Op-Ed: Do we have too many Honoured Citizens?
President who nominated two Honoured Citizens says "No"
Written by JayDee
When Calvin Coolidge opened the discussion So, About Renaming the Forums for Honoured Citizens… in his capacity as Administrator, it gave way to the issue of possibly having too many Honoured Citizens. This discussion was brought to the limelight in the aftermath of Rand and Kazaman’s Ovation ceremonies and Vor’s Triumph which followed shortly after. In another thread, Honoured Citizen Aexnidaral joked that “at this rate you’ll just be grandfathered in to Honoured Citizenship after 6 months here.”
While made in jest, it was also meant as a jab at the string of Presidents, myself included, who had been making HC nominations. This year in particular saw several nominations confirmed, across five Presidents there were four citizens nominated and subsequently confirmed - two of those nominations being mine. Those four citizens will bring the total count of Honoured Citizens to 30 once Vor is officially Triumphed. For the sake of simplicity, I will not be counting former Honoured Citizens. With 127 current citizens both active and inactive, that means 24% of our population is made up of Honoured Citizens; nearly a quarter of our voting population is Honoured Citizens, people who could pop in after years of absence and vote for a random stranger in the next Presidential election. However, is there really that many Honoured Citizens?
At first glance you could make an argument for yes or for no. With nearly a quarter of our citizens being Honoured, that would suggest that we have too many, but across Europeia’s 17 year history that would mean that an average of less than two individuals are nominated per year. Of course, as most of us know, the Honoured Citizen was not a thing way back in 2007, Honoured Citizenship was not established until sometime in 2010. The first record we have of an individual being Ovated is Asperta who’s Ovation was confirmed by the Senate on December 5, 2010. That raises the average slightly from 1.76 to 2.31 citizens being nominated per year. However, if we count the three who’s Honoured Citizenship was stripped that would raise the average to 2.54 citizens per year across the history of its existence.
Customarily, but not super consistently, a president will wait until the end of their term to nominate a person for an ovation. That means there are typically 5 or 6 opportunities for a President to nominate someone and of those approximately half those opportunities will be used. Of course, this is not always observed, such as my own nomination of Vor which took place during Honoured Citizens Day. These are a lot of numbers with some historical merit, but what about the Honoured Citizens themselves? Yes they could simply waltz in to run and/or vote in an election, but how many are currently active? While “active” may be hard to define, of the current Honoured Citizens I would count that seventeen are truly actively engaged with Europeia with another three who pop in and out or could become active again soon. So let’s make that twenty who might vote in an election, though a few of those have openly stated that they don’t. That would bring the voting population down to 117, of which 20 are Honoured Citizens which makes up 17% or less than a fifth.
Confusing numbers aside, these statistics don’t really account for fluctuations in the number of individuals Honoured in a given year nor do they provide any data for whether or not the number has been increasing as of late. Perhaps we’re well on our way to having too many or perhaps we just have a lot of catching up to do with citizens who are arguably worthy of an Ovation. However, at present, I would argue that we really don’t have that many Honoured Citizens and I doubt that there will be a concerning trend developing anytime in the near future. My main concern is whether or not we've Honoured individuals who were not deserving, and again I would argue that we haven't. So no, there aren't too many Honoured Citizens in Europeia.
A/N: No there will be no more Ovations or Triumphs during this term or a possible third term.
