Adam Lee writes a polemic for sortition in OnlySky, a website billing itself as being “dedicated to protecting America’s secular democracy through reality-based journalism, storytelling, and commentary”. Lee covers standard ground – Athens using sortition and rejecting elections, the statistical representativity of allotted bodies, the unrepresentativity of elected bodies, Ireland’s use of sortition. (One thing that I have not heard before is that Ireland will soon have another constitutional referendum for adopting or rejecting a proposal by the allotted constitutional convention, this time for deleting Article 41.2 of the Irish constitution which is concerned with making sure mothers do not neglect “their duties at the home”.)
Lee offers two potential problems with a sortition-based system. The first is the statistical possibility of unrepresentative samples:
What if we choose 100 representatives by lot and get 75 QAnon-believing evangelicals? A legislature that’s far out of the mainstream could wreak tremendous harm or radically reshape society in disastrous ways.
The other is problem is that
even if [the system is] representative, it wouldn’t necessarily be responsive. People mounting a campaign on issues that matter to them is one of the safety valves of democracy. If there’s a problem that the government is ignoring—anything from potholed streets to rampant gun violence to unpopular wars—someone can, and probably will, run for office on a platform of fixing it.
Under sortition, that’s impossible. No matter what your cause is, you have no lever to force the government to act. You have to sit back and hope that someone who shares your views gets chosen on the next go-round.
Lee concludes:
Despite these problems, I can see real potential for sortition—if not as the sole basis for government, then maybe as a component of it. What if, instead of a House and a Senate, we had one democratically elected chamber and one made up of citizens chosen by lot?
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 
> Under sortition, that’s impossible. No matter what your cause is, you have no lever to force the government to act. You have to sit back and hope that someone who shares your views gets chosen on the next go-round.
The argument here is faulty. It is unclear to me why it is that mounting a public campaign would be less effective in a sortition based system than in an electoral system. In fact, the opposite seems true.
The mechanism by which a public campaign could affect government policy in an electoral system is presumably as follows:
1. The campaign sensitizes the public to a certain issue, or brings it to a certain point of view.
2. The government, being concerned about its reelection prospects changes policy in order to please the public.
In a sortition-based system, the first element in this mechanism is sufficient. If the campaign brings the public to hold a certain opinion, then it can be expected that it will bring the allotted – whose interests and values reflect those of the public at large – to hold the same opinion. The allotted can then be expected to act on that opinion simply because they hold it, without any additional incentives or “accountability” mechanism.
For the elected to act when the allotted would not, the campaign would have to take advantage of the elite composition of the elected body, aiming to affect their unrepresentative point of view without necessarily affecting public opinion. Such a situation is possible, but hardly seems like a properly functioning democratic system.
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Having a “lever to force the government to act” (in other words some effective threat) is a common tactic when people are faced with an unrepresentative government, whether elected oligarchs or dictatorial authoritarians. In a democracy there should be no such levers. Persuasion of people in terms of underlying values or facts should be the only tools. If the government is undemocratic, then the tool of threatening is deemed justifiable… but in a democracy it isn’t justifiable, and bemoaning the inability to threaten the democracy, as the author does, is a fundamentally undemocratic complaint.
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> and bemoaning the inability to threaten the democracy, as the author does, is a fundamentally undemocratic complaint.
I think this is more of a bad mental instinct than a reflection of a real anti-democratic sentiment on the side of writer. The notion that “electoral accountability” or is a bedrock of democracy is very ingrained in the public’s mind, and so the fact that this mechanism is non-existent in a sortition-based system is instinctively seen as a problem.
In fact, such thinking, however well refuted by facts and logic, is a mainstay of political science as well and is often mentioned by political scientists writing about sortition as an advantage of electoralism over sortition.
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It’s a bit late but I figured I would comment on this since it enables me to relevantly voice a major issue I have had with sortition since already quite early on in my thinking about sortition and finding the site about 2 years ago. So I am finally progressing from occasional lurker to active participant :) Since I feel that to make my point I have to write pretty much my whole opinion on the topic this will be a bit long.
Nobody has brought it up here and it doesn’t seem to be an oft-mentioned issue, but personally I consider the first problem of the risk of a highly unrepresentative sample to actually consitute a sufficiently significant drawback to invalidate an allotted body as the ultimate authority in a government.
This is why I instead favor a model which combines an allotted chamber of representatives with “popular votation” (initiative/referendum) as used to its fullest extent in Switzerland (incidentally where I am from but I am quite confident that I am not biased by that :)), and as in Switzerland with the latter overriding the former. This would enable the general population to override any unpopular decisions made by an unrepresentative allotted body. I am rather surprised to not have ever seen this possibility brought up on this site; of course I have not read the majority of it but even doing a search with the relevant terms I have not found any proper discussion of it.
A first problem with popular votation which I presume is much of the reason it’s (ironically) not popular on this site is that there is no deliberation as with a chamber of representatives, which means that the voters won’t get to have discussions with other representative members of the population and instead will be influenced by the unrepresentative elite-influenced media. While this is admittedly a problem, this could be much alleviated by precisely having an allotted representative body whose deliberations would be systematically publicized which would help form public opinion.
And an issue that a representative body suffers from which popular votation does not is bribing, and in fact I consider this probably a more important issue than lack of deliberation.
And in any case the mere potential for bribing and of course an unrepresentative sample very much weakens the legitimacy of an allotted body in the public’s eye, which means that enabling overriding by popular votation is very important to make the public consider the system legitimate and support it.
Obviously there are too many decisions of governance to be made to only have popular votation, and I presume this is another major reason, probably the main one, explaining why popular votation isn’t promoted here. But it doesn’t have to be either-or. There can be popular votation while having representatives too, as is the case in Switzerland, with the representatives making most decisions and popular votation only comparatively few, but since typically the questions voted on in popular votation are those deemed most important, popular votation is a very important mechanism. Of course when representatives are elected this is even more important since the elected body is going to tend to be much more at odds with the population owing to the tendency to elitism in an elected body, but owing to the possibility of an unrepresentative allotted body, it still remains important with sortition.
One might contest that having once an unrepresentative body wouldn’t matter since it would be replaced in the next round by a representative body that could undo all the unpopular policies implemented. But that on its own is not sufficient because there might have been irreparable major harm done as the author precisely mentions; for instance the body could have decided to commit a massacre or to eliminate the institution of allotted representatives.
One might then contest to that that there could be a judicial body that would prevent such policies from being implemented, but that raises the question of how the judicial body itself is formed: most logically it would precisely be so by sortition too, as indeed there has recently been a popular initiative in Switzerland to do precisely that, which of course alas failed by a very large margin (though I wasn’t a fan of the fact that it appointed the judges for life). If the judicial body happens to be likewise skewed in the same direction as the legislative/executive, then the judicial body doesn’t prevent bad things from happening.
And then of course if there is a judicial body to prevent the legislative body from implementing bad policies, there must be some sort of overarching law that the judicial body ensures the respect of, which means that there must be a constitution that the legislative body can’t touch; and that then raises the question of who does create and modify the constitution. The most obvious entity for the latter would be the general population though popular votation since that would be the most representative. Also since the judicial body is chosen by sortition too we might as well ditch it and just have a legislative body that itself determines whether or not it is respecting the constitution, and there is of course the risk that they would be wrong whether intentionally or not.
But that then of course itself raises the next problem which is that the majority of the population could have very bad opinions which could still lead to awful things happening. And in fact that is to a large extent the whole purpose of a constitution: to avoid a tyranny of the majority. But how on Earth can we have a legitimate constitution if not approved by the majority? There would have to be some sort of wise intellectual elite, an aristos, that drafts it. And of course if the aristos could persist over time then there would be no need for a constitution, the aristos would simply be the supreme authority. But how does the composition of this aristos get itself determined? There is no way. The problem is intractable. As long as the majority is foolish as is sadly the case, there is no procedure that can guarantee good governance. And the best outcome would be to luck into having the optimal aristos.
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Hi Nathan,
First of all, welcome! It’s great that you are joining the conversation.
I love your comment: each paragraph addresses the points that came to my mind reading the previous one.
In general, I think that referenda, like any mass political mechanism, are a problematic institution because they amplify elite voices. That said, veto or nullification referenda give a fairly narrow role to this mechanism and so are relatively harmless and may actually be useful.
The various points you make deserve more careful consideration than can be squeezed into a comment, so here I’ll just lay out what I think the questions are, as a bookmark for later consideration:
1. How much should we be concerned about unrepresenative samples?
2. How much should we be concerned about decisions inflicting “irreparable major harm”?
3. What should be the relation between an allotted legislature and the courts, or other government institutions?
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Thanks for the welcome Yoram, glad you liked my comment :)
Especially since you mention that each paragraph addresses the previous one, I realize that my comment is imperfect in that regard since there is still an obvious I imagine people might make to the last paragraph, so I figured I would make a new comment to address that a well.
What I imagine many would disagree with is my characterization of the majority of the population as foolish. As a relevant example in support of that assertion I give you Afghanistan where there was recently precisely a 2-decade-long attempt to establish democracy. I have come across a recent poll indicating that in Afghanistan about 90 percent of the population supports putting to death those who leave their religion (and of course about 99 percent support more or less consciously the eternal torture of such people after death), and though I don’t know the data quite as precisely there would be similarly high figures for capital punishment for blasphemy, sex out of wedlock, and homosexuality. And we know that the demos is not afraid of putting this into practice given the regular incidents of stoning and more secretive killings by villagers engaging in a form of judicial self-rule. This is not a society I am at all comfortable establishing democracy in, no matter how well-designed it is to be representative and to ensure good deliberation. And moreover since I don’t believe that genetics plays the major role in determining a country’s ideology but rather that it’s mostly the result of social contagion, this means that a similar percentage of people in any country would support such atrocities if the people around them did too; and indeed as evidence of that we know that the people of the most currently “enlightened countries” of Western Europe precisely supported similar such atrocities a few centuries back in similar overwhelming proportions.
This is a rather grim topic to cover, which is why, along with not wanting to make my comment even longer, I didn’t bring it up in my first comment, and many thus shirk away from it, but it’s important to look at it honestly. It’s obviously directly relevant for any attempt to implement democracy in countries where there is currently support for particularly bad policies. But it goes far beyond that, since because it means people everywhere could potentially be the same, it also more generally largely invalidates the legitimacy of majority rule anywhere. And this is not merely conceptual but also pragmatic since it means that there is no limit to how much the more enlightened places could regress over time, which means that even if it’s “safe” to have democracy in a particular place now, that might not last.
Then addressing succinctly your remarks, though it somewhat repeats what I have already written:
Regarding the amplification of elite voices by “referenda” (presumably you are including initiatives/propositions), I am not sure whether you are referring to the content of the bills or the discourse surrounding them. For the former, in Switzerland a very large proportion of the initiatives have a genuinely populist bent, while eg in California the mechanism does seem to be more of a vehicle for special interests, which is quite puzzling since the requirements for bringing an intitiative to vote are similar; this would require a more in-depth analysis, but the Swiss example demostrates that getting populist bills voted on is possible. For the latter, the media does indeed tend to favor the elitist viewpoint, but there have been several instances of the Swiss population voting against the exhortations of the media and the elected officialdom, and it seems most good initiatives fail more owing to the population’s innate wariness of change rather than manipulation by media, though I do nonetheless agree that the media does excessively influence opinion in favor of elite interests.
As for the “3 questions”, I would consider #2 to be typically just an extension of #1, since the irreparable major harm that we fear would only happen in case of a particularly unrepresentative sample, since we typically wouldn’t be doing sortition at all if we thought that a representative sample would do irreparable major harm (though that of course is quite likely and what the earlier part of this comment precisely further warns of), and risk of irreparable major harm is the only major problem of an unrepresentative sample. Of course one might choose to take a chance and implement sortition even if the majority had problematic opinions (since after all there is no clear better option) in which case #2 would be separate from #1.
And then answering questions #1-2 largely hinges on the answer to #3. If there is some sort of safety mechanism constituted by another branch of governance, then provided the mechanism works well there is almost no risk of irreperable major harm, and so an unrepresentative sample doesn’t matter, but then it raises the whole quis custodiet ipsos custodes problem of these safety mechanisms as I cover in my original comment.
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Regarding the possibility that the majority’s informed and considered opinion is unjust or oppressive: The thought that democracy always generates “good” policy outcomes is not wrong but incoherent. It is incoherent because “good” policy outcomes is only meaningful when applying a certain normative criteria. Since there are no universally accepted normative criteria, then there can be no agreement that a certain system (democratic or not) generates good (or bad) outcomes.
Thus, the concerns that a democracy would produce poor outcomes in our own eyes as outside observers is of interest to “us” and to other people who have similar normative criteria, but is of no theoretical interest unless the theory privileges “our” normative criteria. The advantage of democracy is that it generates good outcomes in the eyes of the members of that society. In fact it seems to me that that is the definition of democracy.
If someone could propose a non-democratic system which promises to promote certain ideals that appeal to “us” (i.e., to me) maybe that system could be a good competitor for a democracy. I have yet to hear of such a candidate, but I’d be very interested to hear of one.
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By the way, Nathan, if you would like to create your own posts on Equality by Lot with your ideas regarding sortition instead of or in addition to using the comment section for that, please let me know and I’ll set you up as a contributor to the blog.
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Nathan,
I will refer you to my paper on multi-body sortition, which I believe solves your concerns. Your top concern about an unrepresentative sample is solved by having a sufficiently large sample, such that an unrepresentative sample would happen less than once every thousand years. But this also requires that these final adopt/reject panels have quasi-mandatory service (like jury duty). Other random bodies would oversee improving and reforming the rules to protect against corruption (they may opt for sequestering the final jury panel), oversee expert witness selection, etc. Your concerns are legitimate from looking at existing citizens’ assemblies, but the multi-body design solves them.
https://delibdemjournal.org/articles/abstract/10.16997/jdd.156/
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Terry, thanks for the reply. I had in fact already been vaguely aware of the general multi-body aspect of your system for quite some time, since it’s quite hard to not come across your work when one looks into sortition :) but only in the past few days looking into sortition more closely have I gotten a good understanding as well as appreciation of it, which does indeed lead me to currently consider it the most promising model of sortition, though I am still keen on trying out single- or few-body models given their advantage of relative simplicity.
However I would like to point out that while your model could indeed fully prevent bribing by sequestering the final jury panel, as well as prevent interested biasing of the procedure (such as moderation and witness selection) by having an allotted body determine that as well, it cannot fully solve the problem of an unrepresentative sample, or of a representative sample of a population which in majority I consider immoral: a mean frequency of once in a thousand years is admittedly rare by usual standards, but it could happen at any time, and civilization has existed for longer than that, and if all goes well should last for billions of years, from which perspective an unrepresentative sample would be a frequent occurrence (though in fact I would then just let everything be decided by AI).
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Oops, my reply to Yoram seems to have vanished, and my reply to Terry doesn’t feature my name. It would be good to have text recovery and early correction functions.
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Okay this time around I am writing my comment on Microsoft Word first; I should have done this from the beginning since I was already worried my writing might get lost.
Yoram, my own position is that there is an objective universal morality which means that there are objectively good and bad policies, mostly based on utilitarianism ie maximization of net enjoyment albeit taking into account everyone individually unlike the standard version. And even ignoring that, typically in a society not everyone will share the same values, and enabling majority rule will yield a poor outcome for the minority with clashing values. And current liberal societies do in fact believe there are absolute values that the majority should not violate, which is the purpose of a constitution and declaration of rights; I am actually rather surprised that you seem to not subscribe to this ideal, though I know many others don’t either.
As for the ideal system in a particular beholder’s own eyes, the obvious answer is for that person to be an absolute monarch of the world, which is what I want and presumably what most of us want :)
Indeed my comments are akin to post unto themselves. I would indeed be keen on making posts here yes, thank you for offering. Though I suspect I have likely written most of what I have to say by now…
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Oh and just to further underline why moral relativism doesn’t make sense: if you don’t believe in any absolute norms then you shouldn’t be concerned about the implementation of sortition (or about anything else for that matter), since there is a logically possible moral system that would consider it good for a population to not be able to implement its preferred policies. The fact that you have a normative opinion in favor of sortition indicates that you do at least hold the satisfaction of the majority of all populations as an absolute moral value.
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The issue of the universality of morality is of course old and well-worn. The fact that there is no absolute morality seems to me a fairly straightforward point – any argument for a particular morality would necessarily rely on some assumptions (like any argument at all). These assumptions can be rejected by some and thus any conclusions drawn from them cannot be universal. This does not mean I don’t have my own morality – of course I do. I cannot “prove” this morality is valid (unless some assumptions are accepted), but I still believe it to be true. It is this subjective morality that guides my own actions, including my support for democracy and thus for sortition.
Historically it was standard among the elites to explicitly reject democracy on moral grounds, claiming that it leads to immoral outcomes (the rich being unfairly deprived of their wealth was a standard example of such immorality). The fact that such a stance has now fallen out of fashion does not mean that it has been refuted or can be refuted but rather that moral fashions have changed (for the better, in my opinion).
Democracy is commensurate with (or defined as) instituting a public policy which corresponds to the morality of the members of society. To me this seems in itself the moral way to set up a government. (Others may disagree.) But there could of course be situations where the majority holds a moral position that is contrary to mine, in which case my moral position in favor of democracy would conflict with my other moral position which is by assumption a minority position in society. I don’t think such conflicts are in general avoidable. Instituting a democracy is not the end of politics but it is the beginning of a better politics where one’s efforts for improving society are focused on improving society’s mores rather than on appealing to the mores and interests of the powerful.
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Yes naturally it is also coherent to consider something as “subjectively societally moral” inasmuch as it enjoys the support of the majority; where I dissent is on the notion that this can be equated with true morality, due to my considering that the latter is actually something that is roughly objective, that it is some specific pre-existing thing to be discovered like a physical law rather than something to be created with a choice of many possible valid options like a work of art, which makes it possible for individuals and societies to simply have a wrong morality.
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So you are concerned that a democracy (a society run according to the ideas and interests of the members of society as they themselves judge things) might be immoral according to your (“objective”) criteria?
As I wrote, that is certainly a possibility. But then what is the alternative? Is there some system of government that would assure (or make it more probable) that the governed society would fit your criteria of morality even when those criteria are rejected by the members of the society?
And even if there is such a system of government, how would you promote it among the members of a society that was trying to design its own government? Why would they adopt such a system – a system that promises to arrange a society along principles that they reject? A great practical advantage of democracy (as defined above) is that by its very nature it appeals to the majority in every society.
IMO, we should promote democracy, under the assumption that (1) the members of the society we live in largely share our core values and interests, (2) to the extent they do not, we can appeal to their good sense and judgement and make them change their minds (or come ourselves to realize that our values and interests were mistaken and that it is us who should be changing).
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Of course those are all valid and important questions. While you are optimisitic about democracy, and I agree that from the simple perspective of satisfying the majority as it is constituted now that would be ideal, I simply have misgivings about democracy in some societies.
To me good values are more fundamental than democracy. Until a society largely adopts my values, I simply don’t care about it not being democratic, and indeed I prefer it not to be so if my values can be imposed by force. In a place that has values I consider bad, such as Afghanistan which I previously brought up, my priority would be the adoption of values that I consider good, and only once that was achieved would I be concerned about the adoption of democracy.
As an example, I would prefer to impose a constitution by force though external forces that share my values and have a democracy under that rather than a full democracy. I imagine this would likely make you bristle since that evokes Western imperialism which you seem to be particularly averse to. Though I would in fact prefer a Western country to do that rather than provide a full democracy, given that Western countries still fail to share my values in various ways I wouldn’t exactly be thrilled with it either. And in practice it probably wouldn’t be feasible anyway since it would probably generate intense backlash by other countries.
My ideal scenario would be that there arise some kind of ideological movement promoting my own values which people adopt, at which point we could then indeed just have a democracy, though in fact I would still want a constitution to ensure that even in case of ideological regression the proper fundamental policies would persist. And so if I had public visibility that’s what I would try to foster. And of course my values include sortition so I would be thereby promoting sortition. But what all this means is that I wouldn’t try to promote sortition on its own so much as an all-or-nothing package which includes sortition and a bunch of other policies and values.
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Also in some societies it seems that a majoritarian value is to be ruled by a dictator, and even if that weren’t the case it still would be logically possible. This would mean that even just to implement sortition in such a society, you would likewise either have to change their ideology in that respect, or impose your own ideology by force.
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> To me good values are more fundamental than democracy. Until a society largely adopts my values, I simply don’t care about it not being democratic, and indeed I prefer it not to be so if my values can be imposed by force.
Democracy itself is part of my values, so having a democratic society is in itself a moral goal. And vice versa: imposing rules by force on an unwilling society is in itself immoral.
But practically it is also not the case that you have a choice between imposing your own rules and accepting those acceptable to society. The choice is between supporting some oligarchy, which has its own rules, and accepting those acceptable to society. If you believe you live in a society which is ruled by an elite that is more benevolent than the demos, then I would understand why you would support the continued oligarchical rule.
> Western imperialism which you seem to be particularly averse to
I am averse to any form of oppression. Western imperialism has been very oppressive on a very, very large scale. Why wouldn’t any decent person be very much averse to it? And, yes, the moralistic rhetoric has always been a prominent part of this oppression.
Let’s just mind our own business and improve our own societies instead of pretending to be a shining example to others.
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While I do consider that Western countries nowadays have better values overall, I fully agree that there is much hypocrisy and that the values have largely been used as an excuse to take advantage of others.
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I greet all the participants, writers and readers, in this discussion of a very old but very important issue, namely democracy. My participation in this discussion has as an objective to raise some different points, which I consider important. I assume that all of us favor the democratic system of government and my points will be relevant to that system. I will try to condense the most important points, which I develop extensively in my book with title: A Therapy for Dying Democracies, in order not to tire you needlessly.
1. Democracy, in my view, is defined by its well-known universal values and not by some tool that is invented to serve those values.
2. The aim then should be to invent tools that will do the jo. In that sense we must make the greatest effort not to be dogmatic but open minded.
Sortition enters into the picture, when we talk about democracy, because it is capable when it is used properly, of removing certain types of collusion, which we want to take out of the democratic system.
In my view, if we, seriously, want to see change we must start with what we have aw a base in politics. This base, in most cases, are the political parties, which, in the condition they are, are the anathema for many. So we have to first upgrade their value in the eyes of the citizens and in this respect sortition can help.
1. In my view, political equality of the members of a group of volunteers can be understood as that which is connected to satisfying certain prerequisites by the members of the group of volunteers, in order for them to be able to be part of the group who endeavor to be selected by lot for a position in a political organ of a political party. Therefore, all the political officers in all party organs, are selected by lot, not through election. In order to have a good representation in the group before the lot is initiated, party members of each region that come from every area of the production are selected also by sortition, if there are more than two from each of those areas, namely a woman and a man.
2. In my system the local party organization, not more than one hundred members, is the kernel and enjoys absolute authority with respect to the local development of the party in that region.
3. The leader of the party is elected by regional assemblies as specialists and have to fulfil certain prerequisites, where the voters in those assemblies are the political officers of all the political organs of the party in the region, which, as said above, result by sortition.
4. A similar approach is used to determine the party slate for parliament, and other regional legislative assemblies. The new part in their case is that the slate is not decided by the leader of the party or any organ thereof. Also which members of the slate will become members of parliament or of the regional legislative assemblies is determined again by sortition that takes place after the election.
This approach finishes the life of the cliques and bosses in the parties. The term for all political officers is one, except the leader’s term which can be renewed once. Thus democratic functioning of the party starts and a new life of it begins. Most important money for election of candidates are no longer needed, nor do the candidates need the services of the known information media, like TV, radios, social media or other. In this way we take money out of politics. The only money the party has is that allotted to it by the budged of each state. In the assemblies all parties have a program to support and parties and not individuals have the responsibility of reaching agreements with other parties during the discussions in the proceedings of the said assembly. In this way the type of representation is automatically solved. In this way accountability is there in the open for the public to judge and decide. The whole system is an appropriate combination of sortitions and elections. This is what at present we need. When the values of the members of the societies will start to change from those that the current political systems produces, where every one acts for himself the new system of governing will invent more or perhaps different tools to serve the people, for democracy’s objective the well being of the people.
Sorry, I cannot fit here all the material of my book.
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Hi Theodore,
I very much agree with your stated approach of starting with a minimal set of assumptions and carefully deriving conclusions from those assumptions, rather than accepting a large set of historically determined conventions as a starting point (which seems like the standard approach).
That said, I must say I do not see how this approach is applied in your proposal, which seems like a complex system which would be hard to derive from first principles.
It is quite possible that this is due to trying to squeeze your thoughts into a single comment. If you would like to expand on your thinking in a blog post or a series of blog posts, please let me know an I will set you up as a contributor to the blog.
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Theodore,
Your proposal to make political parties more responsive to the beliefs and preferences of voters would fit nicely with our hybrid election/sortition model: https://equalitybylot.com/2021/02/26/democracy-should-just-work/
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Dear Yoram Thank you for your response, I will be very glad to expand, so, please go ahead.
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Keith,
I would like to read some document that explains how your hybrid election model works.
My model is based on a plan to
1. transform the political parties to parties whose internal operations will take out collusion, of the type which is produced in the internal fight for the top positions in the different organs of the party. Election is substituted by sortition, the reason being is that election does not achieve political officers of merit and knowledge and most of them are a product of collusion. After all the needs of the politicians to be elected and reelected produce the market in which capital is investing in information companies, like TV and other organizations for the well known purpose, namely to control politics and politicians. If occasional it does happen it happens by chance. The political officers in the party organs have a very important job to perform, that is to to contribute to the fulfilment of the objectives of democracy. So this can come about by an appropriate plan that will ensure that the people that will assume positions in the party organs will be members of merit and knowledge. That is why appropriate prerequisites for every level of a party organ have to be specified. Election might be a tool for these cases if the values in a society were of those democracy produces. The current so called democracies one value they are promoting is everybody for himself and that is why collusion is produced in addition to electing political officers.
The way I propose to perform the activities for selecting political officers satisfies also one very important axiomatic principle of democracy, that of political equality, which makes sense only when it is applied among members-volunteers of equal displacement, concerning knowledge, experience in the field of production and experience working through the party for the good of the community in which they live. That is also good for the interest of people that cannot be selected for some organ if they do not satisfy the appropriate prerequisites. We cannot leave these matters to be done by people that do not have the potential to do a prescribed job. Also the representation aspect is safeguarded because through the process of sortition and prerequisites you will have political officers in every organ from every field of the production process, namely, teachers, businessmen, doctors etc. and also in equal number men and women. This is, anyway, a demand set by the axiomatic principles of democracy. We should not misunderstood the meaning of political equality. The same thing holds for equal chances. If you have to teach a course, say in space mechanics, you won’t put a automobile mechanic in the team from which to lot the professor of the course. Also the local organization of the party, to which absolute authority is vested for the program of local development in some neighborhood, should not be larger than one hundred members. In this way they know each other, and because of this the workings of the local party can be similar to the deliberations of a citizens’ assembly, where now accountability can also effectively be checked. All these improvements need no constitutional changes, just only party by-rules.
In my next comment I will explain how parliamentarians and city consolers will be selected and how the leader of the party and the party candidates for governors, mayors will be selected. For those who cannot wait they can look up many details in my book A Therapy for Dying Democracies, published by Dorrance Publishing Co. USA
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Thanks Theodore, here’s a couple of documents:
https://alexkovner.com/2020/09/07/superminority/
https://alexkovner.com/2021/02/25/voters-just-want-politics-to-work/
These were published some time ago — Alex and myself are currently turning this into a book project.
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Theodore,
Please send me your email address so I can send you an invitation.
My address:
https://equalitybylot.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/yoram-email.jpg.
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YORAM: In order to be able to start applying my system you need to have a political party that agrees to use it. If no political party accepts this system then a new party is formed from scratch. The constitutions of the so called democracies still allow the formation of new political parties. In the initial formation time you operate using a national council or an interim leader that will present the type of the by-laws of the party on the basis which the local organizations to be formed nationwide will operate. Next you form the various regional and national organs using for the selection of their members sortition. The candidates of each voluntary group for the various organs must must satisfy the specific prerequisites, like merit, experience in production and social activities, geographic, gender, age and all fields, if possible, of human endeavor to ensure a good representation that are set for each party organ. At the same time you put to discussion certain fields which will be the chapters of the program of the party. In a year’s time you will be ready to elect a leader of the party. Those who want to become the leader of the party must meat specific prerequisites in order to be eligible to be a candidate. The leader is elected as a specialist by the members of the regional assemblies in which participate all the members of the organs of the party who live in that region. The candidates speak and the voters, who are
all the result of sortition, vote. The same procedure is used to obtain the party candidates for mayors as it is used for the election of the leader of the party
When the elections come for parliament or city hall you form the slates of parliament candidates using exactly the same procedure as for party organs’ members and appropriate prerequisites. The same holds for city counselors and you are set. The term for leader and candidates for mayors may be renew once, for parliamentarians and city counselors one term and you are done.
Once you have the power you change the law regarding elections of parliamentarians etc. using proportional electoral system and make mandatory the new operation, namely democratic, of political parties. Now in these elections people vote for or against the program of each party and not for specific parliamentarians. Who will be the parliamentarians will become known after the elections by using an additional sortition to select the members of parliament the party wins on the basis of its percentage it won. And you are in business!
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[…] application of sortition in various ways for various purposes, along with a stream of condemnations and warnings against the […]
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