Landemore: Response to Brennan

Despite the avalanche of facts that Jason Brennan brings against the average voter and his skepticism of deliberation among ordinary citizens, the resulting attack on democracy turns out to be surprisingly limited. In the end, Brennan concedes, democracy is still the best regime around, no matter how flawed, and we have a duty to fix it. He also concedes that deliberation among randomly selected citizens is going to be part of the solution. Landemore argues that Brennan’s solution, however—a combination of randomly selected mini-publics designing questionnaires and a weighted vote system based on these questionnaires—is still too elitist, empirically inattentive to existing experiments in deliberative democracy, and unlikely to work.

The Elephant in the Voting Booth?

In 2005, the single nontransferable vote system for legislative elections in Taiwan was replaced by a mixed-member majoritarian system, with an accompanying reduction in available district seats. In theory, by increasing the threshold of exclusion and placing the power of nomination in the hands of political parties, this reform should reduce vote-buying and local factionalism. We collected data on legislative nominees charged with vote-buying and on the local factional ties of candidates. Our results suggest that the reforms did reduce these problems. First, comparing the proportion of candidates charged with vote-buying before and after the reform shows a decrease in the second and third post-reform elections. Second, factional status predicts a candidate’s likelihood of running in consecutive elections before the reform but not after. Differences between factional and nonfactional candidates ceased to be significant after the reform, revealing the decreasing relevance of factions.

Minimalinvasiv oder wirksam? Debattenbeitrag zur Novellierung des Bundeswahlrechts vom Oktober 2020

Despite the 2020 reform of Germany’s national parliament voting law, the debate about a robust voting system has not ended . Träger and Jacobs have convincingly shown that Naun­dorf’s suggestion to introduce a parallel voting system creates more problems than it solves, and thus more far-reaching approaches have to be considered . One way to stop the Bunde­stag from growing is to reject the two vote-system . Comparable to the system of Thuringia’s local elections, with open lists and three votes per voter, both the standard size of the Bun­destag can be safely adhered to and at the same time a personalized proportional represen­tation can be maintained . Among other advantages, the voters would have greater influence on the personalized composition of the Bundestag . In particular, reservations on the part of the political parties could stand in the way of such a sustainable solution to the ongoing problems with the German electoral system .

Deteriorating Image of Political Parties in Malang, Indonesia

In the democratic countries, political party acts as mediator bridging communication between government and its citizens. The decline of political party taking place before and after the 2014 and 2019 presidential elections and legislative elections certainly affects the political parties in carrying out their roles. Conducted in Malang, objective of this study is to describe factors contributing declining image of political parties and its implications. The findings showed that image of political parties are deteriorating due to lack of trust towards the political parties and politicians in the parliament. The Decree on direct vote system for both presidential and regional head election and establishment of an open proportional system in legislative election also contribute to the deterioration. Implications of the phenomenon are negative attitude and declining interest towards political party.

A Confucian Hybrid Regime as an Answer to Democratic Problems

This chapter shows that there are some fundamental problems with contemporary democracy, especially the ideology beneath the one person, one vote system and the inevitable consequences of it. It identifies four problems of democracy: the suspicion of the elite, the neglect of the interests of nonvoters, the neglect of the interests of the minority, and the irrationality of voters. Then the chapter shows how the “internal” solutions are inadequate. Next, this chapter constructs a Confucian hybrid regime that is based on Mencius’s ideas discussed in Chapter 2, and shows how it can address the problems with democracy more adequately than present liberal democratic regimes. That is, the chapter reveals that the Mencian reservation of one person, one vote is actually a good thing about Confucianism.

President election in Indian constitutional arrangement-a perusal

Article 54 of the Indian constitution is related to the election of the President of India. The President is elected indirectly by the members of an electorol college consisting of the elected members of both houses of Parliament and the elected members of the State Assemblies. The method of his election is based on proportional representation by means of single transferable vote system.