A bal-lottery procedure would, by the use of the public’s self-selected Proxy Electors, put the common man (a.k.a. Everyman) in the catbird seat, where he/she belongs, overseeing, critiquing, recalling, and even electing congresscritters.
This arrangement would resemble the previously described IVE-Proxy oversight of student council representatives in Chapter 9. (IVE = Inner Voice Entity.) Such a commanding-heights IVE could also, like its collegiate counterpart (see Chapter 10), elect some portion of the body it oversees (e.g., a city council or legislature)—say a quarter, as a start.
How would it have the legitimacy to do that? Answer: By referendums and (where necessary) constitutional amendments.
And why should it have such power? Because:
1. Its alternative, DeMockery, has lost much of its legitimacy. It is no longer a popular incarnation of democracy. (For example, see the next Chapter 13 [previously posted on Equality-by-Lot as Is Greece ripe for sortition?], on the Greeks’ disaffection with DeMockery, and the growing menace there of authoritarianism and extremism.) As a result, democracy is being supplanted or threatened by authoritarian or totalitarian regimes and forces. It would be, to put it mildly, “A Bad Thing” if democracy were to shrivel and die. This is the main reason for empowering Demiocracy.
2. DeMockery is intolerable. (E.g., see Chapters 14b & 15, to follow. Then see Chapters 19-21 and 25-26, which list the overwhelming advantages of Demiocracy vs. the flaws of DeMockery.) It is the worst form of government, as Churchill said, before excusing it by saying, “except for all the others.” But he added a key qualification about those others that is usually unquoted: “[the others] that have been tried.”
3. Proxy Electorates (PEs) haven’t been tried. They are an attractive alternative that just might work—and DeMockery badly needs a workable alternative or supplement. So we ought to be on the lookout for ways to improve it. We shouldn’t dread change and experimentation, but embrace them. Experimentation and pilot projects should actually be constitutionally encouraged.
Quotations on innovation & experimentation:
The essence of. Democracy is not simply “rule by the people,” but rather hospitality to change and, hopefully, betterment. —Leland Baldwin, Reframing the Constitution,1972, p. 16.
The emphasis upon inventions as an outcome of analysis in terms of political philosophy seems to me a point worth stressing. … unless one self-consciously realizes that one is concerned with the critical clarification and analysis of political values, e.g., political philosophy, one takes for granted whatever the prevailing political orientation of the times is, and conceives “solutions” only within the framework of the fashionable and the conventional. —Lewis Dexter, Representation, 1968, p. 165.
Representative government … has played a bewildering role for more than 500 years. Flexibility has been its prime characteristic…. —Charles Beard, in The Representative: Trustee? Delegate? Partisan? Politico?, 1967.
Only a period of intense experimentation, and observation of the actual way our society is sorting itself out, can give us social tools corresponding to our needs. —Gary Wills, Nixon Agonistes, 1971, 544 V 6.
Here the beaten path is the very reverse of the safe road. —Edmund Burke.
4. A Proxy Electorate would be more statistically representative of the populace than Professional Politicians, who unrepresentatively pander (to Pressure groups, to their Party, and to the Press); and who also Propagandize and Pursue Pelf. (“the Anti-Saloon League was the most powerful political pressure group in US history”—Google AI.) Common sense is a quality, and is just as present in a small group as in a large one. (Indeed, it is more present, because a small group can converse, deliberate more deeply, and reason together.) Thus, the majority is virtually present, just about.
5. Lincoln said that democracy is government BY the people. But if “by the people” he meant by ordinary citizens, as he presumably did, then DeMockery isn’t very democratic, because ordinary citizens are not up in the. bridge of the ship of state, with their hands on or near the wheel.
Contrary to what Abraham Lincoln had hoped, the electoral democracy remained more “government for the people” than “government by the people.” —David van Reybrouck, Against Elections, 2018, p. 104.
Instead the bridge is occupied by what amounts to a gaggle of UNordinary persons: political junkies, lawyers, ex-prosecutors, lobbyists, media people, consultants, bureaucrats, generals, etc. They are insiders with connections and influence, BY whom things are done (or not done).
The empirical evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of the existence of what the Italian sociologist Gaetano Mosca christened “the political class.” … Most British MPs are “professional” politicians in the sense that they have decided to make politics their career (and have to decide this at a fairly early age).
Those for whom party politics is the main hobby, perhaps even a passion, are surely more doctrinaire, more narrow-minded, and more extremist than either casual party members or unattached voters. —Peter Pulzer, Political Representation and Elections, 1967, p. 27 & 75.
[Under DeMockery] While all have the right to become functionaries, few only possess the possibility. —Robert Michels, Political Parties, 1915, p. 167.
But however comfortable they [“liberals, Stalinist bureaucrats, and reformists alike”] may make the treadmill, they are determined never to give the worker control of the wheel. —Cohn-Bendit, a leader of the rebellion in France in 1968.
Ordinary citizens are not insiders—they are outsiders. Ordinary citizens, and their vital common-sense, democratic qualities, are missing.
… in a democracy, leadership … must never lose touch with the source of the people’s strength, the shrewdness and simplicity which comes from a direct unmediated experience of the facts and values of everyday existence. —James Hogan, Election and Representation, 1945, XXIX.
Here’s more:
King of the Mountain presents the startling findings of [psychiatrist] Arnold M. Ludwig’s eighteen-year investigation into why people want to rule. … Ludwig’s results suggest that leaders of nations tend to act remarkably like monkeys and apes in the way they come to power, govern, and rule.
Ludwig’s penetrating observations, though presented in a lighthearted and entertaining way, offer important insight into why humans have engaged in war throughout recorded history ….
These men (very few are women) who love to present themselves as having their people’s interests at heart, are driven by the same desire for power recognized by every primatologist as a universal alpha male characteristic. – Franz de Waal, author of Chimpanzee Politics.
What came out of the book right away was that a certain type of man has the drive to become a leader, the alpha male, and that very few leaders just happen to fall into being the man in charge. —From Amazon reviewer comments and the book’s blurb about King of the Mountain: The nature of political leadership, 2002, by Arnold M. Ludwig.
We need a political system—Demiocracy!—in which leadership is not so up-for-grabs by angry apes, as under DeMockery, because Demiocracy gives electorates more agency, information, and influence. And because “Super-Electors” (described later) with even more agency will select executives.
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Equality by lot 
This post is incomprehensible to anyone who first have the background
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The bal-lottery method is described in Chapter 2 as follows:
“Proxy Electors would be chosen as follows. Each member of the “full” (or “base,” or “mass”) electorate would be given 10 (say) “ballots” with which he/she could nominate similar everyday citizens to be his/her Proxies; no more than three ballots could be cast for any one person, including for him/herself.
“All nominations would go into a virtual “bal-lottery box,” along, optionally, with some percentage of randomly selected names—say from 20% to 50%. From the box the names of pending Proxy Electors would be drawn and put into a reserve pool.
“This technique is a combination, respectively, of selection (by nomination) and sortition (the technical term for random selection in politics).
“There would be four (say) tiers, or levels, of Proxy Electorates: Local, County, State, and National. Bal-lotteries would be used to promote Electors from one tier to the next-higher tier, while remaining as much as possible within a similar issue-specialty (or “topical domain”) —e.g., education, law enforcement, transportation, commerce, etc.”
Chapter 2 is here:
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Roger,
It may be expected that it would be hard to understand a chapter from a book without reading previous chapters. However, it seems that in addition there is a lot of complexity in your proposal. Such complexity is a serious weakness. First, because it makes it difficult for people to understand what you are advocating. But also because in the unlikely case where something like what you are proposing is somehow put into place, complexity runs against transparency and thus creates room for internal machinations (and possibly outright corruption) and undermines trust in the system.
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Greetings, Yoram, Roger here, thanks for giving me additional batting practice 🥎 👍
Is Demiocracy hard to understand because of its complexities? I grant that it takes an effort to wrap one’s head aound something so new and different, but I don’t think that its complexities are the difficulty, because:
The initial implementations of Demiocracy would be in nonpolitical entities like the armed forces, workplaces, labor unions, cooperatives, and student councils. These groups would not employ topical specialization or layering, two of Demiocracy’s complexities. As for the rest:
* Indirect election via Proxies is not really complex, just different.
* And the bal-lottery technique is essentially a lottery, which is already well understood, just with the added wrinkle that some or all of the names in the drum would get there because constituents had nominated them.
* Multiple ballots per person are an easy idea to grasp, too.
So the populace would have years to get used to a basic version of Demiocracy. And a basic version is all that would be needed to elect the lowest—local area—layer of political officeholders. This is where Demiocracy would presumably first be adopted, out of caution. Once adopted locally, this would further acclimate the citizenry to the new system.
* The next step, of adding a county layer atop the local layer, and using a bal-lottery among local layer Electors to choose the higher-level ones, would be easy to comprehend.
* So would the step of adding more than one county-level Electorate, to deal with different topics.
These last two complexities are intended to avoid over-burdening electorates; and to give them sufficient knowledge and experience to be good judges of laws and candidates’ fitness for office. These are necessities if the populace is to govern in any real sense.
Does “complexity run against transparency and thus create room for internal machinations”?
No, because, as I wrote earlier in Chapter 2: “These Proxy Electorates (PEs) would meet for hours every few months, primarily over a private intranet. Each PE would hear a report from its officeholder (who would have a correspondingly limited, issue-specific scope), pose questions, hear criticisms, discuss matters among themselves, and optionally make recommendations, authorize research, and launch investigations. During intervals individual electrons could add comments, do research, chat, message, query the webmaster, etc.”
These features are largely lacking under our present system, “DeMockery.” They are (necessary) “complexities” if officeholders and their measures are to be properly “seen” and scrutinized by Everyman. I.e., the citizenry’s virtual embodiment.
An additional defense against “machinations” is the decentralization that results from topical specialization. It is more dangerous for an all-topic legislature to fall under the sway of some malign group or doctrine or grifter than for a miniature legislature 5% its size
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Roger,
It does not seem to me that you have addressed my points. Asserting that the various arrangements you are proposing are “easy to comprehend” does not address the fact that the they result in a very complex system.
If the details of the proposed system are important so that the proper functioning of the system depends on them, then the system is too brittle and complex to function democratically. It is highly unlikely that they will be put into place “correctly” in the first place and it is even more unlikely that insiders will not find ways to manipulate them over time.
If on the other hand the details are not that important, then they should be greatly de-emphasized.
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Hi Yoram, Roger here again:
Albert Einstein said, in effect,* that everything should be as simple as it can be but not simpler.
*”the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.”
Only a simple, comprehensible version of Demiocracy would be needed to represent persons in nonpolitical entities like the armed forces, prisons, workplaces, labor unions, cooperatives, and student bodies. These groups would not employ Topical Specialization, Layering, or Indirect Election, three of Demiocracy’s complexities.
The only refinements to a simple, pure lottery arrangement would be Balloter Input to the lottery box and Multiple Ballots per person. You can’t say that these tweaks would be too complex, or that the resulting arrangement would be too opaque. Can you?
I’ll assume your answer would be No. So next, suppose we add one of the three missing tweaks: Topical Specialization. It would sometimes be beneficial to assign different Inner Voice Entities to oversee different divisions of large, complex organizations, to parcel out the workload appropriately.
I trust I hear no objection. So next, how about Layering? It would be best if the union members overseeing national-level union officials had first had experience overseeing their Local officials, and had made a good impression on their compatriots on that Local IVE. Right?
I suppose the goings-on inside these IVEs could be less than transparent to outsiders. But opacity doesn’t seem like an unavoidable feature. A neutral Secretariat, perhaps appointed by the National Labor Relations Board, could oversee the overseers and keep things more or less clear.
But I don’t anticipate much mischief from common-man representatives whom the office sought, who will serve only limited terms, and who will be adequately paid for their time. Certainly less than from the currently entrenched bunch of unsupervised officials who electioneered their way into near-perpetual power. Do you?
The one remaining tweak is Indirect Elections. But it would not need a rocket scientist to understand how the IVE overseeing a Local (or a National) could elect its officials, instead of the whole membership doing so. It might actually be simpler. AND more transparent, if the Secretariat posted all the proceedings—which could be required by law.
Now, where would we be if Demiocracy had made such serious inroads in the private sector? On the verge, I hope, of a few governmeental jurisdictions allowing local-level officials to be elected by a local-level Proxy Electorate (PE).
It wouldn’t necessarily include Topical Specialization; and there’d be no Layering at this point. So, no incomprehensible complexity yet.
The common-man Proxy Electors would not be especially prone to corruption, because they would have common decency, would interact only over an intranet overseen by a civil-service Secretariat, and might only know one another by their assumed names.
Are you with me so far? If not, where is the dealbreaker?
To continue and expand this discussion, I request that you next post my Chapter 16, which contrasts Demiocracy favorably with pure sortition, which I assume you prefer. Chapters 14b and 15 can wait.
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So let’s focus on that simplest version of the system you propose. Even this system adds significant complexity to an existing system. Instead of just voting for candidates, the members would now have to vote for candidates and nominate people for the allotment pool. The allotted would have to interact in various ways with the elected. The effects of this new complexity are far from clear. You claim that the allotted supervisors would not have to spend a lot of effort in their supervisory role. But if so, how would they be able to develop an independent understanding of the questions in front of them? If they do develop an independent understanding, why would they need to supervise the elected rather than just do the job themselves?
I don’t doubt that you will have answers to my questions, but I also doubt that I will find these answers more than speculative, at best. You seem to be very confident that you can predict the behavior of complex systems. I think this much more difficult than you think. I think we should stick to basic principles (sortition instead of elections), let the allotted take care of any details and assume that this would be a demanding job that cannot be expected to be done as a low-effort side job.
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Hi Yoram, Roger here. Thanks for your continuing interaction with me, thus giving me an opportunity to respond to objections that others are sure to raise. And to patch holes in my argument. But I haven’t received by email the comment of mine to which you are responding.
Anyway, you wrote, “the members would now have to vote for candidates and nominate people for the allotment pool.” Actually, only the allotted would need to vote for candidates, not all members.
You wrote, “The allotted would have to interact in various ways with the elected. You claim that the allotted supervisors would not have to spend a lot of effort in their supervisory role. But if so, how would they be able to develop an independent understanding of the questions in front of them?”
To recap about the allotted Electors’ interactions with their electee or electees, I wrote this in Chapter 2: “These Proxy Electorates (PEs) would meet for hours every few months, primarily over a private intranet. Each PE would hear a report from its officeholder (who would have a correspondingly limited, issue-specific scope [though not necessarily at the lowest, local level]), pose questions, hear criticisms, discuss matters among themselves, and optionally make recommendations, authorize research, and launch investigations. During intervals individual electors could add comments, do research, chat, message, query the webmaster, etc.”
This level of involvement with their officeholders and with one another would be an order of magnitude greater than that of the current mass electorate, even though only taking 8 hours (say) per interaction + chat-time, so their understanding of the issues should be correspondingly superior. It’s not likely to be perfect, of course, but we don’t want to make that the enemy of the good.
If thought necessary to develop an even greater understanding, interactions could be more frequent, lengthier, and/or topically specialized among multiple Proxy Electorates. These would all be features of Demiocracy at successively higher levels (county, state, and nation).
You wrote, “If they do develop an independent understanding, why would they need to supervise the elected rather than just do the job themselves?”
Well, they wouldn’t be able to do the job of elected executives. As for doing the job of legislators, that would be possible, I imagine, in some situations. In a later chapter, for instance, I’ve written, “In small [indigenous North American] tribes the Proxies needn’t elect council members but could serve in those positions themselves. Or they could do that AND elect some portion of the council.”
It’s also likely that some allotted Electors would decide to become candidates themselves after their term expires—or even before that point. This would infuse a different (and probably better) quality of person into the political class:
For instance, Tom Paine wrote: “There is existing in man a mass of sense lying in a dormant state, and which, unless something excites it to action, will descend with him, in that condition, to the grave. … the construction of Government ought to be such as to bring forward by a quiet and regular operation, all the extent of capacity which never fails to appear in Revolutions.” —The Rights of Man, 239
But in most situations the job of being a city councilman would demand at least twice as much time, and would be excessively tedious to many allottees. This would lead many of them to opt out of participating if selected by the draw—diminishing the representativeness and legitimacy of the Proxy Electorate.
And it would result in the elevation to law-making power of some persons quite undeserving of the role, whose incapacity or worse would be very objectionable to the general public.
You wrote, “I think we should stick to basic principles (sortition instead of elections), let the allotted take care of any details and assume that this would be a demanding job that cannot be expected to be done as a low-effort side job.”
But mostly an unrepresentative and/or incapable few would want that task, as I’ve contended above.
BTW, how many examples are there where lottery-allotted persons are now working as legislators?
You wrote, “You seem to be very confident that you can predict the behavior of complex systems. I think this much more difficult than you think.”
All Demiocracy would do is transfer the power of election from the mass to the mini (“Demi”), a mini that the mass has elevated to that role. Conceptually, it’s just a variety of Indirect election, which is a relatively simple matter. It’s not nearly as complex as, say, proportional representation, which we currently cope with.
I’m not overconfidently proposing that we leap headfirst into Demiocratic government. I’m proposing that we edge into it, learning and adapting as we go, starting in the private sector.
Speaking of which, do you have any objections to the Demiocratic election of union officials and board of director members? Or to the elevation, via the bal-lottery, of Inner Voice Entities by currently voiceless soldiers, prisoners, and employees? Even if Demiocracy achieved nothing more, implementing one or other of the above would be a tremendous social advance.
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Hi Yoram, Roger here again. I’ve thought of something I should have said above (it’s something I do say in a later chapter).
You wrote, “If they [the Electors] do develop an independent understanding, why would they need to supervise the elected rather than just do the job themselves?”
They COULD, in effect, just do the job themselves. The Electors’ supervision could extend (if constitutionally permitted) to DIRECTING (e.g., by a majority or supermajority vote) their elected officeholder which way to vote in his Demi-legislature.
(Or they could merely ADVISE him of their preference, if they felt less strongly about the matter.)
(On a strongly contested issue, a majority vote that failed to achieve a designated supermajority level would have the same advisory effect, warning the officeholder of a possible loss of support in the next election if he didn’t heed it.)
This ability would empower the allotted as much, or nearly as much, as being lawmakers themselves—which is what they would be under most varieties of sortition.
Under sortition, the allotted would be presented with information and arguments by experts and others in regard to various motions. Under Demiocracy the electeds and their opponents—primarily past officeholders and future candidates—would fulfill the same function.
Demiocratic education would be superior, being continuous (e.g., monthly) and topic-focused (in jurisdictions above the local level).
And being delivered by more motivated speakers, who would have an office to win and, usually, a Cause to uphold. They would enlist the aid of their political allies to provide them with the fullest information and the best arguments.
This full-hearted representation of opinions held by political factions among the general public would tend to legitimize the proceedings of Demiocracy to them. The absence of such political opinions, or their mere half-hearted presentation, would alienate those factions.
Of course, not all speakers need be strongly partisan. There would likely be adherents of a purportedly nonpartisan party of sweet reason, who would oppose too-partisan politicians.
The allotted would not on their own be as motivated or as able to gather and lay out facts or develop their interpretations. So either politicians or neutral presenters are needed—the latter perhaps under Demiocracy from members of, or consultants to, the Secretariat.
A word about Demiocratic politicians. Many will be wo/man-of-the-people types, quite unlike today’s “operators.” They will be able to do their work at odd hours in their spare time. On average they won’t be very different from their Electors, at least at the lower layers.
Anyone with a webcam can be a candidate—and a legislator. Legislative sessions will be conducted in forums on an intranet. So legislators needn’t all be present simultaneously. Topical specialization will cut the legislative workload by three-quarters or more.
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