Deliberations

This prompted by the misleadingly titled piece at reference 1. Engineer Robert did not devise the process, largely based on those used in the US Congress and the UK Parliament before them, but he did write it down and he did promote it by both word and deed. And the rules that he formulated (or other sets of rules of the same sort) do provide the foundation on which the deliberative assemblies which run most of the world are built. Noting that some of these assemblies have regressed to something much closer to an autocracy; perhaps only existing to give a bit of democratic flavouring to an autocracy or oligarchy.

My interest is more general, in the near universal need in any complex society for ways in which to decide things. In a complex society there are lots of things that need to be decided, there are usually lots of views and there needs to be some orderly and efficient process to bring those needs and views together and to arrive at a way forward, with which all those involved will go along. A process which is going to involve compromise, compromise to the point where decent and conscientious people will sign up to something other than their own view of the matter. A world which involves a bit of give and take, swings and roundabouts. The majority gets its way, but not without the minority getting a decent hearing.

A world view in which orderly and open debate will, at least under ordinary conditions, produce a better result than going for an autocrat, be he or she ever so gifted. An issue which the Roman Republic knew about well before the start of the Christian era, and which they addressed with their dictators, time limited appointments at times of stress, particularly wars.

The chart above is intended to encapsulate the evolution of an organisational device called the deliberative assembly, sometimes representative. An organisational device which many people think is far and away the best way to do big things. The only way, even.

Bearing in mind that this is a rather mixed chart, with the boxes standing for various different kinds of things, different kinds of entities. But hopefully it gives the right idea.

In the beginning, you had patriarchs and chiefs. Then, as things got more complicated, you had nations and kings, kings who might draw on the advice of a council. Bigger still and you had empires and emperors. But empires were too big to be governed from the centre and there had to be delegation in the form of viceroys, proconsuls or governors. 

In parallel with all this, one had the republican stream, right centre in the chart above. Here power was not vested, as it were by divine right, in a person, rather in some kind of assembly, some kind of plurality. An assembly which had a life of its own, bigger than the lives of its members.

And then there were (self-governing) towns, cities, city states – and, rather later, corporations. The limited companies that rule the world now. And, rather different, the oligarchies which have, in many times and places, held the real power.

Out of all this, evolved the idea of a deliberative assembly, an assembly which managed the entity in question by the deliberation of motions – usually describing some action or other – and voting on them. All members were equal and the minority, after free and full debate, submitted to the majority. Onto which ideal it has been found expedient to add parties, sometimes just the two, which more or less alternate in power, sometimes rather more.

Our Westminster Parliament, as it came out of the seventeenth century civil war, is an important exemplar here, as is the slightly more recent US Congress.

Sources

 As noted above, this post has been prompted by Robert’s Rules from the US, that is to say reference 2. These rules have been through many editions. But we are assured by the people at reference 4, responsible for the present edition, that the spirit of the founder continues to pervade the work:

The twelfth, current, edition has been brought about through a process of keeping the book up to date with the growth of parliamentary procedure. All editions of the work issued after the death of the original author have been prepared by persons who either knew and worked with the original author or are connected to such persons in a direct continuity of professional association.

I associate to the psycho-analysts, who all trace their own analyses back to their founding father. And to the Popes, who make claims of the same sort.

The US Constitution proper is to be found at reference 5. And it can still be bought as a booklet for not very many dollars.

Here in the UK we have Erskine May, in some ways the UK equivalent, to be found at references 6 and 7.

While the Freemasons, who are quite keen on meetings and rules too, have their constitutions, to be found at reference 8 – although a lot of these rules seem to be about maintaining the hierarchy of Lodges, rather than about the conduct of their meetings. 

I offer a simple comparison. In Robert’s Rules we have:

• Introductory material

• Twenty chapters organised into 63 paragraphs and 730 odd pages

• Charts, tables and lists

• Closing material, including an index

While in the Constitutions we have:

• Introductory material

• Fifteen chapters organised into 271 paragraphs and 170 odd pages

• A substantial index, occupying near as much space as the chapters

• Illustrations of jewels, chains and collars

And in the much shorter Constitution of the United States, we have

• Preamble

• Seven articles, the first four of which are divided into section; 10, 4, 3 and 4 of them, respectively

• Some 27 amendments. The 21st being the repeal of prohibition and the 27th being about the process for varying the pay of senators and congressmen. This last seemingly having attracted a great deal of attention from constitutional lawyers.

There are, no doubt, plenty of other books about rules for running legislatures and other organisations, in English, never mind other languages. No doubt plenty of people have made careers out of comparing and contrasting. And I learn from reference 9, that there was plenty of interest in these constitutional matters in India in the first part of the twentieth century. No doubt there was plenty of interest in Ireland before that.

I note in passing, that at least one of the teachers at my secondary school tried to teach us something about our constitutional arrangements. I even remember him contrasting them with those of the US, where the constitution could be bought as a booklet for a dollar or so. I have no idea whether teachers at today’s schools are still so trying. Nothing of the sort at university, although some students were prone to chatter about such things in the margins.

The world outside

Members of deliberative assemblies live inside their own little world and sometimes forget that there is a wider world outside. The graphic above is intended to suggest some of the inhabitants of that wider world.

In the case of a legislature, the assembly is often one of two, an upper house and a lower house; in the UK, the House of Lords and the House of Commons, in the US the Senate and the House of Representatives. The executive and the law are the two other arms of central government. Here in the UK, the head of the executive is, by custom, a member of the lower house, but other countries have other arrangements.

There are then parties and elections. There are media to communicate between all this and the nation outside. Not forgetting the wider world outside that. And, lastly, most countries have local as well as central government. Life is too complicated to direct everything from the centre, although here again, countries vary widely in the extent to which, and in the way in which, power is devolved from the centre.

Not forgetting that some countries still have kings. Which some might argue are a convenient and serviceable fiction.

Rules

Now when you put several hundred opinionated and loud people in a room in order to run something or other, it was soon found that you needed some structure if you wanted to get anything done. 

In which connection literacy was helpful: it is all much harder in its absence. I associate to the noisy and sometimes violent debates of the Iatmul of New Guinea. But here the function was more to provide an opportunity for the men to strut about and beat their chests, rather than to get anything done. For which see reference 10.

This eventually led to what is suggested in the chart above.

One starting point is that only one person speaks at a time, and that he does not speak for too long.

Then one adds the idea that he has to speak to the point. The meeting is organised as a debate of one or more motions, a motion originally describing some action to be taken – perhaps to buy a new coffee machine for the staff cafeteria. Nowadays, perhaps to approve some 1,000 page document about something or rather, perhaps twiddling with the rules for housing benefit – which few members are likely to take on with the necessary energy. These motions are taken, one at a time, and at any one time exactly one motion is said to be pending and a member of the assembly can only speak to that motion, for or against.

This works even better if one adds in a presiding officer, the Speaker in the Westminster House of Commons, a presiding officer who decides who is to speak next. The idea is that, in order to get a full and free debate, the speeches alternate between for and against the pending motion; the adversarial system which also appears in most courts of law. The debate is closed by a vote, after which the assembly moves on.

There are more or less complicated rules about when something which has been decided can be revisited. Generally speaking, the losing minority has to accept that it has lost that one and move on.

Meetings work to agendas and there are more or less complicated rules about forcing the pace and about varying that agenda on the fly.

One important feature of these assemblies is that motions can be about these rules, about procedure rather than about action. Which is very necessary, but which can also give assemblies a bad name: the public at large want their assemblies to debate matters of substance, not to be playing games with points of order, with procedure. It is no accident that in the past, perhaps less so now, many of the member of such assemblies were lawyers by training. Think no further back than past masters Thatcher and Blair.

Another important feature is that debates are supposed to be carried on in a polite and civilised way, without insult or abuse. We are told that Edward II banned swords from the Chamber of our House of Commons as long ago as 1313. A ban now reinforced by two red lines on the floor, two sword length’s apart, which members are not supposed to cross while speaking: the idea being that the members for a motion are behind one of the lines, against the motion behind the other, thus keeping them well apart. A story that only works when the House is organised on two-party lines, with one party behind one line and the other behind the other. Maybe POTUS talked about red lines in his book about the art of the deal.

Over time, a whole menagerie of motions evolved, and a summary is attempted in the chart above. Much fuller explanation of all this is to be found at reference 2.

Subsidiary motions are about main motions, perhaps amending them. Privileged motions introduce something new, pushing the pending motion aside. Incidental motions are to do the rules for debate, rather than with the supposed subject matter of that debate: these can sometimes get quite heated – and seem rather silly from the outside. While special motions are needed to reopen a matter which has already been dealt with.

There is another batch of rules governing the precedence of motions; whether or not they are to be admitted and in what order.

In this way we get to another menagerie, this one of rules, and another summary is attempted above.

The colour bar is intended to suggest the increasing difficulty of amendment as you climb the hierarchy of rules. A necessary but by no means sufficient bar to those with autocratic tendencies.

No doubt new rules about the use of AI by the Table Office – the people responsible for the rules of the House of Commons – are in production at this very time. At least Google adds a touch of levity by bringing office furniture on board.

Other matters

Systems like those set down by Robert’s Rules attract people who like rules for their own sake. They like to play games with them. There are also people who abuse the rules, who play the system; abuse the system to get the result that they want. A recent example of this being the blocking by filibuster of the few in the House of Lords of the recent bill for assisted dying.

Members of deliberative assemblies need to be aware of the reputational dangers here: too much of this sort of thing and their voters will lose patience with them.

There is not much in the foregoing about the development of parties, just two in the beginning, the proliferation of committees, laws and government generally. Which last has steadily grown more complicated and difficult to manage from the top down, from the assembly down. And lot of our MPs do not have much of consequence to do; they just do what the whips tell them to do. 

Wherein lies the main spring of decent Conservative thought: there is too much government and it would be well if there were less.

Then, as we have seen, in Robert’s Rules, there is talk of foundation documents and charters. Our own Royal Society is one example of an organisation with a charter, for the current version of which see reference 12.

The first of the graphics above behaves rather oddly on my laptop, with batches of small shadows popping up and down in the spaces between the boxes. Plus other stuff. We shall see if the effect survive publication.

Conclusions

A fascinating reminder of matters constitutional. One can only hope that they remain visible in our schools and universities. A decent proportion of the population do need to know about this stuff.

PS: regarding the US, I was amused to read at reference 12 about the curious custom of US past presidents building presential libraries - libraries which might think of as a sort of show-off mausoleum without the coffin. See reference 13 for an early example of the genre.

In particular, the about to be opened library for past president Obama. And I had not known that POTUS was going one better by building a cage fighting arena on one of the White House lawns. To think that a rich and more or less civilised country should choose to promote such a tacky sport in this way. Maybe a pole dancing arena next?

References

Reference 1: The 19th-century guide to running an effective meeting: A US officer and engineer devised the process that is still in use today – Guru Madhavan, Financial Times – 2026. 

Reference 2: Robert’s rules of order – General Henry M Robert, US Army – from 1876. Now at the 12th Edition: A new and enlarged edition by Robert, Robert, Evans, Honemann, Balch, Seabold and Gerber – 2020. 1,135 pages of pdf. 

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert%27s_Rules_of_Order. 

Reference 4: https://robertsrules.com/. 

Reference 5: https://constitutioncenter.org/. 

Reference 6: https://erskinemay.parliament.uk/.

Reference 7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erskine_May. 

Reference 8: Constitutions of the antient fraternity of free and accepted masons – United Grand Lodge of England – 1947. 

Reference 9: The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian – Nirad C. Chaudhuri – 1951.

Reference 10: Naven: A survey of the problems suggested by a composite picture of the culture of a New Guinea tribe drawn from three points of view – Gregory Bateson – 1936.

Reference 11: https://royalsociety.org/-/media/news/2012/2012-supplemental-charter.pdf. 

Reference 12: The Obama Presidential Center — what is this forbidding monolith trying to say: The $850mn campus aims to revitalise Chicago’s South Side, but stumbles with its monumental centrepiece - Edwin Heathcote, Financial Times - 2026.

Reference 13: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mausoleum_of_Augustus.