Among the major handicaps a reformer can encounter is the opposition of the indignant virtuous …. —E.S. Turner, Roads to Ruin: The shocking history of social reform, 1960.
Cristina Lafont’s 2020 book, Democracy Without Shortcuts, unfairly attacks lottocracy as invidiously exclusionary. A false equivalence is asserted between lottocrats’ current “existential” criticism of the political capability of mass publics and misogynists’ past “essentialist” criticism of the political capability of women (and sometimes of other marginalized groups). Lafont writes, for instance:
… The empirical evidence provided to supposedly ‘prove’ women’s ignorance, irrationality, apathy, and irresponsibility, and the arguments put forth to perpetuate their subjection to others in the not too distant past, are remarkably similar to the arguments and evidence currently provided by the ‘voter ignorance’ literature.
As in the case of women, the problematic feature of this literature is not necessarily the evidence upon which it is based. Given women’s lack of access to education and the opportunities to participate in civil society and political life at the time, their political ignorance or apathy under such circumstances could hardly come as a surprise. The problem is not exactly that the evidence was questionable. Rather, the problem is the use of evidence to do ‘double duty,’ i.e. to not simply document but also justify and perpetuate the exclusion of women at the same time. Evidence of women’s lack of positions of power and political engagement was offered in support of the argument that they were not qualified to exercise political rights. Thus the main problem with this type of argument is not the reliability of the evidence it uses but the specific choice of normative recommendation, namely, that instead of fighting to improve their condition, women should accept that condition and let themselves be ruled by men. Similarly, there is no need to deny that citizens may be politically ignorant or apathetic in order to question the subsequent normative recommendation, namely, that instead of fighting to improve their situation, citizens should simply accept it and let themselves be ruled by others. As the case of women’s political struggles illustrates, only after changing the relevant negative conditions and institutions would it be possible to find out whether citizens can use political power wisely. In the absence of that evidence, the recommendation against the latter remains unfounded. A salient contrast between the ‘voter ignorance’ literature and similar enterprises concerning other ascriptive groups (e.g. women, African American, homosexuals, religious minorities, etc.), is that the former is under no pressure to be politically correct. To the contrary, arguments to the effect that citizens ought to relinquish their democratic rights and let themselves be ruled by others are perfectly respectable, even ‘scientifically proven’! (Pp. 6-8)
But lottocrats don’t characterize the populace as unfit essentially, by nature, the way women were characterized, or they wouldn’t be trying to empower members of the populace in mini-publics. Lottocrats merely object to the existing situation the public finds itself in — a mass-politics situation.
In this situation a citizen’s vote has no effective weight, so there is no payoff in his trying to understand the issues or to dialog with other citizens with whom he disagrees. In other words, this situation is what promotes the “rational ignorance” and “rational irrationality” that the voter-ignorance literature complains of.
Lottocrats agree that “only after changing the relevant negative conditions and institutions would it be possible to find out whether citizens can use political power wisely”. The change we propose is to de-massify politics and empower a mini-public (aka a demi-public)—an “essential” extract of the whole. We don’t see how a mass public can be other than misruled and “ruled by others” (e.g., by pressure groups, pelf, press, party caucuses, and propaganda).
Electoralist reformers have been “changing the relevant negative conditions and institutions” of mass democracy for centuries without substantially fixing those misfeatures, which I call the Pernicious P’s, so continuing to bark up that tree seems hopeless. As I will argue in a subsequent Critique, Lafont offers little herself to improving mass democracy, her most convincing suggestions being, ironically, the institutionalization of advisory minipublics.
There’s nothing invidious about being an anti-participant misanthrope, which marginalizes all equally, unlike being an anti-participant misogynist, which marginalizes selected others and thus disproportionately benefits oneself and one’s allies. This obvious distinction should not need pointing out to even the meanest academic. But:
The faculty of instinctively applying the same order of disinterested and objective criticism to one’s own philosophic system that one applies to a competing system is extremely rare. —A.J. Nock, Snoring as a Fine Art, p. 182.
Filed under: Academia, Books, Elections, Sortition | Tagged: citizen deliberation, citizen juries, Citizen Legislature, democracy, random selection, sortition |
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Equality by lot 
Lafont does not understand the concept of rational ignorance because she does not understand the concept of probability.
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I haven’t read Cristina’s book, but the subtitle reminded me of a conversation I had with Carole Pateman, who suggested that participation and deliberation were antithetical.
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@ Leith James Fishkin writes:
The trilemma is my name for the apparently forced choice between political equality, deliberation, and mass participation. It is a kind of dilemma with three corners. She is correct that I have long argued that commitment to any two of these principles will routinely undermine the third (Fishkin 2009)
“However, in Democracy When the People Are Thinking (Fishkin 2018), I explicitly introduce the trilemma as a challenge that can be overcome by deliberative systems that will facilitate a stage of mass deliberation (Fishkin 2018: 7–9). I argue: ‘Ultimately, we need more than deliberative microcosms of the people. We need a deliberative macrocosm—a deliberative society. How can this be done?’ (Fishkin 2018: 7). I then refer the reader to the last sections of the book, particularly the discussion of deliberative systems (Fishkin 2018: Part IV). There, I re-introduce the idea of Deliberation Day, a proposal that Bruce Ackerman and I put forward in 2004 (Ackerman, & Fishkin 2004). The idea was to take a national holiday and pay everyone a stipend to engage in deliberations on the model of the Deliberative Poll in their local communities.”
Fishkin, J., (2020) “Cristina Lafont’s Challenge to Deliberative Minipublics”, Journal of Deliberative Democracy 16(2), 56–62. doi: https://doi.org/10.16997/jdd.394
I suppose a Deliberation Day might be better than nothing, in theory, but it should be first tested at the city and state levels. It could easily degenerate into the equivalent of a food fight. Iow, how much real deliberation would there be? Surely less than at the minipublic level.
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Lafont is being disingenuous in her pretense to be a champion of the common citizen. It is she, in fact, who argues that the common citizen is so easily corruptible that they cannot be trusted with any power.
That said, the “rational ignorance” argument is a poor basis for arguing for sortition and against elections. It is a reflection of the sad state of political theory that this argument keeps being trotted out despite it being easily refutable.
The real problem with elections is not that the voters are unable to choose “the right candidate” but rather that all the options on the ballot are poor (as Bernard Manin argued 3 decades ago in what is still the best book about sortition). The problem with “participatory democracy” is that it offers no non-elitist mechanism for setting the agenda – exactly in the same way that electoralism does not offer a non-elitist mechanism for nominating candidates.
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Yoram,
So are you claiming that Dahl (and the subsequent rational ignorance literature) is wrong to argue the need for an “attentive” public? And your use of the term “elite” is loaded, as Manin’s principle is only one of distinction (and he made no attempt to evaluate the ballot options). Needless to say Alex and I claim that Superminority is (effectively) a non-elite mechanism for agenda setting, as the proposing body will reflect the ideological diversity of the target population and the successful coalition will be the one that best matches the aggregate preferences of the minipopulus. I guess this puts us in the “deliberative systems” camp (Parkinson and Mansbridge 2012).
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@Yoram: You wrote,
“The real problem with elections is not that the voters are unable to choose “the right candidate” but rather that all the options on the ballot are poor …. The problem with “participatory democracy” is that it offers no non-elitist mechanism for setting the agenda – exactly in the same way that electoralism does not offer a non-elitist mechanism for nominating candidates.”
Mass politics offers voters a choice among candidates for Omni-topic offices, who therefore take positions on a score (20) of bundled issues. It does not offer voters a way of voting on each issue independently.
To achieve that, legislators for each sector on the issue-spectrum should campaign for a seat in a topic-specific mini-legislature or legislative committee. This would provide venues where egalitarian economic proposals would not be overshadowed by controversy over other issues. There would be permanent places on the agenda for them. This unbundling can only be achieved by miniaturization of the electorate. Or rather, electorates, one per mini-legislative seat.
“There exist a great number of potential conflicts in the community which cannot be developed because they are blotted out by stronger systems of antagonisms.” —E.E. Schattschneider, The Semi-Sovereign People: A realist’s view of democracy in America, 1960, 68
“Nobody knows what American politics would be like if we had the institutions to facilitate the development of a wider span of political competition.” —E.E. Schattschneider, The Semi-Sovereign People: A realist’s view of democracy in America, 1960, 72
And the low cost of campaigning before a minipublic would similarly de-marginalize egalitarian candidates:
“… we have the discriminating tolerance today already, and what I want is to redress the balance. … The chance of influencing, in any effective way, this majority is at a price, in dollars, totally out of reach of the radical opposition.” —Herbert Marcuse, in Prophetic Politics, 1970, 109
Since anyone could toss his hat in the ring, there’d be no need to be nominated by a party. It would of course be helpful to collect endorsements from politics-focused groups in advance, including political parties, but the lack of a nomination from one of them wouldn’t be a barrier. Parties would have much less influence.
Candidates would be winnowed down to winners over several rounds of campaigning and voting, or in only one round using Ranked Choice Voting or Approval Voting.
Proportional representation would be desirable, to avoid a centrist bias. E.g., five mini-electorates would vote for candidates to five legislative seats. Thus an egalitarian candidate who got only 20% of the vote would nevertheless win a seat.
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