Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

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You want a layered, federated, representative democracy. Not just a democracy.

By layering and federating, you introduce noise into the system. One layer may be controlled by one party, another by another. You are purposefully introducing noise and isolating possible corruption vectors. With enough noise and isolation, each time power switches over at a node or layer, there's widespread "corruption cleaning" that mostly involves running out all the corrupt guys from the other party and setting up your own corruption that works in a different way.

Looked at another way, the system has to have a way to be wrong. If one person or one party controls everything from top to bottom (or the system stops being layered and federated), then there's no feedback loop -- and there's your unholy nexus.

Personally I'd add term limits to the mix, mainly because I think whatever the government is, it should be understandable and controllable by an average citizen. Also if you're in for a long time, it's doubtful you'll change your ways -- and there goes the feedback loop again.

You never eliminate corruption. That's a fool's game. Instead what you want is to isolate it in such a way that over time it's easy to identify and remedy.

The government at federal level is still a very "noisy" affair. The ruling coalition though enjoying significant majority in lower house is far from simple majority in the upper house which holds elections once in 6 years. You only need to watch a few minutes of a session in action to realize it is well and truly a very noisy affair.

India saw the rise of regional parties with the parallel fall of the Congress party since the 90s. There are many states now where Congress has only namesake presence. This resulted in coalition rule at the federal level which was finally reversed in 2014 when BJP came to power with simple majority (though also as part of the NDA coalition). Subsequently it won most state elections, effectively gaining power in 19/31 states/union territories. But due to the bicameral nature of Indian parliament, it is far from majority in the Rajya Sabha (Upper House, where the MPs are indirectly elected). Because of this they have not been able to introduce many legislations.

The government at federal level is still a very "noisy" affair.

Perhaps so. Perhaps not. I suspect we have different definitions of "noisy". There's also a tremendous gap between what you see in the media and how things actually work. That's one of the cornerstones of a corrupt system, sadly: the impenetrable nature of trying to observe it from the outside.

I wish you the best of luck. My advice is to acknowledge human nature and create systems that work with it. These systems tend to be the ones that are able to adapt and thrive over time.

I completely agree with your POV. Hoping corruption will go away is a fool's game indeed. Just trying to highlight that compared to US system of 2 party rule, India is a true multi party system since the 90s (from a faux one earlier when Congress dominated). The BJP lead coalition appears to be reversing this but its dominance is still far below the levels enjoyed by Congress from 1947 to late 80s. And there is good possibility of its dominance reducing starting from the state elections scheduled later this year.

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