Why this project exists
Politicians get plenty of criticism. What public debate rarely says is that the system which selects them is a design, and designs can be changed.
The gap in the discussion
Commentary on the state of democracy usually stops at the people in office. Two points almost never follow.
First: the systems of government we have in the West, and elsewhere, are not the same thing as democracy. They are one way of implementing it.
Second: the choice we are offered, between “democracy” and “non-democracy”, is a false one. There are other architectures for government, and some may be better, if we are willing to imagine them.
A paper and a site
The position paper, Democracy Without a Political Class: The Architecture of a Citizen Legislature, makes the case in full, with the literature and the objections. It is forthcoming, and the full text will be linked here once it is out.
This site explains the same argument for anyone who does not want to read an academic paper. It uses the same concepts and makes the same claims. The paper provides the references.
Do not optimise the occupants. Change the selection function.
Dan Protopopescu
A physicist at the University of Glasgow. He comes to political design from the study of selection systems, which is familiar ground in experimental physics.
An experiment’s trigger decides which events are recorded. If the trigger’s criteria are only loosely correlated with the signal you actually care about, no amount of later analysis removes the bias. Electoral competition works like a trigger for the legislature. Its criteria are the acquisition and retention of power, and those are only loosely correlated with good representation.
The functional architecture borrows a second idea, from security engineering: separation of duties. No single body should control agenda, evidence and decision together.
Get in touch
Comments, criticism and pointers to work that should be on the reading list are all welcome.
dan.protopopescu@glasgow.ac.uk
All population figures and dots are illustrative. They show how a mechanism works and do not measure any real legislature. The argument is about the architecture, not the figures.
As acknowledged in the paper, AI assistants (ChatGPT and Claude) were used for discussing the argument, refining terminology, reviewing the literature and structuring the text. They also helped build this site. The author is responsible for the content and for any errors.
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