Chris Forman, PhD, an Author, and Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts was interviewed on the Unity Now podcast and discussed his advocacy for Deliberative Democracy and how it relates to his work in physics. Forman discusses how he inadvertently created a deliberation process, how this process can be adopted in the West, and how we can protect it from power-hungry individuals.
Filed under: Deliberation, Elections, Sortition | 2 Comments »
Above is the video of a presentation I made at NESTA in London on 15th November with discussants Claire Mellior and Martin Wolf. I reproduce (AI generated) timestamps in the shownotes of the video below.
00:00 – Introduction and Overview The talk begins with an introduction to the challenges facing contemporary society and the roles of NESTA in addressing them, including applied research, venture building, and policy shaping.
02:09 – The Politics of Policy Solutions The speaker reflects on the difficulties of implementing policy solutions due to the complexities of politics and the need for radical ideas to meet the scale of current challenges.
03:34 – Panel Introduction and Project Background Introduction of the panel members and their contributions to the field, along with a mention of NESTA’s work in collective intelligence design.
05:14 – Democracy and Governance Types The talk shifts to a discussion of different types of governance, with a focus on Aristotle’s typology and the concept of democratic lotteries.
10:43 – Media Influence on Politics Analysis of the impact of media, especially the reduction of presidential soundbites over time, highlighting the influence of media on political discourse.
16:22 – Brexit and Citizen Juries The speaker discusses the impact of citizen juries on public opinion, particularly in the context of Brexit, and how deliberation influenced people’s views.
22:04 – Activism and Nonpartisan Politics The focus shifts to the concept of nonpartisan activism and the importance of citizen juries in representing democratic legitimacy and influencing policy.
28:44 – Embedding a People’s Branch in Government The idea of a ‘people’s branch’ in government is proposed, suggesting a chamber chosen by sampling to represent a check on elected representatives.
37:05 – Panel Responses and Discussion The panel members respond to the talk, discussing their perspectives on deliberative democracy, the role of citizen assemblies, and the complexities of political change.
50:18 – Q&A Session The question and answer session begins, allowing for audience engagement and further exploration of the topics discussed.
You can access the audio here.
I am not sure why YouTube’s transcript creation hasn’t activated and but I’ve posted a rough transcript beneath the fold. Continue reading
Filed under: Sortition | 1 Comment »
ِA proposal by Sam Mace for randomization in university admittance. Conall Boyle’s work on this idea gets a mention.
It’s Time to Sort the University
University is the gateway to a better life. But the gap between elite and non-elite institutions and their admissions contradicts our self-convinced myths about meritocracy that we have developed. The best and the brightest do not necessarily attend our highest caliber and best funded institutions. Instead, all too often, it is the most well connected, the richest, and a lucky few others who are allowed to grace so many hallowed halls.
The reasoning behind the expansion of universities in the 20th century was to dramatically alter people’s economic and social status. But today, what kind of university someone goes to all too often determines their life path. Attending an Oxford or a Harvard may radically change a young person’s life, whereas for someone attending a Bradford or an Alabama State, this is far less likely to happen. Given the increasing pressures on funding for humanities and other scholarly subjects such as ancient history and classics, attending certain universities will soon include an irrevocable decision on what a student can study.
Therefore the question must be not just how many people can go to university but how fair is the admissions process for the very best universities. This question and similar ones about the role of universities has not just been asked by progressives but also by conservatives such as Christopher Lasch and Patrick Deneen. The fear of elite concentrations of economic, social, and cultural capital is keenly felt across the ideological spectrum. It is a problem that plagues the Anglosphere.
The exams to assess who gets a spot at university are more ruthlessly competitive than ever before. We use invigilators to ensure fairness and tie ourselves in knots over the ethics of using tools such ChatGPT, yet few of us are questioning the fairness of the admissions system in the first place. The enormous demand for the most prestigious universities sparks an ugly reality of fraud and inequality.
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Filed under: Academia, Books, Distribution by lot, education, Press, Proposals | Leave a comment »
An op-ed in the Belgian La Libre.
How allotted citizen assemblies could have prevented the failure of the fiscal reform
By Eric Jourdain
Whereas the necessary fiscal reform plan is figured in the government agreement, the seven parties of the Vivaldi government have not reached an agreement. It is time to put the brakes on the particracy, to reanimate democracy and to give an unexpected role to the prime minister.
On July 22nd, our prime minister Alexander De Croo was extremely disappointed. He published an open letter in the written press deploring the fact that “the political class is sometimes so preoccupied by its own matters that it forgets the people and the causes that it must serve”. This was after the failure of the fiscal reform, when the prime minister realized with bitterness that the seven parties which compose the Vivaldi coalition would not reach an agreement on approving yet another version of the fiscal reform presented by the finance minister.
The reform project did figure in the federal government accord presented in September 2020, which explicitly planned for a balanced budget and the reduction in the fiscal pressure on the workers (employees, civil servants and self-employed).
In a country which has the ambition to reach a work participation rate of 80%, one would think that this reform would serve the general interest. In fact, more people at work translates automatically to an increase in contributions to social programs and to fiscal revenue, and a decrease in social expenses by the community.
How to allow a prime minister to resolve this impasse in the future?
By adding a few articles to our constitution specifying the following points:
In case of a positive vote, that would mean that the prime minister and the Citizen Assembly have together prevented an impasse, and possibly a governmental crisis. This would get around the harmful effects of particracy.
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Filed under: Academia, Elections, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 1 Comment »
As I hear about all the news in Israel and Gaza, I can’t help but think how sortition might help. What do people have to lose by trying something different after decades of failed peace talks? I’m just some rando on the internet but here is my modest proposal:
Construct an assembly of about 500 Israeli and Palestinian citizens. This assembly will not be strictly democratic; instead, it will be composed of 50% Israelis and 50% Palestinians. Delegates will be chosen by lottery and with some stratification if desired.
Require that all citizen delegates swear an oath of nonviolence while participating in the assembly. Any delegate that violently attacks another delegate will be thrown out and prosecuted.
Israeli government officials, military officials, Hamas officials, PLO officials, UN officials, etc. would be invited to participate with guarantees they will not be arrested or attacked at the peace talks. These officials will have NO agenda setting power and NO voting power. They will have the power to speak and be heard. They will have the power to submit proposals for consideration and submit amendments for consideration.
To enforce the peace, some international 3rd party will have to broker this participation as well as maintain security. Extreme security measures will need to be made to protect the delegates as they become targets for extremists.
Israeli and Palestinian participants are required to fraternize with one another. The delegates will be split into small group sessions with a random mix of the two sides of various proportions, with around 10 delegates per small group. Group compositions will be changing from time to time to encourage co-mingling with many different people. Multiple translators should be available for each small group to facilitate communication.
Continue readingFiled under: Proposals, Sortition | 2 Comments »
An argument against sortition that is fairly common among academics is that allotted bodies are not representative because the acceptance rates of offered seats are low. It is often claimed that “experience has shown” that “less than 10%” of people are willing to serve on allotted bodies. Such a finding, it is claimed, is grounds for not using sortition at all, for limiting the powers of allotted bodies, or for various forms of meddling in the way allotted bodies are made up.
Despite the fact that it is sometimes admitted that acceptance rates change depending on the circumstances, the “fact” of low acceptance rates is largely treated as being an immutable, if unfortunate, obstacle to the representativity of allotted bodies. In fact, however, it is obvious that acceptance rates can be easily increased, quite possibly reaching fairly close to 100%, if compensation for acceptance is high enough. How many people would refuse to commit a few weekends to participating in an allotted body if they are paid a few months’ worth of the median salary for their efforts? The answer to this question is obviously that (while we can probably make a good guess) we do not know for sure. But equally obviously it would be fairly easy to find out by running a few experiments.
It is a small miracle then that all those who busy themselves with attacking sortition by arguing that low acceptance rates make allotted bodies unrepresenative have not argued strongly for running such experiments. One may suspect that complaints about low acceptance rate is a tool for resisting the democratic power of sortition, rather than a real concern coming from people with a genuine interest in democratizing society.
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Filed under: Academia, Experiments, Opinion polling, Press, Sortition | 5 Comments »
Filed under: Elections, Press, Sortition | 1 Comment »
Joe Mathews writes in The San Francisco Chronicle about an allotted European People’s Assembly.
How government by lottery could save our democracy
Recently, I spent a long afternoon on a dusty and rocky Athens hill called the Pnyx for the first meeting of a novel assembly inspired by the past.
If its members can establish their [new People’s Assembly] in the governance of Europe, it might change everything we think we know about democracy.
“Citizens of Athens, citizens of the world,” declared Kalypso Nicolaidis, a Franco-Greek scholar who helps lead the assembly and is chair in global affairs at the European University’s School of Transnational Governance, “we would like to invite you to change yourselves.”
Around the world, democracy is seen as a system in which the public, through elections, chooses its representatives. But the People’s Assembly wouldn’t consist of elected politicians. Instead, it would be composed of everyday people, chosen by lottery processes that ensure that the body is a demographic mirror of the people it represents.
These wouldn’t be just the people of one city or one province or even one nation. The People’s Assembly would be a transnational body, with members selected by lottery to represent all of Europe. There’s no body like that on Earth.
But what truly sets apart the idea — and what would make it revolutionary — is its permanence.
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Filed under: Academia, Athens, Press, Sortition | 1 Comment »
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Ali
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Common Lot Sortitionist
Conall Boyle
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Equality by lot 