One of the thing that strikes you about the debates in any Parliament, State Assemblies or even local Councils, is the amount of time that gets wasted in filibustering. In an age of live television feed and intense media scrutiny, playing to the galleries is understandable. This wastage of time results in inadequate time being devoted to discussing important issues. In the circumstances, we need to devise mechanisms that will ensure that grandstanding and wasting public time is minimized, while all important issues are adequately discussed and debated. How do we do this?
Political parties espouse issues and interests, with varying priorities. It is natural that if a Party has strong support base among fishermen, it would be more interested than other parties, in being part of any debate on issues related to fishermen's livelihoods. In contrast, political parties for whom fishermen's issues are only one among the many issues in their agenda, may not be as interested in the issue as the Party with strong fishermen support base. The later would at best be a disinterested participant in the debate. It encourages meaningless speeches, where representatives of political parties speak about issues about which they have little interest, only because they have been given their turn to speak.
The cardinal principle of equality demands that all shades of opinion be given an equal right of being heard. This would necessitate giving every Group or Party equal time for representing their issue.
Assume that there is a "speaking time" account maintained in an Exchange within the Assembly, Parliament or Council. Let us also assume that each Party or Group is allotted some total speaking time for the session. In a splintered multi-party system as ours, we can even categorize parties based on their representation, and then allocate time based on the category. The Exchange monitors the time utilized by each Party or Group, with respect to the amount of time allotted to each.
Now let us introduce a mechanism whereby Parties can trade speaking times. Those Parties, unable to utilize their allotted speaking time for a session, can now trade their unutilized times to a Party which is in deficit of speaking time. The incentive for a party to trade its surplus speaking time is that this time can be carried forward for the entire tenure of the Assembly, so that they can utilize their times more efficiently over this tenure. Further, parties refusing to trade their surplus times can be penalized by deducting the same amount of time from their allocation for the next session.
The aforementioned arrangement has many advantages. It would straight away ensure that parties and speakers put more value on their speaking times. Given the cap on the amount of time available, political parties will be forced to better manage and schedule their priorties for the session. Bluster and grandstanding could get reduced. Important issues will get focussed on their substance, and the quality of debates will improve. It is also more probable now that important issues which are not exercising the priorities of the majority, will get highlighted and discussed.
Critics would complain that it promotes parochialism and interest group politics. My answer would be that in modern day democracy, interest group politics is unavoidable. One of the more interesting ways of mitigating the influence of something we want to avoid, but which is inevitable, is to co-opt and formalize it. Trading in speaking times would only recognize this reality and formalize institutional mechanisms to take this into account.
There could be other more interesting incentive structures for trading times. But that is a question of detail. The larger point emphasised here is the utility of trading of speaking times, in enforcing discipline and containing filibustering in the houses of democracy .
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