All current and historical AES states have had electoral systems that differs significantly from the systems known from bourgeois parliamentary systems. Candidates are selected either by the vanguard party or by a unity front dominated by the vanguard party. Voters can then view either for our against the one list of candidates.
To my my knowledge there are virtually no historical examples of voters rejecting the list and there are reports (in Western sources, so they should be taken with a grain of salt) of significant social pressure being levied on voters to vote yes for the list.
You don’t get the election night dramas known from bourgeois systems where there can be genuine uncertainty as to whether ghoul A or ghoul B gets elected. In bourgeois states the function of elections seems to be to legitimise the system by giving voters a relatively free choice between a selection of candidates within the accepted spectrum of (liberal-conservative) opinion. In AES states, at the time of the election voters doesn’t seem to have much influence and their participation seems to be ceremonial in nature.
This begs the question what the function of these elections are. The lazy liberal explanation is that the evil commies are hiding sham elections that they think people are too stupid to see through. However, AES states has been around for more than a century and almost all of them uses some version of this system so they clearly must have some function in legitimising the state and mobilising popular support.
I would love if someone with knowledge in the subject could elaborate on this.
Idk much but I’ve heard that Cuba has some system of selecting candidates that starts at like the neighborhood level and works up from there, so that by the time someone’s name is actually on the ballot there’s already consensus that this is the person people want, and the ballot makes it official.
Apparently China has some kind of devolved thing, too, where CPC officials generally start out at the lowest levels of the CPC and are sent up to the next level with the approval of everyone at their current level. Folks don’t really get put forward for higher office unless they already have a great deal of support.
but again, I don’t know that much. There isn’t that much unbiased information readily available for casual review and I’ve never sat down with a book on it.
USSR had dumb system where they select representatives which are chosen/promoted by local party. It is silly cause it reproduces same problem as american electoral college, only even less varied, as initial barrier is getting local party to cooperate with the candidate. So they were getting more and more cocooned from the workers, as local party commitee were selecting from themselves.
The idea is refreshing people who have somewhat current experience of life as a worker, but basically after cornman everyone was mainly intellectual workers who were working as party member exclusively, and they became completely untethered from reality
I continue to be fascinated by sortition and variations on sortition as a potential solution to this problem, but then sortition runs up against the great degree of specialization and experience required in many roles.
I really like citizen juries as a mechanism for policymaking. They don’t work properly in modern liberal democracies for practical/political reasons, but the concept is something that could be implemented well as a way of getting around the problems of representative democracy (and also of direct democracy). You get the benefits of sortition, like proper citizen representation and limiting the power of career politicians, but without the risk that you accidentally appoint someone unfit to a position.
You’d still need people with specialized skills and experience to implement policy, but they’d have less latitude and fewer opportunities to act against the interests of the public if their job was narrowed down to acting on mandates given to them by citizens.
The thing is elected politicians are already completely detached from reality, idk i feel it couldn’t be worse already.
For ussr they should have flatly demanded worker experience for 10 years, with physical/mental labor split mandated as it existed and it would have been miles better.
I too am interested in this! From what I’ve read so far, there often are conventional elections (ie more than one candidate) at local levels. From there, people are elevated to higher office by their peers in the party. I don’t know however why they bother to hold elections for those higher offices, if there’s only one candidate.
They’re usually “yes/no” elections, so you can vote no confidence in that candidate.
I can tell you from pretty extensive discussion with more than a few English speaking Chinese mainlanders, I have not yet met a single one who has ever voted in their lives :/ it was pretty saddening, and I keep hoping I’ll meet someone who does, but none so far.
I heard the analogy of thinking of the party as the state, and then you vote inside the party by joining it and participating. The vetting process can be strict, but eventually even capitalists in China made it into the party, so if anything the vetting isn’t strict enough. Spooky scary Korea has multiple parties including succdem ones. Cuba has a separate but tightly linked organization (CDR) that elects candidates. If anything of this seems weirder than having a years long fawning pageant masquerading as democracy, sorry but you are a
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