Demiocracy, Chapter 16: Sortition, i.e., a purely lottery-chosen, randomized Proxy electorate, isn’t sufficiently legitimate; Democracy requires mass electoral input, ideally of a “sifting” sort

Posted on March 16, 2024 by Roger Knights

Drawing a statistical microcosm out of the mass population, regardless of its abstract attractiveness, isn’t enough to make a Proxy Electorate seem legitimate in the eyes of the populace. Democracy, the populace generally and strongly believes, allows it to express itself by balloting, the outcome of which will never be a microcosm.

The most severe drawback to government lottery … is that it cuts people off from the opportunity to vote for their congressional representatives.… It is this specific citizen endorsement—and not any abstract idea of democratic representation—that gives the government is legitimacy and insures citizen, acceptance of the government decisions. —Malcolm Margolin, in Ernest Callenbach & Michael Phillips, A Citizen Legislature, 1985, p. 74.

Advocates of sortition should therefore somehow incorporate balloting.

If you want to change someone’s mind about a moral or political issue, talk to the elephant [their intuitional “priors”] first. If you ask people to believe something that violates their intuitions, they will devote their efforts to finding an escape hatch—a reason to doubt your argument or conclusion. They will almost always succeed. —Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind, 2012.

Ordinary people don’t want randomly chosen noxious and/or numbskull neighbors making decisions for them. Instead, they wish to elevate persons whom they respect.

It is at least worth considering whether people in electing the kinds of congressional candidates they do have deliberately chosen not to be governed by their barber, their accountant, the unemployed derelict who hangs aound the neighborhood liquor store, or the nice lady who runs the cosmetic counter at Woolworth’s … but because they want to be ruled by people whom they perceive (however, mistakenly) as successful, powerful and capable … often with a background in law. —Malcolm Margolin, in Ernest Callenbach & Michael Phillips, A Citizen Legislature, 1985, p. 77.

Demiocracy will satisfy this yearning to elect “the best man.”

If balloting were finagled away somehow, sortition might not be robust enough to weather political storms. A non-negligible minority might not accept the new system as legitimate in a crisis, leading to disorder and collapse. Only if there is regular “buy-in” to the system—by balloting—will it have strong enough legitimacy.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Books, Sortition | 27 Comments »