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Let me put it like this.
I would not be against much maligned literacy test to register to vote. I wouldn't be against banning people on SSRIs from voting. I don't understand why felons ever started getting their rights to vote back, when the last thing we need is a felon voting block, somehow convincing politicians to make their crimes legal or at least unpunishable. I think it might be a worthy experiment to whittle away at universal suffrage "disparate outcomes" be damned.
Sometimes I think of the origin story of sorts for the Slavs. Mostly because Dan Carlin did a podcast on vikings in the east, and then immediately after I heard that Putin summarized largely the same history in his interview with Tucker Carlson. And that origin story, as written by the victors, is that the Slavs were so incapable of ruling themselves, they invited some viking nobles who were much better at ruling down to rule over them. The relentless and short sighted tribal strife largely calmed down, some measure of relative peace and prosperity returned to the region.
Now on the face of it, that sounds like a preposterous story obviously written by the victors. Are we honestly supposed to believe that a people requested from foreign stock a new ruling class? That it's even possible for them to have the self awareness required to realize, as a people, they are temperamentally incapable of governing themselves? It's probably just a story, a myth even. But sometimes I think about it wondering, what if?
Kinda sorta happening a bit. Some prominent West coast prosecutors selectively decline to prosecute some classes of crimes. Not prosecuting property crimes of course. But also more serious issues of selectively not prosecuting gun crime depending on the demographics of the perpetrator.
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98% of people with a record believe that the law as written is fair, but they and their friends are being railroaded by the man. Prisoners would not vote to legalize theft/shorten sentences. They would vote like normal poor people, except they might support more of an anti-cop platform.
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Not exactly what you're talking about, but Zimbabwe does come to mind, what with their begging whites to come back and do basic things like organize agriculture and start businesses. In that case they're not asking for a foreign ruling class, but a foreign middle class. Interesting stuff.
I wonder if they're getting any takers.
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There are recorded instances of something like this happening: the Glorious Revolution, Texas seeking US annexation, or Napoleon III in Mexico.
Frequently it seems to be "please invade us to replace our rulers with better ones."
Texas seeking annexation was done on the basis of being a state, not being ruled over, and the selling points were military defense and paying down the ridiculous debt.
Likewise Napoleon III invaded Mexico because it defaulted on its debt. There were individual Mexican politicians supporting him, but that’s because they wanted to be the puppet rulers. Santa Ana might be an example from Mexican history though; he just kept talking the Mexican government into making him president and having to be removed from power involuntarily.
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Even if you limit the process to the same supposed mechanism as the Slavs, "please rule us to provide an impartial judge for our feuds", Slavs wouldn't be the only example of that Stranger King theory - Wiki lists cases in the Pacific, Iceland, and Sri Lanka (although the latter swiftly regretted it).
Wiki doesn't list the Slavs, though. IIRC when I looked into it the historians' consensus was that in their case it was a false narrative invented by writers centuries later.
Well, as little as we know about the Rus, we know of several Byzantine treaties with them, with the earliest ones featuring very Norse-sounding signatories and the latter ones featuring more and more Slavs.
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