notes-politics-governanceSystems-govsChMeetingProcedure

Meeting procedures

Components of meeting procedure: membership, agenda, presentations, discussion, and voting. Some procedures attenuate or omit one or more of these; for example some meetings have presentations and voting, but no discussion. todo

Quorums

Typical quorums:

What happens if quorum cannot be reached? Generally either the meeting cannot be held, or the meeting can be held but no substantive decisions can be taken. Procedures include:

Note that, although turnout in national political elections is often over 50%, many private organizizations often have participation levels below 1/3. For example, between 2002 and October 2016, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers had 20% participation only once [1].

Note that online communities typically have extremely low participation, as a proportion of all users. For example, Facebook used to have a governance procedure by which the company's proposed changes to its Terms of Service could be rejected if more than 30% of its users voted against it [2]. This never happened, because even though in some cases 90% of those voting voting against, participation was typically much less than 0.1% [3] [4].

The British school of parliamentary procedure

This is one family of meeting procedure; for example Robert's Rules.

Some attributes:

Links:

The power of the presiding officer

A group tends to assign its presiding officer more power if the presiding officer is elected by the group, rather than imposed from outside. For example, contrast the US House, which elects its presiding officer and gives them significant power, to the US Senate, whose presiding officer is the popularly-elected Vice President, and whose presiding officers have little power:

" Formally, the Senate’s presiding officers are charged with maintaining order and decorum, but in practice they are usually mere mouthpieces for the Senate’s parliamentarian, who whispers what they should do.

“Whenever you’re making any ruling, you’re simply making a ruling the parliamentarian has whispered to you,” said George Washington University professor Robert Dove, who served as a Senate parliamentarian for 36 years. “There’s no independent judgment up there. ... It’s not a powerful position in any sense of the word. They are totally reliant on whoever is sitting in the parliamentarian’s chair.”

The weak role of the Senate’s presiding officer differs greatly in the House, where they have significant influence over debate. That’s in part because the Constitution tasks the vice president with the Senate job, even though he might be of a different party than that chamber’s majority.

With the threat of a hostile vice president, the Senate over time devolved the powers of the presiding officer, said Steven Smith, a professor of political science at Washington University in St. Louis.

“Because he’s not elected by the Senate, he’s not subjected to control of the majority party, so that majority party is not going to put rules in place that might be used against their interest,” said Smith, who is co-authoring a book on Senate leadership. “So the presiding officer of the Senate is very weak in comparison with presiding officers in most American legislative bodies.” " -- http://www.rollcall.com/news/presiding-loses-its-prestige-in-senate-207942-1.html

examples

Robert's Rules

Standard Code of parliamentary procedure

(note how private organizations tend to imitate the procedures of government legislatures)

my proposal

Parliamentary authorities

History of parliamentary authorities

"...the Greeks were practicing a form of ((parliamentary procedure)) in the fifth-century B.C. As the English-speaking world knows parliamentary practice, however, it grew out of the meetings of the British Parliment as early as the thirteenth century. It remains uncodified in ((America)) until Thomas Jefferson published his Manual of Parliamentary Practice in 1801. The source of all our American works on parliamentary practice is still part of the Senate and House manuals. Rules of procedure used in legislature are not suitable for smaller and more informal groups... Cushing's Manual of Parliamentary Practice...was paramount in the field until Robert's Rules of Order appeared." Cinquemani, Robert's Revisited: Parliamentary Practice in Perspective

"...the influence of the procedure of the ((British)) House of Commons has been world wide. In the United States, Thomas Jefferson, as Vice President, largely restated English practice in his Manual of Parliamentary Practice which he drew up to govern the procedure of the United States Senate over which he presided." (Jessup, Philip C., “Parliamentary Law in National Legislatures”)

"English procedure furthermore exerted a strong influence on the continent, particularly in France and Germany, largely as a result of Dumont's Tactique des assemblees legislatives (2 vols., Geneva, 1816) which disseminated Jeremy Bentham's ideas" (Senturia, "Procedure, Parliamentary", VI Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, p. 454, 455 (1937), via Jessup, Philip C., “Parliamentary Law in National Legislatures”)

todo: and what of non-English speaking parliamentary practice?

Links:

Random links:

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"in the early days of the Revolution the National Assembly trusted to inspiration rather than to discipline as a guide for its proceedings, and only grief resulted. After the first day when only formal speeches were on the programme, pandemonium broke loose. The presiding officer was powerless, a hundred or more speakers where on their feet at once, and specators added to the confusion by joining in alternate hissing and applauding. It is perhaps not too much to say that many of the excesses of the Revolution were caused by an absence of legislative procedure; it is in any event certain that such experience establishes the necessity of fixed legislative procedure."

-- R.K. Gooch, "The Legal Nature of Legislative Rules of Procedure", XII Virginia Law Review (1926), p. 527, 529, via Jessup, Philip C., “Parliamentary Law in National Legislatures”, in: Collected Courses of the Hague Academy of International Law (Recueil Des Cours), volume 89/I, The Hague Academy of International Law