 The term open political system refers to political organisations that have the characteristics of open systems in general, namely that they have a high degree of exchange with their environments and are normalised to respond to changes through feedback dynamics that enable adaptive capacity. Likewise, they are open in the sense of being able to include the distributed perspectives and interests of a wide section of the population into the decision-making process. Open political systems are dynamic in nature in recognising the need to be responsive to change within the external environment and to adapt to those changes. The open-close political spectrum has become in recent years identified as a replacement to the traditional left-right spectrum as defining the most important features to political systems in an age of globalisation and increased interconnectivity. In a 2016 article in The Economist magazine, the author wrote, From Warsaw to Washington, the political divide that matters is less and less between left and right, and more and more between open and closed. Debates between tax-cutting conservatives and free-spending social democrats have not gone away, but issues that cross traditional party lines have grown more potent. Welcome immigrants or keep them out. Open up to foreign trade or protect domestic industries. Embrace cultural change or resist it. Predictions and classifications based on traditional political distinctions are becoming less relevant in the rapid changing world of globalisation and the growing force of hyperconnectivity. From Spain and France to the USA, incumbent political organisations based on the traditional spectrum are finding themselves less relevant to the issues that matter to people and increasingly are becoming displaced by those political movements who recognise a new set of concerns and interests that have moved to the forefront. Speaking at the inaugural meeting of the Open Government Partnership in Brazil, a well-known politician had this to say on the subject. In the 21st century, the most significant divides between nations will be not between east and west, nor over religion, so much as between open and closed societies. We believe the countries with open governments, open economy and open societies will increasingly flourish. She went on to say that those countries that are closed to, change, ideas, cultures and beliefs that are different to theirs will quickly find that in an internet world they will be left behind. The open-closed distinction to political systems is a recent alternative to the standard left-right system, increasingly used to describe the new divides in political systems in Europe and North America in the 21st century. In this system, parties and voters are arranged on an axis from open, social liberal and globalist to closed, culturally conservative and protectionist. A political realignment along these lines, across the western world, has been described by political scientists in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, the Great Recession and the European Migration Crisis, with mainstream left-wing and right-wing political parties shifting or falling behind populist parties and independence. Examples of elections described as having been best interpreted along open and closed lines include the Brexit referendum, the elections that took place between 2016 and 2017 in the United States, France, Austria, Poland and the Netherlands. From this perspective, the central political issues of our time, such as immigration, nationalism, international trade etc., are all issues that can be best interpreted in terms of a model of open and closed political systems. To understand the distinction between open and closed political systems, it is of value to first understand the distinction made between open and closed systems in general. The systems theorist Ludwig Betelampfi describes two types of systems, open systems and closed systems. Closed systems are held to be isolated or closed off from their environments, where the feedback mechanisms between the system and its environment are limited. This is typically the case due to a strong boundary separating the system and its environments. Closed systems have a strong boundary condition that separates the internal workings of the system from its external environments and limits the exchange of resources and information between them. The boundaries to closed systems are largely impenetrable. With a strong boundary condition, limited influence from the environments and no perceived need for adaptation, in closed systems the emphasis is on internal structure. In closed social organizations, where interactions and information are transmitted almost exclusively within the organization, management analyses problems by examining the internal structures of the organization with a limited or only fixed consideration of the external environment. Closed systems tend towards equilibrium over time and this equilibrium is used to manage the system, where different forces are counterbalanced in order to maintain stability in structure. In the context of organizational management, this involves using various direct incentive mechanisms to exert an influence on the members in order for them to conform to the existing governance structures. In the absence of interaction with their environments, closed systems lack adaptive capacity and can thus be seen to be more deterministic in their nature. Moreover, closed systems are generally static and do not provide room for multiple alternatives for accomplishing the same results. Closed organizations tend to hold internal efficiencies, structure and control as the highest goals. Unlike open systems, closed systems are dependent upon their separation from their environments, their boundary and the structure that maintains fixed order within the system. If the exchange with the environment becomes too high, such structures are rendered limited in their capacities. Open systems are systems that allow interactions between their internal elements and their environments. An open system is defined as a system in exchange of matter, energy or information with its environment, continuously maintaining imports and exports, building up and breaking down its structure according to the information it receives from its environment. Open systems are dependent upon their feedback exchange with their environments. For example, all biological creatures are open systems in that they have to continuously maintain in exchange of energy, resources and information with their environments. This gives rise to the capacity to adapt and respond to change within their environment and to grow over time, which is a process of emergence. Open systems are characterized by a feedback exchange with their environments that enables them to adapt and respond through an internal self-organizing process, where the information and resources received from the environment enable the elements within the system to self-organize into new structures that are better adapted to the environments and thus able to intercept more or better quality resources, which in turn enables them to continue to grow. In contrast to closed systems, which are defined by their internal structure, open systems are defined by their exchange with their environments, that is to say the processes through which they transform inputs into outputs. Closed systems and open systems represent a continuum along which organizations are more open or more closed to their environments. The key defining variable governing this degree of openness is the complexity of the environments within which the organization is situated. The effectiveness of all systems is relative to the environment they exist within and this is particularly true for social organizations and how they're managed. Closed linear hierarchical forms of management work best in simpler environments where a finite amount of elements are interacting in a well-defined linear fashion, where there is a low level of interconnectivity and interdependence and change is limited to a relatively low level. The historian Yuval Noah Harari illustrated this when he said the old 20th century political model of left versus right is now largely irrelevant and the real divide today is between global and national or global and local and you see it again all over the world that this is now the main struggle and we probably need completely new political models and completely new ways of thinking about politics. In essence what you can say is that we now have a global ecology, we have a global economy but we have national politics and this doesn't work together. This makes the political system ineffective because it has no control over the forces that shape our lives. Globalization represents a new level of socioeconomic complexity and this is a central challenge facing national institutional systems that were designed for a more simple environment. While the political and economic environment remained relatively stable and simple the distinction was between ideologies. As the world becomes more complex the divide is growing between those organizations that can deal with that complexity and those that can't. Over the past couple of decades with the rise of globalization and information technology national politics have become hollowed out as nations are increasingly required to operate within a global economy and form part of global processes. In the face of this increased complexity and global connectivity at best national political systems have been made increasingly irrelevant. National political systems without the capacity to deal with the complexity of these global processes have been made increasingly irrelevant in the perception of the public. In the face of hyperconnectivity political systems that have remained closed would appear more threatened and less stable. The boundaries and walls of closed political systems may hold out the rest of the world but they also hold up the ceiling. When the political organization is not yet ready for hyperconnectivity and globalization then as the walls start to come down so too does the ceiling and this threatens societal collapse in some instances. Openness also means transparency and as institutions become more transparent all of their failings become more apparent and people start to lose faith in them. Whether this is with political systems and corruption, cultural institutions like the Catholic Church or social institutions like the family. In general open systems are potentially more effective at dealing with complexity due to a number of factors inherent in their design. They can potentially scale larger. They are normalized for non linearity, interdependence, interconnectivity and dynamically changing and unpredictable environments. Formal hierarchical closed sociopolitical systems are limited in their effective range of scale. As the author Clay Scherke notes in his book Here Comes Everybody closed organizations have both an upper and lower limit in their operating space what is called a Cossian ceiling and Cossian floor. The Cossian ceiling is the point above which the transaction costs of managing a standard institutional form prevent it from working well. Institutions which grow too large hit the ceiling and become so unwieldy that the transaction costs of managing a standard institution form prevent it from working well. Typically the largest hierarchical organizations are a few hundred thousand people. A very few are a million or two million. The idea of creating a closed form of hierarchical political system for the entire planet would seem virtually impossible due to too many levels of bureaucracy and the bottlenecks inherent in such centralized systems. Because open networked organizations are distributed they have limited bottlenecks and hierarchical levels which allows them to scale beyond that of the hierarchy. Open platforms like Facebook currently interconnect up to two billion people as long as the network is distributed there is no inherent scaling limit. Inversely the Cossian floor is the point below which the overhead costs are too large for the level of transactions taking place. The author argues that open online platforms drastically reduce transaction costs allowing loosely structured groups with limited managerial oversight to operate under the Cossian floor. Closed systems have problems dealing with high levels of interconnectivity and interdependence. The closed sociopolitical organizations of the nation state that were developed over the modern era all have in common one big idea that of independence. That they were sufficiently independent and could thus manage and control their own internal affairs. National identity was maintained in the face of the other outside of the border. Independence, borders and the centralized regulatory apparatus of the government enable political systems to regulate their internal workings. But as interdependence increases this means increasingly things that are outside of the control of the regulatory system affect it and this comes to reduce its autonomy, credibility and legitimacy to its people. In environments where cross-correlations of interdependence may traverse the whole environment and no single system can manage them this requires open platforms for interoperability to enable cross-system governance. The greater the interdependence the more the requirements to manage phenomena that happen outside the borders of any specific political system and the greater any component in the system has to invest in the whole in order to get the desired results for itself. At a low level of interdependence one system can invest solely in itself to get ahead but the higher the interdependence the more it has to invest in resources in open common platforms to manage those eventualities outside of its immediate control. For example the more the people of Europe's hinterlands in North Africa and West Asia can see what happens in Europe and the easier it is for them to move there the more Europe has to care about what happens in those nations and build collaborative platforms with them so as to enable both to succeed. In complex and dynamically changing environments the true measure of political systems is not what political program it adopts but instead how it responds to change. Fixed plans and ideologies may work within relatively closed systems with limited change but in dynamic complex environments the primary parameter to the success of the system is how effective it is at aggregating the distributed intelligence and information of its citizens and converting that into the required changes. An open political system is one that recognizes the fact that the world changes and there is a requirement to adapt to those changes in order to be sustainable.