IPSA World Congress, 25-29 July 2020

Posted on September 24, 2019 by peterstone

The Call for Papers is currently out for the World Congress of the International Political Science Association. The congress will take place on 25-29 July 2020 in Lisbon. I am currently involved with an effort to assemble a panel or two for this meeting. The focus will be on combining sortition with election and other institutional mechanisms.

The Call for Papers can be found here: https://wc2020.ipsa.org/wc/home. If you have any interest in joining a panel like this, please let me know ASAP. The deadline is coming rather fast–10 October, in fact.

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The principles of representative government and the French sortitionists

Posted on September 22, 2019 by Yoram Gat

A fun paper paper by Samuel Hayat, “La carrière militante de la référence à Bernard Manin dans les mouvements français pour le tirage au sort”, Participations 2019/HS (Hors Série) [original in French, abstract in English], tells the story of how Bernard Manin’s book The principles of representative government came to play a role in the sortitionist movement in France. The bottom line, according to Hayat’s telling, is that it is all Etienne Chouard’s doing. Hayat also claims that Manin’s book was not the source of the reformists’ interest in sortition but rather that they, and in fact mostly Chouard himself, used the book, with its impeccable academic credentials, as a legitimating force for their position.

Hayat’s paper seems to serve as the starting point for Antoine Chollet (“Les postérités inattendues de Principes du gouvernement représentatif : une discussion avec Bernard Manin” by
Antoine Chollet and Bernard Manin, Participations 2019/1 (N° 23)”, [original in French, abstract in English]) and for his claim that Manin’s book was misunderstood by both activists and scholars as a polemic in favor of sortition, when in fact Manin is pretty happy with elections, which he sees as mixing democratic and aristocratic elements.
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Filed under: Academia, Books, Elections, meta, Sortition, Theory | 22 Comments »

Sortition in France – discussion and application

Posted on September 20, 2019 by Yoram Gat

Discussion and application of sortition continue to be very active in the Francophone world. Here are some recent examples:

Guyancourt: “Décidons ensemble” [“Let’s decide together”] are forming their list of candidates for the municipal elections by knocking on door number 20 in each street.

From the Popular initiative to sortition: the responses to the crisis of representation – a discussion with Yves Sintomer, Dimitri Courant, and Clément Mabi.

Random interactions in the Chamber: How allocating legislators’ seats at random affects their behavior.

Allotting candidates for the Paris municipal elections.

An allotted citizen council in Sion, Switzerland will publish positions on the propositions on the Swiss ballot.

Filed under: Academia, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 2 Comments »

The cartelization thesis

Posted on September 17, 2019 by Yoram Gat

A paper by Richard Katz and Peter Mair called “Changing models of party organization and party democracy: The emergence of the cartel party” published in Party Politics Journal in 1995 (and based on a 1992 workshop presentation by the same authors) spurred a body of academic work in political science dealing with the “cartelization” of party politics. In the abstract of a 2009 paper by the same authors (“The Cartel Party Thesis: A Restatement”) Katz and Mair write:

The cartel party thesis holds that political parties increasingly function like cartels, employing the resources of the state to limit political competition and ensure their own electoral success.

The thesis sees this cartelization as a phase in the evolution of party dynamics. Earlier phases were the “cadre party” (19th c.), the “mass party” (first half of 20th c.), and the “catch-all party” (second half of the 20th c.). While the mass parties and the catch-all parties competed for votes by presenting competing policies, the thesis asserts, the cartel parties do not. They huddle around a neo-liberal consensus and offer the public no alternatives.

In their 2005 paper “From Catch-all Politics to Cartelisation: The Political Economy of the Cartel Party”, Mark Blythe and Richard Katz explain the cartelization phenomenon as follows:

We argue that two key changes have occurred that have effectively turned parties from maximising competitors into risk averse colluders: the limits of catch-all politics, and the rhetoric and reality of globalisation.

The first factor, according to Blythe and Katz, is that by the 1970’s the policy competition between parties has produced welfare policy that was at the maximum capacity of the state to provide. Supposedly this was the dominant dimension along which parties were competing, and it has now become impossible to compete along this dimension any longer.

The second factor is a reduction in the ability of states to control the economy due to globalization:

In brief, catch-all parties were creatures of the Keynesian era. States were assumed to have primary responsibility for ensuring jobs and growth and were also assumed to be able to marshal fiscal instruments to those ends.

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Filed under: Academia, Elections, Theory | Leave a comment »

The French Citizen Convention on the Climate

Posted on September 12, 2019 by Yoram Gat

Le Monde reported on August 26th (original in French):

The citizen convention on the climate: the allotment of 150 participants has commenced

This citizen convention, which is one of Emmanuel Macron’s responses to the “Gilets Jaunes” crisis, will propose measures to combat global warming.

The allotment of 150 Frenchpeople who will take part in the Citizen Convention on the Climate has begun on Monday, August 26th and will last until the end of September, before meeting for the first time at the beginning of October. This citizen convention, aimed by Emmanuel Macron as one of the rseponses to the grand debate that followed the “Gilets Jaunes” crisis, will propose measures to combat global warming, as France is far from meeting its obligations.

Telephone numbers are going to be automatically generated – 85% mobile numbers and 15% landline numbers – and about 25,000 people will be called, in order to select 150. Some criteria have been set in order to get the best representation: 52% women and 48% men, 6 age groups (starting at age 16), levels of educational attainment, a diversity of professions. Regional population will also be taken into account with 4 oversea representatives, as well as representation of urban centers, their surrounding areas and the rural areas.
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Filed under: Applications, Press, Sortition | Tagged: | 64 Comments »

Procaccia: Lotteries Instead of Elections? Not So Arbitrary

Posted on September 7, 2019 by Yoram Gat

Ariel Procaccia, an associate professor in the computer science department at Carnegie Mellon University, has an opinion piece in Bloomberg News advocating sortition. Some excerpts:

Have you ever thought that 535 random people off the street would do a decidedly better job than the duly elected members of the U.S. Congress? If so, you’ve been scooped by a few millenniums; the idea of selecting government officials at random, known as sortition, is neither as outrageous nor as original as it seems.

In the fourth and fifth centuries BC, some of the central organs of the Athenian government were populated by selecting random volunteers. For example, the members of the Council of 500 — whose responsibilities included developing legislation, overseeing the executive branch and managing diplomatic relations — were selected at random for one-year terms.

During the Renaissance, sortition was all the rage. For centuries it played a key role in the process of selecting the Doge of Venice, as well as in populating the branches of the Florentine government. It was also employed widely throughout the Kingdom of Aragon, which is part of modern-day Spain. [King Ferdinand II of Aragon spoke highly of the virtues of sortition. Unfortunately, he also established the Spanish Inquisition and ordered the expulsion of practicing Jews from his kingdom, so he is hardly an authority on governance.] Sortition actually endured as a system of government into the 20th century: San Marino’s two heads of state were selected at random from 60 councilors as recently as 1945. [The two heads of state constitute a non-negligible fraction of the minuscule country’s population.]

Procaccia mentions in quick succession David Van Reybrouck, Terrill Bouricius, citizens’ assemblies, Ireland, and the German-speaking Community of Belgium, and finishes off with:

Admittedly, even the Belgian initiative is still a long way off from a Bouricius-style sortition utopia — and the jury is still out on whether we’d want to go that far. But it’s comforting to think that the best fix for our political chaos may be a bit of randomness.

Filed under: Academia, Athens, History, Press, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Roslyn Fuller: Don’t be fooled by citizens’ assemblies

Posted on September 6, 2019 by keithsutherland

Highly recommended post by Roslyn Fuller on UnHerd.com:

I believe that the biggest threat to democracy is the belief among the current societal elite that what they want and what democracy is are the same thing – and that tweaking the rules of the game to get what you want is therefore right, just and somehow unto itself democratic.

This trend that sees democracy as a set of particular decisions, rather than just as a method for making decisions, has been well under way for some time and tends to divide the world between ‘informed’, ‘correct’ decisions, and ‘uninformed’ ‘incorrect’ decisions. ‘Correct’ decisions are automatically democratic; ‘incorrect’ ones are not.

One of the ways that is currently in vogue for ensuring ‘informed’, ‘correct’ decisions is to hold so-called citizens’ assemblies, a democratic ‘innovation’ that many leaders currently feel assured will bring them the results that they want.

This is followed by a nuanced (and sceptical) examination of the use and abuse of randomly-selected citizens’ assemblies, focusing on (wilful) misunderstandings of Irish CAs:

British politicians and intellectuals apparently feel themselves entitled to just blithely repeat these myths as a justification for holding such assemblies on all manner of decisions in Britain.

Filed under: Elections, Participation, Sortition | 34 Comments »