Constitutional Engineering (and the American Shutdown)

There's a lot going on about it on the internet, but a short background. The US government has, as of October 1st, reduced all operations to the necessary minimum because republicans in congress have held the budget approval hostage to reppeal Obamacare, or to make sure it dies. As if this were not rather irresponsible and spoke against all common sense, the debt ceiling has to be raised by October 17th of the American Government will default.

That this borders in lunacy and the disastrous consequences of such a default has been better exposed by others. My point here is that this is a result of the electoral system in the US, hence the title constitutional engineering. In his book "Comparative Constitutional Engineering" Giovanni Sartori made the perfect analysis of the American system. It's crap, but it works because people want it to and work for it to work.

As of this week I think it is safe to say, it does not work anymore. The absolute majority system, with some specifics of how districts lines are drawn has pushed the politicians to the extreme. This has allowed the rise of the Tea Party, and encourages the politicians to cater to extreme audiences. A suggestion to redraw district lines has been mentioned by the economist this week.

I think proportional representation would do far more in shorter time. It would entirely disrupt the two party system and allow other voices to come into government. This would of course require some reforms in the way campaigns are funded, and politicians in the US will also never pass a law that most certainly would see a huge part of them fired. Allowing smaller parties in government and the possibility of a hung parliament will also force the parties to creat coalitions which will make compromise necessary to form government.

I generally dislike proportional representation, specially if you see Germany's current politics. They're based entirely on opinion polls after which the parties build a half cooked program with snippets of ideas from every field, as long as the electorate will give them a couple of votes. Which is why I think Germay would profit from absolute majority.

Mexico on the other hand has a strange mixture of both, which most people are unable to understand and allows/encourages parties to create lists with people who're not even politicians. Mexico would probably, as Sartori states, profit from a second electoral round, but it is still quite governable as Mr. Peña has shown passing astound reforms which were long overdue. Still for the PAN it was nearly impossible to pass reforms because the PRI refused to cooperate. A second round would give the ruling party a higher number of seats which would thus allow parties other than the PRI to get reforms through when they have the government.

France has, however, demonstrated that the second round is no guarantee of good government. That gave them twice Sarkozy and now Hollande. So the caveat is, none of the possibilites are perfect, but if we want democracy to work more smoothly, electoral reforms need to become more likely, to reflect the dynamics which each system starts. So Germany should try absolute majority for a few decades, the US would profit from proportional representation, and Mexico could benefit from a second round, and changes to the systems should become common, to fine tune it to the specific needs of the country. General overhauls after a generation or two strongly recommended.