Demiocracy, Chapter 5b: Three Long-Term Cases of sortition from a nominated sample, Like Demiocracy’s “Ballottery”

Demiocracy, Chapter 5b: Three Long-Term Cases of sortition from a nominated sample, Like Demiocracy’s “Ballottery”

Posted on April 18, 2024 by Roger Knights

Amish Religious Practices

Amish ministers and deacons are selected by lot out of a group of men nominated by the congregation. They serve for life and have no formal training. Amish bishops are similarly chosen by lot from those selected as preachers. — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish_religious_practices.

The Amish employ something akin to what I call a ballottery to select ministers. The congregation (= the general public) nominates (= ballots for) those it considers worthy, and a lottery selects a minister from among those worthies. A second lottery (structurally similar to what I call a “stacked” ballottery) selects a bishop from those selected ministers.

It should be obvious that if those clerics were selected at random from the congregation, they would not perform as well as those drawn from a democratically pre-approved group, and that they would have less legitimacy because of that poorer performance, and of the mechanical way they had been chosen. These considerations of competence and legitimacy apply equally to the next two cases below.

It will be objected that these cases all have to do with the the choice of executive officeholders. But the importance of elevating competence and credibility still applies to deciding on the method of choosing legislators and electors, although incapacity among them would not be as blindingly obvious. Nevertheless, that is hardly a reason to prefer mediocrity, or accept it. Indeed, its subtler manifestation is an even stronger reason to guard against it.

PS, from Wikipedia:

(Note that the Greek word for “lot” (kleros) serves as the etymological root for English words like “cleric” and “clergy” as well as for “cleromancy”.)

Selection of the Venetian Doge

Thirty members of the Great Council, chosen by lot, were reduced by lot to nine; the nine chose forty and the forty were reduced by lot to twelve, who chose twenty-five. The twenty-five were reduced by lot to nine, and the nine elected forty-five. These forty-five were once more reduced by lot to eleven, and the eleven finally chose the forty-one who elected the doge. — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doge_of_Venice.

In other words, over the course of five days the Venetians repeatedly employed a lottery to select several persons from a group that was selected by an election using “approval voting,” a high-agency technique similar to the unconstrained nominations used by Demiocracy’s ballottery. The only difference is that the ballottery limits the number of a person’s nominations. (But that number can be set so large as to be effectively the same.)

The pope of the Coptic Orthodox Church is elected with the following procedure since 1957:

… a committee consisting of fourteen members of the Synod, has the task of preparing, based on reports received, an initial list of five or six candidates for the election….

… this list is then published … a grand assembly is called, including the 74 bishops of the Coptic Church and twelve representatives from each diocese chosen from elders and leaders of associations. This is a large body, consisting of one thousand people who will be voting for the candidates. The three that receive the most support will have their names on the ballot during the ceremony of the ‘sacred election by lot.’ — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_of_the_Coptic_Orthodox_Church.

In other words, the Copts employ a lottery only after half the candidates have been eliminated due to not receiving enough ballots.

I’m unaware of similar institutionally important examples since ancient Greece where a lottery drew its officeholders directly from its entire membership. The advocates of that procedure would be more persuasive if they could cite some more recent cases—ANY more recent cases. “Experience is,” after all, “the best oracle of wisdom,” per The Federalist #15.

Athens-style sortition would not have worked in ancient Rome, and the Romans knew it—or anyway apparently believed it, or at least weren’t attracted to it. What they liked was their mostly useless elections.

That last obstacle—a lack of sales appeal—seems unchanged since then. It has only niche appeal as a form of government.

On top of that, Athens did not produce good outcomes in the long run: the Delian League, the Peloponnesian war, the expedition to Syracuse, the execution of Socrates, a civil war. Venice did better. So might Athens have done, with approval-weighted sortition.

Filed under: Athens, Elections, History, Religion, Sortition |

4 Responses

Roger Knights, on April 24, 2024 at 2:31 pm said:

I should have pointed out that sortition in Venice, like demiocracy’s ballottery, drew out only electors, not officeholders.

Here are a couple of supportive quotations I discovered after the post above.

“… the Athenians … distributed positions only among men who had volunteered for them.”

So the allotted were far from a representative sample. Thus the precedent of Athenian sortition shouldn’t be used as an argument for empowering a representative sample.

https://jamesk508.medium.com/is-democracy-western-the-case-of-sortition-1f0bbfaa78e8

“Chapter Two [Summary from the book Sortition and Democracy] analyzes the rebirth of sortition in the West during the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. It explores the mutations of the medieval and Renaissance Italian republics, as well as the practices of sortition in Early Modern Spain, Switzerland, and other European countries. During these periods, sortition was widespread and took many different guises, though it was always combined with elections and cooption.”

So, again, the allotted were far from a representative sample. Their unrepresentativeness—their human Input—was likely a reason for their acceptability and legitimacy. The ballottery’s human input acts similarly.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/government-of-chance/sortitions-second-birth-in-the-middle-ages-and-the-early-modern-period/1D90AD9754B201EC326739D0651F1D06#

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Roger Knights, on April 24, 2024 at 2:42 pm said:

PS: I’ve read that the Boule met every day. Thus, only citizens with leisure, i.e., not laborers, could afford to serve; so these wealthier men would the ones to volunteer.

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Yoram Gat, on April 24, 2024 at 4:57 pm said:

Roger,

Not that it matters much, because Athens should serve as inspiration and not as a prototype, but the question of the makeup of appointees to allotted positions in Athens has been studied and one researcher concluded that “the lot was a relatively democratic device that distributed offices widely throughout Attica”.

Regarding exclusion of laborers from the council, the evidence seems to be against it – there were not enough “wealthy” Athenians to fill the ranks of the council, considering that service was limited to two years per person. Also, like other allotted positions, service in the council was paid, so it was affordable for anyone. (In fact, if you read Aristophanes you will find that the elite complained that the allotted positions of judges were filled by poor people who were attracted to the pay they got for service.)

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Roger Knights, on April 27, 2024 at 2:14 am said:

Yoram: First, I’m confused about something. You say the Council had 500 members. Where does the Boule fit in?

Also, I’ve read in one place that the Boule had 50 members, in another that it had 150.

BTW, IIRC it was in The Trouble with Elections that I read the it met daily.

You wrote, “the lot was a relatively democratic device that distributed offices widely throughout Attica”. Agreed.

You wrote, “there were not enough “wealthy” Athenians to fill the ranks of the council.” Agreed; but what I wrote was a bit different: “wealthier men would [be] the ones to volunteer.” The wealthier would be persons below the wealthy and above the laborers. (I’m assuming that wealth ran on a continuum, which seems reasonable.) And what I meant, and should have said was, “wealthier men would more often [be] the ones to volunteer.” Don’t you think this would have been true, at least to some extent? (Today, FWIW, political participation and interest is higher among the wealthier than the poor.)

The point I was angling to make was that, as I had said, “the precedent of Athenian sortition shouldn’t be used as an argument for empowering a [perfectly] representative sample.” IIRC, this sort of representation was advocated by TooTheHilt in comments to me—or, if not by him, by other sortitionists elsewhere. My counter-argument is that, if a somewhat unrepresentative extract was good enough for Athens, the somewhat unrepresentative extract elevated by Demiocracy’s ballottery can’t be condemned out of hand.

You wrote, “(In fact, if you read Aristophanes you will find that the elite complained that the allotted positions of judges were filled by poor people who were attracted to the pay they got for service.)” I strongly suspect that the pay for a judge was higher, maybe a lot higher, than for a Council member—meaning that Council membership was likely not as avidly sought by the poor, and thus that it was somewhat unrepresentative.

You wrote, in the 2017 post you linked to, “The council oversaw a large number of magistrate boards, each made of ten 10 citizens allotted yearly.” This sounds like a large, omni-topic citizen body is set over a collection of small citizen bodies. 1) Were those small bodies topically specialized? If so, their arrangement resembled Demiocracy’s. 2) Were the members of both types of bodies drawn from the general citizenry, or were they drawn from each other? If the latter, their arrangement resembled Demiocracy’s.

You wrote there, “Of a population of about 300,000 people, only 30,000 were fully enfranchised citizens (adult males of Athenian ancestry).” This gives me the idea that such elite-type citizens would have been imbued with a greater sense of responsibility and civic-mindedness (or even noblesse oblige) than would have been the case if citizenship had been nonrestrictive, as it would be in a modern incarnation of sortition. Therefore, we should not assume that modern pure-sortition allotteds would perform as well as those then.

You wrote, “The requirements for rotation (one could not serve in the same office more than twice) and the historical evidence regarding the vetting process indicate that neither the requirement for volunteering nor the vetting significantly narrowed the number of citizens who took office.”

1) Non sequitur. Rotation and vetting requirements would not necessarily have much affected rates of volunteering in comparison to other factors. 2) I strongly suspect that at least a quarter, and maybe a half or more, of those eligible in any year failed to volunteer. The persons who did volunteer would have been, one reasonably assumes, psychologically different from the rest: most being better (more energetic and public-spirited) but some being worse (e.g., control freaks, crackpot enthusiasts). This is the same spread that Demiocracy’s ballottery of the approval-nominated would elevate, whom I contend would thus do no worse than the Athenians did—and therefore the ballottery is not very objectionable on this ground.

You wrote, “an implication that detailed institutional arrangements can be validated as democratic because they resemble the Athenian institutional arrangements in one way or another is of course false.”

My (explicit) claims are more modest: that certain features of Demiocracy can’t be dismissed out of hand if Athens was similarly guilty of them. E.g., 1) Complexity—Athenian arrangements were not much simpler, and have certain similarities (e.g., a large omni body overseeing smaller (specialized?) bodies). 2) Susceptibility to over-representation of the ambitious—Athens’ selection from volunteers was somewhat similar to the ballottery’s selection from persons who voluntarily let their acquaintances know that they’d be willing to serve—and whose willingness those acquaintances significantly endorsed. 3) Topical specialization—Athens may have made use of this; it’s unclear. It would make sense if it had done

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