Managers

At both the local and global levels, The People will select Managers of the Executive Branch of government from a list of candidates by approval.

An example of how this might work:

  • Any adult-certified candidate may apply to become Locality Manager by filling out an application which will include biographical information and links to social media and other informational pages. A nominal filing fee should be required to discourage those seeking just to disrupt the system.
  • Compensation packages for Locality and Globality Managers (salary, housing, etc.) shall by specified by ordinance (no negotiation). Compensation should be high by existing government standards (they should be paid more like CEOs of comparably-sized companies than mayors).
  • Organizations may publicly endorse a Candidate, but neither they nor the candidate may pay for any promotion or advertising in support of the candidate (no campaigning).
  • Each voter can express a preference for each Candidate (approve, disapprove, abstain) as well as for the current Locality and Globality Managers. Candidates are shown in The System ranked by approval margins  (number who approve minus the number who disapprove) averaged daily over the month.
  • Candidates with a negative margin approval at the end of each month will be deleted. They may reapply after a three month waiting period.
  • On the first of each month if the average daily margin of approval of the top-ranked Candidate for the previous month was more than 10% higher than current Manager, that Candidate will have 48 hours to declare that they will accept the position as Manager. If they do, they will be considered “Primed” to take over the job. If they refuse, they will be removed from the candidate list and prohibited from reapplying for one year and the process restarted for any additional candidates who exceed the 10% threshold.
  • A Primed Candidate will contest to maintain daily average margin at least a 10% above the existing Manager for a period of one month. If this margin is maintained, the Primed Candidate becomes Manager effective the 1st of the following month.
  • The transition period shall be one month. The incoming Manager immediately gains ultimate authority on each decision, but may delegate as necessary. Both managers are paid for the full month regardless of hours put in. No new primed candidate can be announced for the transition month thereby guaranteeing a new manager at least 3 months as a “trial period” before they can be replaced.
  • For Global Manager position, the Candidates are all of the Locality Managers who have served at least one year, but the procedure is otherwise the same. A separate tally of global approval ratings shall be maintained for this list (i.e., each voter can make an approval assessment for any Locality Manager, but only local votes count when comparing the Locality Manager with the Candidates seeking to replace them).
  • Any Locality Manager or the Globality Manager can be removed from office effective immediately by a majority vote of the Locality Managers. The replacement will come from the current sorted list of Candidates, with one-month transition period starting immediately after the vote to remove.

Managers shall be responsible for managing the staff of the executive branch, organizing the bidding for government-supplied services (contracts), and defining and enforcing regulations. The People shall have the right to review each of these decisions.

The vast majority of decisions made in existing representative democracies are actually made by the executive branch, and in most cases by staff in that branch rather than the executives themselves. All of these decisions should be reviewable by The People but currently for the most part are not. Voting to approve each of these decisions would of course be impractical, so a simpler design must be used. Something like a “consent agenda” should work: Along with the proposal for each week in The System, there would be a list of substantive decisions made by the executive branch that week (new or significant modifications to regulations, appointments, contracts signed, etc.), that would have to be consented to before they could go into effect. Each item would have a checkbox that would essentially work like a vote to “call up” an item for an individual vote (note that this is also similar to the way a “line item veto” works). If you check the box to call up an item, an edit box would appear for you to provide a reason. The executive branch would use this feedback to delay implementation to allow time to refine the proposal and resubmit it in a future agenda, or if it looks to be a sticking point, put it into the general proposal queue. Exactly where to set the threshold to force a revision will have to be determined empirically, but it should probably be comparable to existing standards (between 10 and 20 percent, comparable to a vote to “call up” an item by an individual on a 9 or 5 member board, respectively). Note that the proxy matching system could also be brought to bear here: a request to call up an item should have much more weight if those who request this come from a wide range of personality types than if they’re all the same (which by definition would represent a “special interest” rather than The Will Of The People).

The purpose of government is to ensure cooperation (regulation), not to provide services, and to do so as efficiently as possible. As such, it should be expected that most government services other than regulatory functions will be contracted out rather provided by government employees. This includes police and fire services. Don’t like the way the police are treating The People? No need for (largely ineffective) rioting in the streets, just veto the renewal of the contract which will require your Manager to find a different company, presumably one that better suits The People. The new company can then choose to hire any employees from the old firm they want, and let the rest look for jobs in other areas (or in other industries).

The Judicial branch at each level shall consist of a Supreme Court of five judges with three alternates specified by the Executive Branch.

Judges and alternates are approval-rated using The System, just as for Managers. If a Supreme Court judge maintains a net-negative margin for a one-month period, they are immediately replaced by the top-rated alternate, and a new alternate named by the Manager at that level. Alternates also, on a case-by-case basis, fill in for judges who become unavailable on a temporary basis due to illness, etc.

The People retain the right to remove any government employee, including any Manager, judge, military officer, Moderator, or any other type of employee at any level by majority disapproval at the relevant level.

The System will also allow “write-in” candidates: If a majority of The People specify an individual this way they will be removed immediately. This feature is sorely lacking in existing government systems. Even when a non-elected government manager (e.g., cabinet member, Supreme Court judge, etc.) is demonstrably incompetent, The People have no effective means of removing that individual from a position. This leads to frequent ineffective or even disastrous results as the US has seen in recent years with many regulatory agencies (e.g., the SEC, FEMA, EPA. etc.). No corporation or military force could function this way. How is it permissible that government managers can hire their relatives or cronies without giving The People any control at all over the situation other than resorting to ineffective protests?

Besides the power of The People, which is unlimited, there are three other major sources of political power in a matchist government. All three of these have equivalents in existing organizations, but will be far more important and integrated components in matchist government and so the design of the systems around them warrant very close attention:

  1. Manager, a position that will wield comparable power to current executive-branch heads (governors and the president in the US, albeit presumably with much more restricted “executive order” power than these offices currently have access to).
  2. Social Engineer, the individuals who will manage proposal generation and the “consent agenda”. They must be skilled in generating and revising proposals such that they are effective, efficient, and pass with high a margin of approval, but they must also be skilled in communicating these designs to The People to facilitate them making the best decisions. It is presumed that the individuals with unusual talent in this area will be treated as “rock stars”, celebrities who are encouraged to practice their art whenever and wherever they can. As it is, the people who write bills/ordinances/laws have exactly zero of these characteristics.
  3. Moderator in The System, which while ostensibly primarily that of “traffic cop”, could in many cases have major impacts on the freedom of individuals and even public policy in general through the use (or misuse) of flagging and other acts (topic or thread deletion or reorganization, etc.). A system that balances this power with close supervision by The People without allowing them to end up micromanaging their employees is key to matchism’s success.

Business offices and employment of the Globality shall be distributed among all the Localities, with these branches containing the necessary level of redundancy to accommodate incapacitation in other Localities due to natural or human-caused disasters.

Although the Globality Manager would necessarily have a primary office, the Globality infrastructure must be distributed among the Localities such that a disaster (or attack) in one of them would not unduly disrupt operations. Indeed the office of the Globality Manager might rotate among multiple Localities at the preference of that Manager to ensure that this redundancy is fully functional.

The Globality would also be the ultimate insurer and backup for the public infrastructure in every Locality: It should be possible to run any Locality from a physical location in any other, or from Globality offices if no nearby Locality office is suitable.

Next: The Law