Equality by lot

Criteria for a “good” legislative system?

4 Responses

1. 

   keithsutherland, on January 17, 2012 at 8:52 pm said:

   “Good” in the normative sense presupposes political equality; “good” in the epistemic sense presupposes that legislative judgment should be cognitively diverse.

   LikeLike
2. 

   Yoram Gat, on January 18, 2012 at 6:16 am said:

   David,

   A while back I had a post that may be relevant to what you are thinking about: Government quality and government selection. The discussion in the comments may also be relevant.

   LikeLike
3. 

   tbouricius, on January 18, 2012 at 2:42 pm said:

   David,

   It would be possible to generate a long list of adjectives that describe a good system (transparent, honest, efficient, descriptively representative, etc.), but I’m not sure of the value of that without indicating their relative importance, as it will always be a balancing act where more of A means less of B.

   But, I can offer a few challenging criteria that are not “standard.”

   1. A good system should encourage seeking win-win options, rather than merely determining the majority preference.
   2. It should have a means for weak minorities to defend themselves against the majority (note I said WEAK minorities, not POWERFUL minorities).
   3.It should encourage fact-finding to establish a base of agreed on facts, prior to decision making.
   4. It should take account of uncertainty and probability, and weigh unintended consequences.

   LikeLike
4. 

   keithsutherland, on January 18, 2012 at 8:10 pm said:

   And 4a) it should take account of the interests of future generations and “externalities” — ie those who are affected but have no say in the process. It’s interesting that Rupert Read argues for the creation of a Guardians of the Future council by random selection:

   https://equalitybylot.wordpress.com/2012/01/10/guardians-of-the-future/

   but I confess I’m not sure why sortition would be the obvious mechanism to create a body charged with this function.

   LikeLike

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Enter your comment here...

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Email (Address never made public)

Name

Website

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

You are commenting using your Google account. ( Log Out /  Change )

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out /  Change )

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

Notify me of new comments via email.

Notify me of new posts via email.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.