McKay: Combining mini publics and multi stage popular votes

Posted on April 7, 2019 by paulnollen

The section ‘Combining mini publics and multi stage popular votes’ in Spencer McKay’s new paper ‘Building a better referendum’ presents an interesting overview of several systems where the referendum is combined with mini publics.

Pairing a multi-stage popular vote with a mini-public – a process I refer to as an iterated popular vote (IPV) – may aid in bridging the gap between micro-deliberation and macro-participation. The IPV is an attempt at institutional design inspired by the notion of “designed coupling,” which seeks to “find the optimal strength of linkages between different parts of a deliberative system” (Hendriks, 2016, p. 55).

Filed under: Academia, Ballot measures, Proposals, Sortition |

4 Responses

hubertushofkirchner, on April 7, 2019 at 9:05 am said:

We must look at this the other way round:

The challenge is not to build a better referendum. It is to make the outcome of a mini-public process falsifiable by a mass-public acclamation.

Why?

It is self-evident that decisions through mini-publics for many issues – instead of using up all citizens’ bandwidth with mass-publics for a single issue – yield a much more efficient reform progress, through division of labour. Acclamation adds Popperian falsifiability, it helps us to assess if mini-public processes actually do find the General Will.

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Ted Becker, on April 7, 2019 at 5:14 pm said:

If you would like to see a comprehensive merger of mini public and national referenda, get a copy of The Future of Teledemocracy.(2000) by me. Ted Becker

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Jon Roland, on April 8, 2019 at 3:45 pm said:

I call such a system fetura. Venice 1268-1697 provides an example.

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hubertushofkirchner, on April 10, 2019 at 9:35 am said:

Good one Jon.

We tested an improved form of Fetura a month back for internal elections at GILT. Our full group size was set the number where 15% confidence interval gives 95% confidence level which maxes out at 43.

Then we used lots to reduce to a deliberative group size of 9 (we could have used 9, 10 or 11). Did this for all but the final round which required 65% agreement (50%+15%) of the full group for the chosen. It worked like a charm, including the subsequent general acclamation.

It’s a fun application of the famous six degrees of separation.

In fact, even a World President with the above parameters would only need 19 election rounds working through 817 world citizens. Very efficient

Pop: 7,6 billion
Group size: 43
Rounds: 19 – simply calculated as ln(pop) – ln(size)

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