In their article " Democratic Governance for a Globalized World " teachers Eichenberger and Frey made the observation that the fixed structures Our democracy was incompatible with globalization and its dynamics. To overcome this problem, they developed three proposals which they believe will solve this problem by making our democracies are more flexible.
The first proposal "expands the concept of citizenship to non-state institutions." An individual could thus have the citizenship of a non-governmental organization like the Red Cross. The civic virtue of the individual would be reinforced. The second proposal is the flexibility of political institutions through a system called Functional Overlapping Competing Jurisdictions (FOCJ). The principle is this: instead of defining the tasks of the state (protection, education, health ...) by geographical area, these tasks would be divided by functional units, with changing geographical boundaries. They are in competition, may overlap and thus solve the problem of externalities and public goods. (To learn more about these proposals, see the article mentioned above.)
The third proposal, which draws my attention here is deregulation of the profession of politician. The authors propose that the role of politician is open to foreign residents or not, whether paid by a market process and that organizations and individuals not only can stand for election. For example, a Valais could be a candidate in Then from Geneva to Zurich where he was hired for a higher salary. The authors argue that deregulation will result in increasing the number of candidates and then through a competitive process to improve their quality. Moreover, if organizations are candidates in several cities, they will be obliged to stick to their promises since bad publicity will affect all his campaigns. They must therefore develop an international reputation. In addition, according to empirical research, increased income explicit politicians cannibalize their implicit income and so we could observe a reduction corruption. It could also fear a brain drain to rich countries because the earnings will be highest. However, politicians have instead interest to visit poor countries, where there is often much more to do and many opportunities thereby increasing their reputation.
These apparent advantages have yet met with much opposition from our side. Here is a partial list of problems we have raised:
- wrong incentives for politicians to merge municipalities to get more resources
- polarization of politics, as in Switzerland where the peripheral regions could be affected
- Incentives for politicians to implement policies popular in the short term omitting the well-being long term
- Effect of cannibalization of the remuneration of politicians who undermine intrinsic motivation and thereby the civic spirit (you'll notice that this contradicts what is claimed by the authors)
The panel discussion will take place earlier. This third proposal is that we have the more divided as 10 people approved it while .... Refuted the 10! And you?
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Eichenberger, Reiner and Bruno S. Frey (2002). Democratic Governance for a Globalised World. Kyklos 55: 265-287 (2002).
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