Voting
Voting bodies stand among the most common selector mechanisms, be they for a board, senator, family office manager, or law. The pervasiveness of voting warrants an exploration of the properties and metrics on which voting bodies can differ and how these differences can affect a government.
We will do our best to stay away from the pedantic labels academics in this space love to use (or at least always provide them alongside simple alternative explanations in a way that doesn’t rely on vocabulary memorization). We do this not just for accessibility but because voting systems are often designed for just one type of governance unit (e.g., at the level of the nation state), which obscures the utility of these systems to other types of governance units (e.g., corporate governance).
Let’s set some definitions for entities that vote in a system:
- Stakeholders: Individuals who are in some way directly affected by a system’s governance. Stakeholders can be anything from people born in a country to community members affected by a local company’s factory waste.
- Contributors: Individuals who have made a sacrifice for the organization. This can be anything from a company’s employees or investors to those serving in the military.
- Representatives: Individuals who have been chosen by another body—this could be a representative of a company or someone chosen through another vote.
Warning: This chapter gets a little boring when contrasted with the rest of the book. That said, it features too many unique ideas to warrant banishment to the Appendix. While we have prioritized hot takes over comprehensive coverage, we would not hold it against you were you to skip to the next chapter.