What would happen to 'politicians' in this world?

Question

In the world I'm building the constitution mandates separation of powers i.e.

• Legislature
• Executive
• Judiciary
• Appointments Commission
• Audit/Watchdog
• Civil Service
• Law Enforcement

All positions, are filled either through:

• Sortition (i.e. it's a duty to serve, like jury duty in our world)
• Competitive examinations with an element of sortition (i.e. random selection from the most qualified candidates)

The Appointments Commission controls the appointments to the other functions of the government. Appointments to the Appointments Commission itself are controlled by a special committee of the Judicial Function. Both are monitored by the Audit/Watchdog function to prevent any attempt to game the system.

Positions in the following functions are relatively short term (a few years) filled through sortition:

• Legislature
• Executive
• Appointments Commission

Positions in the following functions are relatively long term (a decade, say)are filled through competitive examination with an element of sortition as described earlier:

• Judiciary
• Audit/Watchdog
• Civil Service
• Law Enforcement

The constitution bans political parties that attempt to coordinate across government functions, but not political campaigns or pressure groups outside government.

In this world, what would happen to the kind of people who in our world become politicians, i.e the kind of people who either have strong ideological views and/or seek power, either for its own sake or as a way of enriching themselves?

BTW:

• It's a separate world with a world government (i.e. it has no connection to Earth and there are no competing powers).
• The constitution has been in force for centuries and is 'working' (i.e the system hasn't failed or been overthrown, though it may have problems).
• Assume other elements of the world are 'earthlike', i.e. its a society of humans with similar basic concerns and range of behaviour as our own.

Answer 1

They take the right classes and win competitive selection.

The positions which are filled without competitive selection are going to decline in importance relative to the positions with competitive selection, simply because average people forced to serve will not be very assertive, even if they are nominally in charge. I expect that the Civil Service gets to provide policy papers and expert testimony to the Executive and Legislative, and that the top Judiciary gets to strike down amateur laws disregarding this expertise -- "you cannot legislate that $\pi = 3$, or that water flows uphill."

To get into the top Civil Service positions, one needs administrative skills like project management or law, possibly more than subject matter expertise. The head of public health cannot be a sanitation engineer, and an epidemiologist, and an ambulance dispatcher, etc., at the same time. He or she has to organize a bureaucracy including all those specialists, and while some health care knowledge is helpful, the key requirements are managerial.

• How do I submit a departmental budget to the appropriations subcommittee of the Legislative, keeping in mind that money is limited and that other departments will make their case, too?
• How do I write the job description so that Appointments will find me the right subordinate, considering that likely none of them has ever heard of the specialty I need?
• How do I write the regulation so that Judiciary does not strike it down?
• How can I tell if the project is on track, if I cannot possibly know the details myself?

So power seekers start out with business administration and then take specialized classes on public administration.

Answer 2

Short answer

People who seek power will become civil servants (UK) or public employees (US) or functionaries (continental Europe), because in the system described in the question it is the civil servants / public employees / functionaries who actually hold and wield power.

Long answer

The entire point of having political power is to do stuff. In order to do stuff, one needs two things: have some stuff one wants to do, and have the resources to do it.

• The first requirement weeds out the vast majority of people, who do not actually want to do anything more than eat, drink, and be merry.

• Resources can be either money as in capitalism, or actual resources (people, raw materials, and so on) as in socialism; but the basic idea is that he who controls the allocation of resources is the one who actually has power. Everybody else is his servant.

Historical experience shows that legislative assemblies selected by sortition are a joke. The vast majority of people do not want to be there, and if they are compelled to be there they won't be able to form a reasoned opinion, and will cast their votes based on the most frivolous and irrelevant factors, and they will invariably fall prey to skilled operators. Sortition is a terrible way of selecting a legislative assembly; see the dismal failure of the Athenian democracy as a cautionary example.

• Practical example:

  Suppose that a random citizen selected by sortition for a short-term stint in the legislative assembly has to vote on a piece of legislation containing the following language:

  The purpose of the processing shall be determined in that legal basis or, as regards the processing referred to in point (e) of paragraph 1, shall be necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest or in the exercise of official authority vested in the controller. That legal basis may contain specific provisions to adapt the application of rules of this Regulation, inter alia: the general conditions governing the lawfulness of processing by the controller; the types of data which are subject to the processing; the data subjects concerned; the entities to, and the purposes for which, the personal data may be disclosed; the purpose limitation; storage periods; and processing operations and processing procedures, including measures to ensure lawful and fair processing such as those for other specific processing situations as provided for in Chapter IX. The Union or the Member State law shall meet an objective of public interest and be proportionate to the legitimate aim pursued.

  (That's Article 6, paragraph 2, letter (b) of the Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, commonly known as the General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR. The thing has 99 articles of similar reading ease, plus of course an introduction with 173 numbered points.)

  So, confronted with reams of pages of impenetrable prose, how do actual elected Members of the European Parliament do it? They rely on the advice of their staff, and on the advice of their political party, which is given on the advice of the staff of the party. The actual MEP is not expected to understand the GDPR. They are expected to follow the very simplified presentations made by the staff and to memorize a short list of talking points.

  Whatever the constitution says, there will be political parties, or factions, or socio-political organizations, whatever name they will use, simply because modern is extremely complex. It has to be extremely complex, because modern life is extremely complex.

Point by point

• Legislature (short term):

  • Those people have very limited political power. Being compelled to serve for a short term, they will either hate it and make a hash of it, or else they will be puffed up by their unexpected importance and make a hash of it. The power will actually belong to their staff, who are presumably some sort of public employees / civil servants / functionaries. (Because with the constitution banning political parties the only practicable way to pay the staff is to have them on public payroll.)

• Executive (short term):

  • Those people have basically no political power. Selected for a short term by sortition, they have no networks on which to rely in order to get the legislature to approve the budget for whatever stuff they may want to do.

• Judiciary:

  The judiciary has no political power full stop. The only exception in the civilized world is the USA, where for some peculiar American reason the Supreme Court has usurped the functions of a Constitutional Court; this would be seen as anathema anywhere else.

• Appointments Commission (short term):

  These people live in constant fear of the Central Control Commission of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, sorry, the Audit Over Watchdog.

• Audit/Watchdog:

  Oh yes, these people do have political power. By controlling the Appointments Commission they can make or break the career of any politician. I expect them to become obscenely rich from the bribes extorted from wannabe civil servants / public employees / functionaries.

• Civil Service:

  These people are the real government. They serve long term, they have to pass an examination meaning they actually want to serve, they form networks, they advise the legislators and the members of the executive. See the most excellent documentary Yes Minister for how this works.

• Law Enforcement:

  Police have no political power full stop. I don't know of any reasonably stable political system where police have political power.

About those examinations

There was a famous long-lived political system where appointment to the Civil Service was based on state examinations: the Imperial Examinations of the successive Chinese empires starting with the Song Empire in the 10th century CE and enduring to the Qing Empire in the early 20th century.

The problem with State Examinations is that they select people similar to the examiners, leading to the ossification of the Civil Service and paralysis of the state. During the thousand years of competitive State Examinations:

• The state was overthrown three times by rebels, first by the Liao, then by the Jurchens who founded the Jin dynasty and later by the Manchu who founded the Qing dynasty.

• The state was outright conquered by the Mongols who founded the Yuan dynasty.

• And eventually the mighty Qing Empire with its 150,000,000 inhabitants was utterly defeated by an Anglo-French 20,000 men expeditionary force and forced to sign the Unequal Treaties with the European powers.

But there is hope

It it fails, it fails hard. But it may work. After all, the Roman Republic did pretty well for about 400 years with a very short term executive...

Answer 3

The audit/ watchdog decides who is in power

They have the ultimate power to decide if someone is gaming the system, which is pretty arbitrary and everyone is probably doing something imperfect. As such, every organization follows their beat, and your promotion is based on how nepotically you are connected to the audit/ watchdogs and thus able to get an advance viewing on how to pass the competency exams.

Anyone who disagrees politically is purged, and the government has whatever minimal level of competency is required to maintain the wealth and power of the rulers of this dictatorship, the audit/ watchdog group.

As such, politicians compete to please them via whatever criteria they decide is important.

Answer 4

They become lobbyists

You say in your question that the constitution does not ban "political campaigns or pressure groups outside government". Which can be boiled down to citizens having freedom of speech and the right to peaceably assemble and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances, a la first amendment of the US constitution (and most if not all democratic constitutions out there).

Now that they can have access to government position only if randomly selected, people who either have strong ideological views and/or seek power, either for its own sake or as a way of enriching themselves will build or join and try to gain control of pressure groups, which is the best way they can gather a bunch of people to trust them into influencing policies.

Think of a real world exemple like the american NRA or the Tea Party, Moms for Liberty, Greenpeace, Amnesty International, some churches... Those are gathering of people who contribute financially and take actions, be it protest or petition to further the policies they want to see put in practice. At their top are managers who are usually employed by the pressure group to organize its action, sometimes quite generously.

Under your system those groups would be quite limited in their ability to infiltrate the government (although, if 10% of the citizens are sympathizers of your group it means 10% of the institutions filled by sortition is actually made of people loyal to the group, so there is some leverage for action), but they could pursue activism by other means, including:

• Producing an argumentary in order to further their views and convince as much people as possible, including members of the government, that they are correct in their analysis and policy proposals. Leaders and charismatic orators (what you call politicians) would play a central role into this.

• Mass protests or rallies to show their number and impress the government and the other groups.

• Petitions, letters, phone calls addressed to selected officials to make sure they are exposed to the argumentary mentionned above.

• Offering expert opinions for the government bodies to consider. Real world assemblies by sortition, being composed of laypeople, usually rely on experts to hear what they have to say and feed their deliberations. Juries, for exemple, are provided with forensic experts or psychologists whose opinion they rely on. A pressure group leader would want to recruit or form credible experts who can present the government with facts and analysis furthering their own views. This recruiting work would again require charismatic and proactive people.

• Occupy the mediatic space, by owning newspapers, TV and radio stations or social media, or having a large part of the presence in them. The pressure group would want their talking points to occupy the public discourse and everybody's attention. The more they dominate the public discussion, the more chance there are the randomly selected goverment bodies will be sympathetic to their views. Here again, charismatic pundits with a knack for spinning a story would be in high demand.

• Monitor sympathizers or members of the group who get selected for government duty. As we said earlier, the percentage of citizens who adhere to the group's ideas is, according to the law of large numbers, more or less the percentage of the government who agrees with it. Those should be contacted, and within the limits of the law preventing government coordination, be kept informed of the group's talking points and platform. Here again, charismatic brokers who are good with people are necessary.

• Monitor members of the government opposed to the group, see if they do something illegal and make sure to report it so that they lose their position and are replaced with more amenable people. Impair them by any way the law authorizes. This would require ruthless and proactive lawyers.

• Raise funds and manage them. All the actions above require time and money. People would have to be employed full time doing or organising these. With a pressure group large enough and loyal donators, this can represent a hefty sum of money and substantive perks. Think of the megachurch pastors who fly in private jets with the approbation of their congregation. The desire to control such pressure groups would be strong for any power seeking individual.

In the end, it seems the political landscape would be just as awful as it is now in most democracies... Although they would be unable to exerce power directly, ambition driven people still have plenty of room to do media control, demagogy and struggle for money and privilege.

Answer 5

The constitution bans political parties that attempt to coordinate across government functions, but not political campaigns or pressure groups outside government.

-- and that provides an opening for ideological politicians, those who want to radically remake the society. They will fail the vast majority of the time, but a revolution only needs to be successful once for a political system to be overturned and on a timescale of centuries, a crisis will eventually turn up that weakens the system enough for one extremely lucky ideologue to prevail.

A system of checks and balances such as you described can be undermined by an outsider entering the system and then not following the checks and balances. An ideologue would likely see them as nothing more than an obstacle for enacting his vision. At the same time a popular movement may develop its own alternatives to the branches of government, ready to take over once the existing powers are sufficiently undermined.

An ideologue can easily get around the prohibition for parties to coordinate across the government branches by not organising its movement as a party. Paradoxically he can be greatly helped in this by being outlawed, in practice if not de jure, which the government may well do willingly if the movement in question becomes a credible threat to it. But that only works as long as the government is able to enforce it, which in a sufficiently severe crisis it may be either unable or unwilling to do.

For a historical example of just how quickly an established government can be replaced by determined ideologues, see the tsarist Russia. In 1913 it was considered one of the most stable monarchies, rapidly industrialising and growing ever richer and more powerful. But mere 10 years later in 1923, it was formally replaced by the USSR. The Bolsheviks followed exactly this script of a fringe movement filling the political void left by a faltering central government with alternative power centres (the worker assemblies known as soviets, hence the Soviet Union) which became legitimate enough to force the government into a power-sharing agreement, from which the government was then forcefully ousted.

Answer 6

Politicians seeking positions within the departments that use an exam may go to special universities/private schools. They would learn about law, rhetoric, and leadership. The school may also develop its curriculum to help its students figure out their ideology so they'll be better prepared for their political career.

As there are political organizations separate from the government, aspiring politicians would join whichever one best aligns with their ideology and make connections. Depending on how good of a job the Watchdogs are doing, "making connections" could range from striking up chit-chat with someone on the Appointments Commission, to slipping a $100 bill into their pocket, to sending them a message letting them know that their extra-marital affair is not a secret to everyone...

Answer 7

Competitive Sortition is going to take over... if the bureaucrats don't take over first.

With non-competitive sortition, the situation will be like the selection of jurors: there are going to be people who really don't want to be there. There will also be a strong element of 'These people don't know what they're doing.' What will happen? The bureaucrats will tell the representatives what to do, and what it all means, and since the bureaucrats are going to have their own opinions, they'll spin what they tell the representatives to get the result they want. The bureaucrats will develop a whole culture and set of techniques for 'managing' the representatives and getting them to make the right choices 'for themselves'.

With competitive sortition, anyone who wants to be a minister must take a course and sit an examination showing that they know and understand the processes of government. The passing candidates could then be selected semi-randomly, with each candidate having a number of tickets in the raffle equal to their examination score minus the highest failing grade, so those who did well in the exam would be more likely to be selected than those who did poorly, but anyone who wanted to be selected and could pass the test could potentially be selected.

With ministers who actually want to be ministers, and who are mostly reasonably well trained in their duties, the ministers could expect to be competent.

As for the audit/watchdog branch, this group would be highly prone to corruption unless their functions were legally open to scrutiny by the general public. Unless there were people metaphorically looking over their shoulders, able to examine any record, including the watchdog members' personal bank records and able to refer their misdeeds to the police, there would be a constant temptation to take bribes to overlook corruption.

Answer 8

The will game the system, because that's what they already do.

Most of our western democracies do not exactly work the way they are written. In most of them, the role of parties is vastly larger than you'd think if you only read the relevant laws. There is gerrymandering, there are appointed positions, there are hundreds of ways around or under the official system. Case in point: The current head of the EU commission wasn't even on the ballot for the election for that position.

Politicians are likely to do the same thing they do now and here: Find the loopholes, byways and exceptions and exploit them.

Some comments here touch on some specific ways in which that could be done. But if you close those off, the politicians will find other ways.

Answer 9

The police take over because they're the ones with guns.

As Chairman Mao once said, power flows from the barrel of a gun. The police are the ones with guns, therefore the police have the power, since there's no mention of a military. If they don't stage an outright coup and depose this government in favour of a police dictatorship, they male sure that everyone else in the system is fully aware that they could do so at any time and there's nothing stopping them from doing so.

Answer 10

You have a government filled with bureaucrats

You've created a system that's so complex that participants will spend most of their time negotiating the myriad of laws, rules, and regulations and little of their time actually getting things done. It's a government of bureaucrats, not legislators, judges and executors.

And I'm willing to double-down on that assessment by asserting that graft, corruption, and "gaming the system" will always exist no matter the governing structure. And the more complex you make that structure the easier it is to hide the graft, corruption, and system-gaming.

On top of that, you have a system that appears to never accept the voice of the people. From the perspective of a U.S. citizen, every governing system that doesn't accept the voice of the people is deemed a tyranny and the less any system listens to the people the more tyrannical the system becomes.

On the other hand, I see echos of Huxley's Brave New World in your idea. If he could make a buck on an overly complex system that's asserted to work, why not yourself?

Answer 11

Ah, the time-honoured tradition of "let's fix what's wrong with government." It can be a fun game to play, especially if you're an ornery contrarian. Which I may or may not be.

The first, most obvious problem is that you've focused all political power in the Appointments Commission. It would be a long game, but not a difficult one, to completely capture your government by corrupting the Appointments Commission. A few bad actors in the Judiciary gets a few of the right (or wrong, depending on how you look at it) people into the Appoinments Commission. They then work on appointing (as is their function) people to the Watchdog arm of government who can be relied on - or coerced if necessary - to assist. From there it's a couple of decades of maneuvering the right people into the right places and you have complete control.

Because you forgot the classic question: quis custodiet ipses custodes?

Your structure is also subject to the effects of ideological capture at the education level. Since everyone who wants to enter government must be qualified to do so, it wouldn't take much work to reduce the valid sources of education to those that provide the "best" (note the sarcastic quotes, imagine them as heavily empasized air-quotes) education for the job. Those institutions are not run nor controlled by the incumbent government, but you can be assured that only institutions that produce the Right Kind of People will be considered.

Imagine a world where only Ivy League schools are allowed to produce candidates for office. How hard do you think it might be to ensure that only people with the "correct" (there are those quotes again) political views are ever allowed to graduate from those shools? And before you start proposing laws to prevent that happening, let me point out that that kind of law is clearly political manipulation and must be quashed for The Greater Good. Now you have a perfectly maintained, rigid structure that forces one point of view on the entire system. Forever.

Well, until the revolution anyway.

In this world, what would happen to the kind of people who in our world become politicians, i.e the kind of people who either have strong ideological views and/or seek power, either for its own sake or as a way of enriching themselves?

Mostly one of two things:

• They try to oppose the system and are filtered out by the education system.
• They work within the system to enjoy all the corrupt benefits.

Any attempt to sway the political position of the system would necessarily require a very, very long game of infiltration and indoctrination. You'd have to get people into the educational system to carefully adjust the idological balance of society over multiple decades until you reached a critical point where your particular ideology is now the norm. (If any of this sounds familiar, don't blame me.)

The other big option for change is revolution. Depending on how you train your Enforcement arm that could be a big issue. There's only so much pressure that a population will put up with. The government will end up having to kill a lot of people to drive that revolution underground. Doesn't sound like a good thing to me, but whatever keeps the powerful in power I guess.

Anybody who sincerely wants change in the nature of government has to work behind the scenes, attacking the weak points of the structure. And these aren't necessarily bad people, just people who have a different idea of what the perfect world should look like.

Because of this:

Assume other elements of the world are 'earthlike', i.e. its a society of humans with similar basic concerns and range of behaviour as our own.

Humans are, by and large, prone to corruption. And you've proposed a system that encourages corruption as a primary political tool.

Answer 12

Frame Challenge: Political Parties are not just about getting Elected

Many politicians don't go into government wanting to be play dirty. They are just people who want to make a change, but once they get there, compromises must be made to see those changes done. If you need votes to get a proposition passed, all of the people who will vote also have thier own propositions they want passed; so, it is naive to assume that those people won't make deals around how they will vote. You support my proposition, I'll support yours. Don't support it, and I'll shoot down yours no matter how much merit it has. By using the power you have to shoot down other people's propositions, you maximize the chance of achieving your own goals. So, based on what changes you are willing to see to get the changes that you want, cliques will naturally form very quickly regardless of if you are dealing with elected or randomly chosen leaders. Anyone who joins such a clique will have a lot more political power than those who don't and those who don't become as effective as not being in government at all because everyone else will vote you down to try to coerce you into making thier clique stronger. So, even though you may formally ban political parties, they are in practice unavoidable because anything shy of a dictatorship naturally selects for them.

As cliques form, it will be clear to those who join them that they have the power to rewrite the rules themselves to better support thier political party; so, any constitutional provision that prevents them will be sidestepped and revised at every opportunity.

So, the problem with your government is not the constitution itself, but that the safeguards to prevent political parties will barely make it out the gate before all your randomly selected leaders undermine that constitution until it suits those who choose to organize. The framers of the US Constitution were very aware of the dangers of party politics and tried harder than most countries to put in safeguards against it, but the Federalist and Democratic Republican parties were already formed before the end of the country's first term of congress. So, while it is not unreasonable to expect a government to exist where people rule by sortition, such governments have existed before, it is unreasonable to expect any style of oligarchy to exist without political parties. Such attempts in the past to stop it have always ended in one of two ways: they fall apart within the first few years or they become the tool of one political party to ban others while safeguarding thier own existence.

Answer 13

Given that you made sortition the major component, this necessitates a very rudimentary government of amateurs (possibly gifted amateurs in some cases) judged by other gited amateurs or picked by chance.

This can really only work in a very simple and small society, like an ancient Greek city-state at most. Anything more complex than that would require a horde of technocrats and bureaucrats to maintain (making random sortition pointless, and exams far more difficult and meritocratic), and a de fact democracy overthrowing the system (the Most Popular Man rallying the masses against the "unfair" sortition system).

You face two additional problems here as well:

• first, if there is no incentive to be a politician, why would people do their duty once sorted into positions? And if there is an incentive, what is stopping them from being essentially corrupted by it? If the sortition process picks a man who does not want the duty, he'll just coast about until the end of the term, or will start taking bribes on the side. If a position-hungry person is sorted in, you just created a politician.

• Testing Effect/Goodhart's Law: if part of the government is filled with people who udergo rigorous exams, then society will train itself to be good at acing exams, NOT at being good at what the exam is about. They will learn to be good at gaming the measurement, not what it measures. For example, if one needs at least 90/100 points at the Finance Exam to become a government accountant, then soon you will have people who are capable of easily scoring 99/100 on the Finance Exam, and then be absolute donkeys at their actual job. Imperial China has around 600 years of history of that exact problem.

Essentially, yes, you can have the system you want. One can argue that there were societies who tried similar options, and such societies lasted for centuries.

They were also pretty crappy, incapable of progress, growth, or dealing with Outside Context Problems. Sortition+routine exams ensures you will have a government of the least enthusiastic, chair-warmer bureaucrats siting side by side with armchair theorist Exam Nerds with no practical skills. Such system is pretty stable, because such a useless government would have no incentive to mess with the lives of the citizenry, and thus not get in the way of grass-roots self-organization.

And then Mongols/Vikings/Conquistadors come along and wipe them out, because Might-Makes-Right societies can field more robust armies that lethargic appointed bureaucracies.