Hugh Pope has a piece in the The New European about the permanent allotted body in the German speaking community in Belgium.
If we are trying to fix our “broken politics”, is the solution really just another set of politicians? If the electoral system is at fault, might the process of government work better if it were run by a group of randomly selected citizens?
Liesa Scholzen is a politician whose constituents are the 70,000 German speakers on Belgium’s eastern border. People with an interest in new political systems are paying close attention to Scholzen’s hilltop parliament in Eupen, Ostbelgien. That’s because in 2021, as part of its Citizens’ Dialogue initiative, Ostbelgien inaugurated the world’s first official, permanent legislative body chosen not by votes, but by lottery.
“The Citizens’ Dialogue” […] is led by a standing council of citizens, drawn by lot. The 24-member council serves for 18 months, and they choose the topics which are then debated by separate Citizens’ Assemblies. These assemblies have 25-50 members, also chosen by lot, who make their recommendations following two to three days of deliberation. Members meet in the evening or at weekends, and receive expenses plus €50 to €95 (£44-£84) per session. All participants are chosen from the German-speaking community.
An interesting paragraph discusses the matter of the rate of acceptance:
[O]nly 5% to 10% of invitations to attend Citizens’ Assemblies are initially accepted. This is because people have no knowledge of them, no time to spare or just think the invitation letters are a hoax. Organisers usually ensure that those who do volunteer are representative through “stratification”, a second layer of random selection that balances gender, language, age, education and other criteria. But [activist Juliane] Baruck from Es geht LOS [a German organization promoting sortition] goes out knocking on the doors of those who don’t respond. “We trust the lottery to get a truly representative sample, so we keep trying,” she said. “I don’t try to convince those chosen. I ask them: ‘What do you need to join in?’ Already, we’ve got the positive response rate up to 22%.”
Another interesting matter is the attitudes of politicians to the process. We are told:
And yet, a transition to a new system can’t happen unless politicians agree to cede at least some power. They would have to do this knowing that, if sortition works, they risk losing their positions altogether. One answer came from Magali Plovie, president of the French-speaking Parliament of Brussels, one of Belgium’s three federal regions.
“Actually, we welcome Citizens’ Assemblies. We know we need to do things differently. Politicians are trapped in short-termism linked to elections, but we need long-term decisions… parliaments also feel they have lost power to executives, and that deliberative democracy might be a way of winning some of it back,” she told the group. “It is more the intermediary bodies like trade unions, civil society organisations and business groups that fear the extension of citizen participation.”
But the one politician who is quoted repeatedly in the piece, Liesa Scholzen, a member of the German-speaking Belgian elected chamber, is quite clearly uneasy:
Scholzen’s visitors come from round the world to learn about this new process of sortition, but Scholzen herself mostly looked bemused by their enthusiasm. “I’m just a part-time politician. And I’m a citizen too!” she reminded her audience of around 50, who had come to hear her talk about the strange new politics.
Ostbelgien’s Citizens’ Dialogue may be “well known internationally, but here some people don’t know it exists,” Scholzen explained to her visitors. “They haven’t had a real impact… When the first Citizens’ Assembly report came in, we told them: ‘You just can’t do it that way. It won’t work.’ So we just changed [some parts of] it… The Citizens’ Dialogue is still in its kinderschuhen, its ‘children’s shoes’.”
Back at Eupen’s German-speaking parliament, Scholzen acknowledged that “public trust in politicians is declining” and this was one reason that “everyone in this parliament gave away a bit of power [to create the Citizens’ Dialogue]. I hope this is valued… that we are considered an equal part of this new model.”
Filed under: Applications, Press, Sortition |
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
Nicholas Gruen
Owen Shaffer
Patrick Chalmers
Paul Gölz
paulnollen
peterstone
Pierre-Etienne Vandamme
pronfeld
qcollective
rcaze
richwbrown
Roger Knights
roslynfuller
Pierre-Etienne Vandamme
shaharavin
tbouricius
Ted Wachtel
Joshua Laferriere
Wayne Liebman
Yoram Gat
Oliver Milne
Equality by lot 
Hugh Pope:> “We trust the lottery to get a truly representative sample, so we keep trying,” she said. “I don’t try to convince those chosen. I ask them: ‘What do you need to join in?’ Already, we’ve got the positive response rate up to 22%.”
But this still leaves 78% refuseniks and a body comprised of only 24 persons fails the test of statistical representation. This would not have passed muster with your late father’s book, published next week:
LikeLike
A funny kind of “liberal” who wants mandatory participation. Should non-voting be punished by fines or prison too?
LikeLiked by 1 person
Ahmed,
Liberalism is certainly a contested term. Those of us who advocate quasi-mandatory sortition have to accept that the need for accurate statistical representation will conflict with the liberal emphasis on the rights of the individual. I guess this aligns us better with Constant’s notion of ancient liberty, where the survival of the polis was primary — there being no difference in principle between military and political service. We also need to accept that the true verdict of the people on a range of controversial policy issues is unlikely to reflect the “liberal” preferences of the existing political classes.
The challenge for sortinistas will be to ensure that refocusing on the needs of the collective does not run foul of the dangers highlighted by Popper in his critique of the enemies of the open society. The secret, IMO, is to ensure that the state does not become an enterprise organisation with a “mission” in Oakeshott’s sense, and that it does not intrude into the space of personal freedoms. Oakeshott agreed with Hobbes that personal freedom (“liberalism”) depended on a strong state and (presupposing democratic norms) this means that participation in the affairs of the state would be mandatory for those who get “called up”. Bearing in mind the short-term nature of allotted representation, this form of civic duty could not be described as onerous (especially if the state provides adequate compensation).
>Should non-voting be punished by fines or prison too?
The sanctions need be no more draconian than those pertaining to jury service.
LikeLike
> A funny kind of “liberal” who wants mandatory participation.
Aren’t liberal enthralled with monetary incentives? Wouldn’t it be much simpler, more effective, and “more liberal” to offer such handsome compensation so that very few would turn down allotted seats?
Funny how the notion that carrots would be more effective (and tastier) than sticks that is never even discussed when the person at the other end of the stick, or of the carrot, is a normal citizen. The elites always have to be rewarded handsomely for any services rendered, but the normal citizen must be punished for non-compliance.
(Another example of this mode of thought is with carbon taxes. How about rewarding citizens emitting less instead of taxing citizens emitting more? Such carbon credits are seriously proposed and discussed for corporations, but never for normal citizens.)
LikeLike
The term “quasi-mandatory” could be taken to prioritise the carrot, and leave the stick as a last resort. This has good Athenian provenance, in that many historians use payment for jury service (as opposed to herding people to attend the assembly) as a token for the radicalisation of democracy. And it’s also a matter of culture — citizens who didn’t participate in the demokratia were pilloried as ho idiotes. Even an anti-democrat Socrates was prepared to “volunteer” for service on the Council.
LikeLike
*** Yoram Gat advocates so handsome a compensation so that very few would turn down allotted seats.
Even with mandatory service some people will find a trick to avoid jury service (health etc) or will accept to pay a small fine.
The result will be practically the same.
Therefore the difference would be only in the ethics of the official discourse.
*** But here we discuss the case of very few citizens turning down the seat. And for now in citizen allotted bodies we are far from this situation. Even in the French Climate Convention around 70 % turned down. The risk is that the effects of non-representativity in such assemblies will be used against the mini-populus idea.
*** With a medium level indemnity, the attractive power will be only for the poorer people, not the richer ones. The system could be accused of lack of class representativity. Aristotle (Politics IV, 9, 2 ; 1294a 36-41) says that the oligarchizing republics give fines to the rich who turn down the juror seats, and no indemnity (interesting for the poor), whereas the democracies (dominated by the poor) give indemnities but not fines, each system twisting intentionally the representation of the civic body.
LikeLike
*** Keith Sutherland says that mandatory service “aligns us better with Constant’s notion of ancient liberty”.
*** Constant put a big political importance on judicial juries, to protect individual liberties from the State apparatus and its over-zealous agents, and to protect the freedom of the press. He wrote “ les jurés sont les représentants de la raison commune ” “ the jurors are the representatives of the common reason”. Strong words. I don’t remember this famous “liberal” thinker criticizing mandatory jury service, which was I think the rule at his time.
LikeLike
André,
> handsome a compensation […] mandatory service […] The result will be practically the same.
As we’ve discussed before, that is far from the case. In fact, mandatory service masking low voluntary acceptance is worse than making than low voluntary acceptance evident by leaving the seats of those refusing to participate vacant.
> With a medium level indemnity, the attractive power will be only for the poorer people, not the richer ones. The system could be accused of lack of class representativity.
It seems hard to take seriously the notion that good pay for the allotted would result in discrimination against the rich. First, the mere possibility of the rich being discriminated against seems unprecedented historically to such an extent that it is hard to imagine. But, second, even if we manage to overcome this barrier of the imagination, a situation where those who are (by assumption) better off could legitimately claim to be unfairly treated seems self-contradictory at a logical level. Can’t they simply get rid of their riches and enjoy the asserted benefits of being non-rich? And finally, of course, if the rich feel that the fact that they do not take up allotted seats results in serious harm to them, they could always start taking up those seats, can’t they?
LikeLike
It’s ironic that Yoram is an ardent defender of liberalism and free market incentives when it comes to political participation, but not for (e.g.) the media. I view myself as an Oakeshottian liberal, yet would insist that this pertains to civil, rather than political society. It’s interesting to speculate on what Constant’s view would have been regarding political juries as he certainly viewed active political participation as an aspect of (voluntary) modern freedom that would be unlikely to appeal to most people who, like Oscar Wilde, had better things to do with their evenings.
LikeLike
Andre:> The risk is that the effects of non-representativity in such assemblies will be used against the mini-populus idea.
Yes, and it isn’t just a risk, the backlash has already started. It’s a problem that Maurice Pope (Hugh’s father) anticipated in his book, written three decades ago, but published today:
http://imprint.co.uk/keys (enter checkout code CAT23 for 30% discount)
LikeLike
One of Yoram’s arguments has been that if given real power (rather than a mere advisory role), people will be more inclined to serve if called. I’m not sure that is true… or that the people who are attracted to power are the best representatives of the people. Narcissistic people who are overly self-confident might be attracted, but people who are less know-it-alls (like me and almost all of us on this Blog) might be LESS likely to agree to serve.
Another factor is that Yoram favors a fully empowered legislature (like current elected ones, but randomly selected), so the social status and ability to pay a relatively small number of recruits very well, he hopes would also induce service. Some other sortition advocates (like me) favor a system that also includes hundreds and thousands of short duration single-issue juries, which may result in zero status boost, like current court juries… And who gets excited about serving on a jury charged with hiring an agency manager and setting waste water system budgets and rates for their municipality. My preferred system requires quasi-mandatory service the same as trial juries (though hopefully with better pay).
Finally, Yoram is concerned that those forced to serve would be token and not really participate. Evidence from trial juries with quasi-mandatory service does not support this guess. Once jurors are empaneled, all the evidence is that they take their job very seriously.
LikeLike
That “And who gets excited…” sentence should have ended with a “?” … as a rhetorical question.
LikeLike
Terry:> people who are less know-it-alls (like me and almost all of us on this Blog)
I take it you mean sortinistas are a bunch of overconfident and narcissitic know-it-alls. In which case I completely agree with your points. The case for representation by quasi-mandatory sortition (proposed by Maurice Pope three decades ago) is convincing
LikeLike
Keith, yes you got it right… Upon re-reading I see that that sentence I typed was ambiguous. I definitely put myself, you and Yoram (at the very least) in the overly-self-confident-about-our-views category.
LikeLike
Terry,
> I’m not sure […] that people who are attracted to power are the best representatives of the people
This is not being attracted to power. This is about having your time and energy well spent. Why would anyone want to spend their time and energy on understanding an issue if their hard-earned insights are eventually ignored, dismissed or manipulated?
> I definitely put myself, you and Yoram (at the very least) in the overly-self-confident-about-our-views category.
Obviously at least some of us are, since we confidently hold mutually contradictory views. But would you put the political science professionals in the same category?
LikeLike
>would you put the political science professionals in the same category?
Only a sub-set. Most of them are just doing a job. One of the reasons I dropped out of my masters degree was because nobody seemed that engaged (and that was the social sciences in the early 70s). A well-published political theorist once told me that his wife knew far more about politics than he did because she was on the town council. There’s a big difference between professionals and activists.
LikeLike
*** Yoram Gat writes “It seems hard to take seriously the notion that good pay for the allotted would result in discrimination against the rich. (…) the mere possibility of the rich being discriminated against seems unprecedented historically to such an extent that it is hard to imagine.”
*** Upper class members have been discriminated against in some revolutionary times; OK, exceptional times, and before leaving room to another upper class. But political discrimination against the rich was a complaint in ancient dêmokratia; not avowed direct discrimination forbidden by the isonomia principle of dêmokratia, but indirect one e.g. a judicial system leaving too much place to judicial blackmail (blackmailers targeting the rich) and to arbitrary fines as punishment (with rich people as main targets). And indemnity to jurors (and assemblymen, later in Athens) could be seen as a way of packing the governing bodies with the poorer people. The lack of representativity is a discourse present in oligarchizing writers, or conservative ones as Aristophanes who describes the jurors as very poor people attracted by an indemnity which will allow them to eat (Wasps, 300+).
*** I don’t say the rich class complaints in Athens did not include a very big part of exaggeration, and we could easily think they expressed mostly bad will for fiscal solidarity. But dêmokratia allowed them to complain without absurdity, because the rich elite was a minority in the governing bodies.
*** If Gat finds very hard to imagine discrimination towards the rich, it is because it was exceptional in history that the rich could issue complaints like that without absurdity. But precisely ancient dêmokratia was the exception.
*** Coming back to the representativity issue, the basic problem is democratic legitimacy which needs a mini-populus mirroring the populus. An under-representation of, say, the fifth of the civic body higher in income would be a strong defect. The basic issue is not if “better off could legitimately claim to be unfairly treated”, but if the mini-populus is able to claim it is populus in miniature.
LikeLike
I agree with Bouricius: in discussing political participation in a dêmokratia, we must not reduce it to a parliament-like body. We must add single-issue bodies, as says Bouricius. And monitoring bodies to oversee managers and State apparatus. And, maybe most important, judicial bodies, from Constitutional jury to today cases. The law is what the judges say it is law. Here we can follow Aristotle: there is dêmokratia where the dêmos is master of all the judicial decisions.
LikeLike
André,
> the rich elite was a minority in the governing bodies
The rich would always be a minority in governing bodies in a democratic society, because they are a minority in the population. Would that give them legitimate grounds to complain about being discriminated against? (The American founding fathers certainly thought so, which is why they were explicitly anti-democratic, but presumably we are all democrats here, aren’t we?)
> The basic issue is not if “better off could legitimately claim to be unfairly treated”, but if the mini-populus is able to claim it is populus in miniature.
But who is to judge this claim, if not the people themselves? Just as in Athens the rich claimed to be discriminated against, but this claim was dismissed by the population, so it inevitably would be in a modern democratic society.
> We must add single-issue bodies
No, it is not for us to decide whether single-issue bodies are to be part of the democratic system. It is for the democratic bodies to decide that. More generally, a democratic system is self-designing and self-changing in an ongoing process of self-reflection and self-improvement. We can only determine minimal starting conditions for this process to converge toward a democracy rather than toward an oligarchy. Any aspirations for determining the details of the resulting system should be rejected.
LikeLike
*** Yoram Gat says “Any aspirations for determining the details of the resulting system should be rejected”
*** Ok, I understand the idea, but I think it will be difficult for a modern dêmokratia to avoid at least some single-issue bodies. There are in polyarchies many bodies issuing rules other than the Parliament e.g. FDA in the USA.
*** And anyway an allotted Parliament could not control the whole judicial power. . When I say allotted juries are necessary for the judicial power, I am not dictating a model for the sovereign dêmos to come, I say only something logically necessary and acknowledged by the ancient dêmokratia.
LikeLiked by 1 person
> I think it will be difficult for a modern dêmokratia to avoid at least some single-issue bodies. There are in polyarchies many bodies issuing rules other than the Parliament e.g. FDA in the USA.
I agree. Having permanent citizen oversight bodies for the FDA and other agencies, and for police departments sounds to me like a very good idea. This is a very different direction from that of the single-issue bodies “experimented with” today and envisaged in various “deliberative democratic” systems, which are usually one-off affairs and are either short-term part-time (several weekends) or very short term (a few days).
> When I say allotted juries are necessary for the judicial power, I am not dictating a model for the sovereign dêmos to come, I say only something logically necessary and acknowledged by the ancient dêmokratia.
Again, I tend to agree. I would expect that a democratic constitutional body would institute such popular courts.
LikeLike
*** I wrote that the dêmokratia political model logically leads to many single issue allotted bodies and even more numerous judicial allotted bodies. Yoram agrees, or tends to agree.
*** An important consequence is the amount of political work given to ordinary citizens. Let’s consider a somewhat rich and peaceful country attracting would be immigrants, and let’s suppose the legislators choose a policy other than total closure or absolute freedom of immigration, a policy with preference for some classes of immigrants, for example fleeing from political persecution, or oppression of their sexual orientation or utmost poverty or any other criterion. Elaborating the law could be done by a somewhat modest number of allotted legislators; but deciding about the individual files of all would be immigrants (a kind of judicial task) will give political work, related to the same issue but applied to individuals; a huge political work involving necessarily a huge number of ordinary citizens.
*** Therefore in a modern dêmokratia, even supposing all policy and legislation choices given to one or few mini-populus, there will never be only a small class of legislators and the rest of the citizenry looking to which goes on and living an apolitical life. A part of the whole citizenry life will be political work, at different levels, as in the ancient democratic cities. This is I think an important point.
LikeLike
> there will never be only a small class of legislators and the rest of the citizenry looking to which goes on and living an apolitical life
Here I disagree. I think the number of people that would be required or expected to get involved in politics and judicial decisions and the level of involvement required from the average citizen are choices that society can make. A democratic society can choose to try and minimize citizen investment in politics by maximizing the reliance on bureaucracy – merely supervised by citizens. Alternatively it can try to maximize citizen involvement. I don’t think that mass involvement is either necessary, nor clearly beneficial, nor a sure sign of a healthy democratic society.
In your example of discussing immigration cases, it may very well be that the large majority of cases are handled by the bureaucracy and only a minority of special or borderline cases require consideration by a body of citizens, in the same way that today only a small number of immigration cases reach the courts.
LikeLike
*** How many of NO to immigration requests by bureaucracy go to the courts ? It may depend on the country, but I am not sure that there is always a strong court control. Real policy may be decided often by the bureaucracy.
*** How many of YES to immigration requests by bureaucracy go to the courts?
*** I agree that in many fields a dêmokratia could rely on bureaucracy “merely supervised by citizens” as says Yoram Gat. But even if if the political work is mainly supervision, it will not be small work – if it is serious supervision.
*** Yoram Gat answer disturbs me because it seems to imply modest political work by citizens, thus modest supervision work; and I am afraid it gives weight to a known criticism of dêmokratia: ” in representative democracy the political class is able to rein on the bureaucracy ; in pure democracy the bureaucracy will mostly in fact control the policy”..
LikeLike
> Real policy may be decided often by the bureaucracy.
I don’t think this is inherently problematic – as long as the policy made by the bureaucracy is considered to be desirable in the well-informed and well-considered judgement of a democratic body .
> “in representative democracy the political class is able to rein on the bureaucracy ; in pure democracy the bureaucracy will mostly in fact control the policy”..
That’s actually a good point that I did not consider, but as far as I see it works against your position and in favor of mine. If we think that today it is the political class that is in charge, and not the bureaucracy, then clearly not that much work needs to be involved in “being in charge” since the total size of the political class is rather small. If that same work is distributed among all citizens, then the average citizen would not be spending a lot of time and effort on this work (unless they choose to).
If democracy chooses to shrink the responsibilities of the bureaucracy in favor of citizen work, then the political work requirement of the average citizen potentially could be significant. But the fact that today’s small political class is able to control the vast bureaucracy shows that such a choice is not inevitable for democracy.
LikeLike