Pre-Vetting & Self-Vetting Systems
Representatives
Now that we have investigated voting systems at a superficial level, let’s do the same with representatives and systems for holding power.
Pre-Vetting & Self-Vetting Systems
While governing structures can easily be shaped by restricting who can vote, the same can be done using restrictions on who can hold elected office. Limitations on elected office holders typically manifest as rule-based restrictions, like minimum ages, or necessary support from sub-government bodies like the CCP, the DNC, or the RNC. The problem with letting sub-governments vet governing office holders is that the integrity of the larger electoral body will only be as intact as that of its most corrupt sub-body. The corrupting influence of sub-governments on elected office holders can be avoided by using simple rules or technical requirements to vet candidates while banning “party based” pre-vetting.
Consider how some businesses forbid stockholders and employees from holding certain elected positions. These restrictions may be put in place to encourage more pragmatic and long-term-oriented leadership. Alternatively, restricting governing positions exclusively to stakeholders and investors ensures leadership has a vested interest in their decisions being in the best interest of the company. Restricting family office governance to non-family members who are elected by family members can spare families from toxic infighting over the position.
Pre-vetting systems can easily be corrupted and produce undesired effects. To have one’s name on the ballot for most elected positions in the U.S., you must collect a certain number of signatures. While this might seem like a test of popular support, functionally it becomes a test of how much money the person—or organizations supporting them—is willing to pay. As such, this signature collection requirement ends up supporting a party-based system.
If you talk to anyone familiar with local politics, the number of votes needed is translated to a cost you will have to bear in order to hire professional petitioners who know all the draconian rules and exploits for collecting these signatures (something a normal supporter will struggle to do). Worse, for obvious reasons it is cost effective for professional petitioners to bundle their services, only charging 10% or so more to add another candidate to their signature collection work (so long as each candidate is politically aligned). This makes it dramatically cheaper for political insiders—and individuals subservient to major parties—to run.
An interesting variation of this is to have certain positions for which a person can only run if they have held some other position for a given period of time. It may be a requirement that all candidates running for a particular position have held positions within a given department for a certain length or time. Someone running for a high court position might need to have spent a minimum number of years practicing law. Requirements like these ensure some level of competence but make groupthink much more likely, as only those who have survived on the bottom rungs of an organization for a long period of time can reach its top ranks.
More important than pre-vetting systems, and almost never implemented, are self-vetting systems. Conditions for holding a position may be so “costly” that most people who would otherwise want it choose not to pursue it. More importantly, conditions for holding a position can shape the character and decision making of whoever holds it. If, to run a family office, a person had to live in an austere cabin in northern Canada and be paid at the end of their tenure based on their performance, they will think wildly differently from a family office manager permitted to live like a king in Los Angeles.
In ancient Persia, Cyrus intentionally built his capital in an extremely inhospitable area. When his troops campaigned to shift the capital to a nicer area, he warned: “Be prepared no longer to be rulers but rather subjects. Soft lands breed soft men; wondrous fruits of the earth and valiant warriors grow not from the same soil.”
After Cyrus’ death, the capital was eventually moved to the most opulent city in the world at the time, Babylon. Only a generation or so later, Cyrus’ descendants grew soft and were easily conquered—because ultimately Cyrus was right: You can influence the character of a person or people through the conditions in which they must live.