Jocaxian Democracy: The Best Democracy
Joao Carlos Holland de Barcellos, December/2008
translated by Debora Policastro

Introduction

The Jocaxian Democracy is a model of democracy in which anyone can vote for anyone and the representativeness is given by the quantity of direct and indirect votes that each voter/candidate receives.

Parties

The parties are something “perverse” about the current political systems. The parties differ from each other by their “governmental plans”, and especially by their ideologies.

Nevertheless, a great part of the population does not feel comfortable about “engaging” into this or that party. A lot of people also do not sympathize with the ideology and governmental plans of the existent parties. Why do we have to be restricted and obliged to vote for the same party ideologies ever and ever? The way it is people are limited to a few offered options. Founding a party? Few people have this kind of time and inclination.

Another problem which I consider very serious about the current party democracy is that the candidates from each party do not need to have any popular representativeness: they are chosen in an indirect way, without popular participation, from inside the parties. For example, in order to run for president it is enough that the candidate is affiliated to the party and chosen by its members. And a good marketing would take care of the necessary image. We are then “obliged” to vote for one of these few candidates we barely know…

Thus, how can we say that the people elected their president in a direct way if the few candidates available were actually chosen in an indirect way, in the backstage of their parties and with no popular participation or representativeness?

The ideal would be a system that allowed the existence of as many parties as there were electors. The “official” parties would not be the only to put candidates in electoral disputes.

The “Jocaxian Democracy”

The Jocaxian democracy (named before as “Representative Democracy”) is a democracy system in which everyone has the same opportunity, everyone has the same rights, everyone can be elected and all this without the necessity of political parties! Here is the idea:

All people that are able to vote, that is, the electors are also candidates in potential and would have the same rights as anyone else.

Initially, in a first level, each elector could choose, that is, vote for any other elector he wanted. It could be for example, him/herself, his/her mother, his/her rock idol, his/her teacher and so on. That is, the elector could vote for any person that belonged to his election zone: in case of a presidential election, it could be any person inside the country; in a governor election, it could be any person inside the state; in a mayor election, anyone in the city.

The difference between a candidate and an elector is that the candidate, in order to remain candidate, must vote for him/herself and the electors vote for people who are not themselves.

In the JD, initially, each person has a single level of representativeness. It starts with each person having a unit of representativeness. Each time the person receives a vote it is added to his/her representativeness. Therefore, the representativeness of a person is the amount of votes that he/she received.

Each time an elector gives his/her vote to somebody he/she goes out of the electoral dispute and transfers all his accumulated representativeness to the elector that received his/her vote: if an elector “A” which had the representativeness (=quantity of received votes) “a” votes for another elector “B”, who had representativeness “b”, the representativeness of the elector “A” is transferred to the elector/candidate “B” and becomes “a”+”b”, as the person who voted now has zero representativeness and is out of the electoral dispute.

This way, the representativeness of “A” is transferred to the person he/she voted for (“B”), but the sum of the people’s representativeness is kept. In our example, “A” got zero representativeness and “B” got “a”+”b” representativeness. The total representativeness was kept. Thus, if a person votes for him/herself, his/her representativeness is not altered by his/her own vote.

On the levels that succeed the first one, the voting will be localized geographically:

On the second voting level all the voters that live on the same block and are candidates, that is, voters that have representativeness larger than zero, must gather and get to know each other’s ideas and, after that, vote on one another. After the voting, the voter that has the bigger representativeness wins the election of his/her block. The votes that direct or indirectly are not transferred to the winner, through the voting will be discarded.

This algorithm must be used in all levels: the winner of the level is the one who has the biggest accumulated representativeness after the voting is closed. The votes that are not transferred through the voting to the winner are discarded.

On the third voting level, the winners of each block in the district would gather and, like in level two, would choose their district representative.

On the forth level, the winners of each town would gather and choose the candidate of the town.

On the fifth level, the winners of each town would gather and choose the mayor of the city and vice mayor.

On the sixth level, the mayors of each state would gather and choose a governor and a vice governor. The vice governor would take the place of the mayor that was chosen to be a governor.

On the seventh level, the governors in the country would elect their president and the vice governor would take the position of the governor elect president.

This way, despite the elections being indirect, there would be popular participation in all levels. Everyone could be elected, at first, and there would be as many ideologies that could be chosen and equally likely to be chosen as there are citizens in the country.

 

Portuguese version: http://www.genismo.com/logicatexto32.htm