Equality by lot

Maurice Pope’s book The Keys to Democracy is the third book ever written advocating the use of sortition as a major component of a modern government. (The two earlier ones being Ernest Callenbach and Michael Phillips’s A Citizen Legislature and John Burnheim’s Is Democracy Possible?, both first published in 1985. Pope, who seems to have started writing at about the same time, was apparently unaware of either.) The great strengths of Pope’s writing are his independence of thought and his evident sincerity. Coming early into the field, and being a classicist rather than a political scientist, Pope was clearly breaking new ground, following his own logical train of thought. He was thus free from the burden of formulaically making connections to prior writings and from the petty-political considerations of self-promotion. This unique situation made a thoroughgoing impact on the book as a whole.

Authors of works about sortition (including Pope) generally share the ostensible aim of achieving some measure of democratization of society. But while this general aim is broadly shared, the consensus ends there because the detailed aims and the proposed mechanisms for achieving them vary widely. At the conservative end, the problem with the existing system is conceived as some sort of sclerosis. The main symptom of the problem is fatigue, or a lack of confidence. Sortition-based institutions are then seen as a way to infuse the system with new blood or new vigor, rejuvenating a system that is essentially sound but has for various reasons, that generally remain vague, fallen into a bad state. Associated with this view of things are generally quite modest proposals – advisory bodies that “help” current decision makers make more informed decisions. Even those more informed decisions are perhaps less important than the mere fact that allotted citizens are widely recognized as having had a part in the process. Indeed, what exactly the problems are with the current outcomes of the process and what are the expected improvements in terms of policy is usually not specified. In fact, sometimes the entire point is to have the allotted citizens themselves become more informed rather than making any changes in decision making. Writings in this vein tend to be heavy with references to the canon of “deliberative democracy” and light on the idea that democracy is a regime of political equality.

At the other end, the problem with the current system is seen as radical. The current, elections-based system is inherently (and by design) anti-democratic. Such an understanding of the situation is informed by the classical view of elections as part and parcel of an aristocratic (or oligarchical) system. The proponents of this view do not see the current decision makers as uninformed but as effective promoters of their own interests, and advocate far-reaching changes in decision making. Elected positions should be eliminated altogether, or at least stripped of much of their decision making power, with this power being transferred to allotted bodies. This far-reaching institutional change would result in far-reaching policy outcomes, addressing the justified grievances of the population. In particular, this would likely include a dramatic decrease in economic inequality, reverting the level of inequality to its minimum point of the early 1970’s (and possibly going farther in this direction). At this side of the spectrum, sortition is also often tied with participatory ideas, and in particular referenda.

When advocating sortition, the two positions are associated with two different modes of advocacy. The conservative position would naturally lead the advocate to address the current decision makers. The argument would be that introducing sortition into the system would alleviate the troubles they are having with declining trust and a disgruntled public. The radical advocate would address the public and argue that the a sortition-based system would fix the outrages they suffer under the current regime.

The Keys to Democracy does not fit comfortably into either of those positions or in any one position on the spectrum between them. Befitting his background as a classicist, Pope’s attitude toward the elections-based system is radical. Like the ancients, he recognizes the obvious fact that elections result in elite rule, and like them he draws the obvious conclusion – a conclusion that we have been trained very hard not to draw – that an elections based system is anti-democratic. His proposal – a complete replacement of the electoralist system by one based on sortition – is accordingly radical. However, other aspects of Pope’s narrative are less trenchant. In terms of policy outcomes of oligarchical rule, Pope is rather vague. It is only by implication, when in his sketch of utopia he discusses decreased economic inequality, that it turns out that this is a problem that he is hoping sortition will address. Other than that Pope asserts that elites tend to hinder progress being too committed to the status quo, but it is not made clear what progress is to be expected by democratization. Democracy is desirable as an ultimate goal, an inherently liberating power, rather than as a tool for certain public policy objectives.

The book is also atypical by avoiding the Scylla and Charybdis of “deliberative democracy” and “participatory democracy”. It contains no mention of the standard deliberative democracy references – these have risen to prominence after the book was written. We are thus spared much of hackneyed formulas about the wonders of deliberation which are so often used to obfuscate matters and avoid reference to such unpleasant terms as “oligarchy”. On the other hand Pope explicitly rejects mass participation devices such as assemblies and referenda. Pope states that participation is “as natural as talking” and that it expresses “the democratic attitude to life”. He rejects the elitarian view that people are not interested in politics. At the same time he argues that mass participation, in the direct sense of everybody being meaningfully directly involved in decision making, does not work in a large group and becomes in such a setting no more than a facade for unequal political power.

Pope’s audience, as well, seems to be neither the troubled powerful nor the oppressed public. The indications are that instead Pope has in mind his fellow members of the academic elite. His arguments are analytical and make little explicit appeal to interests of sectors of the population or of society as a whole. He spends much of his efforts arguing against rule by experts, which is not a viable political option but does seem like the natural notion of ideal government for academics. Finally, Pope uses a scientific expedition as a model of a rational society and his utopian society enacts highly progressive taxation, but only starting at 4 times the median income which would presumably put the incomes of the academic elite out of danger of a steep increase in taxes.

Putting aside the mismatch between Pope’s academic style and his radical proposals, substantively his arguments are by now mostly familiar. He discusses the Athenian system and notes that Athenians would see modern government as clearly anti-democratic, he argues against the notion of expert rule producing “correct” policies and in favor of the ability of laypeople to arrive at good political decisions as well as in favor of bringing a diversity of viewpoints into the decision making process. Pope’s answer to the question of why sortition was not made a part of the Western system is also rather similar in attitude to the answer later given by Manin (and which seems to have become standard). Both Pope and Manin present the reliance of elections rather than sortition in the Western system as a choice made by the founders between two mechanisms that were both perceived as democratic, or “democratic enough”. The fact that neither Pope nor Manin entertain the notion that elections were adopted and sortition was suppressed (without so much as an explicit discussion of this mechanism as an alternative) specifically because the former was oligarchical and sortition is democratic (a notion that is all but explicit in the writings of the 18th century revolutionaries) is a remarkable convergence.

Despite the familiarity of much of the argumentation, and beyond the unorthodox explicit rejection of participatory ideas on the grounds that they are not democratic, I think the book makes contributions on a matter that is under-discussed and under-appreciated and that merits further consideration in the context of sortition. Namely, Pope is offering an epistemological theory of sorts making a connection between truth and form of government.

It is traditional to contrast opinion with knowledge, with the latter being the better approximation to truth. Plato and Madison contrast the whims of the public with the enlightened view of the natural aristocracy. Pope argues that different forms of government are associated with different epistemic regimes. In a democracy opinion plays the role that knowledge plays in an autocracy. This idea is similar to the one developed more extensively in the context of juries by Thomas and Pollack (1992). Indeed, Pope goes in this direction as well when he discusses how the justice system should function in a democratic society. In a democratic society, the law should be intelligible to the layperson, and public opinion, or public mores, should serve, he proposes, as the basis of judicial normative standards. Also in this direction, Pope considers the function mass media in present societies and in a democratic society. The media, Pope points out, is necessarily controlled by a tiny group of people. In an oligarchy, the function of the media is to disseminate the ideas of the elite. In a democracy, Pope proposes to have allotted bodies with oversight powers over the media making sure that matters are not systematically misrepresented.

In conclusion, Pope’s book is certainly an important document. It presents an independent assessment of the politics of our society and the role that sortition could play in its democratization. It could be thought of as an alternative intellectual history of sortition, challenging the conventional thinking on this topic. It is neither a “rabble-rousing” manifesto nor a systematic cohesive analysis but a loosely-knit collection of ideas. Many of those ideas are not new to the field but others are novel and provocative even today, almost 40 years after the book was originally written.

Filed under: Academia, Athens, Books, Elections, Fiction, History, Juries, Participation, Press, Sortition |