Choose your personal leader (Image: Sipa Press/Rex Features)

Didn’t vote for the bozos who are running the country? Join the club. Thanks to the competitive nature of electoral democracies, many – often most – citizens end up being governed by a party they didn’t vote for. But there is a way to ensure that every single voter is satisfied by the results of an election: simply have each voter governed by the political party he or she picked at the polls.

The idea is not as far-fetched as it might sound, says Olivier Ledoit, an economist at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, who proposes this so-called “choice democracy”. “It’s really not a major problem, even though it is a bit unfamiliar,” he says. After all, metropolitan New York spreads across three states and many different municipalities, so workers at adjacent desks may pay very different taxes and enjoy different government services. And many Muslims in the UK have disputes resolved in sharia courts, which coexist with the British legal system.

It could work like this: before an election, each political party would lay out its governing principles – what services it will provide, how its taxes will be structured, what social policies it will pursue, and so forth. After the election, each voter pays taxes to the party they voted for, and receives that set of services – cultural and educational subsidies, for example, or unemployment benefits – until the next election. This would require doing away with secret ballots. On some things, parties may choose to band together to govern specific services – military defence, for example, or monetary systems – where economies of scale are important.


The idea might reduce demagoguery, says Ledoit, because a party that campaigned on an appealing-sounding but impractical platform would be forced to deliver after the election. Total voter satisfaction guaranteed.

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