Re: [apsa_itp] community law-making, a system based on recombinant text

[Michael Allan <mike@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Aug 15, 2007 at 06:06:41PM -0500, Peter Muhlberger wrote:
> Hi Michael and others:  I'm a social scientist who is quite interested
> in communityware.
> 
> Here are some potential hurdles for Michael's community lawmaking proposal:
> 
> People aren't lawyers.  Will participants be able to draft laws that
> are sufficiently precise and technically consistent with the existing
> legal framework?

Hi Peter,

Probably, they should be able to... The proposed system incorporates a
collaborative medium; people could use it to pool their expertise.
Not all people are lawyers, but some are.  For example, a citizen
who's an expert in a particular social issue (by virtue of direct
involvement in it) could draft rough legislation in English; a law
clerk might then restructure it technically; and a constitutional
lawyer might correct inconsistenies with existing law. Later, an
experienced legislator might broker a deal with another community
group that was focused on other issues. And so on. Legislative
drafting would proceed in reactive cycles, among many actors.

I see precedents for this kind of sustained collaboration in
open-source software projects, and in Wikipedia.  But legislative
drafting involves an added level of complexity, because the result
must accurately reflect the will of a diverse community.  If
recombinant text (the collaborative medium) works as anticipated,
there should be no problem. It is designed for exactly that purpose.
 
> People aren't political.  Most Americans understand politics little
> better than quantum mechanics and are about as interested in it.  If
> community lawmaking were adopted, would this not end up either being
> lawmaking by a select elite of people who are a) interested in and b)
> (quasi-) knowledgeable about politics?  I suspect any effort to
> involve people in direct democracy must be preceeded by a range of
> civil society efforts to get the average person more involved and
> interested.  My own focus is with various efforts at cultivating
> democratic deliberation, efforts that are advisory for political
> institutions and carried out by civil society in various ways.

I would only add:

  * Being *able* to meaningfully participate (for first time)
    is bound to increase the level of interest.

  * Community legislators might be paid by the state. They might
    also share amongst themselves the prestige, access to state
    resources and other benefits that are accorded to traditional
    legislators.

  * Even if it happens that an elite group does the bulk of the actual
    legislative work (being the most competent for it) they would
    not be a closed elite, but an open meritocracy.

  * Participation might be increased using a delegate cascade
    to allow otherwise non-participating citizens to express trust
    by delegating their votes. This would better ensure that any elite
    (of legislators) that did form had the trust of the community.
    So, in a very real sense, every citizen could participate.
    (Mathematician Marcus Pivato argues that even children and the
     mentally infirm could participate, and benefit society
     in this way. So effective would be the resulting
     'pyramidal meritocracy'.)
    file:///home/mike/project/textbender/d/overview.xht#fn-23

> People are twisted.  The average American scores quite high on a
> measure of Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA).  Do we really want a
> direct democracy with a public a substantial portion of which thinks
> along lines similar to the Nazis (ethnocentrism, obedience to
> authority, punishing attitudes toward deviance, etc.)?  Again, I think
> some intermediate political education efforts are needed.  RWA is in
> part due to inadequate socio-political understandings that might be
> fixed as people are challenged to reason about social and political
> matters.  This creates a case for more civil society efforts to
> involve people in democratic discussion, but I suspect direct
> democracy would result in a variety of problems.

I depend on the political theory being a sound one. As I understand
it, our laws rest on the authority of the public, and are intended to
be broadly reflective of society.  Accepting this theory, my job (as
an engineer) would be to build a system that could put that theory
into practice.

In practice, then, if society is broadly wrong-headed, it should get
wrong-headed laws. Those laws would cause problems, of course; but
that would lead to society's political eduction.  Having nobody to
blame but themselves (cannot blame politicians anymore) the public
would have no choice but to pull together, and correct the
wrong-headed laws.  In the end, therefore, society would no longer be
so wrong-headed.

> Community lawmaking might be a step in the right direction if it we
> introduced first as an effort to create rules in non-political social
> settings and then as non-binding efforts to suggest laws to lawmakers.
>  That's pretty much the best that can be hoped for in the medium run
> anyway.

I agree. It would have to be one small step at a time. There'd be much
to learn along the way.

-- 
Michael Allan

http://zelea.com/

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