Opinion:Junior Minister Program Moves in Right Direction




Opinion: Junior Minister Program Moves in Right Direction
Written by GraVandius








Last week a small but relatively significant change was announced to the Junior Minister Program in Foreign Affairs Roll Call by Minister Aexnidaral Seymour. From this point forward, being a JM in the FA Ministry would no longer count towards the program's existing limit of participating in two ministries at a time.

President Deepest House had the following to say regarding the move, "I campaigned committed to reviewing the junior minister program and improving it where we can increase participation and efficiencies in government. I’m proud to say I have fulfilled that campaign promise by relaxing the junior minister limit for the ministry of foreign affairs. As the term continues, we will continue to improve upon the junior minister program in partnership with the various ministries to ensure all of our citizens have an opportunity not only to participate in government in a meaningful way, but to advance and rise through the ranks."

With this change, Foreign Affairs joins the Ministry of Justice and the Europeian Republic Navy in being the only institutions exempt from the limit. This leaves citizens of the region to choose two ministries from World Assembly Affairs, Interior, Culture, Communications and Radio. Additionally, citizens may still write articles in Comms, appear on air in Radio, or Recruit in Interior without officially being Junior Ministers in that ministry. The standing policy from last term is that with the latter case is that those members are not allowed to access the main discord channel for the ministry.

Personally, I still have a lot of problems with this existing limit as I've expressed multiple times previously. I don't think people should be forced to pick a lane in a voluntary game in the first place and, additionally, I don't think it achieves it's goal of giving people a more direct line to a leadership position. However, I do not yet have any evidence to back these claims.

What I do have evidence for is that the junior minister program negatively impacted the Ministry of Communications last term. The number of articles published last term compared to the term before fell from 42 to 26. It doesn't seem like there was a substantial increase in quality to explain that quantity drop off either as 9/26 articles this term were Europeian Nightly News; the more frequent equivalent of the 6/42 Sunday Morning Update the term before. Additionally the number of people writing at least one article fell from 14 two terms ago to 9 this term.

It could be argued that this was due to changeover within the ministry leadership, but there is a direct relation between preventing people from being in the communications chat and who writes articles for the EBC because of how the ministry has operated for the past few terms. Usually, when the minister or the President has a topic they would like covered by the EBC they will simply drop a ping in the ministry's discord chat. With the limit, that means that anyone who is not a Junior Minister in Comms will not be able to access the list of articles ideas to be written. That effectively limits everyone who is not a JM to totally independently driven Op-eds. As evidence of this point the only person outside of Comms last term to write an article for the EBC was, in fact, me.

This is just an example of how one ministry's productivity has been impacted by the limit. I would hazard that it is a similar situation in the ministry of Radio as based on my limited time in the ministry operates in a similar way to Communications. Interior is effected in a different way as it would simply isolate every non-JM recruiter from their peers, currently however, no one recruits as a non-JM in the same way very few people write articles or appear on Radio shows that are not in those respective ministries. As has already been showed in Comms, this limit can have a negative impact on the ministry as a whole. Thus, hopefully over time, President Deepest House and future Presidents will continue to erode the limit and return to these ministries to their full potential.

This is a personal opinion and not intended to reflect the opinion of the EBC.
 
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