Dimensions of Government
Dimensions of Government
The cultures of the world have come up with countless exotic and intricate forms of government, using just as many different goals and mechanisms to keep power. I want to propose a set of metrics by which we can evaluate a particular government and make predictions about it.
One potential dimension of government is the ideals the ruling class are supposed to live up to. For example, a theocracy is a government where religious leaders are in control. The idea is that those that have studied the moral and existential questions of theology are most likely to make the best decisions for the people. Technocracy and Plutocracy are similar, where those that know most about science and technology or those who have been most successful in gaining wealth are the most likely to make the best decisions for the people. These could all be seen as subsets of Meritocracy, where each is just choosing a different definition for who is best to rule. Even the “divine right” of European kings and the Apotheocracy of the Egyptians, where the rulers were considered gods, are forms of Meritocracy. Because, who would know better how to rule than a god?
But all of these descriptions aren’t really forms of government at all. They’re just stories. Ideals. Values. They’re what people look for in a ruler, and thus affect how a ruler acts – in the Broadway sense of the word.
A theocratic ruler will cite holy texts. A technocratic ruler will spin scientific sounding stories and play pseudo-statistical games. A plutocratic ruler will talk about how they and others have made money in the past (picture Donald Trump if he were king). These are just themes, not structures of government. Even in a meritocracy where candidates are chosen based on proven performance, either the people as a whole do the choosing, or a subset of the people do the choosing. The merit is in the eyes of the beholder. And as I’ll mention next post, the beholder is almost always an oligarchy. So I’ll discard these themes as useless to really understanding government and how we should change it.
As a reminder from a previous post, I’ve suggested that a government’s legal structure has six important attributes:
Number of leaders – Autocracy vs Direct Democracy
Amount of representation – Monarchy vs Republic
Separation of powers – Single Branch vs Multiple Branches
Limitation of powers – Totalitarian vs Libertarian
Level of agreement – Majority vs Unanimity
Coupling of sub-governments – Unitary vs Federal
I’ll talk about each one, starting with…
Number of Leaders: Stability
One significant dimension of government is the spectrum from autocracy (rule by one) to omnigarchy (rule by all). The number of people empowered to make direct governmental decisions is a simple and important dimension that affects how stable a government’s policies are over time.
Throughout history, the vast majority of governments have been oligarchies, with a strong bent toward autocracy. Single leaders have imposed their rule whether through popular support, military might, or successful institutional navigation. Most governments have officially placed ultimate power in a single leader – a king, a dictator, an enlightened despot, or some other synonym. Only in the past few centuries have the world’s people been widely successful in spreading out formal power to more than one person.
In some governments, whatever the king says goes. In others, a king and a parliament share powers. In still others, whole populations have some governmental powers. Theoretically, sole power could be vested in a vote of an entire nation.
In North Korea, Kim Jong Un rules as an absolute dictator – his word is law. In England, the parliament has almost total control within few constitutional limits. In Switzerland, public referendums allow people to enact laws somewhat directly and the a popular vote is required in addition to a canton vote in order to change the constitution.
In autocratic governments, a change in leader can mean a complete change in direction. It can also mean a higher likelihood of an attempted coup. Both these things increase the instability of a government’s policies, leading to a more volatile legal environment where laws change more often and when they do, they do so more drastically.
Conversely, the more that control and power is split up within a government, generally the more stable the legal environment.
Amount of Representation: Who matters?
In a monarchy, there is no representation. People have no say in who their leader is. By contrast, in a republic with universal suffrage all people have some say in who their leaders are. The amount of representation affects who’s interests will be promoted, on average, when government action is taken.
This makes the amount of representation one of the most important dimensions of government, and also the most nuanced. It may be easy to have elections in which everyone can nominally participate, but all influences of government should be examined when determining fairness in representation. If participation is made difficult for some, as Jim Crow laws did in the US or as voter registration laws are currently doing in the US, the amount of representation diminishes. Same if there are mechanisms by which politicians can be persuaded against their natural character, such as happens in widespread bribery or in money-based political campaigns primarily driven by large donors. Same if the government delegates power to a private organization, or if the nominees for election are chosen or heavily influenced by a small subset of the voting population.
An important metric in this dimension is the amount of influence the current leaders have in choosing the next leaders. Ideally, the current leaders have no influence over the next set of leaders, but no government meets this ideal. An example is the huge incumbent advantage where incumbents are 4 times as likely to win elections than other hopefuls in the US.
No leader rises to power on their own, and so no matter if a government is an absolute monarchy or a constitutional republic, any leader comes to power on the shoulders of their supporters. The social atmosphere surrounding a government’s official powers strongly influences how those powers are used, and who gets to use them. There are many cases of kings being forced to take unfavorable legal action because of social and political pressures, for example when King John of England was forced to sign the Magna Carta. And there as many cases of democracies hijacked by the political pressures of a dictator, for example, when Vladamir Putin has his political opponents like Boris Nemtsov conspicuously shot to death in Russia’s capital city, or when Hugo Chavez recently rigged the elections of Venezuela.
These nuances mean that the amount of representation a government gives its people is not always as obvious as it may seem. But regardless of the nuances, the more evenly a government represents its people, the more evenly people’s interests will be protected and promoted, and therefore the fairer the government will be on average.
The nuances of representation are well captured in a concept known as selectorate theory, which posits that the only two important components of representation are the sizes of the real selectorate (regardless of the size of the nominal selectorate) and the winning coalition. The larger the winning coalition, the better representation a country (or organization) has.
CPG Grey created a fantastic video that eloquently explains selectorate theory – how the difference between dictatorships and democracies is primarily a difference in representation. Those represented (the real selectorate) are called “keys to power” in the video, and it convincingly demonstrates how only those that can help a leader rise to power and keep that power will have any meaningful representation. In a dictatorship, it may only be a handful of people while in a democracy it may be voting blocks containing thousands or millions of people.
Separation of Powers: Consistent application
Going back to more clear-cut dimensions of government, another dimension is separation of powers. The amount of power-separation a government is required to have affects how consistent a government’s policies are applied across various individual cases.
Some governments consist of a single body that is legislator, judge, jury, and executor. Others have many distinct groups of officials that have different and often conflicting legal abilities: a “balance” of powers. For example in the US, there are three clearly separated branches: congress, the court system, and the president. Australia and Italy only have two major branches: parliament (which is executive+legislative) and judicial. In the UK, the supreme court was only enacted in 2005 and isn’t even clearly separated from parliament.
The idea of separation of powers is to reduce conflicts of interest and inherently increase the number of independent groups who need to agree before an action can be taken. One department head can’t simply persecute someone they don’t like – they have to get other departments to agree. This greatly improves the consistency of rule-of-law.
Contrary to what many people seem to think, separation of powers doesn’t slow down the government. It only increases the level of agreement needed for government to take action. If the US congress and president agree on something, change can literally happen within 10 days. And the judicial branch can’t slow anything down since they only come into play after the fact.
Separation of powers is, instead, a filter where bad actions by one branch can be blocked by another branch. This is an incredibly practical stabilizing force that prevents the head of one branch from unjustly ignoring the rule-of-law. This makes the application of government policy more even. No would-be tyrant can unilaterally ignore laws and persecute their enemies without likely being challenged by another branch.
Limitation of Powers: Consistent policy
Another extremely important dimension is limitation of powers. While this is related to separation of powers, its different in that it limits the powers of all sections of government. How limited a government is affects what actions that government will take and also how consistent general policy is.
A constitutional bill of rights, for example, explicitly calls out what the government can’t do. Some governments are entirely unlimited in the legal sense. King Louis XIV of France during the 1700s is an iconic example of an absolute monarch who could do anything he wanted. England’s constitutional monarchy in the late 1600 was a nudge toward limited government, and the United States constitution describes one of the most limited governments in history, though without a doubt, many of the limitations it describes have been reinterpreted to be far less limiting.
If a government is more limited, that government’s policy will be more consistent, since, when a leader changes, there are fewer types of actions they can switch to.
Level of Agreement: Minority protection
The level of agreement needed to take government actions has implications for minority interests. The level of needed agreement affects both how likely minority interests are to be protected from government action, and consequently, the amount of action that will be taken.
Votes that only need 50% (a simple majority) are common around the world. Majority votes are usually the smallest level of agreement usually needed to take significant action. Sub-majority votes exist but are almost always used for submitting ideas, nominations, or other procedural things (eg the number of signatures needed to be put on the ballot in an election). Super-majority votes are a higher level of agreement, and unanimous votes are the highest.
The bicameral congress is another way that a country might require a higher level of agreement to enact laws. Even if both houses of a congress are filled from the same proportions of the same populations, it add some additional agreement. In the US federal congress, even more agreement is needed because one house represents people by population and the other represents states equally, regardless of population.
Another aspect of this is the distinction between the level of agreement needed for changing the constitution vs normal law. A lower level of agreement needed for constitutional change means that the structures of the government will change faster, and may tend toward removing protections for freedoms supported by a (potentially large) minority.
If a government requires more agreement to take actions, smaller minorities will be more able to prevent government involvement more often (tho they don’t have any additional ability to cause government involvement) and the less government action that will be taken.
Coupling of Sub-Governments: Uniformity
The last dimension is coupling: how much independent authority the governments-within-governments have within their larger parent government. All collectives above a certain size have some kind of hierarchical structure, with governments within governments, because otherwise government wouldn’t scale. How coupled a government is internally affects how uniform government policies will be across that jurisdiction.
In some modern dictatorships, its provinces and regions are often overruled by the dictator – in a disagreement, a province would not be able to get its way. In contrast, states in a federal government like the United States have quite a bit of autonomy – there are a host of things the federal government can’t legally force a state to do. This creates an environment that prompted Louis Brandeis to describe states as the “laboratories of democracy” where experimental laws could be tested without affecting the entire nation.
In the past, coupling has been weak because even the strongest states were relatively weak by modern standards for a whole host of reasons including speed of communication and ease of information collecting and monitoring. In medieval times, a shire far from the capital could expect less attention paid to them by the crown, for better or worse, and thus may simply not have as much pressure to enforce the crown’s statutes. In modern times, it makes a bit more difference.
Because a more loosely coupled government will have greater ability to enact differing laws, its governed people can learn and improve faster in the long run than a people with a strongly coupled government. In strongly coupled scenarios, short term changes can sometimes be made quickly, but less is learned collectively and change is then short-lived, making for less change in the long run, and certainly less improvement.
Sum of its Parts
So there you have it: the six dimensions of government. The more leaders a government has, the more stable the government’s policies over time. The broader the representation, the fairer government action is. The more powers are separated, the more consistently applied government action is. The more limited the government, the less actions it will take. The more agreement that’s needed for action, the more likely minorities can prevent action. And finally the more coupled the government, the more uniform are its laws geographically and the more it “learns” over time.
Themes like theocracy are entirely unimportant, as they’re simply a method of communication that serves to justify rule but don’t change the nature of the government.
My next post will discuss governments throughout history using these attributes, with a focus on governments that have performed the best, and will mention why most governments throughout history have kept humanity in the gutter.