Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2014 October 9

= October 9 =

elected Cabinets?
In at least some of these several united States, most(?) cabinet officers are separately elected, rather than appointed by the chief executive; thus a voter in California punches a chad not only for Governor but also for Lieutenant Governor, Treasurer and so on. Is that true in any sovereign state? I'm interested in indirect elections (i.e. by a parliament) too. —Tamfang (talk) 19:12, 9 October 2014 (UTC)


 * The Cabinet of the United Kingdom are also appointed to their posts, but they are nearly always selected from among the Members of Parliament, and so must have been elected to parliament. (The "nearly always" is because occasionally they are members of the House of Lords, who are not elected). --ColinFine (talk) 20:09, 9 October 2014 (UTC)


 * I'm not aware of any UK Cabinet that did not contain some peers, but I'd be happy to be corrected. There are always fewer of them than elected MPs, but I believe there have always been some.  This split is reflected in most Westminster Cabinets, e.g. Australian Cabinets are composed predominantly of Members of the House of Representatives, but there have always been some Senators as well.  Both Houses are fully elected in most bicameral Westminster systems; the UK House of Lords and the Canadian Senate are the obvious exceptions.  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  20:17, 9 October 2014 (UTC)
 * I think this misses the point. Sure, most cabinet members are elected as MPs - but if I understand the OP correctly, he wants to know about instances where a minister is elected into that particular office. As I understand in, in the UK, ministers are not individually elected, but appointed by the Prime Minister. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 20:26, 9 October 2014 (UTC)
 * That was my understanding of the question too, Stephen. I just wanted to comment on Colin's comment.  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  21:10, 9 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Also, IIRC, in the UK, convention holds that Cabinet members should be also members of parliament, but I don't know that there's any law that requires it. The sovereign in law (and the Prime Minister in practice) is free to appoint anyone to such positions.  That it never DOESN'T happen the way it always has doesn't mean there is a legal requirement to work that way.  -- Jayron  32  00:12, 11 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Here is the answer: The second key constitutional constraint is convention: ministers are presumed to be members of Parliament. This is only convention: in theory there is nothing to stop a Prime Minister from appointing someone from outside Parliament altogether. (Putting Goats Among the Wolves: Appointing Ministers from Outside Parliament, p. 25). The "altogether" bit harks back to Gordon Brown's appointment of a Government of All the Talents (hence the acronym GOAT), in which he brought in people with no parliamentary experience and had them appointed to the House of Lords, and then had them appointed Ministers.  The paper above is contemplating a scenario where the ministers appointed would not become members of either chamber.  This seems never to have happened, at least for many centuries since the genesis of the Westminster system.
 * Btw, the Australian Constitution explicitly provides for appointment of people not in the parliament as ministers, but with the proviso that their appointment will lapse if they do not become a member of either chamber within 3 months. --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  02:01, 11 October 2014 (UTC)


 * I'm not sure your last point is correct. A fully elected upper house appears to be the exception not the rule, in bicarmel Westminster system governments. Specifically the Australian Senate is actually the the only ones listed in our article which is completely directly elected. The Senate of Pakistan appears to mostly elected by members of the Provincial Assemblies and does have some directly elected if I understand the article correctly. A few I'm not certain how they're chosen although our article does call them all elections. There is also the Indian Rajya Sabha which is mostly (it has 12/245 appointed members) indirectly elected (elected by the state and territorial reprentatives). Next we have the Seanad Éireann of Ireland who are mostly (43/60) indirectly elected (elected by various representatives) from panels and with a small number elected by graduates of certain universities. But also includes some who are appointed (11/60). Finally the Malaysian Dewan Negara nowadays includes a minority of indirectly elected members (elected by state legislative assemblies) and a majority who are appointed. Originally the majority were indirectly elected with the appointees being in the majority but this has controversially been changed over time. (I don't think the number of state reprenstatives has decreased, just the number of appointees has.) The constitution also has a provision for direct election of the (now minority) state representing senators but this has never been implemented. Beyond that, other than the appointed Senate of Canada and the (appointed but fairly complicated) House of Lords of the United Kingdom, as per Westminster system we have Senate of Saint Lucia, Senate of the Parliament of Jamaica, Senate of the Parliament of Grenada, Senate (Belize), Senate of Barbados, Senate of Bermuda, Senate of Parliament of the Bahamas, Senate (Antigua and Barbuda), Senate (Trinidad and Tobago) all of which are appointed according to our articles. The few references I checked seemed to confirm the cases I checked. In any case there seems to be a similar system for most of these Carribean nations of some of the appointees being by the Governor General, some on the advice of the Prime Minister, and some on the advice of the leader of opposition. The large number of Caribbean governments obviously doesn't help the case, nor does the large number of unicarmel legislatures. Israeli Knesset, Parliament of Singapore, New Zealand Parliament, Parliament of Vanuatu, Parliament of Tuvalu, National Parliament of the Solomon Islands, House of Assembly of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, National Assembly (Saint Kitts and Nevis), National Parliament of Papua New Guinea, Parliament of Nauru, National Assembly (Mauritius), Parliament of Malta, House of Assembly of Dominica, Bangladeshi Jatiyo Sangshad. Although excluding all the Carribean ones, even if we include Australia, Pakistan and India (considering the appointed members represent less than 5%), we still have Ireland (18% is far from a majority but it's still enough that I don't think we can discount them), Malaysia, Canada, UK and perhaps Belize which are not fully elected. Nil Einne (talk) 15:06, 10 October 2014 (UTC)


 * The US: each presidential elector has two votes one for President and one for Vice-President. They don't have to vote for a President and a Vice-President on the same ticket. They could collectively elect a President from one ticket and a Vice-President from an opposing ticket if enough of them did that. But I don't know if that's happened ever.
 * Where they have both President (either elected by general suffrage or by the parliament) and Prime Minister they are not strictly speaking both elected separately as the Prime Minister is not directly elected (except for a short time in Israel) but is the outcome of legislative elections.
 * On the other hand in some presidential systems some members of the Executive, while not being elected directly, may have to undergo confirmation by a legislative body (e.g. the Senate in the US), which, while not as irrational as direct elections of members of the Executive over the head of the Chief of that Executive, can still interfere somewhat with the ability of the Chief of the Executive to assemble around him a team to his liking.
 * Contact Basemetal here 21:07, 9 October 2014 (UTC)
 * In theory, the electors could have voted for, say, Obama for President and Ryan for Vice President. But that's not going to happen. The electors represent their party. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 21:16, 9 October 2014 (UTC)
 * In a recent cycle, iirc, one Elector got mixed up and voted (say) Cheney/Bush rather than Bush/Cheney. —Tamfang (talk) 23:45, 11 October 2014 (UTC)

World Wide Win
With the Internet (hereafter referred to as the "World Wide Web", "the Web" and "WWW", irrespective of whether or not those terms are precisely accurate here) mankind has finally found a way to allow one to keep one's gender roun if one so chooses. This can (note that I said "can" and not "will") make some conversations that were once (due to certain fellows' perceptions) impossible, now possible, as well as some perceptions held by some fellows to be heard by those who would never have heard them before (this is both good and bad at times, one might argue). In addition, certain dialectal pronunciations don't have to be heard by those who do not wish to hear them, yet one can still hear the arguments and statements of speakers of those dialects and not have to be distracted by their pronunciations, and can more adequately take in what is being said by them.

Now, the Web isn't perfect in terms of communication, of course, as it starkly fails to express human emotion and tone. Nevertheless, it does improve upon certain aspects of general communication. This does not mean that it is a legitimate substitute for normal human interaction, but it can be a good supplement to it if utilised in certain ways.

Nevertheless, all of this begs the question:

'Why did it take the World Wide Web to fangle a (functional) venue for (more-or-less) genderless communication and the like? Why couldn't such a thing be adequately put together long, long ago?' Tharthandorf Aquanashi (talk) 23:39, 9 October 2014 (UTC)
 * I suggest you read about the Telegraph, for one. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 23:55, 9 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Whilst vaguely similar in the sense of its ability to communicate with many people, it was a pay-per-word system (IIRC. I didn't read the article because I don't think it has any information relevant to this discussion that I am not already aware of) and wasn't as widespread. It's far closer to the telephone than it is to the Web in terms of communication. By the logic you seem to be using, one could simply use a voice changer over a phone to achieve the same results. Not so, for what I was referring to in my question was the scenario that the Web presents, in which one can essentially do the many things one does in normal life, sans gender. Tharthandorf Aquanashi (talk) 00:01, 10 October 2014 (UTC)
 * How is this any different from paper? Plenty of people throughout history have written under either gender-neutral names or as members of the opposite sex. Mogism (talk) 00:10, 10 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Just about any form of old-time communication that was possible to be used in a genderless way has been used that way.
 * Pen_name is the obvious example, but there are others. All kinds of written correspondence has been used throughout history in this way. Usually so that female authors could be respected in a male centered society, but not always.   Ben Franklin famously wrote The Speech of Polly Baker which was originally published as non-fiction.
 * I suppose you're asking why there wasn't a two-way communication system that allowed gender concealment, in the way of Facebook or Twitter. The answer is that such communication systems didn't really exist.  The closest analog are either personal letter-writing, or newspapers' classified and letters sections (which were very popular sections back in the day.)   I don't have a reference to prove that people concealed their identity while debating local politics in public forum of the paper's letters' page, but I'd be astonished if it never happened.
 * APL (talk) 00:29, 10 October 2014 (UTC)
 * There was at least one guy who wrote his own obituary, in the sort of anonymous voice those typically use. His local paper refused to run it, but two out-of-state ones did. InedibleHulk (talk) 01:41, 10 October 2014 (UTC)


 * As for letters to the editor, apparently it goes beyond local politics. InedibleHulk (talk) 01:48, 10 October 2014 (UTC)
 * In the olden days Letters pages functioned more like a discussion board than they do now. Now, most letters are either political propaganda or angry rants at the paper itself.  But if you find a pre-internet newspaper, or better yet, a pre-internet magazine about a niche topic, the letters pages are often filled with back-and-forth discussion. APL (talk) 02:16, 10 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Writing letters to the paper under genderless pseudonyms generated its own pre-internet meme, Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells, which apparently dates back to the 1950s. --Nicknack009 (talk) 12:07, 10 October 2014 (UTC)


 * This is also a rather language-dependant (English-dependant?) generalization. In many languages (for example French, or Hindi, or Polish) the writer's sex cannot be concealed in writing, except through deliberate dissimulation. 184.147.132.209 (talk) 15:12, 10 October 2014 (UTC)
 * The same is true in Russian, but only when writing in the past tense singular. All past tense singular verbs have different endings depending on the gender of the referent.  But present tense verbs do not (and the future tense doesn't have its own separate form anyway).  If writing in the past tense, you can avoid disclosing your own sex only if you confine your writing to second and third persons, or plural.  Even then, it can be tricky, e.g. referring to "my wife" sort of presupposes the author is a male, even these days.  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  20:47, 10 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Certain smoke signals in different cultures were undoubtedly functional forms of prehistoric genderless communication, e.g., "danger!" "here", "whale ashore: party time after butchering!" The scholarly community is divided (along predictable lines) as to whether or not the white smoke signalling "new Pope elected" is necessarily a form of gendered communication (i.e., "That's Mr. Pope, to you") or better thought of as a non-gendered declarative, akin to "danger!"
 * Other scholars note that the mere sign of smoke, when coming from a known location &/or accompanied by certain smells, was often interpreted as something like "mammoth's hot: BYOF! (Bring Your Own Flint)" - again, an inherently genderless signal, depending on cultural norms and gender stereotypes concerning the fine art of barbequing bison and other free-range meats.
 * That article on gender and language notes several hypothesized distinctive speech norms associated with gender, beyond gender pronouns and stereotypical words. Many are amenable to more-or-less automated empirical test, using the massive data sets made available thanks to the WWW and its unholy spawn, Facebook. Arguably (which I certainly won't here), modern communication technologies, like clothes, can help hide, but rarely totally obliterate, certain linguistic norms that mark male and female uniquely.  -- Paulscrawl (talk) 16:14, 10 October 2014 (UTC)