I was lucky enough to get the following letter on sortition published in New Scientist, (not quite as I penned it). I’m hoping there will be an exchange of letters, so if anyone wants to comment, there is an opportunity.
Letters should be sent to:
letters@newscientist.com
or:
Letters to the Editor, New Scientist,
110 High Holborn, London WC1V6EU
They like them to be short (250-300 words maximum). Be sure to include your full postal address and telephone number, and a reference (issue, page number, title) to articles. In this case you should include “Campbell Wallace (Letters, 20 May, p53)…” if you comment on my letter; or, if you comment on another letter, the name of the writer and the date of publishing.
As published:
Dave Levitan (22 April, p 24), and Alice Klein (p 25) rightly deplore politicians such as Donald Trump and Malcolm Turnbull, who disregard scientific evidence in favour of policies chosen for short-term electoral advantage or to further special interests. But the problem is a consequence of the electoral system itself, which repeatedly brings to power people unfit to use it.
Since the 18th century we have assumed that elections are both necessary and sufficient for democracy, and that without them tyranny results. Yet the Greeks of Aristotle’s day knew that elections could lead to oligarchy, not democracy, and that a democratic alternative existed. Athenian democracy selected decision-makers by lot to get a statistically representative sample of the whole community: this is called “sortition“. It is perfectly feasible to design a system with the means to ensure that those chosen are well-informed on each issue that comes before them. Sortition would end the reign of big money, greatly reduce corruption, and would make intelligent decisions, taking into account the interests of all.
It’s high time we abandoned the myth that elections equal democracy.
Adam Cronkright
Ali
Ahmed R. Teleb
avanderven
avergne
Alex Kovner
azakaras
Brett Hennig
campbellwallace
Simon Threlkeld
Nick Coccoma
codyhipskind
Common Lot Sortitionist
Conall Boyle
constitutionalism
davidschecter
graytmatter
gtridimas
H.J. Hofkirchner
John Burnheim
jgarry20151
johnedwardtaylor
johnhuang865
Jonathan Crock
keithsutherland
Jacob Richter
lukewhito
SimonPek
Nathan El
Nicholas Gruen
Owen Shaffer
Patrick Chalmers
Paul Gölz
paulnollen
peterstone
Pierre-Etienne Vandamme
pronfeld
Emil
rcaze
richwbrown
Roger Knights
roslynfuller
Pierre-Etienne Vandamme
shaharavin
tbouricius
Ted Wachtel
Joshua Laferriere
theodorestathis
Wayne Liebman
Yoram Gat
Oliver Milne
Equality by lot 
Great letter!
I just sent my response:
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Fair enough.
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Peter Stone’s comment on the Kleroterian facebook page
is a good indication of the two incompatible approaches featured on this blog. On the one had there are those determined to overthrow “electoralism” (Yoram, Campbell, Terry, Brett etc) and on the other hand those (including myself) who wish to bring incremental improvements to our political arrangements with the introduction of sortition. In the shoot out between Brett and Peter and the PSA conference, my impression was that most of the audience sided with Peter. But then I would say that (and Yoram would retort that all political scientists are self-interested pro-establishment patsies).
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It is really rather disappointing to see Peter making such a weak argument (while calling the opposing, much more considered view, “stupid” [And where is Sutherland’s outrage at such intemperate language?! I am shocked, shocked!, to discover that Sutherland is not quite sincere on this matter.]).
Of course “we have people like Trump because of elections”. Or is Peter claiming that Trump was not elected?
At most, even we take Peter’s argument at face value, and see Trump as some kind of an inexplicable, unprecedented anomaly (rather than a product of long term processes of the electoral system, a product which is in fact quite similar in many ways to the typical president), it would show that elections produce both Trump-like presidents and non-Trump-like presidents.
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>“I really wish people would stop making the stupid argument that we have people like Trump because of elections.”
Does Peter Stone think that Trump got where he is without elections? And actually, I don’t think there are many people “like Trump”.
>“We’ve been electing presidents since 1789, and in all that time we’ve elected only one Trump.”
And:
One Obama, saviour of the banks.
One George “Dubya” Bush, who saved the Iraqis and the oil companies from Saddam Hussein, by killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.
One Bill Clinton (forget the “lying to Congress”, it’s the deregulation of banks that made the soup boil over).
One Richard Nixon.
One LBJ (ok, the Great Society had its good points, but the Vietnam war was all bad).
And so on, and so on. (One might ask when did the US last have a good president.)
Other countries too:
One Tony Blair (Iraq again).
One Thabo Mbeki, who caused tens of thousands of needless infections and deaths from AIDS.
One Rodrigo Duterte.
One Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
One Viktor Orban.
etc, etc.
>“So it should be bloody obvious that elections do not inevitably produce the bad outcomes that we are witnessing in the current era.”
It is “bloody obvious” that they very commonly do. They produced some pretty bad outcomes in the 1930s, too. Of course, I did not say that they inevitably produce a bad outcome. Occasionally, you get a good candidate elected. But power attracts many people for all the wrong reasons, and elections make it likely that bad candidates will get power. Elections are certainly no guarantee of either an equitable result or intelligent, far-sighted wise policies.
And, Peter Stone, if you happen to read this, suggesting that I am stupid is not a very effective way to persuade me that you are right and I am wrong.
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I’ll leave it to Peter to defend his choice of words, but I imagine his anger may in part be a product of the attacks on the integrity of members of his profession on this blog. The regular explanation within the polsci community for Trump and similar phenomena is rational ignorance, but Yoram has informed us that this is not in fact the case, that it’s all down to mass politics furthering the interests of the rich and powerful. In terms of recent British experience this would mean that the rich and powerful manipulated the vote for Brexit and then decided it was in their interests to shoot themselves in the foot by hobbling the negotiating power of the person charged with executing the public will. A more parsimonious explanation would be rational ignorance.
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On the subject of interests:
vs rational ignorance:
Dominic Lawson, Sunday Times, 11 June 2017
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Hard to decide what’s more laughable – the fact that the Sunday Times prints such pretentious, self-important, patently idiotic nonsense or the fact that there are readers (not that many, it seems, but at least one anyway) who appear to take it seriously.
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Yoram,
>pretentious, self-important, patently idiotic nonsense
Perhaps you might explain this verdict? The Sunday Times has for many years been the top-selling UK broadsheet newspaper, so your verdict implies that its readers are gullible idiots. Note also that Lawson’s verdict on the Labour manifesto aligns with your own interests-based perspective, but denies your claim that electoralism necessarily reflects the interests of the rich ‘n powerful. I seem to remember that you have been prepared in the past to see Bernie Sanders as the exception to this iron law, and you should be aware that Corbyn is the UK’s equivalent of Sanders. It’s also the case that both Corbyn and Blair agree that the majority of the age cohort should go on to higher education, the only difference being over who should pay for it — in Blair’s case the direct beneficiaries, whereas in Corbyn’s case the money would be added to the national debt.
No doubt your rich ‘n powerful trope applies to the Conservatives, irrespective of the contents of their manifesto, which has been viewed by many informed commentators (including the left-leaning New Statesman) as an attempt to transfer wealth from older richer house-owners to the young and to seek not to further burden the latter with the debts of the baby-boomer generation. The irony, of course, is that the young voted en masse for Labour, and this strikes me as a good case of rational ignorance. I accept, of course, that Brexit was the other determining factor but it should be remembered that Theresa May was a Remainer and only switched side as a result of the popular will as expressed in the referendum. Note also that the rich ‘n powerful were overwhelmingly in the Remain camp. So it is unclear in what sense mass politics (both electoral and plebiscitory) necessarily reflects the interests of the rich ‘n powerful rather than the views of the (rationally-ignorant) masses. Can we have some empirical evidence please (rather than just recycled Mosca and Pareto).
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*** Keith Sutherland says: “the rich ‘n powerful were overwhelmingly in the Remain camp. So it is unclear in what sense mass politics (both electoral and plebiscitary) necessarily reflects the interests of the rich ‘n powerful rather than the views of the (rationally-ignorant) masses”
*** Right, the Brexit process demonstrates that the polyarchy is not a plutocracy (maybe sometimes a plutocracy, an aristocracy of the rich, could be better as more rational). The political decisions in polyarchy are the result of a complex parallelogram of forces, including all the social powers. The money elite is only one of these powers – but a very important one, whose interests are especially well defended.
*** That said, Keith Sutherland should wait a little before taking conclusions from the Brexit. We are not in the end of the Brexit process. Maybe we will get a soft Brexit – so soft a Brexit that it will not be unpleasant for the UK elites; some kind of association with the EU which actually will be not very different, except in name, from the Union itself. As we saw the “European Constitution”, rejected by the French plebiscitary vote, coming back through the Lisbon Treaty.
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Andre
>sometimes a plutocracy, an aristocracy of the rich, could be better as more rational
That is an alternative explanation for some of the data cited by Gilens and Page in their study of the alignment of politicians’ policy preferences with those of richer citizens.
>so soft a Brexit that it will not be unpleasant for the UK elites
And that is partly because of the concern of the elites for jobs and national prosperity, see for example the Chancellor’s recent Mansion House speech. http://www.cityam.com/266984/chancellors-mansion-house-speech-philip-hammond-lays-out
The simplistic dualism of elite and mass interests is not applicable to modern polyarchies.
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*** I never said that the moral or material interests of the different elites are always contrary to the other interests to be considered. Why?
*** But too much power for a too much self-centered group, and a group prone to feel superior to the others, has its specific drawbacks.
*** Anyway my comment was about the weight of the elites in polyarchies, which is much more important that it is in the theory of “representative democracy”. If the effects are good or bad is another subject.
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Sorry, Andre, I was actually agreeing with you — the simplistic dualism of elite and mass interests was aimed at others on this list.
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*** About “the simplistic dualism of elite and mass interests” I would suggest Keith Sutherland consider the discourse of the “Old Oligarch” (pseudo-Xenophon) in the “Constitution of the Athenians”. Funny book. The author (the oldest known Greek anti-democrat writer) explains how the Athenian mass is intellectually and morally inferior, but goes on saying the common Athenians are right not to delegate the sovereignty to the elite, because the elite people would use their intellectual superiority to pursue the specific elite interests, against those of the lower classes …
*** That said, the elitary phenomena are more complex in contemporary North-Atlantic societies than in the Old Oligarch’s Athens, and even then the discourse was maybe simplistic.
*** But let’s consider the following discourse “the elites of the North Atlantic societies have basically the same moral and material interests than all their inferiors, and the political differences come only from their higher intellectual level allowing them to well understand these common interests”. I hope that Keith Sutherland would likewise consider this discourse as somewhat simplistic.
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There have been two comments on my letter in New Scientist so far:
Published 7 June 2017
Elections are to get rid of politicians, not pick them
From Liam O’Keeffe, Abinger Hammer, Surrey, UK
Campbell Wallace suggests the ancient Greek system of selecting officials by lot as an alternative to elections (Letters, 20 May). It is true that elections often lead to unsatisfactory outcomes. I’m sure that, like me, many have voted for politicians who have betrayed us or let us down once in office.
Because we cannot accurately predict how a politician will behave once in power, the true purpose of elections is to peacefully remove leaders who have failed us.
Published 14 June 2017
Athenian ‘democracy’ was nothing of the sort
From Pam Manfield, The Narth, Monmouthshire, UK
Campbell Wallace proposes the “sortition” solution adopted to pick legislators by lot in ancient Athens (Letters, 20 May). But this didn’t pick from “the whole community”. It excluded women, most people not born in Athens, people with disabilities and, at times, others who lacked property or wealth.
But sortition of some sort still sounds better than our current system, in which big money and poor information or the insulting of opponents can influence voters. Brexit is an ideal example.
I have long advocated a lottery for the UK’s House of Lords, with people having to commit to five years’ regular attendance with no other employment. The same for the Commons would surely be no worse than the deal we have now.
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Andre,
I’m opposed to any form of simplistic reductionism — including both antediluvian elite theories and epistemicism. Both, in my view, fail to adequately explain political behaviour in advanced polyarchies.
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I have been taken to task – correctly – by Dimitri Courant:
Sortition, participation, and representation
From Dimitri Courant,
Lausanne, Switzerland
Campbell Wallace, suggesting “sortition” as a democratic solution, says that “the Greeks of Aristotle’s day knew that elections could lead to oligarchy, not democracy” (Letters, 20 May). Centuries before Aristotle, the Greeks thought of election not as potentially leading to oligarchy, but as the defining mode of selecting an oligarchy.
The idea of a “statistically representative sample” originated in the 19th century. The Greeks preferred sortition because it guaranteed equality and impartiality. Athens was a direct democracy, not a representative one. The Ecclesia was a popular assembly where any citizen (so no women or slaves) could speak and vote by being present, without having to to be selected. The Council of the 500 was selected by lot, but couldn’t take final decisions without approval by the Ecclesia.
Sortition is an interesting procedure that helps us to look at political history with new eyes and to open paths to deepen democracy through participatory innovations. Getting rid of the myth that elections equal democracy is vital. But we must do so in a scientific, critical and empirically informed approach.
I have inadvertently deleted my copy of the original letter, so I can’t reproduce it here. That “could” in “could lead to oligarchy” leapt out at me when I read it in the magazine: I’m pretty sure it was introduced by NS editorial staff. It certainly was not what I meant. As for the “to get a statistically representative sample of the whole community”, the “to”, which looks as though I meant “in order to” (and not simply that that was what they ended up with) was a poor choice of phrasing; “decision makers” was pure sloppiness on my part.
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I think you concede too much, Campbell. It is important to vanquish the “direct democracy” mythology, in order to achieve effective democratic reforms.
Athens was not “a direct democracy” because such a thing cannot exist in a society bigger than a few hundred people. The Ecclesia was akin to a modern day electorate. Thousands or millions makes very little difference – such a body is necessarily a body of spectators with the decisions taken elsewhere. Saying that the voters (today or in Athens) are decision makers is like saying that the viewing audience are the decision-makers in movie making. No, the director and producers and other professional staff make the decisions. The audience can merely make a selection from a very short menu of options.
So it was in fact the Boule that made the decisions, together with the oligarchs of the time – the privileged minority who did speak in the Ecclesia. And it was the fact that the Boule did make the decisions (setting the agenda and making and advocating for policy proposals) that made Athens democratic (or semi-democratic), not the fact that up-or-down votes were taken in the Ecclesia. Up or down votes were taken in the Spartan Assembly as well, and are taken in modern electoral regimes. Neither of those is even remotely democratic.
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>”I think you concede too much…”
My letter could have been better worded. It’s not always easy, though, to be absolutely precise in a couple of hundred words.
For me, the important thing is to acquaint people with the notion that there is an alternative to elections. The letters column of a scientific magazine is not really the place to go into the details of ancient history.
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This is not really a matter of the Atheinian system. The point is not that the standard “direct democracy” story about Athens is not true. The point is that it cannot be true.
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I agree with Yoram that it is a myth that Athens was (or could be) a direct democracy. It was REPRESENTATIVE (though not by elections… but by random selection and self-selection), and well exceeded the size at which face-to-face direct democracy is possible. Even if the Boule was not the ultimate authority as Yoram surmises, the random jurors of the court could overrule the ecclesia (assembly). And even at the ecclesia itself there were never more than about a fifth of eligible citizens present (acting on behalf of all citizens)… the courts and legislative jurors (nomothetai) were statistically representative OF THOSE WHO VOLUNTEERED… which to my mind, along with the exclusion of women and slaves) were the biggest failings to achieve what we think of as true democracy.
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Campbell,
Dimitri is a good scholar — his paper at the PSA sortition panel was excellent https://www.psa.ac.uk/conference/2017-conference/participatory-and-deliberative-democracy-sortition-and-democratic-0 — and his PhD supervisor is Yves Sintomer (author, Pouvoir au Peuple, who knows more about sortition than all of us put together. So you are right to acknowledge his criticisms.
Yoram,
> the standard “direct democracy” story about Athens is not true. The point is that it cannot be true. [emphasis added]
This is a good example of the discredited “covering law” approach to the historical record beloved of Marxist historians, whereby the historical facts are distorted to fit the theory. Oliver Dowlen (whose M.Phil was on Marx’s theory of alienation) is guilty of the same crime, when he insists that sortition has always been adopted as a prophylactic against corruption and partiality (on account of his “blind break” theory), and has nothing to do with representation. In practice it’s probably a bit of both. The reason that historians are unanimous that 5th century Athens was a direct democracy was because the Council of 500 was a collective magistracy — the secretariat for the people’s assembly — and selected at random in order to ensure the sovereignty of the latter. The idea that it was a policy-making body is simply wrong, as the maximum size of a deliberative group in the modern sense is a couple of dozen.
Terry,
What you say is only true of the 4th century. In the 5th century magistrates were selected by lot in order to enable citizens to rule and be ruled in turn and the graphe paranomon was introduced in 417 (to replace ostracism). The 5th century was a mixture of direct democracy and (effective) monarchy with the principal citizen (Cleisthenes, Pericles or whoever) advising and the ecclesia deciding. The decision outcome was often very erratic (and fiscally irresponsible) leading to the 4th century reforms that introduced lawmaking by representative juries and election for financial magistracies.
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PS, the only representative decision-making institution in classical Athens was the jury, and we are all aware of the highly restrictive policy regarding deliberation (any juror speech acts were ruled out as thorubos). If we are going to take this as a model for modern sortition systems then we need to attend to the detail, rather than indulge in theory-derived wishful thinking (especially regarding the Boule).
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>”If we are going to take this as a model for modern sortition systems”
Perish the thought.
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Campbell:
If classical Athens is not the model for a modern demokratia, then why do you devote so much of your letter to it? If it is your model, then you should get it right, that’s why I’m glad you acknowledged Dimitri’s corrections. Yoram, however, is content to peddle a deductive-nomological view of Athenian democracy that would be ridiculed by classical historians (peddlers of “the direct democracy mythology”). But then who needs historians when we have no shortage of neo-Marxist software engineers to explain to us what Athenian democracy was really about.
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Hello,
I tried to write a comment to say I had sent a reaction to Campbell’s letter, but I did not managed to publish my comment on this feed. I don’t know why.
Anyway I am glad you are debating my comment, which maion point was : the Athenians didn’t had the concept of representative sample, therefore they couldn’t think representation in the way we do. And the role of the Assembly was of critical importance.
This is based of the work of my advisor Yves Sintomer, his book will be published in English this year.
Best regards
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ps: I’ve originaly tried to post my comment in May but failed.
I am glad it works now as I am looking to take part in the kleroterians’ debates.
Here is the link to my letter: https://www.newscientist.com/letter/mg23431313-200-9-sortition-participation-and-representation/
And here is my webpage:
http://www.cresppa.cnrs.fr/csu/equipe/les-membres-du-csu/courant-dimitri/
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Welcome on board Dimitri !
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Hi Dimitri,
> the Athenians didn’t had the concept of representative sample, therefore they couldn’t think representation in the way we do.
What is the concept of a representative sample that supposedly moderns have and the Athenians didn’t? Surely, unless you limit your attention to a tiny minority, this concept cannot be about mathematical properties of sampling. What then?
> And the role of the Assembly was of critical importance.
What do you mean by that? How is this role essentially different from the role of the electorate in the modern system?
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