The Business of Democracy

Every time an election is announced the anxiety is insurmountable. Quest for a person or party that’s going to change it all begins. But then some of us are old enough to see how this plays out, hind sight is 20/20. We are inured to the sense of dysfunctional democracy except when we come up for air once every four or five years during an election to look for alternatives. Its possible we are looking for alternatives presumably in an incorrect dimension.May be the design of democracy is outdated or maybe it was designed the way it is by the mythical conspirators who wanted to be monarchs in sheep skin as legislators for generations. So what do we do? Go back to complete monarchy or bring in anarchy? Of course not. If we need to have some peace and civility then more objective democracy needs to be defined and practiced.

I will leave the naming of such a democracy to the marketing team with a focus group but for our discussion let's call it "Accountable Democracy". Let's start with something basic like an Service Level Agreement (SLA) . It's basically two individuals or organizations signing on a dotted line to say the service provider will comply to the terms set forth by the service receiver. In case of democracy in some ways the elected government is the service provider and we the people are the service receivers. In our world of democracy we pay before we receive the goods or even seen them. We only hear about them(may be). I think that concept has to fundamentally change given service providers (elected officials) are not driven by passion but driven more by factors that are tangential to service mindedness. So let's agree that people representatives are business men/women and let's start treating them like who they are (of course with respect)! Let’s get in to the business of democracy and slowly getaway from emotional of democracy that we are so entangled in.

Let’s contemplate a model ( I know this is naïve but hear me out) - In this model there are two basic concepts 1. Contract 2. What happens when the contract is violated.

Every party in a democratic system publishes a paper weight a.k.a election manifest. Instead of each party telling people what they can do we create a Manifest for each election whether it's local , state or central. The manifest can be created in the same way as how the 5 Year plans are created by the planning commission. This manifest doesn't have to boil the oecan but instead foucs of few items that are ciritcal to the smaller geographic. The list has to be very objective,for example "power cut reduction by 95% by certain date" etc., Instead of completely relying on a nonbinding contract published by the party we should move towards adopting the manifest created by the people as binding contract   for the election. One can contest in an election only if the mandatory manifest is signed by him or her.

Now, let's talk about enforcing the contract. The contract has to be continuously and periodically managed from the beginning of one’s term. Every outcome should be measured and the outcomes determine the rest. If outcomes are not as stated in the contract then it’s a violation. Violation's have serious repercussions including not being able compete in an election ever again. Enforcing accountability for a legislator is not possible if he/she doesn't have power or means to implement the contract - empowerment and accountability have to tango. If we take our current world of democratic governance defining or enforcing the contract will be challenging or even impossible since things are vague and way too centralized. There has to be radical change in the way legislative bodies and executives are empowered and structured. There will be a need for us move towards decentralized autonomous power structures that can be empowered appropriately to achieve the intended accountability based on outcomes. In short we need to reorg the system.

Don't get me wrong, democracy has filled the void for more than a century and has tried hard to achieve equality and justice. But if you take in account current trends in our democratic society it's clear that the degeneration of this democratic model has started aggressively decades ago and the cancer is spreading faster than what the diagnosis (our media) reveals. If we intend to take a nonviolent path towards betterment of human society then we cannot be married to the current concept of democracy as its sold today. If democracy is construed as philosophy then there are too many open interpretations leading to tangential thought processes that are only driven by greedy agendas. Instead, if democracy is structured as business like organization where you have measurable out comes then you start deconstructing the public service myth that you are being sold today ( This is almost like legalizing pot).

Deep inside we all want that one person or party that will be the savior but at the same depths we also know that real unicorn from utopia cannot be bought in amazon. Let’s stop trying to mend this and it’s critical to end this union with non-functional democracy. Social engineers and scientists should take the mammoth task of building better governance models leaning extremely towards practical governance (like the model discussed above) so we move towards a better social setup. I know this is not something that can be considered for a decade or two or even more but the bottom line is we need to detach ourselves from the fairy tale vision of a savior evolving within the bounds of the current system. Let’s move on people!! Let’s engineer an Accountable Democracy!!