Governmental Ruminations

As I was sitting in the food court having a spicy meal of mutton curry, my mind drifted to and fro and in and out of consciousness. And then, something struck me as being odd.

The current system of democratic elections as practised by most of the civilised world seem to bias itself towards a local optimum as opposed to a global optimum system, what with the need to first elect members of parliament (MPs) to represent the constituency before selecting the cabinet ministers from the MPs in the dominant elected party.

Okay, so maybe they don't elect cabinet ministers from the MPs because that is only applicable to countries with a parliament (a republic) as opposed to one with a senate (a democracy). But the general idea is the same---everyone votes for their local representative, and the overall ``winner'' is determined by the aggregate votes throughout.

By virtue of the workings of the system, there seems to be an innate assumption that through selecting the local representative, it is possible to obtain a corp of people who, as a whole, can govern and manage the country well. This particular assumption is not wholly substantiated by theory---it is not known that government systems based on elections follow an optimum substructure property that guarantees us a global optimum peformance. Using a less jargon-filled approach, what I mean is that we have no proof that the local representatives whom we have voted into office to represent our localised interests are indeed effective custodians for the country's interest.

But of course, trying to institute a dual system will definitely cause a lot of complaints, since there will then be a perception that those who are voted in to deal with ``the big stuff'' are somehow ranked higher than the local representative representing the common folk. There are current governmental systems that have this partitioning concept sans the ``vote into power'' bit---observe how in some governmental systems, there is an upper house and a lower house, where the upper house are either made up of hereditary posts and the lower house is made up of members who were voted into power. It would appear then that the innate local versus global optimum bias is side stepped by a clear partitioning of the two interest groups---the upper house, being of ``noble descent'', seem more clearly suited to handle ``the big stuff'', while the lower house, being made of people voted into power, represent the localised interests. But of course, this just introduces a new type of bias that is a little hard to quantify; are those of the ``high born'' really more interested in the country's welfare?

But anyway, ruminations aside, political systems, in spite of the many efforts to rigourise them, are still products of an organic system that is not easily explained with the cold logic of empirical science. Even as we speak, even as I utter things here, the perceptions of how governance is enacted is still a hotly debated topic in both the academic and practical fields. I suppose only time will tell if what we are doing are indeed correct enough to stave off any major polirical catastrophes.