There is a growing academic field of "governance" that exists that would variously be described as a branch of political science, public administration, or policy studies. It is a relatively small field, but has several academic journals where that fit the description of the literature you're looking for. The best of these journals, in my opinion, is Perspectives on Public Management & Governance (although it has a focus on public governance structures to a fault of ignoring corporate governance structures).

In addition to this, there is a 50 chapter OUP AI Governance Handbook that I've co-edited with leading scholars from Economics, Political Science, International Affairs, and other fields of social science that are interested in these exact ideal governance questions as you describe them. 10 of the chapters are currently available, but I also have complete copies of essentially every chapter that I would be happy to share directly with you or anyone else that comments here and is interested. Here's the Table of Contents. I'm certainly biased, but I think this book contains the cutting edge dialogue around both how ideal governance may be applied to controlling AI and how the development of increasingly powerful AI presents new opportunities and challenges for ideal governance.

I have contributed to these questions both from trying to understand what might be the elements of ideal governance structures and processes for Social Insurance programs, AI systems, and Space settlement ideal governance and to understand what are the concerns of integrating autonomous and intelligent decision making systems into our current governance structures and processes.

I think there are some helpful insights into how to make governance adaptive (reset/jubilee as you described it) and for defining the elements of the hierarchy (various levels) of the governance structure. The governance literature looks at micro/meso/macro levels of governance structures to help illustrate how some governance elements are best described and understand at different levels of emergence or description. Another useful construct from governance scholars is that of discretion or breadth of choice set given to an agent carrying out the required decision making of the various governance entities, this is where much of my own interest lies, which you can see in work I have with colleagues on topics including discretion, evolution of bureaucratic form, artificial discretion, administrative evil, and artificial bureaucrats. This work builds on the notion of bounded rational actors and how they execute decisions in response to constitutional rule and insertional structures. Here & here in the AI Governance Handbook, with colleagues we look at how Herbert Simon and Max Weber's classic answers to these ideal governance questions hold in a world with machine intelligence, and we examine what new governance tools, structures, and processes may be needed now. I've also done some very initial work here on the Lesswrong forum looking at how Weber's ideal bureaucratic structure might be helpful for considering how to control intelligent machine agents

In brief recap, there is a relatively small interdisciplinary field/community of scholars looking at these questions, it is a community that has done some brainstorming, some empirical work, and used some economics-style thinking to address some of these ideal governance questions. There are also some classic works that touch on these topics as well around thinkers such as Max Weber, Herbert Simon, and Elinor Ostrom.

I hope this is helpful. I'm sure I've focused too much on my own work here, but I hope the Handbook in particular gives you some sense of some of the work out there. I would be happy to connect you with other writers and thinkers who I believe are taking these questions of ideal governance seriously. I find these to be among the most interesting and important questions for our moment in time.

Your "select 1,000 voters at random, give them time to do research. Only they vote" system made me think of how Venice used to elect a doge. It was madness! Basically they introduced N layers of "this group of people appoint a larger group, that is stripped back by lot. They then appoint the next group..." [1]. The fact that this kind of system did exist, but doesn't any longer, perhaps reflects badly on it.

As a separate point, the official system, "constitution", is always actually beholden to whatever the "real" system is, which can drift quite far. In a charity I helped out at the directors, in theory, told the CEO what to do, but in practice it was just a lot of directors saying "oh great CEO, you have been here for more time than me and therefore you are more wise. What would you recommend?". The director turnover was high, and it takes time for someone to learn how to use the reins of power even when they have them in hand. The TV program "Yes minister" made a similar claim about the UK government. Its not hard to imagine a situation where a  jury are officially in charge. but are actually commanded by a judge.

[1] To quote wiki: Thirty members of the Great Council, chosen by lot, were reduced by lot to nine; the nine chose forty and the forty were reduced by lot to twelve, who chose twenty-five. The twenty-five were reduced by lot to nine, and the nine elected forty-five. These forty-five were once more reduced by lot to eleven, and the eleven finally chose the forty-one who elected the doge.  (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doge_of_Venice#:~:text=Doges%20of%20Venice%20were%20elected,were%20republics%20and%20elected%20doges.)

Curated. I think we spent very little thinking about the topic of governance despite it being a very big deal. It's extremely hard to change existing structures and even when you're setting up something new, it's scary to pick something very different from what's typically tried. I'd be excited for people to make progress on the questions described in this post.

I'm surprised that this whole conversation has happened with no mention of the minor but growing trend towards self-management organizational structures, teal organizations, Holacracy, or Sociocracy.

I have some experience with Holacracy, and while I would never call it a cure-all, I feel strongly about the relevance of its driving principles to the question of what an ideal governance system would look like -- eg. a structure of nested units/teams with high levels of local autonomy, a unique method of making governance decisions on how to change said structure, mechanisms that privilege "moving forward" over "inaction due to conflictual gridlock", fluid process for defining and appointing power-holding "roles" to individuals, etc.

One thing to consider, in terms of finding a better way of striking a balance between deferring to experts and having voters invested, is epistocracy. Jason Brennan talks about why, compared to just having a stronger voice for experts in government, epistocracy might be less susceptible to capture by special interests, https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/z3S3ZejbwGe6BFjcz/ama-jason-brennan-author-of-against-democracy-and-creator-of?commentId=EpbGuLgvft5Q9JKxY

Some other literature OTOH:

• Collective Reflective Equilibrium in Practice
• Not "ideal," but exploring what's possible: Legal Systems Very Different from Ours
• There's a pretty large literature on various forms of "deliberative democracy," e.g. see here and here
• I would guess there's been interesting discussions of ideal governance in the context of DAOs

I recently stumbled across a sociology classic of sorts: Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell, "The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields" (American Sociological Review, 1983). https://www.uio.no/studier/emner/matnat/ifi/INF9200/v10/readings/papers/DeMaggio.pdf

"We ask...why there is such startling homogeneity of organizational forms and practices." 

The main answer: "We identify three mechanisms through which institutional isomorphic change occurs...: 1) coercive isomorphism that stems from political influence and the problem of legitimacy; 2) mimetic isomorphism resulting from standard responses to uncertainty; and 3) normative isomorphism, associated with professionalization." 

Curtis Yarvin might be intresting. There are two post I would recommend mainly general theory of collaboration and one about Monarchism. He gives an interesting perspective.

Many of the references and communities I might have suggested have already been listed (e.g. Metagov) so I won't repeat them (and I've also discovered some helpful new ones!). 

One I didn't see mentioned is the the work of Claudia Chwalisz and her team at the OECD, which I've found immensely valuable—not only their excellent reports, summaries, etc. but an Airtable documenting hundreds of real-world governance experiments around the world (and I'm happy to connect folks into the community of practitioners implementing these new approaches to support significant policy decisions). 

I have also personally been exploring many these questions at Harvard, focused primarily on governance of FAAMG companies given their impact on our 'collective cognitive capacity' to address all global challenges (and particularly catastrophic risks) and their concentration of AI capabilities (and bolstered by their capacity to change quickly and the incredible pressure on them to change). 

In particular, you might find this working paper belfercenter.org/publication/towards-platform-democracy-policymaking-beyond-corporate-ceos-and-partisan-pressure interesting as a sort of advocacy for applying sortition to FAAMG (building on significant empirical literature from others; cited in the paper). 

Caveat:  The the audience I'm writing for there is somewhat different from you, even though my personal motivations appear to be similar to yours (my current published work is focused on those who have influence over those organizations; in fact I was actually directed to this post by someone who with significant power in FAAMG org who suggested that I comment.). It does not engage with many of the difficult questions around actual operationalization of sortition at a global scale for overall restructuring of governance (part of my current work). That said, it was meant to lead to (initially private) pilots by FAAMG-like corporations and it is directly doing that. It is one step on the road from that to much more significant governance changes.

This might be also be interesting re. brainstorm: Building Wise Systems: Combining Competence, Alignment, and Robustness—a (work in progress) framework re. thinking about ~governance systems.

I have also dug deep into systems like Polis (e.g. https://github.com/compdemocracy/polis/issues/1289 ),  its variants in the private sector, and other relatively novel elicitation/deliberation systems.  There is a lot to learn from those and to build upon but also huge amounts of ground that has not been covered (IMHO due to lack of effective messaging and investment for a long time). Language models will also change the possibility space.

Finally, Engineering a Safer World (open access) is interesting on this, and I particularly appreciate this diagram which explores the role of governance in managing a complex system:

I recommend Paul Tucker's work on independent agencies. His book "Unelected Power" goes not only into the practical application of central bank governance structures but also the philosophical underpinnings of governance design in general. His follow-up book (which looks at the governance of international organizations) "Global Discord" is out this fall. Central banks in general may be worth investigating as there is a decent amount of variation (across and within countries) within the last 100 years. 

It has been a while since this post was made, but the issue remains important! A new development I recently found out about that I think is super interesting is this paper on a new voting method called 'Maximum Partial Consensus'. 

Springer Nature 2021
Fair group decisions via non-deterministic proportional consensus
Jobst Heitzig, Forest W. Simmons and Sara M. Constantino

https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1140&context=odettepub 

(Contains a few mention of extreme circumstances to make thought experiment points. That is not the primary focus, and can be avoided by skipping 10 and 12. Also, 7 gets political as an example of how a particular variation of liquid democracy might allow for a kind of check and balance. The numbers are otherwise not necessarily a good division. 11 just suggests that a 'law' or decision can have a term limit, and that this might affect 'equilibriums', echoing some stuff in the post talking about 'moral parliament/s'.)

1.

an informal association

I noticed that this didn't get any graphs. (Yes countries are complicated, and 'government' alone involves different levels and that wasn't fully covered either, even with one example.)

2.

I'll outline some common governance structures for countries and major organizations today, and highlight how much room there is to try different things that don't seem to be in wide use today. More

So the link broke when I copied it to here, but...

The original is actually broken. (I did not check all the links.)

Currently the link is

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SCs4KpcShb23hcTni/www.cold-takes.com/ideal-governance-for-companies-countries-and-more/#common-governance-structures-today

instead of, say:

http://www.cold-takes.com/ideal-governance-for-companies-countries-and-more/#common-governance-structures-today

Huh, that's this post linking to itself (from it being in a different place).

3.

he world today has lots of governments, but they seem to mostly follow a very small number of basic governance templates.

So, if you're looking for stuff that's structured very differently, maybe stuff that isn't governments? Smaller groups, informal groups,..I don't know a lot about co-ops*, or activist groups**, but there is some literature about dealing with internal problems between members, in stuff like the second one. There's also stuff around communities/roommates (resources, allocating tasks, getting everything done, dealing with conflicts, etc.).

*Like a company but run/owned differently.

**Not necessarily concerned with politics, but also sometimes solving a problem.

4.

When I was 13, the lunch table I sat at established a Constitution with some really strange properties that I can't remember.

Informal groups experimenting might be interesting as well. Like, different groups might exist at different time scales:

What term limits exist for the different entities?

so like, not necessarily something involving term limits, but the group itself, existing and handling things in a period of time. And maybe that informally happens again (with similar set of people), and/or eventually becomes more formal.

5.

Which restrictions are enshrined in a hard-to-change Constitution (and how hard is it to change), vs. being left to the people in power at the moment?

How able are people to walk out? Can they just walk to a different table?

6.

Barring violent revolution in the case of countries.

There are ways things can be less permanent if people are willing to leave/quit/etc. This is easier to see for 'a lunch table' than a country, but it seems like 'organizations' (perhaps in a different sense) can do this more. I mention this because 'the stakes are high, and you only get one choice' seems like a weak point.

Reset/Jubilee: maybe it would be good for some organizations to periodically redo their governance mostly from scratch, subject only to the most basic principles.

And here I was imagining change (probably) being less extreme (most of the time - perhaps earlier on, or in response to larger changes in conditions, or more info, there might be larger changes).

the Constitution receiving the most votes

(looks like majority voting again)

7.

More examples in a footnote.3

...

At first glance it may seem to pose a risk that people will be able to "buy votes,"

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Imagine a vote where people who care more/are affected more, are able to vote with more weight. Also, differences around 'government' versus 'corporate' might mean people are just like 'why is that a problem'?

Soft term limits

You could also have less power. (Or, with the proxy thing, term limits might not exist (on a fixed schedule, or at least have early termination whenever desired.))

Also, you could have multiple voting rounds around the proxy thing. One option is sort of like, if the proxies didn't work/there's major breaks with them, then the round gets re-done (without proxies).

Formal technocracy/meritocracy

This might be compared with proxies. One option - which might be tricky - would be to label things differently. Like 'I trust (doctor) John Doe' and will delegate this vote (for the first round) to him for votes involving (medical stuff)', or a specific type. By having two rounds, and the first round, the proxies are treated as a faster approximation to the direct vote, maybe it works a lot of the time. (And some times a difference is found, and things get shaken up a little - the tentative decision, the rules people have created around their proxy delegation.)

I'm kind of thinking something like a proxy guesses for you, as opposed to, 'is given power' also seems like it might be useful sometimes. For instance, I'm going to use a (made up) political example here:

Someone is generally against vaccination requirements (and any proxy they make will reflect that). However, during a serious pandemic, on the second vote they change that. It is a specific override, not a general one, but it is a different situation. (As opposed to, 'epidemiologists are given more power during a pandemic' or chosen or elected, or (given power) around (handling) 'this might be a problem can we head this off' and they choose to close borders for like a week as a situation evolves. Or that is a measure in place that automatically triggers once certain circumstances are met. And then, there's more time for deliberation (or confirmation or revision), and making decision around how things will be handled going forward.)

8.

Footnote 4:

Most systems of government have a sort of funnel from "least engaged in day to day decisions, but most ultimately legitimate representatives of whom the institution is supposed to serve" (shareholders, voters) to "most engaged in day to day decisions, but ultimately accountable to someone else" (chief executive). A nonprofit structure is a very short funnel, and the board of directors tends to be a somewhat random assortment of funders, advisors, people who the founders just thought were cool, etc. I think they often end up not very accountable (to anyone) or engaged in what's going on, such that they have a hard time acting when they ought to, and the actions they do take are often kind of random.

This was good. It explained a structure, a design and why it used. I could comment on that one and how people might try to do it better but this post is about looking for other ways that are more different, and I don't have a lot more to say - I've heard about a specific attempt, and why it was done that way, but don't think it turned out 'well'.

9.

Here's an unusual setup: open source. (Completely.) (I don't know a lot about DAOs, and experiments around that. though do watch out for things that are like this:

Another alternative is a setup that is somewhat common among tech companies: 1-2 founders hold enough shares to keep control forever, so you end up with essentially a dictatorship. This also ... leaves something to be desired.

which mean there are shares! (but that doesn't matter.))

10.

For example, there are arguments that our ethical decisions should be dominated by concern for ensuring that as many people as possible will someday get to exist. I really go back and forth on how much I buy these arguments, but I'm definitely somewhere between 10% convinced and 50% convinced. So ... say I'm "20% convinced" of some view that says preventing human extinction6 is the overwhelmingly most important consideration for at least some dimensions of ethics (like where to donate), and "80% convinced" of some more common-sense view that says I should focus on some cause unrelated to human extinction.7 How do I put those two together and decide what this means for actual choices I'm making?

So. I won't say that extinction is the only thing that matters. But if say, my happiness matters and a meteor hits the earth (or a powerful solar storm) and everyone dies quickly or slowly - well, I'm not going to be happy about that.

There's a certain amount of 'other things don't matter if we die first'. For instance, if I found out (somehow) that 20 years from now I'm going to get cancer and die, but I'll be fine for the next 15 years, that would worry me. But if I was on a plane and something went wrong involving the plane that would worry me more.

11.

What stops someone who lost the randomized draw from just asking to hold the same vote again? Or asking to hold a highly similar/related vote that would get back a lot of what they lost? How does that affect the negotiated equilibrium?

What if people vote on doing things one way for a period of time, and then voting again? (Not a change from a past vote, but building it in?)

12.

and the better I expect this "moral parliament"-type idea to end up looking, compared to alternatives.10

...

An important factor in decision making is value of information, or 'as you get more information, you can make better decisions'. Not everything is about (conflicting) values, and stuff all getting decided in advance. For instance, if I like banana splits, and then a banana company invades a country...maybe it's hard to get bananas if I don't buy with* them, but I clearly know that is more important to me than how much I enjoy banana splits.

*I meant to write with, but if a credit card company invaded another country, I might stop using them.

I think you'd like my post, Building Blocks of Politics: An Overview of Selectorate Theory. Selectorate Theory is a framework that can be used for evaluating government structures, and my post gives a thorough overview of it. 

I've been interested in this topic in the past, especially from the economics / game theoretic perspective. There's one journal I know of that explores this topic that might be worth looking into:

The Journal of Mechanism and Institution Design

http://www.mechanism-design.org/

Mechanism design in this context being the kind of inverse of game theory that starts with a desired outcome and designs a system that produces that outcome, as opposed to the traditional approach of game theory where you start with a system and figuring out the outcome. More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_design

I also think this topic of ideal governance & mechanism design has a lot of overlap with the field of cryptoeconomics, or the economic analysis of how cryptocurrencies work / enforce behaviors via incentives: https://policyreview.info/glossary/cryptoeconomics

If you're curious about cryptoeconomics more in depth, Tim Roughgarden out of Columbia has an excellent lecture series on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcH4Ga14Y4ELFKrEYM1vXCg/playlists

Some more general literature that might be of interest to you:

The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dictator%27s_Handbook

The Logic of Political Survival

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Political_Survival

Both these books are by the same author(s) and provide a solid intro to the Selectorate Theory of politics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selectorate_theory) which also provides a framework for answering some of the questions you posed regarding things like the ideal number of representatives.

Hope this helps!

You might find Origins Of Political Order interesting. Emphasis on how the principle agent problem is one of the central issues of governance and how without strong mechanisms systems tend to descend into corruption

The r/achipelago subreddit is quite small but exists for hobbyists to share designs for alternative political systems and to consider the effects the alternatives would have. Most of what's there right now is about electoral systems rather than full institutional structures. Some posts include links to resources, such as one of my favorites, The Electoral System Design Handbook, which describes case studies of several countries and the typical good and bad effects of different design decisions.

"Ideal governance" depends on what ideals you're aiming for, of course. There have been proposed improvements to futarchy such as this one, which picks utilitarianism as its explicit ideal.  An explicitly virtue theorist option could be to modernize Plato's Republic instead. Granted, these are extreme examples. For more sober-minded investigation into ideal governance, you'd of course want to start with criteria that are well-defined and pragmatic, rather than broad philosophical or ideological traditions.

Jason Brennan's work defending Epistocracy is worth checking out, particularly some of the mechanisms he talks about, like government by simulated oracale. His book Against Democracy is a good place to start.

"Constitutional design" may be a useful keyword. (Though it's obviously focused at the state-actor level, not governance generally.)

A small point but I wonder if it’s worth considering governance arrangements over time as well as at a point in time. For instance, a ‘well-functioning’ democratic government over time may be a step closer to your idea of proportional decision-making in that power switches back and forth according, so a given coalition may have disproportionate power at any given time but something more like proportionate power over time (albeit very imperfectly and in complex ways).

[This article](https://medium.com/the-ready/the-operating-system-canvas-420b8b4df062) may interest you.

If you want a system that is both fast and dynamic and also takes care to account for all interests from all stakeholder groups, not just shareholders

Then the obvious idea to me seems to be a "forecastocracy" rule by the best forecasters. The best person at forecasting all stakeholders' interests is most capable of taking them into account while being a dynamic decision-maker.

It shouldn't be too hard to implement. Just hold a score voting election every X years where all stakeholders score a set of candidates for forecastocratic governance, but also appended to that vote they predict what the final score  for each candidate will, then rather than a standard score voting election where each vote has equal weight, each vote would be weighted by its predictive accuracy. 

You could do futarchy and have the prediction markets in charge, but that seems like it'd lack the dynamism required, and has the difficulty getting traders on the market.

Here's an interesting example of a fairly unique governance arrangement: https://issues.org/revisiting-nsf-nsb-science-advice-olds-rosenberg-robichaud/

So the hardest part about any model of governance is that so often planning for "good governance" is not just about governmental structure, it's about competition and the composition of the people involved in that competition. Perhaps understanding the benefits and drawbacks of different types of government doesn't matter as much as understanding the culture/environment in which and through which a particular organization operates. You have to weigh internal personalities and external factors and plan from there. It's all so humanly variable. 

This is, in short, to say that there's no "one size fits all" approach to government. I'm sure I'm not saying anything unexpected there, but the age-old debate of democracy vs. oligarchic technocracy vs. autocracy will rage on forever because it ultimately comes down to the net competency of particular sets of individuals living in a particular place and time. That's true across each of the public, private, and voluntary sectors. I'd say experimentation is key.

Try these specific Wikipedia series if you're looking to deep dive into the topics you're asking about:
(Governance) (Electoral Systems) (Forms of Government)

I'd also like to point out that there is a slight distinction between government and governance. The former generally refers to the structure and the latter generally refers to the process.

In the moral parliament, I would constantly move that I am appointed dictator forever. Eventually, I will win the lottery. Except of course that everyone else will do the same, so the odds are that someone else will win before I will. I say this to point out that the interesting parts of the moral parliament end up being the constrains on the mechanism, rather than the mechanism itself. The paper, in fact, handles these constraints by abandoning the mechanism! It says that we'll assume everyone acts as if there will be a lottery, but we'll actually just use straight plurality voting.

Two very small contributions:

1. In most jurisdictions, companies can have classes of shares with unequal voting power. If one of your concerns is to enable a veto, share classifications can get  you there pretty flexibly. Also, if outright vetoes are not on the table, you could also embrace the mandatory delay. The class B shares can't say don't do it, but they can say don't do it yet.
2. A spin on Leninist organizations is to have the top of the organization pick the new members at the lowest levels, and the organization has levels that each select the next level up, to the very top. So, you could have 1,000 members selected by the top 10 committee; with the top 10 committee selected by the top 100 council, who are selected by the membership. Within the "selection," you can have any variety of mechanisms -- proportional representation, districts, whatever. But the organization will tend to maintain its identity over time because the people at the top decide who the right people to bring in are.

So, if you are looking for a way to organize a set of class B votes that can only veto and not participate in the economic benefits of ownership, the Leninist spin organization could give you the members who vote the class B shares.

I think it's interesting that you put companies, nonprofits, and government bodies into the same group. The goals of these different bodies are quite different, and it seems that their “governance” would thus be different. My point is that we can’t apply the government style of a for-profit company to a state. The reasons are the different goals and responsibilities of either entity.

The goal of a company that is run by shareholders is very simple and one-dimensional. It is for-profit. The goal of the shareholders is to put people in power who will make them money. It is simple, and for that reason, there is a simple style of governing the company.  A nation/state is much more complicated in its goals. In truth, I don’t even know what it is. Is it the well-being of its population? The wealth of its policymakers? The occupation of the most resources? The domination of the world market? It seems that a nation has a difficult time knowing exactly what it wants, and this goal tends to change with who is in power or the cultural mood at the time. Therefore, it seems that the government style has to reflect and allow for this flexibility.  As you mentioned, changes in a government “have to be made using the rules of the existing system.” The government of a nation has to reflect a president who wants to promote social reform and another who wants to focus on war-making. TL;DR The government of a nation has to be flexible to accommodate changes in goals, whereas a company's goals usually don't change that much. This is why I am interested in your choice to combine the two in an analysis of government.

Secondly, I think it is interesting to point out the epistemic environment in which this all takes place. In any ideal government, the people who are making decisions have to have the most knowledge possible in order to make the best decision. For students of philosophy that may be a polarizing statement, but I will rely on some decision theory to support me. I think the dominance principle applies quite well here. If you wish to make the best decision (vote for the best option) you need to choose the best option for all states of the world. The more information you have, the more you can know about the states of the world. That justification may be futile (and just an excuse to bring it into the conversation), but I think the overall point is intuitive enough. 

I guess I don’t really have a point, just that it's an interesting connection. If there is any point it is that any ideal government should be built with the epistemic environment in mind.

-R.A.

So, of tangetial relevance, but something I've been thinking about recently is... well the governance structure of a small company (dictatorship of one person over 3-8 people, who all have the option to leave), vs the same company several years/scale increases later.  (A company of millions of people which effectively acts as a large piece of infrastructure in the country it lives in, yet is still goverened by private interests)

It kind of feels like different governance structures are warrented... and should be legally mandated.
Like... I want small start ups to do what they want. 
I want Amazon to slow morph into a democratically run piece of infrastructure, as opposed to a monopoly, as it gets bigger.  I want medium sized companies to have a sort of semi-democracy, where the CEO/board steer the ship, but the staff are INVOLVED in the decision making. 

How do we do this?
Can a company set itself up with a governance structure which is explicitly designed to change with scale. Should the government say "You have more than a million staff. You are actually a government department now"? Or, like... maybe we don't trust governments? (I do, but I live in a country with high trust, not everyone has that, so whatever).

Cryptocurrencies and specifically DAOs provide some interesting reading about governance. Most of the writing is in the form of blog posts, twitter threads and the like. In my opinion, the "small probability of a future big win" reason to care also applies to cryptocurrencies since they, with the right scaling solutions and legal status, possibly could replace fiat or at least live along side it. That future would require great governance structures for the projects. The current ones of computing power = voting power in the case of proof of work or wealth = voting power in the case of proof of stake are two examples of governance structures from that space. Another interesting aspect is that miners need to accept the changes to the protocol suggested by the developers which in a sense acts as a control function. The possibility to fork is also very interesting from a governance standpoint. 

The DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization, basically organizations with voting rights connected to some kind of token) provides a great opportunity to experiment with governance structures since the governance can be programmed into smart contracts and isn't required to look a certain way due to some law. That is of course subject to change in a potential future where DAOs play some important role and governments start regulating. I've seen models where governance power is tied to reputation systems, your voting power essentially increases as you contribute more (See dxDAO for an example). I've also seen alternative voting schemes that use prediction markets to facilitate rapid decision making (See Holographic consensus for an example). 

To my knowledge there is some scientific litterature on the subject, a quick search on google scholar using the keywords bitcoin, governance, cryptocurrency, DAO reveals some litterature. 

I think your point on "What are the culture, expectations, norms and habits?" is possibly crucial. While there are others here in the comments with much more experience than me, I am just reading Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari and I think it is important to keep in mind that a society (the "object" you want to look at governing in different ways) is a fictional creation and hence trust is essential. This means there is large value in doing things the way they have (to some degree) worked in the past (just look at some people's fear of letting in immigrants out of a deep rooted fear of collapse). On a related note, and perhaps I overlooked this in your article, one can look at alternative societies around the world. One example that comes to mind is Auroville in India where I think governance is somewhat creative. Perhaps there are other experimental societies out there who have organized in even more radical ways like using computer science to set up distribution systems that circumvents the need for money and demand and supply (like some sort of Soviet style economy but made more efficient by the use of IT)?

Put one person in charge.  Every project I've ever worked on that succeeded (as opposed to 'succeeded') had one real boss that everyone was under.

One option for a country or company (not useful for single brain ethics, though) is rule by committee. Specifically, a small (5-7) number of individuals who are selected by different methods to represent different interests, who then talk amongst themselves and decide on policy.

For a company, that could be:

1. The Founder, who serves until they chose to retire, and select someone else to take thier place
2. A Fiduciary, elected by stockholders in a one stock=one vote system, reaffirmed annually
3. The Union rep, selected by the employees, with or without a formal Labor Union, seven until voluntary retirement or a vote of no confidence by the employees
4. An Outsider, where an NGO devoted to Ethics selects representatives for many different companies, and explicitly represent humanity as a whole/all living things
5. The CEO, hired by the other members for a fixed length contract.

This may not be news, but I think that any investigation of optimal governance needs to at least privately acknowledge the rational ignorance argument (e.g., as popularized by Bryan Caplan) and its uncomfortable/dicey implications for "democratic" design features: as the number of voters increases, the likelihood of one individual vote affecting a policy outcome diminishes, and thus so does the incentive to care about figuring out the optimal policy (ceteris paribus). This can potentially be partially offset with social and psychological norms to care about making good decisions, but systems such as social media (including e.g., echo chamber algorithms) increase the reward for social conformity rather than critical thinking. The social/psychological norm strategy also can run into problems if the community norm becomes "Critically examine your options and support policies/politicians which seem to be socially beneficial", yet the complexity of decisions increases to the extent that the socially-optimal strategy should simply be "delegate your evaluations to political/policy experts that make voting recommendations and whom you sample-test for credibility rather than trying to directly evaluate optimal policies/politicians." Such a calculating strategy might lack the warm social/moral appeal needed to propagate as a norm.

I'm not saying there is a clearly better structure available for this purpose - I think the weirdness comes from the fact that it's so unclear who should go in the box normally reserved for "Shareholders" or "Voters."

Isn't the obvious answer for nonprofits "Donors"? (Yes, it's not immediately obvious how amount or recency of donations should translate into power to ultimately direct the organization, but this at least tells you who should go in the box.)

That's not to say that this is how nonprofits are run (it seems not to be) but that it would be the obvious translation of the ways that for-profit companies and governments are run.

To HoldenKarnofsky. You write widely about basic problems of our civilization. You try to write down, to formulate the basic principles and rules for some hypothetical future society. I will comment only one aspect. E.O.Wilson in his books On Human Nature and Sociobiology (pdf- s are available, I will send if You are interested) wrote that we have created the societies, the contemporary life that doesn't correspond to our biological nature. I propose to place this thought at the base for creation all laws and values You try to formulate. More about these laws in my homepage www.basicrulesoflife.wordpress.com Since many years I have been thinking about the 'right', the best laws, states and governments, but I can start a discussion only if we can agree on basic principles. Just read the first paragraph Home in my blog. If You can accept this first principle, the discussion will follow. Your's Imants Vilks