28. Democratic Fractals

Fractals are fascinating.

According to Wikipedia:


A fractal has been defined as "a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole," a property called self-similarity.


Fractals are formed by various types of mathematical repetition and can be found in many aspects of nature such as clouds, snowflakes and plants.

One of the wonderful things about fractals is that they look the same at different scales – this is particularly true of certain types of fractal such as the Koch Snowflake and the Sierpinski Triangle which are created by the repetition of simple mathematical rules. These are the same sorts of rules that can be found for naturally occurring fractals.


So what, I hear you ask, has this got to do with democracy?

Well, it occurs to me that fractals might provide a rather neat way for establishing democratic structures based on the following two principles:

1. Exactly the same democratic structures should be repeated at every level of government


So, for example, if the UK parliamentary arrangements are in fact ‘the envy of world’ then they should be replicated at every level of government. This already true to some extent for the devolved administrations but is certainly not for local government or town and parish councils (I have posted about local parliaments before). It doesn’t have to be that system of course, it could be a different one, but there has to be ‘self similarity’ at every level.


The benefit is that it is easy for everyone to understand – once you ‘get it’ at one level, you ‘get it’ at every level.


2. The distance between different democratic levels should be decided by a simple mathematical rule

How are these distances decided now? How did we decide, for example, that there should be x number of devolved administrations below central government, x number of councils below that and x number of community councils below that? I don’t really know to be honest although I’d guess the arrangements we have now have evolved for various historic and contextual reasons.

Instead why not have a mathematical rule for deciding distances? Here is an example using ‘divide by 21’ to illustrate this:

1 UK Government
21 Regional Governments (population about 3 million each – same as Wales)
441 Local Governments (21 for each region, average population c. 140,000 – about the same as Wales!)
9261 Community Governments (21 for each local area, average population 6,500)
194,000 Street Governments (21 for each community, average population 300)

I wondered whether you could use Fibonacci numbers but I’m not sure my maths are up to the task!


Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dkuropatwa/2912488625/

2. Local Parliaments

This was one of the three ideas I put forward in my essay in the original SOLACE pamphlet (pdf). Put simply the argument is that if the parliamentary system is good enough for national government then things should work the same way for local government.

At the national level the UK parliament consists of a house of commons and a house of lords - at the local level local council meetings could mirror the role of the house of commons although nothing similar to the house of lords exists.  My suggestion is to set up a stakeholder senate which would give all the interested local agencies, forums, community groups and other relevant bodies a voice within the local government process.  the role of the stakeholder senate would be to act as a check and balance in the same way as the House of Lords does.  The function currently carried out by parliamentary select committees is already more or less carried out by council scrutiny committees so not much change would be required there.

One of the main differences between UK local government and national government (and the governments of Wales and Scotland for that matter) is that whilst national governments feature a legal separation of powers between the executive (aka Cabinet and the Government) and the non executive (aka Parliament) there is no such separation for local government.  This means, amongst other things, that the same set of local government officers support both sides, whereas nationally different civil servants work for the government and for parliament.  Interestingly a recent report for the Welsh Assembly Government has recommended that a similar kind of legal separation should also apply at the local level.

The idea of a local parliament might capture the public imagination much more that local council meetings do now.  Especially if local parliaments were able to pass local laws.