[0xDEAFBEAD]

>It turns out that when elections are fought on the basis of identity (race, religion) etc corruption is actually considered a benefit! This is because the loyalists interpret this as "we" are winning and "they" are losing.

So how could one design a political system so this behavior doesn't emerge / is not incentivized?

[avaika]

In no way this is a good example of such a system, but I still find Bosnia and Herzegovina political system absolutely hilarious. After Dayton peace agreement the literally put ethnicity requirement for presidents to Constitution as a hard rule. One Bosnian, one Serb and one Croatian. And yes, the country is ran by 3 presidents at the same time. So there is no longer a competition whether the main guy in the country will be theirs or ours.

There were two guys: a Roma and a Jew in BiH who also wanted to take the president office. However according to Constitution they didn't have a chance. So they went to EU Human Rights Court to look for a justice. The court told the country it's kinda racist to have a rule like that and they should change it. This was like 15 years ago. Guess whether the rule has changed since then. (Sejdić and Finci v. Bosnia and Herzegovina for more details).

PS. If you find 3 presidents not fascinating enough, then google for High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina.

[roryirvine]

Northern Ireland has a similar system, with an executive built on a forced coalition.

The executive is led by a First Minister and Deputy First Minister (despite the difference in title, they have exactly equal powers), who are selected from the largest party representing each of the two main communities.

Major decisions require cross-community support - at least 50% of all those voting AND 50% of the representatives of each of the two communities, OR 60% of all those voting AND 40% of the representatives of each of the two communities.

On paper, it seems slightly absurd... but in practice, it's a reasonable way to deal with deeply divided societies.

[soulofmischief]

I don't know... Never go to sea with two chronometers; take one or three. Two guys with equal power is a recipe for inaction in critical moments.

[tdeck]

In practice Northern Ireland is subordinate to Westminster in most "critical moments".

[0xDEAFBEAD]

I like this term "forced coalition". How about a traditional parliamentary system where a supermajority is required to pass legislation?

I assume if you need 70% to pass legislation then you get a grand coalition pretty much every time?

I guess it could incentivize brinkmanship among coalition partners though, since the leader of the coalition has less leverage if a small party threatens to quit?

[0xDEAFBEAD]

Interesting.

When I put my programmer hat on, there's something inelegant about this approach, because it involves hardcoding the words "Bosnian", "Serb", and "Croatian" into the constitution.

It seems like with a sufficiently clever electoral rule, you could generate a small "national steering committee" with an odd number of members, where each major faction is guaranteed representation. But that also sounds a lot like a parliament where there's one party for each ethnic group, and then we're back where we started?

What happens when the 3 presidents disagree? Maybe the trick is to incentivize consensus-driven decisionmaking?

[avaika]

>What happens when the 3 presidents disagree? Maybe the trick is to incentivize consensus-driven decisionmaking?

That's where High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina comes into play. This is external guy appointed by the EU (US also was participating in the appointment in the beginning, but they withdrew themselves from the process quite a few years ago). This guy has the power to fire any (like ANY) politician in the country. And the permission to overrule or enforce any law.

This guy is probably controlled by EU and can't turn into dictatorship mode, but you never know. At the very least two times presidents were fired due to political disagreement.

EU considered to discontinue this practice, but local people encouraged EU to leave things as is. Cause nobody trusts politicians and the systems is still pretty corrupt.

Anyway, whatever decision presidents have to make, all 3 must agree. That's why a lot of controversial topics are hanging for eternity (e.g. recognition of Kosovo).

When country was trying to choose a national flags, all the parts couldn't find the agreement for a long time. That's why High Representative just approved his own version nobody really liked. So today if you visit the country, you will find Serbian flag in the parts where Serbs live and Croatian flags in the part with Croats. Actual country flag normally is in the parts where majority is Bosnian.

[sterlind]

having three is interesting because it gives a way to break ties. how do they handle candidates with mixed ethnicity, though? or the Serbians and Croatians converging, while the Bosnians move farther apart from both?

[intended]

This has not emerged due to the political system, this has emerged due to the issues in the information economy.

The core issue is that news cannot compete with entertainment, and the firms that appeared after Murdoch on the right, insulate themselves and their politicians from the need to be accurate.

The cycle is essentially:

1) Fringe theory appears on the internet

2) Fringe theory is picked up by Notable Person (Someone who is able to come on Prime time Television)

3) Notable comes onto media network and repeats fringe theory

4) Reporting can now cover Fringe Theory as main stream

This economy of ideas shares little with the processes on the center and the left. People who come up with counter arguments don’t end up getting amplified.

This has demolished the exchange and debate of Ideas, and it has worked in all liberal democracies. Implacable Partisanship has been rewarded.

[Atreiden]

Get rid of FPTP and the Electoral College that enables a two-party stranglehold. If a vote for a third party wasn't a wasted vote, we could see nuanced parties and politicians emerge that don't have to tow a party line.

[0xDEAFBEAD]

Strengthening third parties can also increase extremism though. Consider parties such as Reform in the UK or AfD in Germany.

I think what you want is electoral rules which tend to select for consensus-makers. Approval voting would be an example.

[solumunus]

FPTP is what makes Reform so dangerous though. They have a real chance of having a lot of power. In a proportional representation system where parties have to share power in coalitions these extreme parties actually have to be involved in government, at which point they’re exposed as completely incompetent. See the Netherlands right now for example. I would rather have these extreme positions represented, because they will be represented poorly. It takes wind out of the populist sails, where they can no longer simply promise everything until they’re in power and completely destroy the country.

[0xDEAFBEAD]

I think FPTP ends up working out a lot different in the parliamentary context. The US only has 2 parties in Congress, despite FPTP.

In terms of strength of 3rd parties, I'd say they are generally quite weak in the US system, somewhat stronger in a proportional representation parliamentary system, and potentially overpowered in a FPTP parliament like in the UK.

Historically I believe the 2-party system in the US was pretty good at tamping down on extremism, but recently the 2 major parties have acquired too many extremists.

[zimpenfish]

> the 2 major parties have acquired too many extremists.

You're blaming both parties for where the US is now?

[0xDEAFBEAD]

Yep, see here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44216278

[solumunus]

MAGA is basically a reaction to the far left.

[secos]

Ranked Choice Voting goes a long way to solving this as well.

[t_mann]

Does it? Could you explain which mechanism you suggest using? Because the main results from social choice theory about ranked choice voting that come to mind seem to be all about impossibility of fair elections (eg Arrow) or even paradoxical situations such as cyclic preferences (eg Condorcet).

[pornel]

These kinds of perfectionism complaints keep the status quo of FPTP, which is the worst of them all.

[cardiffspaceman]

Since none of the proposed replacements can be perfect according to the theory, let’s just stick with the worst one.

Big fat /s

[trueismywork]

You need to educate the people and convince them on how it works. Easily a 30 year project in places like India.

[FireBeyond]

Easily a 30 year project in the US, too.

[0xDEAFBEAD]

Yep. Sadly, Ranked Choice is not doing too well at the ballot in the US.

https://ballotpedia.org/Results_for_ranked-choice_voting_(RC...

[unicornporn]

How about not creating a precarious underclass with lack of (higher) education that is ready to vote for whatever solution promising to take down the system that made them so desperate for radical change?

[0xDEAFBEAD]

If the functioning of your nation's political system depends on the functioning of your nation's education system or your nation's economy, you've created a circular dependency. The education system and the economy are themselves downstream of the political system. Dysfunction in one tends to create dysfunction in the others. See https://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2004/Caplanidea.htm...

A good political system is one which continues to work well even when education and the economy suck, so societal self-repair is possible. Ideally it would actually start working better when things suck, so society becomes antifragile.

"More college diplomas" is not a great solution when existing graduates are already working at Starbucks. This is the "elite overproduction" which creates instability.

Americans already have a relatively high standard of living by global standards, e.g. see median income adjusted for cost of living: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income?tab=t...

Yet Americans are still dissatisfied. Part of the problem is that our political system incentivizes candidates and media outlets to stir up dissatisfaction so they can exploit it. There's also envy / the hedonic treadmill.

[CamperBob2]

I don't really buy the education argument. How do you "educate" somebody who lived through the first Trump administration and voted for more of the same? Let's get specific: what exactly did they miss in school that would have driven them towards a different decision?

At some point it's necessary to confront the uncomfortable truth: stupid people are easy for smart, ill-intentioned people to herd, which gives the latter a leg up in any democratic election.

This bug in democracy was there in the beginning. But it's only now, 2500 years later, that it can be exploited effectively enough to invalidate the whole concept.

[tshaddox]

> At some point it's necessary to confront the uncomfortable truth

Sometimes the truth is even more uncomfortable than “lots of people are stupid.” A much more insidious scenario is when there’s two groups with no major differences in education or access to facts, but one has a cultural which is actively and explicitly hostile to truth. In such scenarios, ever-escalating hostilities between the two groups is inevitable.

[0xDEAFBEAD]

>This bug in democracy was there in the beginning. But it's only now, 2500 years later, that it can be exploited effectively enough to invalidate the whole concept.

Not sure where the 2500 number came from. The US is about 250 years old, and the founders were extremely wary of democracy based on its history prior to the US. The US constitution was designed to mitigate issues with democracy, e.g. that is the purpose of "checks and balances". By democracy standards, the US has been very successful; the average constitution only lasts 17 years: https://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/lifespan-written-constitut...

This article estimates that the US is the #2 longest-lasting republic after the Roman Republic: https://www.broadstreet.blog/p/the-democratic-institutions-o...

Nonetheless, you would think that the "technology" for writing constitutions would've evolved more in the past 250 years. And in fact, in the Federalist Papers, it is predicted that political technology will evolve, just like any other field of technology. Yet results there have been quite disappointing, if you ask me. There aren't that many interesting and innovative ideas in this area. Most people, even programmers, tend to get lost in the object level us-vs-them conflict instead of going meta with their creative algorithmic brain.

[0xDEAFBEAD]

My comment is too old to edit, but I would like to issue a correction. I should not have written "This article estimates that the US is the #2 longest-lasting republic after the Roman Republic", since the caption for the figure in the article states something different ("Duration of Long-Lived Democracies", i.e. the word "democracy" is used rather than "republic", and also there wasn't a claim to "longest-lived")

Never trust internet comments!

[alimw]

> Not sure where the 2500 number came from.

Athens probably? From what I remember of school, this was the world's first democracy. (I've heard that Americans are taught something else!)

[0xDEAFBEAD]

I didn't get the impression that Athenian democracy was particularly successful. So it seemed weird to say that the flaws in democracy are only now becoming apparent.

In fact, I understand that CamperBob2's critique of democracy is quite similar to that of Socrates. So I'm puzzled by the claim that it's "only now" that the critique is being proven correct, given that US democracy is notably more stable and long-lived than Athenian democracy.

In general, I think times of turmoil are always much more salient when you yourself are living through them. We lack the historical perspective to understand how bad turmoil has been in the past.

[CamperBob2]

The flaws in democracy were always apparent, and they've always been exploited by parties willing to do the dirty work. But they couldn't be exploited consistently and decisively. Now they can be.

Think of it this way: you can't reach people who don't read much by starting a newspaper, but you can reach them with Fox News and Twitter. Mix in a bit of that old-time religion -- Billy Graham with a side of sauce Bernays -- and the left-hand side of the bell curve is yours to do with as you please.

[ringeryless]

umm Switzerland disagrees with the assessment of the USA being the oldest democratic republic. If we are only speaking of republic, Portugal has been one since the 12th century, albeit there's been 10 or 11 iterations on the constitution, including Salazars so-called New State.

[0xDEAFBEAD]

Correction here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44223617

[Propelloni]

They missed that liberty and freedom is not a god-given right, but hard-earned privilege. They missed that liberty is not a personal property but a shared practice of pluralism. They missed that liberty is not absolute, but requires compromise and limitations so that we all can be free.

To be fair, those are not things that are taught in school. If they come up at all it is in some historical context, a battle someone else fought--and won. There is no mention that maintaining a liberal democracy requires effort and vigilance. Modern, ie. post-WW2, "fighting democracies" have built-in safeguards to oppose internal enemies of democracy, but if they are effective remains to be seen. The USA mostly does not even have such mechanisms and it shows.

[0xDEAFBEAD]

>Modern, ie. post-WW2, "fighting democracies" have built-in safeguards to oppose internal enemies of democracy, but if they are effective remains to be seen.

Eh, "internal enemies of democracy" is way too vague. E.g. Trump supporters claim that "unelected bureaucrats" in the "deep state" are enemies of democracy. Anyone can call anyone an "enemy of democracy".

[Propelloni]

Those fighting democracies are very specific about what is and what is not irreconcilable. For example, in Germany you can murder the president--that's just homicide--but you cannot abolish the protection of minorities. That's a violation of the constitution. Germany's far-right party Alternative für Deutschland has been under suspicion of violating a few of those provisions for quite some time now.

The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (aka. Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz) completed a report a few weeks ago but is required by law to withhold it from the public due to due process. Of course it leaked, you can read the report here [1] (it's in German, obviously).

Now there is a discussion ongoing, if the Alternative für Deutschland has to been dissolved. That's a fighting democracy at work, following the rule of law.

[1] https://assets.cicero.de/2025-05/Geheimgutachten_Teil%20A.pd...

[0xDEAFBEAD]

I'm not sure Germany's approach is a good one, based on the historical record:

https://www.thefire.org/news/blogs/eternally-radical-idea/wo...