Explaination

Abstract

The following section explains the flaws of the current mainstream government systems and how the Participatory Preference Process fixes them.

Delegation system

The current system revolves around the concept of representation: public matters are not decided by the people themselves, but only by elected "representatives"; the sole decisional power held by the people is that of electing them, and letting the chosen one decide on their behalf, without even being required to properly consult with them; this obviously decreases the probabilities of an outcome that satisfies the actual wills of the people, because there is no guarantee that the opinion of the representative actually reflects the general will of its electors.
In the P.P.P. instead, everything that can be directly decided by the people is directly decided by them; representatives are only invoked in cases where the number of people involved would be too high to achieve a conclusion in due time, and even in those cases they can have no decisional power other than that of reporting their electors' decisions; this guarantees that the final outcome will always be as close as possible to the real wills and interests of the people.

Non-imperative mandate

The current system does not normally include the so-called "imperative mandate", that is: the obligation for a representative to comply with their electors' requests, penalty the loss of their position; this is a fatal flaw because this way the so-called "representatives" have no incentive to actually respect the wills of their electors and can instead follow their own personal interests (or the interests of their corruptors) with little fear of backlash, making them more similar to temporary monarchs (or vassals, if they choose to comply with external interests) rather than actual people's representatives.
Contrary to this, in the P.P.P. the mandate is always imperative: if a representative does not do his job right, he can be immediately replaced by their electors, ensuring that the actual wills and interests of the people are never disregarded.

Candidature system

In the present system, people are not allowed to elect just anyone they want, but can exclusively choose among a pre-determined list of candidates, with arbitrarily high entry barriers which are pre-determined beforehand; this not only decreases the probability that the chosen candidate is the one the people actually want, but also creates the condition for the political class to degenerate into a self-perpetuating closed cartel that only promotes its own interests, leaving the people only the illusion of choice between equally bad pre-determined alternatives who are actually just different fronts of the same oligarchy.
In the P.P.P. by contrast, delegates can be chosen among anyone, maximizing the probability of a just candidate, and completely erasing any possibility for the formation of an oligarchy.

Party system

The current system revolves around a fatally flawed concept called "party": people do not normally submit their own proposals by themselves nor propose themselves as indipendent delegates, but only after forming a party and/or entering an already existing one, and then settling on a shared list of proposals (a "program") together with its other members rather than the potential voters; this promotes a mindset where the interests of the party are put above those of the people it is supposed to represent.
Alse, because it is impossible for all members of a party to always have the same ideas and interests around something, these shared program will always be suboptimal not only in regard of what the electors actually want (for the reasons explained above), but even in regards of the general opinion of the party members themselves.
Moreover, the very process of settling on a program varies according to the internal policy of any party, in which the very problems listed in this section might or might not be replicated, turning the party into an oligarchy inside another oligarchy.
All these factors combined exponentially increase the distance between a party line and the people's wills to such a level that the latter are almost completely disregarded. In the P.P.P., there is no concept of party at all, removing at the root all of these problems; every proposal directly expresses the will of the single individual, putting the least possible distance between the final outcome and the general will.

Majority rule

The currently adopted decisional system is based on the majority rule, meaning that for any list of options, the chosen one will be that with the highest number of votes; this might look like a fair model but it's not, because it's arbitrarily based on a binary and exclusive mode of choice that does not reflect the real way human preference works; in other words, for every available choice, a person can only decide whether he agrees with that choice or not, and only 1 possible positive choice is allowed; this is a faulty model, since ignores that human will does not work in a binary fashion (yes or not) nor an exclusive one (either...or) but as a continuous spectrum of preferences (more or less) that are independent from each other (and/or); because of this, such a system will inevitably distort the decisional process, increasing the probabilities of giving a final result that does not match the actual general will.
For example, in a state where 40% of the voters have a 100% preference (complete agreement) for choice "A" and a 0% preference (complete disagreement) for "B", while the remaining 60% have a 0% preference (complete disagreement) for "A" and a 50% preference (indifference) for "B", the average preference would be 40% for "A" and 30% for "B" meaning that people's *real* general preference is for "A"; however, in a system that merely counts how many people prefer B over A (as a relative measure), the result will unfairly favor choice "B" since that number is superior.
In the P.P.P. instead, things are decided not by merely counting the number of votes, but by allowing people to determine their exact degree of preference for any available option and, for each one of them, averaging all specific degrees of preference, guaranteeing that the final outcome will always represent the closest possible match to the real general will.

Non proportionality

In cases where some form of nesting is featured, the mainstream system usually treats the decision coming from every administrative division as if it came from a single individual; that is: it makes no distinction about the people size of the member groups, nor about the exact degree of prevalence the majority had over the rest. Because of this, the vote coming from a small group has the same value as those coming from biggers groups, with the result that people from the former have an unfairly increased decisional power compared to people from the latter, while the people from the bigger minorities might have their decisional power unfairly decreased.
For example, in a federation of 3 states, where one hosts 40m people all of which voted for choice "A" while each one of the other 2 host 30m of people 1/3 of which voted for choice "A" and the rest for "B", then the majority of the entire population voted for "A", however the final outcome will be "B". The same would happen in a federation of 5 states of equal population, where the people voting for "A" amount to 6/10 in 3 states, and 9/10 in the other 2, while the rest vote for "B".
In order to avoid these problems, in the P.P.P., whenever the result of the votes from an administrative division is to be transported to a higher-level one, the exact percentage of preference is always taken into account, and is always weighted by the amount of people in it, so that the final outcome of any voting session will be the same that would be if every single individual from any involved administrative division directly took part in it.

Lack of decentralization

In the current decisional system decisions are typically only taken at the nation-state level, and no other level of social organization is recognized; people are allowed to participate exclusively on the basis of their belonging to the current nation-state and the system does not allow subdivision to indipendently decide on their own on the vast majority of isses by themselves; however, there's no guarantee that the current division of the world into nation-states reflects the actual level of personal involvement of the people in the decisions taken inside them and, in fact most of time, it doesn't: this means that in the majority of cases people will be unfairly allowed to influence decisions about issues that do not regard them at all, which basically amount to forcing their own will onto others; since every collective decision necessarily requires the individual parts to balance their own desires with those of the other members, even the outcome that comes closest to the general will (which is already extremely unlikely, for all reasons listed in this section) will necessarily be suboptimal compared to what would be if each individual subdivision were allowed to decide independently from the others.
In contrast to this, the P.P.P. is highly decentralized and allows any individual and community to decide by themselves in all case where this would be possible without interfering with the decisions of others, and only resorts at higher levels of collective organizations in those issues that would be inherently impossible to manage indipendently by lower levels without generating conflicts or sacrificing the needs of the majority for those of one member.

Lack of reversibility

The current system only allows people to exercise their decisional power on very specific occasions, like elections and referendums, which means that their decisional power is basically suspended for the vast majority of time; furthermore, such occasions are set at completely arbitrary frequency that cannot reflect the variations in people needs and/or opinions as a result of changes in either contingencies, informations, or preferences; as a consequence, all new wills will necessarily remain unfulfilled until the next call to vote, which also enables representatives to stray away from people's will and follow their own interests instead.
The P.P.P. on the other hand, poses no restrictions neither on the times at which proposals can be presented, nor the times at which votations are can be made; this allows society to constantly re-adapt itself in order to match people's will, allowing the most stable possible level of general satisfaction.

Return