Gutenberg doesn't include a fairly important piece of context - these are the practical, battle-tested & known-to-work rules on how to actually run a democracy with diametrically opposed competing interests.
I'm not sure what the Indian government uses but I suspect Robert's Rules are state of the art.
Similar to First Past the Post voting where there are probably some easy wins tweaks that could be made based on the current academic literature - but the sheer number of popular "sound good, don't work" ideas floating around make change highly risky because it will have to run the political process and still be a good idea when it makes it through. In practice everyone wants their pet topic to be able to bypass normal procedure.
I've been in a lot of well-run Roberts meetings, ranging from a dozen to a thousand people. People who didn't get their way always felt they'd had a fair shot at it.
I was also in a "consensus-based" meeting with a couple dozen people. It was dominated by one person who just kept insisting on getting their way, until everybody else got tired and "agreed."
> I was also in a "consensus-based" meeting with a couple dozen people. It was dominated by one person who just kept insisting on getting their way, until everybody else got tired and "agreed."
Sounds like a manifestation of Nassim Taleb's "Dictatorship of the Small [Intransigent] Minority"[1]
A game-theoretic problem with positive sum games (as opposed to zero sum) is that apart from obvious focal points, there's no objective way to split the positivity of the payoff.
I've been brought up to "always leave something on the table", but I understand that other societies hold the opposite.
RRO is used for the US Congress. That may be why it was developed.
It is far from perfect, but I feel it works.
I have been in many RRO meetings, and a few "CBDM" meetings.
I worked for a Japanese corporation for a long time, and saw their consensus system, which was painful, but worked. It was completely different from the "CBDM" meetings I've attended.
I once wrote up a very complete presentation and paper on real CBDM, but no one was ever interested in learning about it.
In my experience, most CBDM meetings aren't actually designed for "consensus." They are designed to let "the people that matter" accelerate the process of getting what they want.
RRO is used for the US Congress. That may be why it was developed.
The US House of Representatives uses a set of rules based on Jefferson's Manual. Bill flow is a bit different than Roberts Rules of Order, but the concepts are very similar.
Thanks. I stand corrected. I just assumed (ASS out of U and ME), because I see them use the same language. I think there’s something in the intro to RRO about it, as well.
Been awhile since I read it. It’s not light reading.
Also, most folks use modern versions (copyrighted, so not open-sourced) of RRO.
>I was also in a "consensus-based" meeting with a couple dozen people. It was dominated by one person who just kept insisting on getting their way, until everybody else got tired and "agreed."
I heard somewhere about a variant that would be interesting to try: everyone specifies a favorite option and a consensus option. If the consensus option eventually attains a supermajority, it wins, otherwise you choose a member at random and his/her favorite option wins.
Because random is fair but usually bad, there's an incentive to reach a consensus. Anyone who blocks the discussion is gambling with the risk of getting a bad favorite option.
You could probably fix the most egregious risks by say choosing at random from the options that a supermajority don't object to. (E.g. choose an option at random, if a supermajority has marked "definitely not this", then loop to the beginning and pick another one at random.)
One of our presidents over a pool of largely self interested and disparately oriented divisions has a similar tactic.
When they have a big decision to make, he puts the division heads in a room, says "so, what are we going to do?", lets them bluff and bicker in their usual way, and then proposes in all seriousness the worst possible and least effective way to technically accomplish what has to be done. It's a gift, really.
It's effectiveness in unifying them through their desperation to make sure it never comes to pass is unparalleled.
He also had those same people give each other researched introductions to his leadership, which is every bit as brilliant and trollish as it sounds.
My impression of the reason consensus works for the Society of Friends is that they don't get tired, but rely on "seasoning", being willing to take time, over several meetings if necessary, to find unity.
The whole point of Roberts Rules of Order is that the membership is in charge. Motions, after being discussed and amended, eventually come down to a vote of the group. That's the basic mechanism of democracy.
Most nonprofit membership organizations in the US were run that way at one time. But since the 1960s, there are more self-perpetuating boards and other schemes for taking control away from the members. So people don't get practice at running a democracy. Which is a problem.
> the membership is in charge. Motions, after being discussed and amended, eventually come down to a vote of the group
Strictly speaking, this could be a subset of the group, so long as that subset is quorate. For some groups this quorate level is going to be a surprisingly small number of people.
Sorry, I am having trouble understanding the point in your final paragraph - are you saying that there are probably some tweaks that could be made to Robert's Rules, or are you saying the Rules protect against tweaks that might end up harmful?
I think the suggestion is that Robert's Rules have actually the result of a bunch of previously tweaking, have been tested, and are shown to be safe to implement.
On the other hand, many other decision making procedures (such as many alternatives to the U.S. first-past-the-post voting schemes for elections) might sound good in theory, but in practice could fail utterly.
Surely this is more about parliamentary process which is somewhat independent of the voting scheme? How do you even measure the success of a voting scheme? Most modern democracies use a form of proportional representation these days. This is particularly true in Europe, where most countries also score higher than the US on the Democracy Index: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index .
Even in the US, non-FPTP voting is starting to happen here and there. San Fran's mayoral elections used a ranked choice system if I'm not mistaken.
Item 14 is pretty interesting too. "Is the legislature the supreme political body, with a clear supremacy over other branches of government?" That's probably a no for the US, but who knows. The "experts" who make the determination are not revealed, so the whole index is really based on trusting what The Economist says.
Item 18, "Do special economic, religious or other powerful domestic groups exercise significant political power, parallel to democratic institutions?". I can't imagine how that can be fairly scored: the only realistic possibility is that the "experts" vote on how much they like the interest groups in this or that country.
There are lots of items like that. Even if they make sense for a democracy index, you can easily see how different people might give completely different answers.
In item 40, "Alternatively, % of people who think that punishing criminals is an essential characteristic of democracy", where you get the full score if that is over 80%. Wouldn't most people say that punishing criminals is an essential function of _any_ government, not having anything to do with democracy in particular? On the other hand, many dislike the very notion of punishment. In the US, this waxes and wanes; does the country really become more democratic during the "tough on crime" phases of the cycle? The index seems to say so!
All good points. As discussed in that doc it is very tough to define and measure democracy, and as with many fields of knowledge there comes a point at which the laymen have to trust the experts.
Regarding item 10, the UK has FPTP but political parties other than the biggest two are nevertheless able to wield significant political power. Even if that weren't the case I wouldn't call it a tautology. Rather I'd say that the tendency of FPTP to lead to a two-party systems is one of its democratic flaws.
Regarding item 40, yes: most people would say that preventing crime is an essential function of government, but many countries value rehabilitation over punishment. You're correct though that there's some ambiguity about the meaning of "punishment". Without delving into the World Values Survey itself it's hard to say much more.
If UK has FPTP, why isn't it a two-party system? I thought Duverger's Law means that its third party would die out to be more like the Green or Libertarian party in the US.
I can't put my finger on it but there's something about US culture that leads to sharp polarisation in social, racial, religious and political spheres.
That first line could mean several different things. Are you claiming that the excessive power of fringe elements in the EU is why the UK decided to leave?
From a global perspective, the UK and US are currently undergoing existential crises - arguably due to people feeling politically underrepresented - whilst many countries with a strong PR such as Finland or Switzerland seem to be functioning better.
I've been on the board of three community tech orgs (user group, hacker space and coop).
Each was pathologically mismanaged to the point of embezzlement (literally) using consensus rules. I managed to force Roberts rules to be adopted in two of them.
The end result was that the user group that didn't adopt them stagnated and no new members have stayed for longer than three months in the last 5 years. The other two grew to the point where they were self sustaining. The coop managed to negotiate a 50 year lease on a property from the city council at $1 a year, the hacker space ended up expelling the whole board for mismanagement and reduced the monthly fees to a quarter of what they were because we were drowning in cash.
Consensus is a way to run therapy groups, if you want to get anything done peoples feelings only get in the way.
Robert's Rules of Order is an incredibly large number of rules that no one ever fully reads--I seriously ended up buying some physical copies of the book to bring to meetings to demonstrate to people "you didn't read this (and neither did I), would you like we both go home and read it and come back, or can realize we just stop pretending we are following these rules in the first place?"--that are largely designed for a use case of running a very very large meeting (so large that you would rather do anything than separately ask everyone for their opinion or even their vote on a matter... the "voice vote" mechanisms are thereby designed to try to shortcut real votes).
I thereby will suggest people take a look at Rosenberg's Rules of Order--which its author, Judge Dave Rosenberg, subtitles "Simple Rules of Parliamentary Procedure for the 21st Century"--which is what many smaller governments in California have been standardizing on using (and so if nothing else, maybe you now need to know both, as these are actively being used ;P).
Robert's Rules knows that everyone doesn't read all of it - this is why the chair is given the responsibility of helping members of an assembly formulate their motions when they aren't sure how to do so. There's even a specific motion, "parliamentary inquiry", for help understanding the rules.
In practice this means that, since no one (including the chair) has read the rules, people go asking the lawyer (who might remember the rules) or they call for a staff member who has (hopefully, but probably doesn't) a copy of the book to sit around and try to dig through and find something related to figure out the answer to whatever esoteric argument people are having about what motion can currently be considered and why. Meanwhile, nothing is getting done, the board is getting bored, and the audience/public has no clue what is going on but has become increasingly confident that government isn't something they have any hope of understanding or influencing, and maybe shouldn't even exist :(.
> practice this means that, since no one (including the chair) has read the rules,
That's usually not the case, esoteric questions of the rules usually arise because parties have read the rules and at least one of them thinks they have found a clever exploit, and at least one disagrees.
> people go asking the lawyer
The parliamentarian, who may or may not be a lawyer (and when they are, very often so are a lot of the members, and anyhow, while there is a similarity to the roles, they aren't, at least relevant to the task at hand, being employed to practice law per se, except to the extent that the body is one whose rules have legal force.)
Most esoteric arguments I have seen end up being where both parties think they know something about the rules but have different, non-overlapping areas of the rules they remember (and even then, only vaguely).
Most of the time people stick to some subset of the rules they have seen used before, but every now and then they get annoyed when someone else seems to be taking some liberty and they challenge it; at best this is because they have some vague memory of that being wrong, but more often it is because it feels like it should be wrong.
(My favorite example of this was one time I saw an eight hour long meeting get ground to a halt as the chair of a student government asked the supporting staff member to "do me (her) a solid" and search their old minutes to see what they did the last time they had this same argument, as they had all determined later that whatever they had done was wrong.)
On the "parliamentarian"... if you even have a "parliamentarian" (omg lol) you probably are in the category of group where Robert's Rules of Order might have even been designed. Most governments (not by area serves but by count; these are all the small districts and cities) are at most five elected or appointed board members, and they have access to a city/general manager and maybe (if they can afford the luxury), a lawyer. (My government decided we can afford access to a lawyer every other meeting. I have seen many governments that never have lawyers available during meetings.) The idea that any of the governments I am a part of would have access to a "parliamentarian" feels just absurd to me... :(.
("Source": I am an elected government official who was further elected by all of the local special districts to serve on the meta-government that creates, modifies, and destroys other governments; and I am further the kind of person who then--with glee--attended both the big annual conferences for my kind of government as well as of all of the meta-governments to talk about all of the different kinds of government ;P. I work with a lot of governments, and I'm seeing everyone migrating to Rosenberg's Rules of Order.)
> Most esoteric arguments I have seen end up being where both parties think they know something about the rules but have different, non-overlapping areas of the rules they remember (and even then, only vaguely).
In a well-run meeting, this sort of dispute should be dealt with by the chair simply taking a decision— The chair’s rule is final, unless overturned by an immediate vote of appeal.
Everything else is about making things go smoothly by setting everyone’s expectations about what the chair’s rulings will be.
> Everything else is about making things go smoothly by setting everyone’s expectations about what the chair’s rulings will be.
Exactly this.
And to add on: if the members (in aggregate) do not trust the chair, then it really doesn't matter what rules you use (or don't use)—you're going to have a bad time.
For small or less formal organizations, trust in the chair may be all that you need. For others, condensing those expectations into a set of written rules helps maintain organizational transparency and coherency.
The 1893 version that is in public domain (and linked here above) of RRO is actually surprisingly short and readable. The version that has become such a big tome after all these years since, that is still held in copyright by Robert's heirs, hasn't diverged much and while it answers/fixes some edge cases and adds some procedures that may be of use to modern meetings, you can run meetings pretty well today with 1893 version and have everyone read it.
> (so large that you would rather do anything than separately ask everyone for their opinion or even their vote on a matter... the "voice vote" mechanisms are thereby designed to try to shortcut real votes)
My brief time as a parliamentarian for college meetings suggested the opposite is true: voice votes (yea/nay) on the question are a great shortcut for small meetings when you can trust volume is count rather than emotion (and only need to ask "all those in favor? [aye]" and "all those opposed? [nay]"), but gets unwieldy fast in larger meetings where you either have to the ask the question individually to each member in a voice count one at a time or switch to a hand or ballot count.
RRO, from my reading, was built to cover the gamut of small meetings and large meetings, it wasn't focused on one or the other, and most procedures (especially in later versions) are as much about splitting large meetings into smaller sub-meetings as anything else because smaller meetings will always be easier to manage and faster to run.
> Robert's Rules of Order is an incredibly large number of rules that no one ever fully reads...
Some people have come up with variations as well:
“The [Grateful] Dead still meet about once a month in a boardroom to discuss their projects. Initially, the meetings were free-for-alls, Garcia says, but somebody dug up a copy of ‘Robert’s Rules of Order,’ and they riffed on it until they had devised their own warped version of parliamentary procedure.”
Bill Barich, “Still Truckin’,” The New Yorker, October 4, 1993, p. 98.
An organisation will also have a Rules of Debate and Standing orders which are used - with Roberts or Citrine being used when the standing orders /rules of debate are silent.
Not so sure these are actually very useful a quick read finds this gem
"There can be up to three motions on the floor at the same time"
It seems unlikely that Calvinball is a nomic. Instead Calvinball appears to be more like Mornington Crescent, in that players are all participating in creating a mutually satisfying fiction, Calvinball's fiction looks like a complicated ballgame, Mornington Crescent more cerebral but since in both cases there aren't actually any set rules the game is not about changing the rules. Rosalyn eventually figures out how to play Calvinball well just as players can get "good" at Mornington Crescent with experience.
I'm not sure what the Indian government uses but I suspect Robert's Rules are state of the art.
Similar to First Past the Post voting where there are probably some easy wins tweaks that could be made based on the current academic literature - but the sheer number of popular "sound good, don't work" ideas floating around make change highly risky because it will have to run the political process and still be a good idea when it makes it through. In practice everyone wants their pet topic to be able to bypass normal procedure.