Is Democracy The Best System?

It’s a common saying. Democracy is a terrible system, but it’s absolutely the best one we have.

Most people seem to agree with this. And I guess, on the surface, I agree with it too. But that didn’t stop me from asking the question: “Is it the best system though?”

I am a game designer and a fiction writer. I also lean into the “educational” part of these things, by making educational board games, writing stories based on history/science, etcetera. As such, I have thought a lot about different ways to govern a society. I wrote fantasy stories (mostly for younger ages) that started with a question like “what if a country was ruled in THIS weird way?”. I created games where you are running some country or city (or running something together) and you are actually playing and experimenting with different rules and systems.

And it seems to me that it’s a very valid question to ask whether democracy is actually “the best system”.

Most people seem very narrow-minded here, without perhaps realizing it. For example, some people believe that any society must have the rule “one person = one vote”, so any system that deviates from that is automatically impossible in their mind. And then some people are on the other end of the spectrum. They’ve decided that all systems are hopeless and politics is a farce and they don’t care any more, so they’ll refuse to consider any alternatives that might be “better”.

Democracy Means Many Things

And that’s, I think, where my answer can start. Yes, democracy is “the best system we have”. But there are many many many ways to execute a democratic system. Many alternatives. Many tweaks to how you vote, how representatives are chosen, how laws are decided, etcetera. Even tiny changes can make a world of difference. You can execute democracy badly, or you can execute it in a much more effective way.

Because, in the end, democracy means nothing more than “the people decide”. Demos means “people” and kratos means “rule”. In a way, democracy is simply the general idea that the people living in a country vote on how that country should do things. As opposed to, for example, a “dictator for life” deciding everything. Or, simply rolling a die and letting chance decide.

That final example is an interesting one. I stumbled upon the idea of “Lottocracy” not too long ago. It’s a very simple system of governance: you randomly pick some people to be the lawmakers/jury/judges/deciders for every issue. That’s it. As long as you use a truly random number generator, you can do this.

And the idea might sound silly to you. Like a joke. But think about it. Any bias is gone. There can not be problematic people in power (for a long time), because random people are in power at random moments. Everyone is actually involved in the process, much more directly than by casting a single vote once in a while. And if you truly apply this to everything, then, over time, the law of large numbers dictates that the decisions made are spot-on for how the people in the country feel. All people get equally many chances to be the decider

I’m not saying the Netherlands should switch to this system tomorrow. Of course not. It has clear downsides, such as conflicts of interest. When there’s a conflict between you and your neighbor, you don’t want your neighbor’s family to be randomly chosen as the judges. (Even those issues, however, are removed and counteracted over time. Again, law of large numbers. Repeat some random experiment often enough and all extreme results will even out: you get lucky with the people chosen for your case just as often as you get unlucky.)

I’m saying this is a possible system of governance. And it has clear advantages over democracy and should not be brushed off as a joke. Yet whenever you mention something like this, people will laugh it off and not even consider any part of it.

A Simple Example

Now it gets really interesting. Because I make and play a lot of games, I design systems and get to actually see if they work in real-time. And quite often, those systems resemble systems of governance in some way. It’s simply a very common and engaging problem for players to try and solve. Whenever you have multiple things, multiple players, multiple places on a game board … you’re gonna have to make decisions and decide who gets power and who doesn’t.

And when you implement “Lottocracy”, it actually represents the will of the players (“will of the people”) very well. For example, at the end of each round you could say,

• “You all get a reward: 1 gold, 1 wood, or 1 point.”
• Now pick a random player (roll a die, use a random number generator on your phone/online, draw sticks, whatever)
• They decide what they want. For example, they need wood, so everyone ends up getting 2 wood.

Because the decider is chosen randomly, if the game has enough rounds, the rewards given represent what players want very well. Everyone gets a few turns to ask for the thing they want. If many players want that thing … then they’re likely to get it too on other player’s turns.

Now, compare this with a democratic system. Something that’s present in more games, usually through voting.

• All players cast a secret vote (1 gold, 1 wood or 1 point).
• The end results are revealed tallied. The one that comes out on top is given out.
• For example, your 3-player group said: 2 votes for wood, 1 for gold.

That one player might need gold for the entire game, and they are guaranteed to never get it. Because other players keep getting a majority for some other resource. (And don’t even bother finding a fair rule for ties.) Unless you happen to be part of the majority, your vote and your desires do not matter at all.

I’ve seen this in practice over and over. Games with a typical democratic system usually lead to very dissatisfied players and do not represent them well. At the end, they’ll remark things like “I felt like the game was playing itself” or “I could never do what I want”. Games with more “gamified” and “outrageous” systems of voting/decision-making gave players much more agency, more strategical plays, and made them more eager to actuall play.

Now realize that both examples are democracy. In the first one, the people decide. In the second one, the people decide. In the first one, it would not be democracy if you simply rolled a die that told you which random resource everyone would get. Then no player would decide anything.

They’re wildly different systems. But they’re both democracy. That’s why I say that democracy is probably the best kind of system, but it’s not one specific system at all.

Real-World Examples

But when you tell people that “our democracy doesn’t work” or “democracy needs to change”, they think you’re some extremist nutjob who wants anarchy. They think you want democracy gone entirely.

Instead, I write this article to encourage people to try and improve their democracies. You can stay a democracy, just a better one!

For example,

• (Very) Early Greek city states had democracy, but they did not “elect” anyone. Instead, on every issue, everyone had a say. Directly. This is nice in some ways, but also obviously leads to endless discussion and lots of wasted time and non-action. IMPROVE IT!
• The USA is a democracy. But their system of “you win the state, you win all its seats” is laughable. It has created a system where one party is fully in power while, almost every time, 49% of the country wants the other one. IMPROVE IT!
• The Netherlands has a pretty fair system. You vote on one person, all votes are thrown into a single pile, and parties gain seats by percentage of total votes. This, however, has been shown to lead to “strategic voting” and very skewed results at the end if many people do not strategically vote (by voting on a very small party instead). IMPROVE IT!
• It’s been shown again and again that “Single Transferable Vote” is universally better. It’s a more fair system for actually “transfering” people’s votes to who gets to be in power. Simply put, you write down a ranking (most desirable candidate to least), and that ranking allows the system to mathematically make the most people happy with which candidates end up elected. Is it the best though? No, of course not, but it would be a big IMPROVEMENT!

I don’t get how this isn’t a major talking point all the time. How this isn’t the first thing anyone checks when a new election is coming up. Can we improve the rules of our democracy? Can we use our experience and past knowledge to create a better system?

If I ran some political party that just lost a load of seats in the election, I would be screaming this! I would say “if we had used a fairer system, we would have a number of seats that represents the people’s votes more!” I would at least try to get the discussion going and move to a better voting system in the future. It seems an obvious thing for small/opposition parties to focus on, because that change for the better has the added benefit of (likely) helping them too in the next election.

Most of all, however, we can change a lot more than just “how exactly people vote”.

• We can change the number of elected people.
• We can change how often we elect them. (I read a fun idea once about simply having a “running vote”. You could change it, at most, once every week or so. The votes were constantly counted and checked to see which politicians could stay or had to go. A bit extreme, of course, but still fun to think about.)
• We might abolish “parties” entirely and just make every politician be their own individual.
• We can hold a lot more referendums, asking people to vote on a specific large issue on several days of the year. They can be “non-binding”, just to gauge what the people want, or actually “binding” and now the politicians have to do it.
• We can change how the media handles elections. Are polls allowed? How aggressive is campaigning allowed to be before it’s just propaganda and manipulation? Should all parties get equal attention, or should only the largest ones be invited to debates?
• We can set strict rules on who may be elected, what they can or can’t do, when they’re thrown out again, etcetera.
• The people can set specific issues for which they want change before a specific deadline. They can actually demand things from politicians and hold them accountable.
  • Because right now, even in the Netherlands, there is no accountability or check at all. Politicians can say one thing in their campaign, do the opposite, then blatantly lie about it, and … well, that’s “just politics, right?” No! We can CHANGE how politics works! We can IMPROVE IT!

I’m not saying all these ideas are good. I’m just saying the options exist. Democratic systems can always be tweaked and improved. Doing so will keep it a democracy—the “best system we have”—while also actually leading to more happy citizens and better (or at least more representative) leadership. It can make your vote actually matter more and your influence on making the country better just slightly bigger.

This is obviously a huge topic. There are many possibilities that even I have never even considered or stumbled upon. I don’t have specific answers—though I will try to give my thoughts below—but that isn’t a problem. You can still improve democracies, and explore avenues for representing the people better, without knowing the “best” system.

My Personal Thoughts

See, the issue is that people are stupid. I’ve said this many times, don’t get offended yet. I am stupid too! We are monkeys with a slight upgrade to our body and brain.

This is where the first part of that famous saying comes from: “Democracy is a terrible system, but …”.

Because it means the people decide what to do, but the people as a whole are rather stupid.

The alternative, however, is that the people do not decide … about what happens to them. We go back to dictators, to randomness, to survival of the fittest. We instantly lose more freedom and autonomy than any human, even the most silly of all, are willing to give up. And I just don’t see a world where any of that creates a sustainable, fair, and free society.

So, begrudgingly, we admit that it has to be a democracy then.

So … how do we counteract the stupidity of people? How do we allow smarter ideas to prevail? How do we prevent people’s worst impulses?

The best way to get people to do smarter stuff is by making that the easiest and most common thing to do. To design their environment such that being smart and thoughtful is the standard. Doing anything else would be more work and more punishing, so you don’t let your stupidity win.

Thus we should design our democratic system for that. We should design it such that there are inherent guardrails. That it automatically steers people towards knowing what they want, and then voting for that thing in the right way.

Research repeatedly shows, for example, that most Dutch people are very left-leaning. A large majority of people thinks the same way about society, about how everyone should be equal, how we should help the weak, all very progressive points of view. And yet, the majority of them votes for right-wing parties. Often even extreme right-wing parties. They vote against their own interests.

Look at the USA. A majority (supposedly …) voted for Trump, who explicitly said he would place tariffs on stuff, take away benefits, ignore the law, etcetera. And now he is actually doing that … and people are surprised. His own voters are completely shocked that they are actually losing everything, and stuff is getting more expensive, and they lose their rights, and so forth. They all voted against their own interests.

A proper democracy should not have the vast majority of people vote for the thing they don’t actually want. If that’s happening, your system just isn’t functioning. You should design a better system that makes this far less likely. Not impossible—that’s not feasible. Just very unlikely that it lets people be stupid and vote against themselves.

The entire idea of “campaigning” is idiotic to me. It’s nothing more than propaganda. It should be about your actual plans and perspective. About your logic and the facts of what you intend to do when you get in power. Anything else is just advertising, and those with the biggest budget and the nastiest tactics win. This is how the PVV gets so large in the Netherlands. They hammer home the same point over and over, until people falsely believe it’s the most important thing in the world, and it is a problem, and only they are going to solve it. And so they vote PVV, and then, a year later, they actually stumble upon the party’s plans and realize they absolutely do not agree with 99% of that.

I started this section by saying all people are stupid, including me. I hope you realize that I am not placing the blame with the people. We are easily persuaded, manipulated, etcetera. Politicians literally made it their job to convince people to do what they want. I purposely stay away from any campaign nonsense and don’t engage with it, because I know it will send my own brain down stupid trains of thought too. Before you know it, you start thinking “well it IS a bit full in the Netherlands with all these migrants coming in, so maybe I should vote PVV anyway”. Before you know it, just for a second, you actually consider voting for a party that’s 180 degrees from my actual views. Our brains are stupid.

That’s why I say the system should be designed to prevent it.

It’s the same in game design. You quickly learn that if a player doesn’t have fun or misunderstands a rule, you should assume that you need to write better rules. Just saying “you are not playing the RIGHT way” or “well can you READ!?” merely means nobody will ever play your game again, and you are a terrible game designer ;)

How? I don’t know. But the following things have shown themselves to be good ideas in practice, in games and other systems.

Smartest People, Most Influence

You need roles or experts. Some people have more knowledge about a topic and smarter ideas about how to solve it. Some people have thought about it more and care about it more. For every topic/issue, select a group of experts to decide. This means that the people still decide—namely, experts living in that country—but it’s the right people deciding about the right things.

Many games have this idea of roles. Only that player is allowed to do those actions. Only that player is allowed to touch that stack of money. And it’s absolutely the best way to create a good game where all players are engaged, all players can do what they want but also need to collaborate, and nobody is cheating because nobody has full power over anything.

Nothing But The Facts

You need to de-sensationalize (boringify? normallify?) the entire election process. No fancy campaigns, no adverts, no handing out free things, no polls, no overdone attention at talk shows, etcetera. It’s not some game show or entertainment—it’s literally the decision about whether your life goes to shit or not.

In games, the player who can play the “drama” card best usually wins. The one who appeals to people’s emotions, who talkes about “being allies” or “won’t you help a friend?”, who becomes overly dramatic when someone “backstabs” them. They win because people stop thinking logically about their best move in the game, and instead think about this person soaking up all the attention and how they can create more “drama” (or get attention themselves).

Iterative Policymaking

You need constant feedback and updates (“iteration”). No long long talking about what to do, then doing it, and realizing you missed a thousand things and it works out in practice. No “big beautiful bills” that change a thousand big things at once, forcing you to take a lot of bad with a bit of good. No, any updates to policy/law should be tiny. Because these updates should be done weekly, in tiny increments, forever. Quickly seeing your new ideas in practice, learning from it, then updating.

Short feedback loops are basically the holy grail of games. A game without it can be very clever and whatnot, it just won’t be fun and players will be bored. The quicker you do something and get feedback, the faster you can learn and improve/iterate. And everything, and I mean absolutely everything, is created through (fast) iteration.

Nobody can perfectly predict the future. Taking six months to make a massive policy change does not save you at all. The moment it goes into effect, you suddenly see all sorts of side effects you didn’t predict. If, instead, you had made a small policy change every month and looked at the results, you would now have been able to learn + analyse + course-correct six times already. I am absolutely certain the current state of your democracy would be much better because of this iteration.

You can extend this to the “job safety” of politicians, if you want. But I don’t think it’s even needed. It’s fine if you vote once every ~4 years. It gives people time to actually make mistakes, learn from them, and get something done while they are certain they are in power.

Divide & Conquer

Most of all, you need to stop creating large countries with single governments ;) People were made to live in small communities of 20–50 people. That’s how many people and relationships we can handle. That’s how many issues, and space, and possible problems we can actually understand and reason through. I would always recommend that people vote for more local things.

Sure, you can have some government for the whole country, but their influence is tiny, relegated to the side lines. The more local you get, the more power people have. And so, when voting, people actually vote for a person they know. Someone who lives in the same town, who they’ve talked to, of whom they know the character and the intelligence and the integrity of character.

Any game system that becomes too large or tries to incorporate too many players/systems/elements … falls apart. I’ve seen it happen time and time again. Systems are complex things. People are complex beings. Put too many people into the same bucket, and there is just no system at all that could ever represent them all in a fair and balanced society.

Instead, when designing games, you’re really focused on divide and conquer. Break a large game board into small regions, so players only need to focus on their region and their neighbors. Break large systems into roles, so each player can mostly focus on their own role. Break the round into three “phases”, so that each phase can be simple on its own and represent/simulate some aspect of the system very accurately. Have players interact, but only when they’re right before or after you in turn order. Because, when the group gets too big, and the distance between people gets too big, all communication and agreement just breaks down. You are bound to not understand each other’s wishes and environment, because they are not your wishes or environment.

It’s happened many times that I’ve basically missed what the player opposite of me did for the entire game. They started on the other side of the map, their turn has always been far away from mine, so they are just not relevant to me. In fact, I have lost many games by completely misunderstanding what they want or what their strategy was.

In the end, I think the majority of people will always be sad about the election result. And it will be bad for perhaps the majority of people. No matter how great and fair you make this democratic system. Because when there’s 18 million people voting on just 1 government, there’s basically 18 million people more concerned with their own immediate environment (and its immediate problems) than yours. Why would you care about a place where you don’t live? A place you couldn’t even find on the map? Why would they care about the same things as you?

I truly think we should just vote per municipality or something. Have one main government to loosely oversee all the municipalities. But the real power lies within the actual community, of people who know each other, live close to each other, walk the same streets, encounter the same problems, and so forth. That way, your vote will actually have a real effect. That way, your vote will very likely line up with the votes of others, creating nice focused majorities that can deal with problems surely and swiftly.

Everything we know about the oldest civilizations and hunter-gatherer societies shows the same thing. They likely had a very egalitarian and fair society. In many ways, they were healthier, happier, and more creative than us. Why? Because they lived in small traveling groups, had no leader but “experts” (“the best hunter decides whether we hunt this bear or not”), obviously had no dramatic elections, and simply dealt with issues iteratively until … they survived and advanced to create modern society.

Those were my thoughts for today,

Tiamo