The Flaws That Kill Our Democracy

by Klaas Mensaert

Democracy is under pressure. Western democratic societies face problems such as today’s increased polarization, climate change, and migration crises. But democracies have been facing challenges from their very existence. Democracy should enable us to peacefully resolve social problems by political means. Unfortunately, it has failed to do so—before the American Civil War, during the Weimar Republic, in many post-colonial African countries, and more recently in the Arab Spring. If this system is broken, what are the flaws that prevent it from working well?

The Flaws That Kill Our Democracy analyzes the fundamentals of our system of representative democracy in order to detect its defects. Klaas Mensaert examines and proposes solutions to these problems that are both simple and that may have the largest impact. He addresses important questions such as: What are political parties? Should political parties be ideological? How and by whom should one be represented? Should elections resemble popularity contests? What is the link between economics and politics?

An enlightening analysis of Western political ills, The Flaws That Kill Our Democracy provides not only insights into our fundamental political problems—it also offers concrete and scientific solutions.

127 pages, Paperback

Published March 24, 2020

About the author

As a bioinformatician, Mensaert has been inspired by decentralized, bottom-up processes that can be observed both in nature and in the best of human endeavors—ideas such as the free market and the scientific process. As a former member of the Belgian Pirate Party, he has observed both the capabilities and weaknesses of political parties.

Reviews

[Zjef Van Acker · Rating 5 out of 5]

** Spoiler Alert **

“The flaws that kill our democracy” really impressed me.

Klaas distilled 4 years of passionate research and thorough thinking into 109 pages of only the most important technical and historical information. You will need all of your focus and attention to completely comprehend what he’s saying - but it’s all worth it because this book has the potential to become a milestone in history by fundamentally improving politics and democracy.

For this review - I will discuss four things that were highlighted by my brain while reading the book.

(1) Article 42 of the Belgian constitution - what is obvious when it comes to democracy?
(2) The flaws that kill our democracy: Exclusivity and centralisation
(3) An upgraded parliament - How can our democracy work better via more inclusivity and decentralisation
(4) An upgraded book - some ideas for the next versions!

Article 42 of the Belgian Constitution

I’m pretty sure every decent democratic country has this article in its constitution in one way or another. It is the perfect indicator of what democracy should be:

Article 42: “The members of both chambers represent the nation and not only their own electors”.

This seems so obvious!. Yet if you look at most international democratic politics, it’s hard to imagine that there are a lot of politicians upholding these values. There is an increasing polarization and an increasing bubble effect. The below graph is a beautiful proof of this. It’s the evolution of the level of agreement in the US congress.

click here for graph

It seems obvious that in a democracy, when people get elected, it is their jobs to make good decisions for all the people. One of the very important conditions for doing good for everyone, is a high level of agreement. The current evolutions of polarization are the opposite of that, hence there is something undermining democracy.

Klaas Mensaert - wisely - chose not to attack the integrity of politicians. He went to look for the fundamental driving forces behind this concerning evolution. He shows in a very clear way that the best players of a certain game are the product of the rules of that game. And some of the rules of governing a country are rewarding things that undermine democracy itself. Just like you will never have a healthy democratic government in Monopoly, as long as the rules of monopoly reward having a monopoly.

Reality is not as bad as the democracy in a game of Monopoly, but current democracies do have some fundamental flaws that undermine its core values.
The flaws that kill our democracy: Exclusivity and Centralisation

Klaas Mensaert builds a firm case around the flaws in his first two chapters. He does this by referring to other researchers and thinkers, the main ones being Nassim Taleb (author of “Antifragile”) and Moisey Yakovlevich Ostrogorsky (a politician far ahead of his time in 1902). Via all these references, Klaas thoroughly describes what the problems are, and distills them to Exclusivity and Centralisation.

Centralisation

“Centralisation is the process by which the activities of an organisation become concentrated within a particular geographical location group. This moves the important decision-making and planning powers within the center of the organisation.” (Wikipedia of course).

Centralisation is not good or bad. It has it’s pro’s and con’s. When you have a democracy, it is important to know that - just like a computer - a centralised parliament has a maximum processing capability. The bigger the organisation or country, the more information and activities there are to process and the harder it becomes to take everything into account and make the right decisions.

In our increasingly globalised and connected world, there is an enormous amount of information. And democracy has not yet learned how to deal with this. It is lagging behind.

This centralisation-problem is amplified because of the second flaw in our democracy: Politicians waste precious information-processing power on polarization caused by exclusivity.

Exclusivity

What if you’d have to choose 1 shop every 4 years, and you could only shop at that store for those entire 4 years? This would put an enormous amount of pressure on the chooser, and even more it would put an enormous amount of pressure on the shop. For the simple reason that that store has to provide everything.

In politics we can also only vote for one party, and that puts an enormous amount of pressure on the parties. Each party has to have an answer to everything. Each party has to be as good as the whole government itself.

You’d think this is good, but it’s not. You want a government to be amazing, but you don’t need its parts to be good at everything. Just like a rocket engineer doesn’t need to be amazing at business. The most successful rocket companies put their brilliant rocket engineers together with business people, marketeers, sales, software engineers,... and so on.

The basic idea: We need more specialized solutions in order to run a country, not less! With political exclusivity our democracy loses a lot of the variety in specialised knowledge, ideas and insights.

And it gets even worse if you combine exclusivity and centralisation.

While there are probably more than a 1000 issues in a country. Elections are being won over only a handful of those issues. This is extremely fragile and can get us into extremely dangerous situations. Like Klaas Mensaert says it in his book: It’s quite troubling that we still have more or less the same political system with which the NAZI’s rose to power.

Luckily, Klaas describes in his last chapter how we can evolve into a more healthy and antifragile democracy.

An upgraded parliament

So how do we build an antifragile political system that is more inclusive and more decentralised? Or simply said: How do we upgrade our parliaments to act as a well oiled team that has a much higher processing power?

Klaas Mensaert describes how this can be done with only two changes: Two types of representatives, two different ways of electing them

To improve democracy we should have two types of representatives: party-representatives and people’s representatives.

Party-representatives are the ones we already know. They have a specific ideology, a specific goal or a specific speciality. Because we want inclusivity of more specialised knowledge and insights, we want a wide variety of parties that are specialised in a wide variety of subjects. This has a couple of very interesting side effects:

Politics becomes more transparent. Organisations that are now influencing politics behind the scenes via lobbying are now incentivised to publically join the political debate. Lobbying people’s representatives behind the scenes can also be criminalised.
Ideological and utopian thinking becomes less dominant. Voters can vote for as many parties as they want. In this way you can be for a free market, but also want social and ecological justice. Everyone can vote on what’s important for them.

You might think: “Even more parties? This is going to be mayhem!”. But nothing is further from the truth. For the simple reason that the parties will not have decision power. The decisions are made by the people’s representatives.

The people’s representatives are not tied to any party and are inherently obliged to listen to all the ideas of the representatives of the elected parties. Their job is to pick the best ideas and to make the best decisions for the good of all (Article 42).

What makes the people’s representatives truly an interesting upgrade for democracy, is the fact that next to voting for them, you can also vote against them.

The voting against is something I have seen with Christian Felber’s economy of the common good. It causes decision-making to be much more equal, stable and just. I can therefore only applaud the fact that Klaas incorporates this in his proposal for upgraded democracy (I have to add that it’s not completely the same as what Christian Felber describes because different circumstances create different solutions).

“Voting against” has another amazing benefit: The polarising politicians get much less power. When you can “vote against” someone, people who focus on connecting get into power.

As examples: Trump would never have gotten elected because there’s too many US citizens “against” him. The same is probably true for Bernie Sanders. In Europe - the extreme right that’s on the rise everywhere, would never get the amount of power they have now. Simply because at least half of the population does not want to be represented by an extreme ideology like this. This does not mean that these voices should not be present and listened to. Many different ideologies have to be present to compete with each other, in order to improve. Yet the ultimate decisions should be made by the people that link all voters and ideologies as much as possible.

When you get the specialised party representatives and the connecting people’s representatives into one government, that government will become more decentralised and more inclusive. This government has a higher processing power and will be more capable, more decisive and - of course: more democratic.

An upgraded book

What good is a book review if you don’t have at least some constructive feedback to help improve it for the next print.

Frame the solution by using the solution

One big improvement I immediately saw was the framing of the third chapter. Framing the solution, by using the solution would give an extra layer to the book.

Klaas should frame the third chapter as a political proposal by one party, which then would be criticised and improved with the help of the other parties (more ideas and more insights). In the end he could describe how this proposal has to be voted upon by the people’s representatives.

It would give this book an even higher level of genius, while actually making it easier for us (the readers) to grasp the idea.

A possible way forward

What Klaas also doesn’t mention in his book, is a way forward. What steps could be taken to get to this upgraded democracy? Because I love to think about this, I shall propose an idea here, one that would definitely work in Belgium (which has more than 10 parties in its federal parliament).

A simple way forward is to start a new party that walks the talk. A new party that specializes like a party, and acts as people’s representatives.

The specialization is to make the political system more inclusive and decentralised. And it’s elected representatives would act as the connecting people’s representatives. This party Listens to all the insights of the current parties and their opinions, deciding which solutions are the most useful for specific problems. Basically - if there’s more than one party that you like, you just vote for this new party.

This could work in many other democratic countries, other countries will need other ways forward.

Conclusions

Klaas Mensaert did his research and thinking very thoroughly, and wrote his book in such a way that it could be referred to by many people in many different democratic systems. After reading this book you will understand that exclusivity and centralisation have had their time, and that Inclusivity and decentralisation are the way to go!

This book has the potential to shake the foundations of our democracy, and start a wave that will actually improve it.

Are you one of those people that is interested in politics, then this book is A MUST BUY and MUST READ for you.

*Disclaimer - Klaas Mensaert gave me the book for the purpose of reading it!

[Denise · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's no such thing as the perfect political system - on that, I think, we can all agree. Out of the ones being practiced in the world, I strongly agree with the author that representative democracy is the best one available. I also strongly agree that it, too, comes with a number of significant flaws. Mensaert lays them out one by one, giving detailed explanations of how and why various aspects of the system as currently practiced in different countries pose difficulties and offering suggestions on how they might be addressed. While I don't wholeheartedly agree with all his proposed solutions, I certainly found this an interesting and thoughtprovoking read. Despite its brevity and intriguing subject matter, however, the book nevertheless proved to be somewhat of a slog. The writing is, to put it simply, dry as dust. The aspiring political scientist may not mind that so much, but as a casual reader with an interest in politics, I had to strain to get through it.

***I received a free copy in exchange for an honest review.***

[Michiel · Rating 4 out of 5]

In "The Flaws That Kill Our Democracy", Mensaert discusses the main issues with our current western democratic system, which inevitably leads to polarization, stagnation and corruption. This book outlines an alternative approach based on smaller, specialized inclusive parties. Borrowing ideas from scientific disciplines such as complex systems theory, Mensaert argues that such a system would be antifragile, which would be more resistant to external lobbying and influence.

It is a thin booklet yet rich in ideas. I immensely enjoyed the scientific approach to democracy. The last part is, relating to voting, is in my option the least well developed (or rather, it discusses the most complicated problem: finding out what people want!)—food for many stimulating discussions.

[Peter Monien · Rating 5 out of 5]

As someone who has read a lot about the topic of democracy and also wrote a book about upgrading democracy, I gotta say, that I am impressed.

The bottom-up approach of Klaas Mensaert's ‘inclusive party’ completely dissolves the current party oligopoly, greatly reduces the current polarization, and allows for better cooperation.

Klaas argues well why the current approach of ‘exclusive parties’ leads to polarization, a large accumulation of power, little innovation, and instability of the entire political system.

Great read and one of the most convincing models for a far better democratic system.

I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

[Angelino Desmet · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the quest for efficiency, scientists and engineers are often inspired by, and get praised for using mechanisms from the natural world. That politics should be no different is my main takeaway from this book (e.g. bottom-up approach, piecemeal changes, trial-by-combat, etc.), achievable ideas I can fully get behind. Except for that last one, that was a joke.

The Flaws That Kill Our Democracy is insightfully written with academic integrity, but the author occasionally forgets that his readers won't always share his academic background or knowledge. This lead to some paragraphs going over my head. Similar to having a mathematical formula explained; it makes sense until you have to prove it yourself. Fortunately, this criticism—punishment, if you will—does not fit the 'crime'. It just might need additional descriptive examples in which one can follow the reasoning. That being said, his brevity is definitely a virtue; especially for a topic as boring as contemporary politics. That it doesn't need to be is made abundantly clear. I sincerely hope the proposed new paradigm comes to fruition, because there's a desperate need for the populace to feel relevant again, beyond mere consumers.

I usually sell books unworthy of my bookcase, and this one is getting a spot. Excellent work, Klaas.

[Rita Bogorad]

First things first, I do not come from a political background. I am a scientist and my usual reads are scientific publications with focus on biology.
The book was a great weekend read! It was something insightfull and rather easy to follow thanks to the relatable examples and the book structure.
As an author, Klaas gives a very a very interesting view on the flaws of democracy. What's even more interesting is that he goes on to suggest scientific solutions to what is commonly percieved as strictly social problems. As a scientist, those solutions make a lot of sense to me.
At no point in the book I was lost or uninterested becuase the book is just long enough to feel connection to the author and grasp his train of thought but it is also compact enough to be read in one breath.
Overall, time well spent, great value for money and it has definitely enriched my knowledge of democracy.

[Nathan Albright · Rating 3 out of 5]

[Note: This book was provided free of charge by BookSirens in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts and opinions are my own.]

In many ways, this book resembles a shorter cousin to John C. Calhoun's disquisition on American politics in a way that demonstrates a desire to create a more consensus-based government that serves as a case of reasoning from flawed premises.  Given that the Belgians have adopted a concurrent majority model not too dissimilar from Calhoun's model, that is not too surprising.  On the positive side, the author has clearly read a great many good books and has sought to gain insight from them.  On the other hand, the author shows a great deal of contradictions that show the internally inconsistent nature of late-stage socialism as it relates to the reform and structure of political systems.  The author tries to argue for bottom-up reforms of the political system while simultaneously arguing for the creation of more layers of bureaucracy in an already overly bureaucratic European democratic model, and claims to be a moderate while simultaneously endorsing Pirate socialism.  The book certainly has interesting insights and the author has done a good job at thinking about issues, but he is still creating an idealistic and utopian view of politics that seeks to promote the soft tyranny of bureaucratic solutions to deal with the threat of division between genuinely opposed political parties.  Whether or not that soft tyranny is to be preferred to the options that result from populist demagoguery or whether it is to be viewed as legitimate are up to the reader to decide.

This book is a relatively short one at between 100 and 150 pages and it begins with a preface and acknowledgement that introduce the author and his background and perspective.  After that the author looks at the issue of decentralization and tries to discuss his own personal political awakening as well as a look at fragility and the nature of political parties and their flaws.  The author looks at exclusive parties (to which he contrasts his own goal for inclusive parties) and the issues of oligarchies and specialization that results from having people committed to political parties, somewhat disregarding the reasons why times of crisis tend to have sharply divided and exclusive parties more than normal periods.  The author also deals with questions of representation, including complete choice voting and accounting for popularity in different ways as well as providing negative comments about lobbyists and the way that the political process can frequently be manipulated by the press or marketing efforts.  After that the book ends with an appendix that includes an faq as well as notes and additional ideas.

I expect this book to have multiple versions.  This is only the first, and it seems likely that the author will address concerns and critiques of his philosophy as well as changes to the political behavior of the Western democracies by making further versions that are likely more complicated and more nuanced.  The author notes the status quo bias of many voters while also presenting a solution that is clearly not a status quo one by adding layers of elected officials and seeking to counteract the presence of lobbyists.  If the author recognizes the problem of biased media and biased political elites within parties, it is difficult for republics to understand what the people want--and people, especially the low-information masses of our contemporary world, may not be well-equipped to understand and articulate what they want no matter what model of government we provide them.  Ultimately, the author seeks to fix fragility within the governments of the West that may or may not exist through the use of very technical solutions that appear to support an agenda of managing democracy by unelected technocratic and bureaucratic elites.  And if the author finds that compelling, there will be many people who disagree.  Nonetheless, I do not expect this to be the last word that the author has on the subject.

[Janalyn, the blind reviewer]

In this book The Flaws That Kill Our Democracy Claus Mensurt , Tries and in my humble opinion succeeds and explaining the week parts of our democracy. Not only does he break each aspect of democracy down he also In very simple terms explains it from all sides. For example chapter 1.5 is titled, What are Political parties,1.6 is critique of political parties, 1.7 changing political parties in 1.8 The flaws of political parties A&M each one like most of the topics he tells you the good the bad and the ugly. He explains it all in an academic yet flowing text and for the most part kept it really interesting. This book was written about democracy And he referenced countries in Europe but mainly his opinions were about England. Do you know what they say though if it votes like a democracy it’s a democracy and this book can be read whether you live in the UA Or the USA. Also, I didn’t find they were any political opinions one way or the other with this book his point in writing it wasn’t to get Debs in on any party or politician it is just a book explaining democracy and I can honestly say I thought it was pretty good. It’s a book I would definitely recommend to those who like political books in history books. I definitely think this is the perfect book to have in your library if you love either genre.

[The Inquisitive Biologist · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Flaws That Kill Our Democracy is a neat little book that proposes changes to the system of representative democracy so as to fix it shortcomings. See my full review at https://inquisitivebiologist.com/2020...