Mahanu

draft project

Democracy, Examined

how self-rule actually worked

Understand humanity's experiments in democracy — what worked, what failed, and the current state of representative and direct forms — well enough to reason out what would work if a new order were set up from scratch, say on Mars.

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A copy carries over only the public parts you see here — the owners' private files never leave their own vaults.

🚧 Draft — not final. This page was auto-generated as day-one scaffolding for the project and still needs a human pass before it reads as finished. The blanks and placeholders below are intentional — someone who runs this project should fill them in and delete this notice.

Forms of self-rule

The catalogue — every serious way humans have organised collective decisions, each an honest set of trade-offs rather than a hero or a villain. The discipline: state what each form is good at and what it fails at, because the Mars charter later has to pick deliberately, not by default.

Form How decisions get made Strong at Fails at Seen in
Direct democracy Citizens vote on issues themselves Legitimacy, no principal-agent gap Scale, time, expertise, mob swings Athens (partial); Swiss referendums
Representative Elect people to decide for you Scales; division of labour Capture, careerism, distance from voters Most modern republics
Sortition Decision-makers chosen by lottery Immune to campaign money; statistically representative No mandate feel; needs strong support/expertise Athenian juries; modern citizens' assemblies
Parliamentary Executive drawn from the legislature Flexible, fast to change leaders Instability; coalition horse-trading UK, India
Presidential Separately elected executive Clear mandate; fixed terms Gridlock; strongman risk US, France (semi)
Federal Power split across levels Local fit; laboratories of policy Duplication; blame-shifting India, US, Germany

The questions each form answers differently

  • Who decides? — everyone / representatives / the randomly chosen / the few.
  • How is power limited? — courts, terms, federalism, a free press, an armed citizenry — which, and why.
  • How does it correct a mistake? — the single most important property, and the one failure studies keep returning to.

For the Mars charter (later)

Every row above is a menu item. The charter's job is to choose — direct for some decisions, sortition for others, hard limits everywhere — and to defend each pick against a specific historical failure. This table is the menu; the charter is the meal.