EKIP– Expert Club for Economics and Politics A Different Opinion
After midnight parliamentary dramas, we woke up to yet another change in the electoral legislation, seemingly inspired and pushed through by the MRF. On the one hand, this is another lesson for small urban parties about how much power a small political force can wield without upsetting GERB, and on the other, it is an opportunity to talk about democracy again. Unfortunately, just like when we were dealing with compulsory voting, these are changes in the wrong direction [1].
De facto, the abolition of preferential voting returns power to party headquarters and turns elected representatives into even greater button-pushing automatons. It reduces the possibility that advocates of ideas outside the boring mainstream will have a chance at the elections at all and in practice significantly reduces representation in parliament. Even the vilified 15/15 phenomenon had a positive role – it confused the plans of party puppeteers, exposed the dirty laundry of the democratic system and shattered the rosy fantasies of “informed voters”.
Another sharp turn followed when Borisov's (for now) almost unerring political acumen suggested to him that open talk (including by Tsvetanov) about governing through the DPS could lead the entire election year in a very wrong direction for GERB. The sharp reaction from the noisy capital circles completed the picture of a typical Gerber turn. Things (again for now) are at a starting point.
Still, this opens up a small Overton window on the issue of democracy. At least let's brush our tongues.
Democracy is part of the modern political religion [2], so criticizing it is not welcomed with open arms (or minds), but it is important to point out that apart from thinkers like Buchanan, Schumpeter, Hoppe and who else who have criticized democracy, we all have first-hand experience with its problems. Illiterate voters decide on tax policy, welfare recipients vote on how big the welfare state should be, subsidized producers - how much subsidies should be, how much one should take from another. Politicians lie, the oligarchy controls the state, and bureaucrats interfere in everything. A familiar picture.
Even without these examples – how many of us read the party programs, have the preparation to understand them (quick test: what is a pro-generic drug policy?), have the time to monitor the work of parliament, administration, court and executive branch? I recently heard what a “market failure” is the information asymmetry in the purchase and sale of certain goods and services, I wonder what we will call the asymmetry between the voter and the work of the state.
Churchill's sentence that democracy is the worst form of government, with the exception of all the others that have been tried so far, usually serves to end the conversation with a shrug of the shoulders "there are no better ideas". And accordingly, all the manipulations, dishonesty and inconsistencies of the system remain in the background. We stop and think about how the representatives of the people in the National Assembly collect a rating of 8-9% approval from the people. An interesting decision-making system in which less than 1 in 10 is satisfied with... the decision made.
History, tradition, praxeology, and public choice theory come to our aid. With a few modest ideas for improvement. Arranged from the most popular and applicable to the most innovative and bold.
Active registration
Active registration is a procedure in which adult citizens eligible to vote are required to register to vote before election day. This gives them the opportunity to choose the government of the country. A model best known from US elections.
We would observe several important effects with an active registration system – weeding out the dead souls, limiting some of the uninterested voters, creating an additional expensive obstacle for electoral tourism and vote buying. General difficulty for people who are illiterate to vote. Additional costs for parties to work with their own voters.
The host of our podcast "60 Minutes of Freedom", Kaloyan Pravov, is the author of a monograph on the subject, which you can find at this link. It describes all the specific problems of active registration and how they are or can be avoided.
Decentralization
Perhaps the most important reform that would seriously improve the quality of democratic governance is strengthening local self-government and providing more rights and obligations to local authorities. Transferring sovereignty from the central government to the yellow cobblestones in all corners of the country.
The advantages are on two levels. First, we bring decision-making closer to the people. In reality, locals know much better what a municipality needs, far beyond the current power prerogatives of mayors. Second, we create the opportunity for competing models that can succeed or fail on a small scale and, accordingly, serve as examples for each other.
Even today we see different municipalities with their own approach to topics they can influence. The towns in the Balkans have a completely different attitude towards mining compared to the people of Trnava, who, with a local campaign and referendum, expelled heavy industry. In both places, they get what they want - why should anyone from Sofia interfere? What if we could see similar experiments with tax policy? Or regulatory innovations?
It is no coincidence that one of the most decentralized countries – Switzerland – also has the best-performing referendums. If one likes direct citizen consultations, they can only work well with serious self-government.
Censorship
Censorship still cannot emerge from the deep waters of exotic political ideas, but it still has quite a few admirers in Bulgaria. Unlike the West, which is increasingly crushed by public guilt, we have retained some level of basic skepticism. Although we should all be equal before the law, do we all have enough capacity to make certain types of decisions? And don't we enter into a conflict of interest when we vote for the state to give us something that belongs to someone else by force?
Moreover, the census is part of the history of all European republics (and even constitutional monarchies), including the Third Bulgarian State.
The most popular type of qualification in our country is the educational one, because there is still a worship of the false god of state higher education in enough Bulgarian minds. Although it would probably yield better results than the current broad suffrage, the educational qualification seems to me to be fundamentally dishonest, considering even just how many successful and useful people without a title deed there are among us and how many over-educated, but parasitically existing ones. Also, the European Commission is FOR even more higher education, which in itself should tell us that this is a bad idea.
A much more meaningful division would be along the conflict of interest axis. Namely, those who receive taxpayers' money cannot vote on how that money is spent. In other words, we vote only for the net creditors of the tax authorities, while the net beneficiaries either pass or let the state suck. The interesting thing about this system is that it will have a multi-layered class distribution - including among the richest members of Bulgarian society, we will have those without voting rights. [3]
Secession
We leave for last something truly innovative, which could represent the future of nation-states in the next millennium. Namely, the leading Liechtenstein experience. The small Alpine principality has a unique political system that includes an (almost) absolute monarch, a very direct democracy, and private contractors for state functions.
A constitution was approved by referendum in 2003, giving the prince the right to veto all decisions by the small parliament or by multiple plebiscites. However, there are three types of referendums that are beyond his power – whether to abolish the monarchy, whether to replace the prince, or whether a settlement should secede from the principality's government. [4]
This is about both true democracy and true choice. If your municipality thinks it can govern itself better or join another country with better governance... it can do it. In practice, introducing maximum (almost market) competition into governance and of course, taking on a very solid amount of responsibility.
Even without reaching the Liechtenstein level of innovation, we could make an interesting combination of purely Bulgarian decentralization and freedom of self-government. For example, in a model of stronger local government, why can't Lyulin give up the short-sighted governance of Sofia and join the growth-oriented model of Pernik? Through a local referendum?
A telegraphic glance through some of the international and historical experience gives us the idea that preferential voting is neither the icing on the cake nor the best invention since sliced bread. Either way, the positive note is that for now we are keeping it, while mandatory voting sits in the trash can of discarded ideas.
At the same time, if the results of the system today do not satisfy us at all, why don't we look for new ideas? [5]
[1] I am pleased to emphasize that with my colleagues from the Bulgarian Libertarian Society, we organized the #VoteWithoutHorses campaign, which protested in front of the parliament and even led a live sheep to illustrate voter behavior. Some information HERE
[2] The only second alternative that has any support in the Bulgarian mind is a one-party socialist dictatorship.
[3] The famous science fiction writer Robert Heinlein has a very curious system for obtaining citizenship in his novel "Star Rangers" - popularly adapted by Hollywood 20 years ago.
[4] https://www.fuerstenhaus.li/export/sites/inta_fuerstenhausli_v2/.content/lgt-internet-v2-documents/Die-wichtigsten-Verfassungsaenderungen-im-Ueberblick_zwei-Spalten_en.pdf
[5] The author remains rather agnostic on the subject of electronic voting, which will certainly not produce the results expected in some smart-beautiful circles. Still, it is likely that it, like machine voting, will have some positive effect on electoral fraud.
