Presentation at Democracy Without Elections meeting

Presentation at Democracy Without Elections meeting

Posted on January 18, 2022 by Yoram Gat

On Sunday I presented the presentation above at a meeting of Democracy Without Elections. The presentation was followed by a lively discussion. There was some interest in the “call to action” I make in the next-to-last slide (namely, resisting the oppressive convention of calling countries where the political system is elections-based “democracies”). A proposal was made that we – sortition activists – draw up a list of possible actions that we could engage in, as individuals or in groups, to promote sortition. I had to admit that I have made no such list, and that as far as I know no such list exists. I’ll draw up a list of ideas I have (it may unfortunately be a rather short one) and share it in a future post, and we could collectively extend and improve it.

It was great to meet this group of enthusiastic sortition activists. I thank those who participated and in particular Owen Shaffer for inviting me, and I warmly congratulate all those involved. It is great to see such activity which I think was unimaginable on a decade ago.

Filed under: Action, Elections, Organizing, Sortition |

9 Responses

jlowrie, on January 18, 2022 at 9:49 am said:

There are NO democracies, only oligarchies!

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Yoram Gat, on January 18, 2022 at 7:07 pm said:

Currently there exist no democracies. But democracies could be created by constituting the political system differently.

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Ahmed R. Teleb, on January 18, 2022 at 9:36 pm said:

Good work Yoram. I like your framing, “election-based system,” as it does not concede either the word “democratic” or “representative” to the current outdated, 18th century-based oligarchy. Even “polyarchy” was a distraction from the nature of the dominant model that polittical “scientists” euphemisticaly call “representive” blahblah…

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arturoiniguez, on January 20, 2022 at 1:30 pm said:

Shall we call those countries “elective aristocracies”, following Rousseau’s typology?

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keithsutherland, on January 20, 2022 at 2:17 pm said:

Rousseau wrote his book well before the age of universal suffrage. Most modern political theorists conclude (with Bernard Manin) that electoral regimes are a combination of aristocratic and democratic functions.

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arturoiniguez, on January 20, 2022 at 5:12 pm said:

The theft of the word “democracy” was committed in the third decade of the 19th century, thus well before the age of universal suffrage. I fail to see any value in your argument.
And, frankly, if I have to decide whether I get my definitions either from Plato, Aristotle, Montesquieu and Rousseau or from “modern political theorists”, I guess I’ll stick to the former.

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Yoram Gat, on January 20, 2022 at 6:53 pm said:

The good thing about “elections-based” is that it is non-controversial. Once such a neutral term is adopted, the question of whether elections are a democratic or an oligarchical mechanism can be discussed in a way that is not biased a-priori.

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keithsutherland, on January 20, 2022 at 6:53 pm said:

Arturo,

Texts need to be read in their historical context, and the conditions of modernity are entirely different from the ancient and early-modern world. Irrespective of the intentions of the 18th century founders, how to institute democracy in large multicultural states is a genuine challenge. Using scare quotes to reference modern political theorists is a good example of the tendency of sortition advocates to disparage scholarly expertise that I was deploring in my latest post — if we do this then we will continue to languish on page 9 of Google searches for sortition.

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Action ideas | Equality by lot, on January 28, 2022 at 4:52 pm said:

[…] the discussion following my presentation in the January DWE meeting, one of the participants suggested that a list of actions and activities […]

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