Politics of Animalia

This article is an entry in the citizen-edited encyclopedia Animalopedia. The neutrality of this article is disputed (see Talk:Politics of Animalia §"On whether it is proper to call the Five Families a 'governing body'").

The Politics of Animalia is the collective term for the machinery of governance in the city-state of Animalia. Officially it is a dual system consisting of the Oracle Tower Administration Bureau and the Ecosystem Council, but among citizens it is more often described as a triple governance that also includes a "third government"—namely, the turf administration of the Five Families 〔citation needed〕.

Overview

Animalia's structure of governance has been run for 121 years, ever since the Founding (AE 1), without ever possessing a written constitution. The public-administration scholar Harriet Longyear (owl, Urban Studies Lab, Echoes Library) called this a "constitutionless equilibrium," remarking that "in this city, the supreme law is precisely that no one holds full authority" (On the Governance of Animalia, AE 112).

Oracle Tower Administration Bureau

The Administration Bureau is the city's central executive organ, founded simultaneously with the completion of Oracle Tower (AE 20). It oversees every department: zoning, climate tuning, infrastructure, finance, and public safety.

Departmental structure

• Urban Planning Department — zoning and building permits. The fact that expansion-and-renovation applications for Five-Family strongholds are "approved same-day, without exception" has become a scandal seven times in the council's history, and on all seven occasions the answer given was "a triumph of administrative efficiency" (TMA Times, April AE 96 issue).
• Climate Tuning Department — management of artificial weather. It runs the Biome Wards, from maintaining the low temperatures of the Polar Ward to the humidity of the Jungle Ward.
• Finance Department — taxation and budgeting related to AMT. It has no involvement whatsoever in issuance itself (→ TMA-Economy-AMT).
• Citizen Records Department — civil registry and registration. It is said to hold the Archive Vault under its control, though the department's headcount has never been made public 〔citation needed〕.
• Public Safety Commission — a commission that, in principle, supervises the Animalia City Police (→ TMA-Police). Its roster of commissioners is not disclosed.

The "Unmanned Summit" Problem

The Bureau has no Director. Its successive "Acting Directors" rotate out within a few years, and there is no record of any of them ever delivering an inaugural address. Decisions are said to be reached by "the deliberative council of the tower's upper floors," but citizens have no means of verifying that body's name or membership. The political reporter Felix Dach (badger) won the TMA Times Journalism Award for a series calling this "the faceless government," but the series was cut off at its eighth installment "for reasons concerning sources" (AE 104).

The Ecosystem Council

The Ecosystem Council is the assembly of representatives of each species, established in AE 31. Its fixed size is 121 seats (derived from the number of species registered at the Founding; it has never been revised since, even as species multiplied—which is why fourteen small-rodent species share a single seat, while nine "vacant seats" remain reserved for species long since extinct).

Seat elections

Councilors (commonly called species-seats) are chosen every six years in the "Grand Election Season." Voting is conducted species by species, with the method left to each species' discretion. As a result—

• Wolf species vote vocally by howling (tallied by volume)
• Bird species use perch voting (landing on the perch bearing the candidate's title)
• Turtle species practice "deliberative voting," which takes an average of eleven months to count

—and so on; the methods proliferate wildly, and bills to standardize election administration have been voted down five times in the past, each as "interference in species culture." At the most recent Grand Election Season of AE 118, the average turnout across all species was 31.4% (TMA Times, December AE 118 issue).

Species-bloc politics

The real unit of the Council is not the individual species-seat but the bloc (parliamentary caucus).

Seasonal power rotation

The greatest seasonal spectacle of Animalia politics. Through the winter, the authority of hibernating councilors and officeholders is delegated to proxies (a custom dating from the AE 30s). The autumn maneuvering over the naming of proxies is called the "scramble for the sleepers" and has become a regular feature of the politics page. The received wisdom is that the Tundra Syndicate's influence swells in winter not merely because they endure the cold, but because non-hibernating northern species lock down the proxy posts en masse (Fifty Years of the Scramble for the Sleepers, AE 115).

"Does the Council Actually Decide?"

The Council's resolutions carry legal force, but their execution is entrusted to the Administration Bureau. Of the 372 major measures the Council passed between AE 78 and 120, the Bureau has left 208 unexecuted, still "under technical review" (Council Secretariat Annual Report, AE 120—though the Secretariat classified that report as non-public from the following year onward).

Ward government — the Ward Assemblies

Each district (Chinatown, Savanna Square, the Polar Ward, Broken Burrow, and so on) has a ward assembly elected by residents from among themselves. It handles matters close to daily life—road repairs, the parceling out of stall-vending zones—but holds no budget-execution power, and its resolutions are passed up to the Administration Bureau as "requests."

In practice, it is common knowledge among citizens that a ward-assembly resolution is realized fastest not by way of the Administration Bureau, but when it is brought to the local Family (see below).

The Third Governance — the Turf Administration of the Five Families

The third government, absent from the official chart of governing institutions. Since the Five-Family Accord of AE 51 (→ TMA-Timeline), each Family has provided de facto administrative services within its turf.

• Dispute mediation — a neighbor quarrel is settled faster by taking it to a Family's young men than to the courts (→ TMA-Justice)
• Welfare — a tradition dating back to the soup kitchens of the Great Broken Burrow Fire (AE 24). Goldfist-affiliated donations to orphanages, the Ninkyou-gumi's festival fairs, Rosso's holiday rations, and so on
• Infrastructure repair — there are repeated reports of a Family fixing, within the following week, a matter the Administration Bureau has left "under technical review" (TMA Times, February AE 109 issue, "The Cup That's Faster Than City Hall")

Political science calls this "surrogate governance," but on the street people simply say "ask the bosses."

Lobbying and the "Tower Pilgrimage"

Petitions to the Administration Bureau are officially received at the Citizen Records Department counter, but the speed of approval differs strikingly from petitioner to petitioner. Powerful go-betweens (fixers) have become a semi-official industry, and Tree Market is lined with signboards advertising "Permit Agency Services." Every one of the Five Families keeps an external-affairs handler who negotiates with the Tower, yet whom they actually meet with is treated as a closely guarded secret even within each Family 〔citation needed〕.

Civic political awareness

In an AE 119 opinion poll (commissioned by Family Radio; response rate unknown), the answers to "Who really runs this city?" were as follows.

Regarding the 18% who answered "it just turns on its own," sociologists diagnose "a vague sense of the automation of urban functions," but the taverns of the Shadow Layer have long had a blunter way of putting it—"the landlord of this city never comes to collect the rent."

関連項目

• TMA-Timeline — 正史年表
• TMA-Police / TMA-Justice — 治安・司法
• TMA-Economy-AMT — 通貨と財政
• Oracle-AI / Animalia-Map
• TMA-Underworld — シャドウ・レイヤーの自治