In Australia we consider ourselves probably over-governed.
There are separate elections for Federal, State and municipal jurisdictions. They are held at different times and different cycles.
The first two have two pieces of paper, sometime quite large. The third is just one.
Sometimes there might be a plebescite.
We elect the Federal lower house representative, they elect the Prime Minister.
We elect the State lower house representative, they elect the Premier.
We elect the local councillors, they elect the Mayor.
Both upper houses are proportional representation systems.
But having elected three tiers of government representatives we expect them to appoint and have responsible oversight of the functionaries.
We don’t consider school boards, hospital/medical area boards or judges to be political appointments nor the directors of government agencies and/or quangos who are typically appointed/dismissed as the prerogative of the responsible minister.
We had that in my (non-MN) county a few years back, with a different pair of Andersons, both male. One, a Dem, was running for county clerk; the other, a Republican, was running for sheriff.
The sheriff won easily. The county clerk candidate won an unexpected and very tight victory. The local paper did an article and talked to a few people who knew they wanted to vote for somebody named Anderson (the one running for sheriff) but couldn’t remember what office, what party, and what the first name was. So they voted for both Andersons, just to be sure.
Gives you lots of confidence in democracy.
As for the OP–it certainly has been known for many years that ballot position makes a difference. When I started working in political campaigns forty-gulp years ago that was already conventional wisdom. I guess I’m a bit surprised that this article was such big news?
“American republic model is a podium finish for being the US’s most dangerous export”
It would be difficult to argue that the American model hasn’t been very successful domestically, but when exported it has proved disastrous with it’s inherent tendency to authoritarism, resistance to leadership change and susceptibility to gridlock. The American experience may indeed be the only case it has worked, but I’ll stand corrected.
In the aftermath of WWII the US imposed a constitutional model on Japan. Given how quickly it was drafted (less than a week) you would have thought a suitably rebadged US model would feature strongly in the draft. It didn’t.
Col. Kades who lead the constitutional drafting team was reported as saying that the United States Constitution was not given much attention and may not have even been discussed during the process.
There shouldn’t be efforts to discourage voting, any more than there should be efforts to discourage reading newspapers. We should just treat them the same. Vote if you’re interested, don’t if you’re not.
Because the US presidential-congressional system is the only one in the world that has lasted as a democratic system for much more than half a century. All other presidential-congressional systems have failed, falling to coups, civil wars, and various types of strongmen. The US is very much an outlier in terms of the longevity of its congressional-presidential system.
Juan Linz was the leading academic studying this issue. His major article on this point, "The Perils of Presidentialism"makes the point that parliamentary systems are more stable in the long run, and better able to deal with strong political divisions within a country.
Because parliamentary systems accept a failure to compromise as normal and provide mechanisms for stable policy and political changes even in the face of sustained domestic opposition, and because they rely on collective leadership rather than a unitary executive, they are better able to function even in times of sharp political division. They tend not to fail to the “strongman” which is so typical of presidential-congressional systems in crisis. (e.g. - every country in Central and South America at some point in the past two centuries, which all copied the US model rather than a parliamentary model.)
Linz attributed the success of the US system to a general consensus within US politics that bipartisanship is possible and desirable. He predicted that if that consensus failed, and the US developed more typical ideological parties that were unwilling to compromise, than the US democratic experiment could fail, just like all the other presidential-congressional systems. Not that that would ever happen in the US, right? :eek:
And that meme, “Gridlock is a feature, not a bug!” turns out to be not true. Yes, people will accept some degree of political gridlock. But when that gridlock continues for a lengthy period of time, and makes it difficult for anyone to use the government to make any major political, social policy or legal changes, then people start to look for alternatives. If the political system becomes so calcified that political changes are not possible, then people start to lose faith in the political system. They start to look for strongmen, and to denigrate their political opponents as useless, harmful to achieving their own political goals, and unpatriotic. But again, that won’t happen in the US, will it? :eek: :eek:
The consensus seemed to be Costa Rica, which has managed to be democratic since the mid-20th century. That’s not much of a track record for the presidential-congressional systems: the US has stayed democratic for over 200 years; the next runner up, of all the countries that have tried congressional-presidential systems, is just over a half a century. No other country which currently has a presidential-congressional system has been democratic for more than half a century.
What other civic functions would you apply this standard to? Jury duty? Taxes? National service in time of war?
A citizen’s interest is immaterial to his position. He lives in the society, derives benefits from it, is subject to its rules–he ought to be included in its basic citizen functions.