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Pepper's avatar

"I’ve spent a lot of time over the years considering far more radical governance proposals. So the very slow trend toward adopting parliamentary systems seems quite discouraging."

One advantage that radical proposals may have is that being radical helps get attention, useful for marketing.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

An important factor in this question is how the parliament itself works and is formed.

If your parliament is uni-cameral, uni-party, without proportional representation... that parliament will become corrupt very swiftly. You can get rid of any single one of these properties and empirically it won't matter A LOT, but if you get rid of all of them, woe betide the citizens of your polity, whose wealth will be extracted and transferred to the tiny ruling clique that dominates the one locus of governmental power.

A bicameral system forces every potential "secret deal" to be put in writing twice, and then survive publicly visible reconciliation.

A multiparty system causes enough adversarial feelings that people at least run their fallacy detection engine on their enemies, and everyone has as least a few enemies to keep them slightly honest.

Proportional representation gives even "kinds of people" who only make up only 5% of the population roughly 5% of the voice in the parliament so these groups do not ONLY have the option of submission or revolt.

ALSO RELEVANT: The prime minister of the one or two houses of parliament will probably make a mediocre commander in chief. In addition to a Senate, and a defacto socially recognized "Princeps Senatus", the Romans had a one or more tribune of the plebs who could veto legislation, and a Senior Consul who ran the army.

In order to make the US military not suck (and maybe out of persnickety completionism?), the constitution COMBINES these jobs into the US president (and then patched the role with legal immunity so that the the incentives faced by Julius Caesar wouldn't apply to the US president (regarding civil wars based on personal loyalty by the army to a very clever commander in chief with a justified fear of future bad faith legal prosecution)).

If there is ONE CLEAR FLAW with US "Popular Consul" elections, I think the flaw is that it simply CANNOT select the Condorcet winner (except in crazy accidents) when a Condorcet winner exists. Condorcet's writings were not widely known and understood when the US was booted up (though he knew Benjamin Franklin and John Adams wrote critiques of his proposals) so perhaps this flaw is understandable.

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