Good Governance Without Political Parties

My paternal grandfather, Aristide Rieffel, was a leading journalist for the French newspaper Le Figaro. The high point of his career was covering the peace conferences in The Hague during the 1890s. He brought his family to the USA in 1914 to avoid World War I but kept writing (mostly in French for US-based French-language newspapers). 

Most of Aristide’s writings are now split between the archives of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the University of California at Santa Barbara. This still left half-a-dozen file boxes of papers and memorabilia saved by my father that ended up with me after he died in 1994. The time has come, however, to sort through these boxes, digitize a small collection for posterity, and deliver the remains to the recycling center.

Before starting this project, I remembered that my grandfather’s main obsession (after peace, I suppose) was alcoholism. He attributed France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871) to the excessive consumption of wine by its population. I have just discovered a second obsession: universal suffrage. He was convinced that only well-educated adults should be allowed to vote for their political leaders. That would have excluded most women at the time.

You could accuse me of having a comparable obsession: how political systems based on partisan elections tend to be incompatible with “good governance”. My rough definition of good governance is a system of national government that produces and implements policies that treat all members of its population equally and advances their well-being broadly speaking.

The singular moment that brought me to this anti-partisan election obsession took place in the Spring of 2004 in Jakarta, Indonesia. I was there to research an essay on Indonesia’s transition to democratic rule. It was eventually published in the September-October issue of Foreign Affairs.

My visit happened to coincide with the visit of a small group of US Congress staff members for the purpose of showing members of Indonesia’s parliament how to do all the good things that the US Congress does. One evening I was invited to join this group for dinner and was enjoying the evening until one of the staff members, sitting across from me at a long table, started talking about how important it is for Indonesia’s legislature to initiate legislation and not simply react to legislation proposed by its President. I interjected with a question: are you sure that this is best for Indonesia? The staff member turned red in the face and started yelling at me for being undemocratic (and maybe even a communist!)

My reaction was based on two views. First, the US Congress then (and even more now) was not a model of “good governance”. It was (and is even more today) playing a key role in a political system that was (is) making the rich richer and the poor poorer. Second, the social culture of Indonesia was very different from that in the USA. In particular, Indonesia has a “patronage culture” in which voters have no tradition of voting for candidates based on their positions on key issues and no tradition of donating to finance the election campaigns of candidates. Instead, people tend to vote for the candidate who pays them the most or whom they have been instructed to vote for by their village head.

Since that experience in 2004, I have become increasingly convinced that political systems based on partisan elections will sooner or later produce a country with bad governance. This expectation of mine has played out dramatically, and tragically, in the case of Indonesia. Through the terms of four presidents beginning in 2004, Indonesia’s party-based government has become increasingly dysfunctional, eventually producing the uprising on 25 August 2025 that reflected broad unhappiness with the government led for less than one year by President Prabowo Subianto.

You need this background to have some appreciation for the “Ideal System of Government/Administration” that I sketched out as much as ten years before my dinner-table epiphany in 2004. My note is undated, but it was among other materials with dates in the 1990s. Here it is, only lightly edited.

Ideal System of Government/Administration

1. Each community elects [several] members of an administrative/executive council for the community, including a head of the community council for a term of 2 years. [Elections at all levels on a non-partisan basis.]

2. Each community elects a former or sitting member of the council to represent the community in a county council, plus members at-large [2 or 3 based on petitions] for a term of 3 years.

3. The residents of each county elect a former or sitting member of the county council as the county leader [or city mayor] for a term of 3 years.

4. The residents of each county elect 3 former or sitting members of the county council to represent the county in a state/provincial council, plus members at-large [as many as 5] for a term of 4 years.

5. The residents of each state/province elect a former or sitting member of the state/provincial council as governor of the state/province for a term of 4 years.

6. The residents of each state/province elect 4 former or sitting members of the state/provincial council to represent the state/province in the national congress, plus members at-large [as many as 10] for a term of 5 years.*

7. The citizens of the nation elect a former or sitting member of the national congress as the nation’s president for a term of 5 years.

8. The citizens of the nation elect a former or sitting member of the national congress to represent the nation in a world assembly.

* Nonpartisan interest groups with members in excess of one million can select a group member to become an at-large member of the national congress. The national congress can also appoint additional citizens to become at-large members.

Note. This design is notionally for a country with a population of 200 million. It would be divided into 25 states/provinces each containing 4 percent of the population and formed along natural (geographically, historically, culturally) boundaries. Each state/province would be divided into 20 counties each having 5 percent of the county’s population, with comparable divisions for cities.

As I look at this system today (September 2025), it still seems better than what we have in the United States. There are, of course, many details that would need to be considered and decided. For example, in many cases the terms of elected officials should probably be staggered so that the members of the community, county, state/provincial, and national congress are not all elected at the same time. Also, term limits should be set, possibly different at each level of government.