I was also in a "consensus-based" meeting with a couple dozen people. It was dominated by one person who just kept insisting on getting their way, until everybody else got tired and "agreed."
Sounds like a manifestation of Nassim Taleb's "Dictatorship of the Small [Intransigent] Minority"[1]
[1]https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
I've been brought up to "always leave something on the table", but I understand that other societies hold the opposite.
It is far from perfect, but I feel it works.
I have been in many RRO meetings, and a few "CBDM" meetings.
I worked for a Japanese corporation for a long time, and saw their consensus system, which was painful, but worked. It was completely different from the "CBDM" meetings I've attended.
I once wrote up a very complete presentation and paper on real CBDM, but no one was ever interested in learning about it.
In my experience, most CBDM meetings aren't actually designed for "consensus." They are designed to let "the people that matter" accelerate the process of getting what they want.
RRO based off us/common practice but Congress, Senate and the House of Commons do a lot a "naughty shit" that are outside RRO / Citrine.
Amending a motion with non related things should really be ruled out of order.
The "naughty shit" is a direct quote from a former whip.
Might be similar for UK Parliament.
But you guys have the most downright entertaining government in the world.
It is online at https://erskinemay.parliament.uk/
But the executive has far to much power in the UK in my opinion - you can see why thye went after John Bercow as he was pushing back.
The US House of Representatives uses a set of rules based on Jefferson's Manual. Bill flow is a bit different than Roberts Rules of Order, but the concepts are very similar.
Been awhile since I read it. It’s not light reading.
Also, most folks use modern versions (copyrighted, so not open-sourced) of RRO.
It's pretty damn complete. It's actually a multi-hour class.
If I missed anyone, let me know.
I heard somewhere about a variant that would be interesting to try: everyone specifies a favorite option and a consensus option. If the consensus option eventually attains a supermajority, it wins, otherwise you choose a member at random and his/her favorite option wins.
Because random is fair but usually bad, there's an incentive to reach a consensus. Anyone who blocks the discussion is gambling with the risk of getting a bad favorite option.
You could probably fix the most egregious risks by say choosing at random from the options that a supermajority don't object to. (E.g. choose an option at random, if a supermajority has marked "definitely not this", then loop to the beginning and pick another one at random.)
When they have a big decision to make, he puts the division heads in a room, says "so, what are we going to do?", lets them bluff and bicker in their usual way, and then proposes in all seriousness the worst possible and least effective way to technically accomplish what has to be done. It's a gift, really.
It's effectiveness in unifying them through their desperation to make sure it never comes to pass is unparalleled.
He also had those same people give each other researched introductions to his leadership, which is every bit as brilliant and trollish as it sounds.
Dominated by "drunken yahoos" was her comment, I believe this is where Guido Fawkes cut his teeth.
Most nonprofit membership organizations in the US were run that way at one time. But since the 1960s, there are more self-perpetuating boards and other schemes for taking control away from the members. So people don't get practice at running a democracy. Which is a problem.
Strictly speaking, this could be a subset of the group, so long as that subset is quorate. For some groups this quorate level is going to be a surprisingly small number of people.
On the other hand, many other decision making procedures (such as many alternatives to the U.S. first-past-the-post voting schemes for elections) might sound good in theory, but in practice could fail utterly.
Even in the US, non-FPTP voting is starting to happen here and there. San Fran's mayoral elections used a ranked choice system if I'm not mistaken.
Item 14 is pretty interesting too. "Is the legislature the supreme political body, with a clear supremacy over other branches of government?" That's probably a no for the US, but who knows. The "experts" who make the determination are not revealed, so the whole index is really based on trusting what The Economist says.
Item 18, "Do special economic, religious or other powerful domestic groups exercise significant political power, parallel to democratic institutions?". I can't imagine how that can be fairly scored: the only realistic possibility is that the "experts" vote on how much they like the interest groups in this or that country.
There are lots of items like that. Even if they make sense for a democracy index, you can easily see how different people might give completely different answers.
In item 40, "Alternatively, % of people who think that punishing criminals is an essential characteristic of democracy", where you get the full score if that is over 80%. Wouldn't most people say that punishing criminals is an essential function of _any_ government, not having anything to do with democracy in particular? On the other hand, many dislike the very notion of punishment. In the US, this waxes and wanes; does the country really become more democratic during the "tough on crime" phases of the cycle? The index seems to say so!
Regarding item 10, the UK has FPTP but political parties other than the biggest two are nevertheless able to wield significant political power. Even if that weren't the case I wouldn't call it a tautology. Rather I'd say that the tendency of FPTP to lead to a two-party systems is one of its democratic flaws.
Regarding item 40, yes: most people would say that preventing crime is an essential function of government, but many countries value rehabilitation over punishment. You're correct though that there's some ambiguity about the meaning of "punishment". Without delving into the World Values Survey itself it's hard to say much more.
I can't put my finger on it but there's something about US culture that leads to sharp polarisation in social, racial, religious and political spheres.
You right its unique its more prevalent in PR systems its only rare cases where governments don't have a working majority in the UK
From a global perspective, the UK and US are currently undergoing existential crises - arguably due to people feeling politically underrepresented - whilst many countries with a strong PR such as Finland or Switzerland seem to be functioning better.
I'm not sure what the Indian government uses but I suspect Robert's Rules are state of the art.
Similar to First Past the Post voting where there are probably some easy wins tweaks that could be made based on the current academic literature - but the sheer number of popular "sound good, don't work" ideas floating around make change highly risky because it will have to run the political process and still be a good idea when it makes it through. In practice everyone wants their pet topic to be able to bypass normal procedure.