April | 2017 | Equality by lot

Strictly Eating Chances: You can’t eat chances? Oh yes you can!

Posted on April 29, 2017 by Conall Boyle

I say this despite David Wasserman’s snide comment on the claims made by us lottery enthusiasts. We would say that where there are more qualified applicants than places available, a lottery’s the thing. Some will then win a place — “eat”— but everyone will benefit by having had the chance of winning.

But what is the value of a chance when you win nothing? Rationally we should conclude that the value of nothing is zilch, zero, nada.

In another swipe at advocates of lotteries for sharing Wasserman comments:

if it makes sense to treat an expectation as a good, it also makes sense to ask whether the value of that good increases the longer it is held by the recipient.

It’s nice to see a bit of sarcasm from a philosopher whose main concern is medical ethics!

Instead, I’d like to take up Wasserman’s challenge, and propose that your ‘expectation’ — your ticket to the lottery — can indeed be made more valuable by spinning out the process.

Take for example the way the TV hit show Strictly Come Dancing (in the US it’s called Dancing With the Stars) operates. They start with a dozen or so stars. Each week they dance competitively, and by a complex process one star is eliminated. Over the next weeks the process is repeated, one ‘loser’ every week until there are three left. It is then decided by a Grand Finale.

I take it as axiomatic the producers know how to give the public good entertainment value. That’s show business!
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Filed under: Academia, Applications, Books, Distribution by lot | Leave a comment »

The allotted Irish Citizens’ Assembly sends its recommendations to the Oireachtas

Posted on April 25, 2017 by Yoram Gat

Wikipedia:

The Citizens’ Assembly (Irish: An Tionól Saoránach) is a citizens’ assembly established in Ireland in 2016 to consider several political questions: abortion, fixed term parliaments, referendums, population ageing, and climate change. It will produce reports to be considered by the Oireachtas (parliament).

[…]

On 26 July 2016, Mary Laffoy, a judge of the Supreme Court of Ireland, was chosen by the government as chairperson of the assembly.

The 99 other members are “citizens entitled to vote at a referendum, randomly selected so as to be broadly representative of Irish society”. As with the 66 citizen members of the Constitutional Convention, these 99 plus 99 substitutes were selected by an opinion polling company; Red C won the tender and began selection at the start of September. The Electoral (Amendment) Act 2016 was passed to enable the electoral register to be used in this process. Media were asked not to photograph the citizen members before the inaugural Assembly meeting. By the 27 November 2016 meeting, 11 of the 99 had been replaced by substitutes.

The Irish Post:

THE Irish Citizen’s Assembly has voted overwhelmingly in favour of abortion in a landslide vote.

[…]

The citizens involved in the vote had attended five two-day meetings since November 2016 and had heard from a series of legal and medical professionals.
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Filed under: Applications, Ballot measures, Elections, Press, Sortition | 12 Comments »

Ganesh Sitaraman’s sortition version of the Roman tribunes

Posted on April 19, 2017 by Simon Threlkeld

Ganesh Sitaraman proposes a sortition version of the tribunes of the Roman Republic in his new book The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution: Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic.

Angus Deaton, the Nobel Prize winning Princeton economist, describes the proposal in his review of the book in the New York Times (March 20, 2017):

Perhaps the least familiar and most intriguing policy proposal that Sitaraman discusses is the idea of reviving the Roman tribunate: 51 citizens would be selected by lot from the bottom 90 percent of the income distribution. They would be able to veto one statute, one executive order and one Supreme Court decision each year; they would be able to call a referendum, and impeach federal officials.

Such a proposal seems fanciful today, but so is campaign finance reform, or greater redistribution. Yet we do well to remember Milton Friedman’s dictum that it takes a crisis to bring real change, so that our job in the meantime is to develop alternatives to existing policies that are ready for when “the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”

Sitaraman is an associate law professor at Vanderbilt Law School.

Filed under: Books, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 5 Comments »

“Representation Against Democracy: Jacques Rancière on the French Presidential Elections”

Posted on April 18, 2017 by Jonathan Crock

From an interview with Jacques Rancière on the French Presidential Elections (translated from the original in French):

How would you organise collective life without representatives? By drawing lots — a measure you supported in your 2005 book Hatred of Democracy?

We should distinguish between delegation and representation. In a democracy, logically enough some people will carry out certain activities on other people’s behalf. But the delegate plays her role only once, which is not true of representatives. Drawing lots was once the normal democratic way of designating delegates, based on the principle that everyone was equally capable. I proposed bringing it back in order to reverse the drive toward professionalisation. But that is no simple recipe, any more than non-renewable mandates are. These tools are only of interest if they are in the hands of a vast popular movement. Democracy does not exist without these pressures emerging from outside the system, pressures that shake up the institutions of the state — like the “squares movements” did recently. Democracy presupposes that institutions autonomous of state structures and state agendas are able to make these egalitarian moments last.

Filed under: Academia, Elections, Sortition | Tagged: France, Rancière | 6 Comments »

A prominent French presidential candidate makes sortition part of his programme

Posted on April 7, 2017 by Yoram Gat

A post by Arturo Iniguez.

L’Avenir en commun (A Shared Future) is the name given to the programme of La France insoumise (France Uprising) and its candidate for the May 2017 French presidential election, Jean-Luc Melenchon. The programme is arranged into 7 parts. The first one, under the tag-line L’urgence démocratique (The democratic urgency), is called La 6eme République, in reference to a new Constitution that would replace the current one, the Fifth, instigated by Charles de Gaulle in 1958. If elected president, Melenchon has promised to convene a constitutional convention and prematurely end his five-year mandate as soon as the new constitution is adopted. Thus, the very first measure in the programme is Réunir une Assemblée constituante (Summon a Constituent Assembly).

Each individual measure is developed in a separate booklet, forming a whole collection. Number 28 of the series, under the title Changer de République pour faire place au peuple (Reform the Republic to create a place for the people), explains how the members of the constitutional convention would be designated. The proposal is to combine election and sortition. In which proportion? That is left to the people themselves. At the poll, each citizen can either vote for a candidate or express his or her personal preference for sortition. The percentage of options for sortition will determine the share of seats to be sorted.

This is a clever way to avoid one of the main sources of resistance to any future attempts to introduce sortition: the opposition of those who are not interested in being sorted, will immediately resign in the event of being chosen by the lot, and are generally happy with the aristocratic setting of voting for professional politicians. These people will see any amount of power given to a purely sorted body as power directly detracted from them. Such a change will be unfair to them (the status quo is of course unfair to all those who do not vote).
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Filed under: Elections, Proposals, Sortition | 45 Comments »

Notes on McGill Sortition Workshop

Posted on April 1, 2017 by Jonathan Crock

Here are some brief notes on a workshop on sortition held at McGill University.

“Representation, Bicameralism, and Sortition: With Application to the Canadian Senate”

McGill Sortition Workshop: Randomly Selecting the Canadian Senate

I had the pleasure of attending a fascinating one-day workshop on sortition and replacing the unelected Canadian Senate with a randomly selected Citizen Assembly that was held on December 9, 2016, at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Peter Stone (Political Science, Trinity College Dublin), Alex Guerrero (Philosophy, Rutgers), and Arash Abizadeh (Political Science, McGill) each presented papers on sortition in separate sessions.

In advance of the workshop, Abizadeh did a radio interview (at 21:10) on Ottawa Today with Mark Sutcliffe. Sutcliffe seemed very receptive to the idea of replacing the Canadian Senate with a randomly selected Citizen Assembly. Abizadeh also published an article in the Montreal Gazette in advance of the event.

This event was a timely opportunity to inject sortition theory and practice into current discussion of reforming the unelected Canadian Senate. Canadian Senator Paul Massicotte participated in the public forum and wrote a diatribe—“A randomly selected Canadian Senate would be a disaster”—against sortition following the workshop. Yoram Gat in his post on this insightfully commented on how exceptional such a response is: “It is an indication of the precarious position of the Canadian Senate with its non-electoral appointment procedure that the Senator feels that the proposal to appoint the Senate using sortition requires a refutation. It is a feeling that, as far as I am aware, no elected member of parliament has ever shared in modern times.”
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Filed under: Academia, Applications, House of Lords, Proposals, Sortition | 13 Comments »

Participatory and Deliberative Democracy: Sortition and Democratic Representation

Posted on April 1, 2017 by Jonathan Crock

An upcoming session in the Political Studies Association’s Annual International Conference 2017:

Participatory and Deliberative Democracy: Sortition and Democratic Representation

Room: Executive Room B
Time Slot: Wednesday 12th April 11:00 – 12:30

Panel Chair: Dr John Boswell (University of Southampton)
Panel Members:

Mr Keith Sutherland (University of Exeter)
Dr Brett Hennig (Sortition Foundation)
Dr Peter Stone (Trinity College Dublin)
Mr Dimitri Courant (University of Lausanne & University Paris 8)

We are witnessing something of a revival in support for sortition, with the idea popularised in particular in David Van Reybrouck’s recent Against Elections: The Case for Democracy. Although the debate around the use of sortition has typically been tied to discussion of mini-publics, this panel seeks to look more broadly at its relationship to democratic theory and democratic practice more broadly conceived. It brings together proponents and sceptics, normative theorists and those whose work is more applied, for a contemporary, lively and varied debate on this age-old topic.