define the size of the legislature. I suppose it’s possible to have an indefinite size and instead have a kind of sponsor-based membership (you need X existing members to support you joining). But it sounds like we’re talking about general elections for all seats. I don’t think the idea is bad inherently, but it conflicts with the desire to have easy-to-attain membership in the legislature. By definition some who want to be actively involved in the Assembly wouldn’t be able to join. That’s where I see the end of the road with this idea.

Bicameralism

This is another idea that’s not inherently bad. Introducing bicameralism into our legislature requires that we differentiate between upper and lower house. There isn’t a ton the Assembly actually does outside of pass laws and give advice & consent on appointments. So what would an upper house do?

In the real world, upper houses originally existed to represent the interests of the aristocracy, and most exist today as either a “house of sober second thought” or to represent regional interests (like the US Senate). We don’t have those kind of cleavages in TSP, so an upper house meant to represent some interest would be pointless. (Unless, I guess, you want to argue for writing “the oligarchy” of our oldest TSPers into law.) So if we consider creating an upper house, what makes most sense to me is that it would take over functions that rest with the Cabinet or other executive body right now.

In any case, we should still aim for our lower house to have easy-to-attain membership.

Reasons for opening a session

So I think mentioning that members have to specify a reason when motioning to start a session gave the wrong idea, at least a little bit. My goal there is just that there’s a reason for it, not just opening a session to have an open session or “just in case” or whatever. But yeah, this is a major area to explore, because we don’t want 15 sessions called in a single month to just slightly change some wording of a law.

Let the Chair reject a motion to open?

We shouldn’t try to list the reasons why the Assembly enters a legislative session, but we can establish some general guidelines and let the Chair recognize or reject a motion. Some examples of what I’d consider worth starting a session to do:

  • Propose a new law
  • Propose major revisions to a law
  • Give advice & consent for appointments
  • Emergency sessions to address a crisis

For smaller legislative things, we could wait until enough accumulate to start a session. Or they can be brought up when a session starts for some other reason. Note that sessions are limited to whatever reason somebody called to open for business. And the Assembly wouldn’t end a session until it agrees it has nothing left to do. The overarching theme, though, is that we wouldn’t want to disqualify people from the next session over not participating in whether to change “shall” to “must” in a law or something small like that. If we’re specifically trying to incentivize participation, there needs to be something interesting enough to talk about.

Small sessions?

It’s also possible that we have “small sessions” that don’t require participation. If all we’re opening business for is to pass an omnibus of small changes, there’s no new law to propose or major revisions to one, then that session that can be a freebie.

What about just debate?

Of course, the Assembly isn’t just a law-writing body. We also have debates that aren’t meant to end in a vote on a bill. The Assembly holds the Cabinet accountable, too. And the Cabinet might want to present something to the Assembly that’s not a bill or a treaty.

I think this is where the idea of committees would really shine. In the real world, that debate happens mostly in committees. Members could join committees based on their interests, and the committee can meet on any issues that pop up between sessions. But we do want to make sure that, if we’re heading towards drafting some law or major amendment, we’re opening the legislative session. Otherwise we’d end up in situations where there’s nothing left to debate, we open a session to vote a bill that was drafted and debated out-of-session, but the whole purpose a session is to have a defined period where people have to actively participate in debate.

22

Consider the three goals and how you would satisfy all three:

  1. Easy-to-attain enfranchisement for Cabinet and Delegate elections
  2. Easy-to-attain membership in the legislature
  3. Meaningful activity and productive participation in the legislature

Because right now, unfortunately, we don’t and can’t satisfy the third goal. If we try to enforce a meaningful activity/productive participation requirement under the existing model of the Assembly, people complain that “there wasn’t anything to debate”, “I wasn’t interested in the topic”, “how am I supposed to know at all times when there’s debate going on?” We tie legislator status to voting rights, so any attempt to require actual participation in the community beyond voting has historically been seen as disenfranchisement.

We could try to avoid that by adopting a “citizenship for elections” and “legislators for the Assembly” model, but if we have no meaningful participation requirement, what’s the point?

23

That makes sense, thanks.

An idea I had - what if the Cabinet were reformed into a sort of permanent committee of this new Assembly, with the power to establish sessions with a particular agenda?

24

Is there a particular reason you’d prefer to keep voting within legislative sessions? I’m not sure the opportunity to vote on whether to change “shall” to “must” in a law, for example, really does much to incentivize participation — why not just get that out of the way through voting procedures like we have currently, so sessions can focus on the topic they’re established to address?

I’m not inherently opposed to this, but I’d also like to explore a bit further what your intent is in handing this responsibility to the chair instead of making that determination based on how many legislators actually want to call a session.

I think the reason I ask this is because you mention…

It would seem to me that if there’s enough support to start a session, there’s going to be enough interest in debating whatever that session is about. Wouldn’t that filter out the smaller changes? If people don’t think there’s really much to debate and would rather just get on with a vote, they wouldn’t start a session. And if, somehow, there’s genuinely a lot of controversy over whether to change “shall” to “must” somewhere in our laws, that might seem frivolous to some of us but hey, if that’s what people want to debate then it’s something that incentivizes participation.

25

Well, if we did go down that route, we could use the APC(RC) formula when that was still a thing.

It roughly broke down to one “rep” for every 4 members.

26

We could also do the system used in Europeia where citizens vote for the size of the legislature concurrently with the election. The options are based on the number of candidates (those options are between a fixed max of 9 and min of 5).

27

Yes, it’s to make legislative sessions an event that means something. The idea is to create FOMO, which incentives people to participate. If they don’t participate in these debates during this session, they won’t get to participate and vote in the next one. You need defined sessions to do that, otherwise there’s nothing to miss out on. This is the primary reason why I like the idea. A revolving Assembly that never ends is never really an event to care about, whether or not there’s participation requirements. I want there to be a level of “pomp and circumstance” to legislative business.

Then the second half is that having a defined session makes it simpler for the Chair to determine who did and didn’t participate, and removes any excuses people have for why they shouldn’t be disqualified. You know the session was opened, therefore you know you need to engage before it ends. This is similar to having a monthly review like we currently do, but as we see there are sometimes months where nothing happens in the Assembly. Those would become just times where the Assembly isn’t in session. The Chair doesn’t need to do anything, because the chamber just isn’t in session at all.

Eh, I know this community well enough to know that somebody is going to call open sessions for trivial matters.

28

I think my previous post was worded poorly — my question was intended to be specifically about whether we need to save voting on small legislative sessions until the next time we have a session (to address something major). I can understand the reasoning that it’s simpler for the Chair to track participation, but is there a democratic advantage in addition to that administrative one, as opposed to voting on small changes regularly and saving the pomp and circumstance for the major changes that deserve it?

I can believe that, but I also feel like there’s plenty of other ways for those people to make an issue out of those trivial matters?

29

No.

31

That is not a particularly helpful response. I would encourage you to provide more details to your reasoning.

32
  • Cabinet.

I see an issue. Let me check certain understandings first before coming to a conclusion.
-Does this proposal apply to Cabinet Orders in any way?
-What is to be the legal avenue for the legislature to check (and balance) the Cabinet through active communication between the two interconnected but separate bodies? If the answer is ‘Cabinet Orders and Reports’, I fail to see how that is a communication.
-Finally, I propose that along with these provisions, an additional “urgent session” be granted to the Assembly if a Cabinet member has acted against the duty of “enforcing the law” by using their own discretion.

  • The Chair’s discretion…again…

-I fail to see the benefit of using the Chair’s Discretion more than it already is. Keeping in mind that (de facto) it is a bureaucratic (no negative connotations), and neutral position;
-This proposal either needs to have a committee preceding it’s enactment which is to report to the Chair of which motions are being considered to start by the community.
-Alternatively, the Proposal becomes needlessly dreadful by over-use of legalese.

  • The citizen as Bicameral - End of Direct Democracy?

-Citizens get the right to vote in legislative matters. (Lower House).
-Legislators can both cast votes in legislative matters prior to debating them. (Upper House).
-As mentioned, I recommend weighing the votes, 0.5-0.75 value of Lower House vote to Upper House. Why? Actual incentive to become a legislator.
-Essentially this would mean an end to direct democracy. It would become a sort of sociocracy (officially). The essence of a client-agent based oligarchy still remains.

33

Oh I didn’t see this at first (5 hour difference). Probably because it was out of the replies to Comfed.
The succeeding reply was to the proposal itself, not @Comfed s’ proposal to legislature size.
The explanation is simple - I don’t think that TSP, being the 2nd-4th most nation-populated region, depending on time of measurement, can operate with 5-18 legislators. Considering that the branch division is soft (R1: Cabinet, Delegate, CRS, the HC, LegComm members are also legislators; R2: All laws usually have a provision where the Assembly is granted the power/obligation to revoke the statuses mentioned in R1 from a citizen under certain circumstances), this is uh a needless and very hard criteria to reach.

34

The actual activity of the Assembly is effectively driven by the same amount of people you’ve described there, with the others being generally silent voters instead. This isn’t us arbitrarily cutting off a group of active debaters from participation, it’s just singling them out and making them the actual legislative authority, rather than delegating that task to a group of ever-present “lurkers” that votes yes on everything.

Plus, this system has worked for large regions before. TEP currently has a similar system to what Glen’s proposing right now, and from what I’ve observed, they’ve managed to maintain sustainable activity and interest in legislative discussions instead of falling off the activity cliff like it’s been feared.

35

Please use the reply chain feature it’s one of the reasons for the forum transfer.

Again, you’re cutting off crucial points of my argument (R1 or Reason 1 in this case). Are legislators in TEP also the ones holding other non-legislative titles? Because 10 legislators are essentially 1.5 fully staffed ministries in TSP.

36

I’ll use the features that I actually need, thanks.

Actually yes, they’re still holding all other non-legislative titles. Europeia, the region Comfed mentions, does the same too. I’m not sure why you’re thinking otherwise.

37

Right, bad recommendations stemming from less influential regions*, non-negotiable and cuts out crucial points in quotes. No reason (or way) to continue discussion from my end, in a meaningful manner, with the user.

(* FFR: recommending practices of less influential regions isn’t necessarily always an issue but in delicate topics that should be avoided).

38

Just because the ideas may be viewed as flawed, doesn’t mean we can’t learn from them. Look at how many times people keep creating republics and tweaking those. At least keep an open mind on how we can build a better mouse trap, so to speak.

39

I don’t agree with this. It’s already bad enough that we can’t get rid of the Local Council. Now, we’re gonna create an upper house that may likely never get abolished? I’d prefer we do not establish an institution that will only stand in the way of democracy and effective governance.

40

I’m not proposing bicameralism here, but it’s a topic that’s been brought up in the conversation. If people want to explore the option, we would need to think about what an upper house would do, what its role would be.

They don’t necessarily need to have any say in constitutional amendments, nor would we need to allow membership in both houses. So this concern isn’t, to me, a huge stop sign saying go no farther.

41

I’m not even sure how a two tier system would work in TSP. We have no noble/common or state/people divide that would give the dynamics needed. Are there other real world examples I might be missing?