Equality by lot

It is always encouraging and useful to find people making arguments against sortition. It is encouraging because when people make an argument against sortition rather than dismiss it reflexively out of hand, it means that sortition is being taken seriously enough to merit refutation. It is useful because the arguments being presented reflect ways in which the prevalent ideology rationalizes the electoral mechanism. Understanding this ideology better enables sortition advocates to be more effective in dislodging this entrenched convention.

The following was posted on Reddit by a user going under the label ‘cpacker’.

The sortition challenge

Some energetic arguments hereabouts have been launched in favor of sortition, which is the selection of representatives by lottery. The justification for it is that — to oversimplify a bit — voters are stupid. But this is directly contrary to the idea of the social contract, which depends on the electorate believing that they have a proprietary stake in the system. The less stupid the electorate, therefore, the less likely they are to want to leave their choice of representatives to chance. Therefore the ultimate success of a system based on sortition depends on keeping voters permanently stupid.

It should be remembered that the internal dynamics of legislative assemblies themselves are not purely democratic. The U.S. congress, for example, is actually run more like a conglomeration of fraternal societies, with committee chairmanships allocated by seniority, etc. Negotiating this kind of system requires specialized expertise of a political kind. Voters should be able to size up the likelihood of their representatives being able to wield this kind of expertise.

Filed under: Elections, Sortition | 2 Comments »