Sometimes elected representatives will vote against a measure when they approve of its general direction, but don't think it goes far enough.
For example, suppose the status quo is that people have to buy their own widgets at retail prices, which is really hard on the poor. Widgets are a necessity of life, but they really are awfully expensive. An integral part of the Purple Party's platform is that the government should provide free widgets to everyone. However, the Purple Party is not in power. The Yellow Party is, and they have just tabled a bill to provide a 10% widget rebate to help citizens pay for the cost of widgets.
The Purple Party would consider this bill a step in the right direction, but nowhere near sufficient. Under the current system, they may well not vote for it. However, I propose that they should have the option to vote "Yes, but..." on the bill. "Yes, but..." is understood to mean "We do not consider this bill an adequate solution and it is not our intention to consider this issue closed. However, because this bill is an improvement over the status quo, we will support it until something better can be implemented." It counts as a yes when they're counting up all the yeas and nays, but also makes it clear that the Purple Party does not consider this sufficient. That way, the Purple Party cannot in the future be accused of supporting the Yellow agenda, and the Yellow Party cannot in the future claim that their bill had the full support of the House. And the people can at least get a 10% rebate on their widgets until the Purple Party can get a better bill through.
To use a real-world example, as I blogged about before, it has been reported that Canada may get in the way of royal succession reform because apparently "Canadians aren't interested in a debate on the monarchy." If a "Yes, but..." option existed, Canada could vote "Yes, but..." on gender-blind primogeniture, saying "While we agree that this is better than male primogeniture, we don't necessarily agree with this whole monarchy thing in the first place and reserve the right to dissociate ourselves at some point in the future." No need for a big messy debate no one wants, no one's views go unrepresented, and the right thing gets done.
I think this concept would be very useful, but "Yes, but..." is a stupid name. Taking suggestions for better names.
3 comments:
I fully support the movement for a "Yes, but" option and feel it would go a long way towards getting things done in baby steps.
Maybe instead of yes and no votes, the members of a voting body should each submit their own proposal. Instead of a tally of yes and no votes at the end, a process to "calculate" the "average" of the proposals. Surely this could apply to basically numeric matters such as budgets. Surely the budget vote could be a m ⨉ n grid where m is the number of legislators (or citizens, under direct democracy?) and n is the number of line items. For other, less quantitative legislation, perhaps there should be an ad hoc committee of the 'yes, but' votes formed for the purpose of hammering out a second draft, or an alternative bill.
Averaging is interesting! The only issue I can see is that they would tweak their proposals with this in mind and aim higher and lower than they actually want. I'm not sure whether or not this would result in different outcomes than the current committee process.
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