Representative Democracy and Its Mechanisms

Political parties and politicians –by and large– are inefficient to communicate, synthesise and materialise the general will because the mandatary tends to privilege a particular interest to the detriment of the collective one of the constituents (divergent interests) and because the relationship is mediated by a differentiated access to information (asymmetric information).

The “Principal-Agent Problem” described, has been exacerbated in the context of the current individualist paradigm, the crisis of the institutions in charge of transmitting values, excessive hedonism-consumerism and the neoliberal model; who placed individual benefit (profit) as the main catalyst in interpersonal relationships and money –originally a means of payment to speed up exchange– as the ultimate goal and contemporary measure of success.

General decisions that privilege particular interests induce serious distortions in the systems. E.g. Generalised environmental deterioration and massive extinction of species, public-private corruption, inequality in income and opportunity, et al.

Despite its complexity, the distortion by delegated decision can be easily seen in the model of public-private corruption, thanks to its fractal properties:

Self-similarity on all scales and infinite perimeter.

Based on these properties, we propose to reverse its global effect by local action that applies the following principles:

Principle of Sustainability. Every social process (socio-ecological, s-economic, s-political and s-cultural) is conduct in search of a common ideal. Ideal is any state or process unattainable in time-space but infinitely approachable. If there are no immutable states (as a specific destination or final result), only the continuous and infinite approach to the ideal gives sustainability to the processes.

Economic-Environmental Sustainability. Biological systems remain productive in time-space, if the species use the resources without exceeding the carrying capacity of the ecosystem.

Socio-Political Sustainability. Political systems reproduce in time-space thanks to the legitimacy attributed to them by the governed. In this sense, legitimacy is a resource subject to degradation and the limits of its own capacity for renewal.

Principle of Sovereignty. When the ideal individual will infinitely approaches towards a concretion of the general will (popular sovereignty), the political regime becomes sustainable by renewal of its own legitimacy.

Optimisation Principle. If the general will is an iterated function of the individual will (the value of the first depends on the value of the second), its infinite approximation can be approached as an Optimisation Problem.

Direct Democracy, now!