Sortition has found a fairly prominent advocate in the Financial Times‘s Martin Wolf. Wolf was introduced to the idea by Nicholas Gruen and is highly influenced by him. Wolf has written a book offering sortition as a solution to “ailing Western polities”. His prominent position and impeccable institutional credentials make him possibly the most prominent promoter of sortition in the Anglophone world.
Wolf is now repeating his argument in an article in the Financial Times. In particular he is implying that the “failure” of Brexit would not have happened if the decision whether to leave or remain were made by an allotted body. But Wolf goes farther and proposes a permanent allotted chamber with not insignificant powers.
“Brexit has failed.” This is now the view of Nigel Farage, the man who arguably bears more responsibility for the UK’s decision to leave the EU than anybody else. He is right, not because the Tories messed it up, as he thinks, but because it was bound to go wrong. The question is why the country made this mistake. The answer is that our democratic processes do not work very well. Adding referendums to elections does not solve the problem. But adding citizens’ assemblies might.
In my book, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, I follow the Australian economist Nicholas Gruen in arguing for the addition of citizens’ assemblies or citizens’ juries. These would insert an important element of ancient Greek democracy into the parliamentary tradition.
There are two arguments for introducing sortition (lottery) into the political process. First, these assemblies would be more representative than professional politicians can ever be. Second, it would temper the impact of political campaigning, nowadays made more distorting by the arts of advertising and the algorithms of social media.A modest way to do this is to introduce citizens’ juries to advise on contentious issues. These juries would be time-limited, compensated for their time and be advised by experts.
There is evidence that such a citizens’ jury would have come to a different decision on Brexit than in the referendum, since Leavers will change their minds in response to the evidence.
One could go much further, by selecting a people’s branch of the legislature. This, too, could be advisory. But it could decide to investigate particularly contentious issues or even legislation. If it did the latter, it might ask for the legislation to be returned to the legislature for secret votes, thus reducing the control of factional party politics. The people’s house might even have oversight of such issues as electoral redistricting or selection of judges and officials.
Citizens’ assemblies could be started on a purely private basis. Donations would be needed to get some going on particularly significant issues. In the UK, I suggest one on immigration. Participants would need financial compensation and resources would need to be found to run them. Gruen suggests that a fully funded citizen assembly of 100 people meeting 26 days a year and receiving an honorarium of $150 for each day’s sitting would cost around $15mn annually in the US or EU. Suppose a citizens’ assembly had fully investigated the claims in the Brexit debate — how much cost it might have prevented!
There is a lively debate among political scientists over whose preferences are reflected in democratic politics. The evidence is that the preferences of the wealthiest are over-represented. But, as important, is how far manipulation influences how preferences are formed.
This is where the assemblies could be most helpful. After my experiences as a juror, I have come to share the view of Alexis de Tocqueville that juries are a fundamental institution of citizenship. Given time and open debate, ordinary people show great perspicacity. Lacking the ambition for power, they could contribute hugely to our public debates.
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
Jochen Krattenmacher
johnedwardtaylor
johnhuang865
Jonathan Crock
keithsutherland
Jacob Richter
kkoreilly
lukewhito
SimonPek
Nathan El
Nicholas Gruen
Owen Shaffer
Patrick Chalmers
Paul Gölz
peterstone
Pierre-Etienne Vandamme
pronfeld
Emil
rcaze
richwbrown
Roger Knights
roslynfuller
Pierre-Etienne Vandamme
shaharavin
tbouricius
Ted Wachtel
Joshua Laferriere
theodorestathis
towardsautonomyblog
Wayne Liebman
Yoram Gat
Oliver Milne
Equality by lot 
I argued the case for a Brexit citizen assembly as an alternative to the (forthcoming) referendum on Open Democracy in April 2016: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/can-europe-make-it/brexit-lottery/
But, unlike Martin Wolf, Nick Gruen and Alan Renwick, I argued for partisan (but representatively-balanced) advocacy, rather than “information” and was open minded as to what the outcome would be. This is because I believe in democracy, rather than consensus-driven deliberation.
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Both are democracy Keith, one orients around difference and competition, the other orients around the other part of democracy — that the potential civil war is called off and we work out what we do as a community.
Not that that proves which is better, (and I expect one can do each well or badly) but name calling doesn’t do it either — though it’s certainly more consistent with the spirit of partisanship which you feel is such blessing :)
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NIck,
The problem is that the system has to be perceived to be democratic by the vast majority of people who don’t receive one of Willie Wonka’s magic tickets. This is especially problematic when you factor in the ambiguities in public opinion you highlighted in your response to Yoram. I’m also not aware of any large-scale functioning democracy which did not depend on difference and competition — as Habermas acknowledged himself, deliberation is “as rare as islands in the ocean” in everyday praxis. Even Helene Landemore has acknowledged that deliberative democracy is just a set of norms, rather than a practice. I prefer to organise the docks, rather than recline with the dandelions or Imagine all the people livin’ life in peace.
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Thanks Keith — Indeed. Wasn’t trying to recline.
Competition between views is necessary. But that DOESN’T mean that it needs to be the predominant and organising focus. I wrote about this in this piece where I contrasted the adversarial and inquisitorial legal systems and much else besides. Both adversarial and inquisitorial legal systems have cooperation and competition embedded within them. But their relation is different. And ultimately in a democracy, the cooperation of those within a democracy (their support of the rule of law and democratic norms) is the foundation on which political competition is built.
I’m not trying to keep a citizens’ jury from partisan debate and competition, but I’m also trying to frame the process in such a way that it is distanced from the dominant experience of politics in our angertainment electoral system — where public policy is overwhelmingly framed in terms of the debate between organised political parties. That has the disastrous effect of suppressing alternative ways of seeing things and maintaining major party duopoly in public discussion wherever they stick together.
Right now Australia is building its defence capability to dovetail with the Americans and enable us to assist the Americans in a war with China. You’d think that would be of immense consequence in Australian politics. But it’s not, and receives a fraction of the coverage and discussion it deserves because it’s a bipartisan policy across the two major political parties.
That having been said, one does need the process to be governed in a way that is perceived as politically legitimate. And that is often done by having retired ‘worthies’ from both of the majors govern the process. However, I suspect among our confreres we’re both further towards the idea that competition is indispensable than many who support sortition.
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Nick,
Agree in principle (Alex Kovner’s outcome criteria are convergence and acceptability), but the big difficulty is finding an alternative democratic mechanism for making policy proposals. We have concluded that it has to be some variant on the political party, but under Superminority rules they would be very different creatures, as opposition parties would no longer benefit from the harlot’s prerogative. The outcome would be to Turn Down the Noise (forthcoming paper), as posturing and obstructionism would no longer cut the mustard. I think we should also be mindful that Bernard Manin (one of the founding fathers of DD) now advocates adversarial debate rather than Habermasian deliberation.
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Thanks Keith, my thinking on this takes the world as it is and tries to inject sortition into it in a way that can start to demonstrate its qualities.
When you create a society in which the major political parties operate under superminority rules, I want to be the first to know. But until then, I’ll be trying to think of how to inject the other way to represent the people into our politics as it is :)
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Nick, once again, agree in principle, the only caveat being the need to focus on democratic representation, rather than the other benefits of sortition (neither of us would claim that sortition is democratic just because Aristotle and Montesquieu said so). As for practicability, the shift to superminority only requires a change in the decision threshold of existing legislative assemblies, and the case for large randomly-selected juries is now very widely accepted. In another forthcoming paper Alex and myself imagine how the CCC might have functioned under superminority and how easy (and inexpensive) it would be to implement.
I appreciate none of this will not appeal to hardcore sortinistas, who want to blow the whole thing up and start again from ground zero.
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oops, unintended double negative
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Well you seem stuck.
On one side are ‘hardcore sortinistas’ who want to blow things up.
On the other side is me — just wanting to make some progress in this world, not an imagined future world.
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I’m in the latter camp. What worries me about current sortition endeavours is that they will make implementation harder if they are perceived, rightly or wrongly, to be undemocratic (irrespective of any epistemic merits). That’s why I think everyone involved in the sortition movement has to be scrupulously neutral on substantive issues like Brexit.
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Another somewhat high profile advocate for sortition in the UK is the LSE “economist and philosopher” Daniel Chandler: Re-imagining politics to build a fairer society.
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[…] continued their back-and-forth, sortition found a new fairly high-profile advocate in Martin Wolf, the chief economics commentator at the Financial Times, who was introduced to the idea by Nicholas […]
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