Setting aside Capitalism vs. Communism (or maybe I just think I am), this structure vs. that. Why is it that there aren’t really huge lists of alternatives? Where are the people who are imagining new government structures?
Like electing citizens to office at random, like we do with jury duty (forget the word for it). Or totally different arrangements of legislatures. Or even a pure democracy in a modern sense. That one is especially probably a terrible idea, and they’re not even that unique, but who is brainstorming this stuff? Is it mostly just sci-fi authors? Where is it talked about that isn’t already bending toward a team in the already-existing scheme of things? Even the most radical sorts are referencing back to books/ideas that are a century old. There are ultimately like four ideas and we just kind of gave up? That’s all of them?
Why have we seen so few different approaches tried? Or seemingly even imagined? I feel like even in fiction, it’ll be 2,000 years in the future and the whole thing is structured like a glorified city council ruling entire star systems. I feel like it’s difficult even for our minds to imagine anything truly inventive, in that sense. Is that baked into the concept? Is it because we’re just dumb monkeys that only understand “big strong monkey better?” HAS this stuff been written about extensively and I’m just unaware (probably, yes)?
The Constitution of the Italian Republic and The Constitution Of The Republic of Poland have been interesting to read. Reading about the ways the Knesset and Parliament of the United Kingdom and the Riksdag work has also been interesting. I’m sure the constitution of Germany is interesting too, but it uses a structure that is less similar to the others I’ve researched recently (elected representatives of the states are involved in choosing federal representatives, whereas in other places local representatives have much less influence on country-wide elections).
It’s also interesting to see who is the commander in chief of the armed forces: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commander-in-chief
In general, I find it hard to design fundamental social institutions (constitutions), but I expect that someone will find a way to improve those that we already have.
In particular, I would not have come up with the Constitution of the Italian Republic if I was working in isolation, but I haven’t noticed any major flaws with it (at least for periods of peace: the election of the president requires participation from every region, so if one was occupied by a foreign power such that it could not participate in an election it might be impossible to elect a president). One thought I had is that it might be good to limit the president’s ability to dissolve parliament, like limiting that power to cases where the parliament has had a significant amount of time to produce a budget but hasn’t actually done so (as is the situation for Poland), to avoid situations where the president says they dissolved the parliament but the parliament says they impeached the president before being dissolved.
Some similarities I’ve found
Of the states I referred to, there are some interesting similarities I’ve noticed.