Equality by lot

I’ve been rather quiet on the blog lately. I hope to change that in the weeks ahead. Rather than comment on some of the recent postings, I thought I’d raise a topic that I thought merited a post on its own.

One of the most common uses of sortition that has been proposed is to approve or reject legislation drafted by some other body–usually, an elected legislative body.  The new People’s Senate Party in Canada, for example, endorses this proposal. In some respects, this makes the randomly-selected house (hereafter Representative House, or RH) into a substitute for a referendum. Instead of seeking approval for laws from the people as a whole, seek it from a randomly-selected sample.

I think there’s a lot of merit to this proposal, but I have a serious concern that I think merits addressing. Basically, I think that there are two types of legislation. On the one hand, there is “must-pass” legislation–stuff like the defense budget, or the debt ceiling. There’s an interesting literature on legislation like this. Take, for example, the work by Thomas Romer on referenda for school district budgets. Typically, the practice is that if such referenda are not approved, the district budget reverts to some insanely low level, one that no parent would want. School board officials are assumed to want to maximize the size of the budget. And so unsurprisingly, Romer argues, they propose the maximum possible budget that a majority will approve via referendum (i.e., the one that leaves the mediam voter indifferent between approval and rejection). And given how bad rejection is, this could be rather large.

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Filed under: Ballot measures, Sortition | 33 Comments »