Pyramid Republic

The fundamental problem with representative democracy is that it is only as good as the process for choosing the representatives. Consider, for example, the process of voting for President of the United States: in any given election, about half the population is going to feel disenfranchised as a result, and that's arguably not an incorrect perception on their part. But in order to be a representative government, there must necessarily be some compromise on the matter.

In the Pyramid Republic, the general public only directly votes for local representatives. These representatives are apportioned roughly according to population. For example, every cluster of 5,000 people might get to select three representatives. These districts could be determined geographically, although experiments involving other methods of assigning districts, such as voluntarily through coordination and registration of a group via the Internet could prove interesting.

These representatives are responsible for managing local affairs, and are also responsible for electing representatives to the level of government directly above them. The scope of their collective authority, then, is limited to the set of people represented in aggregate by the representative they elect to the next higher level of government. So, citizens might directly elect neighborhood presidents, who then are responsible for electing a city councillor, who in turn may, along with all of the other councillors, collectively exercise power over all residents of the city. Elections are held whenever there is a vacancy, but no person may ever advance more than one level upwards at a time—so, for example, aldermen may only become mayors, not governors, and the system may only be entered from the bottom.

The pyramid proceeds upwards, group by group, until it reaches a handful of representatives at the highest level (although in countries adhering to the principles of Federalism, there may be multiple such pyramids, and there may regardless be multiple pyramids representing different branches of government). The need for a single executive at the top is thereby obviated, since the representatives at the highest level need only negotiate statewide policy among themselves. They may, if they choose, select one of themselves to be the "President", "Speaker", "Prime Minister", or "Grand Poobah", but that person remains "first among equals" and enjoys no special powers over the others.

Anyone elected to a position may serve in that position indefinitely, or until removed from office via an ostracism vote. Patterned loosely after the Athenian process, ostracism is a method of removing unsatisfactory representatives from office. Every so often, each citizen may participate in a retain/recall vote for any of his own representatives, including any representative elected by one of their representatives. These elections are held with frequency varying from every six months for the lowest level representatives, to every four years for the highest. Any person who receives more recall votes than retain votes is immediately removed from office, and relegated to basic citizen status. That person may run for office again, but of course must start over at the very bottom.

Under this system, government more directly comes from the mandate of the people. At each level, the people you vote for are largely from the pool of people you personally are familiar with, and you can therefore be far more confident in knowing that you've chosen the best person to represent the interests of you and your constituents. Additionally, each citizen has a more or less equal say in the overall makeup of the government, without giving one group or the other a disproportionate amount of power at any given time.

Of course, as an (as yet) experimental/theoretical form of government, many of the above outlined parameters could be adjusted or substituted as necessary to address unforeseen problems; the practical implementation presented here is merely a suggestion. So this idea really encompasses any form of government defined by the two key features of (1) level-by-level ascension, wherein a vacancy in any given rank may only be filled by a member of the immediately preceding rank, and (2) the presence of some process by which citizens may, either directly or indirectly, remove any unsatisfactory representative from office.