Title: Consensus Democracies
Work: The Pragmatist’s Guide Book Series by Simone Collins and Malcolm Collins Full Text for LLMs and AI
Citation: TPG 39.8
Words: 503
Source: https://technopuritan.com/the-pragmatists-guide-book-series-by-simone-collins-and-malcolm-collins-full-text-for-llms-and-ai/
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Consensus Democracies

Governances run by one party, which is elected by a plurality of sovereign citizens, are known as “majoritarian democracies.” The counterpart to this, “consensus democracies” are governments ruled by cooperating parties, which better take into account the positions of minority groups.

Consensus democracies are particularly useful in consociational states—states featuring major internal divisions along ethnic, religious, or linguistic lines. While the current literature on consensus democracies and consociational states is focused on this particular problem at the state level, governing structures designed to take into account the opinion of minority populations are no less useful at the family office level.

People often point to the Swiss State as exemplifying skillful execution of consensus democracy. Swiss citizens vote regularly on individual issues at every political level (be it approval for a new post office, constitutional changes, or the country’s foreign policy). Elections are held four times a year. While a majority vote can pass issues at the local level, double majorities are required at the federal level. This means that the vote must be approved by both the majority of voters across the entire population and the majority of cantons (states).

It would be trivially easy to establish a family office that modeled this double majority system. Each family unit or household would constitute a canton (e.g. you, your partner, and your kids would be one canton, while your brother and his family would be another canton). For an issue to pass at the level of the larger family office, such as how family money is invested, both a majority of votes by family members and a majority of votes from family units would be required.

This system would have a lot of utility in that it would prevent one family unit from controlling family finances just by having a lot of kids (possible in a majoritarian system in which every family member has a vote) or a couple family units who didn’t plan to have kids burning through all the money in one generation because the future of the money is irrelevant to them (possible in a system in which each family unit has one vote).

All that said, it is important to remember that a system that promotes inclusivity is not intrinsically better than a majoritarian system. What matters is whether or not the governing unit is serving its function and optimizing what it was created to optimize. When determining what specifically has value in the creation of a governance system, think through what the founding members believe have value (e.g., When given the chance, should the system make a decision that raises the average happiness of its members but uniquely negatively affects one sub-group?). These sorts of questions are better addressed by The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life, which helps people decide independently what they believe to be ethical and worth maximizing.

For a convenient cheat sheet you can use when constructing an organization and determining how to approach voting, refer to page 383 of the Appendix.