Democracy Without Shortcuts, A Critique. #1: A false equivalency is drawn between electoral misanthropy and electoral misogyny 

Posted on June 29, 2024 by Roger Knights

Among the major handicaps a reformer can encounter is the opposition of the indignant virtuous …. —E.S. Turner, Roads to Ruin: The shocking history of social reform, 1960.

Cristina Lafont’s 2020 book, Democracy Without Shortcuts, unfairly attacks lottocracy as invidiously exclusionary. A false equivalence is asserted between lottocrats’ current “existential” criticism of the political capability of mass publics and misogynists’ past “essentialist” criticism of the political capability of women (and sometimes of other marginalized groups). Lafont writes, for instance:

… The empirical evidence provided to supposedly ‘prove’ women’s ignorance, irrationality, apathy, and irresponsibility, and the arguments put forth to perpetuate their subjection to others in the not too distant past, are remarkably similar to the arguments and evidence currently provided by the ‘voter ignorance’ literature.
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Filed under: Academia, Books, Elections, Sortition | Tagged: , , , , , | 11 Comments »

Demiocracy, Chapter 20: True democracy needs Depth more than it needs electoral Width

Posted on June 23, 2024 by Roger Knights

The imbecility of men is always inviting the impudence of power. —Emerson, Representative Men, ch. 1.

The incompetence of the masses … furnishes the leaders with a practical and to some extent a moral justification. —Robert Michels, Political Parties, 1915, 111.

The weaker the interest and knowledge of the electorate, the more decisive become the efforts of organized groups in molding opinion. This situation alone implies a tendency toward oligarchy within democracy …. —Herbert Tingsten, The Problem of Democracy, 1965, p. 102.

Democracy is the most difficult of all forms of government, since it requires the widest spread of intelligence, and we forgot to make ourselves intelligent when we made ourselves sovereign. —Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History, 1968, p. 273.

Proxy Electors will be better informed than effectively “imbecilic” mass-voters, because they will be focused on a single responsibility. They will not have a dozen other political issues competing for their attention. They will instead be exposed to opportunities to delve deeply into their sole topical area, such as online lectures by experts, testimony by insiders and whistleblowers, audiobooks by investigative reporters, etc. Much of it should soak in.

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Upcoming Presentation by Oliver Milne: The Jury Trust Model

Posted on June 21, 2024 by richwbrown

The Jury Trust Model: Nationalised Industries Without the Corruption

Presented by Oliver Milne, PhD. – Independent scholar and game designer based in Galway, Ireland. PhD in Philosophy from the University of Galway in 2024.

The control of capital is among the most potent of powers: the power to make or break people’s livelihoods, landscapes, and governments. There are limitless ways this power can be abused, and vast amounts of it can be amassed by its abuser. In this talk, Oliver will propose a novel model of capital ownership, the jury trust, in which allotted juries are entrusted with the stewardship of large firms, and make the case that this model can address the problems inherent to state and private ownership.

Date: Thursday, 27 June · (Friday, 28 June in Asia & Australia)

Time: 20:00 – 21:00 Time zone: Europe/Copenhagen

Google Meet link: https://meet.google.com/kfs-vatf-jnu

Or dial: ‪(DK) +45 70 71 45 70 PIN: ‪247 732 930# More phone numbers: https://tel.meet/kfs-vatf-jnu?pin=6887037700703

INSA is a volunteer organisation aimed at connecting pro-sortition academics, advocates, and activists around the world, to share resources and tactics and advance the theoretical understanding of sortition. Join the conversation!

Discord invitation https://discord.gg/6sgnrphp6w

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INSA Presents the Online Conference: Sortition and Socialism

Posted on June 21, 2024 by richwbrown

Sortition and Socialism

Saturday, August 31, 2024

– Sunday, September 1st in Asia & Australia – 

15:00 – 19:00 UTC

17:00 CEST • 11AM US Eastern • 12:00 Buenos Aires • 8AM US Pacific

Google Meet joining info Video call link: https://meet.google.com/ntz-xguv-bsb  

Or dial: ‪(DK) +45 70 71 41 10 PIN: ‪115 473 082# More phone numbers: https://tel.meet/ntz-xguv-bsb?pin=5619945386152

Featured Presenter

Dr. Camila Vergara

Dr. Camila Vergara is a critical legal theorist, historian, and journalist from Chile writing on the relation between inequality and the law, and on alternative institutional solutions to systemic corruption. She is Senior Lecturer at University of Essex Business School, Editor of Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory, Associate Editor of Critical Sociology, and author of Systemic Corruption: Constitutional Ideas for an Anti-Oligarchic Republic (Princeton University Press 2020). In her work on constitutional theory, republicanism, and corruption, she advocates for council democracy and sortition-based plebeian institutions as part of a counterpower structure against oligarchy. In addition to her scholarly work, Dr. Vergara is a global public intellectual and an activist advising and collaborating with grassroots organisations on rights, deliberative democracy, and community-based forms of governance.

INSA is a volunteer organisation aimed at connecting pro-sortition academics, advocates, and activists around the world, to share resources and tactics and advance the theoretical understanding of sortition. http://www.INSA.site

You are invited to join our Discord server at https://discord.gg/6sgnrphp6w

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Monbiot has a change of heart on sortition

Posted on June 19, 2024 by Yoram Gat

Back in 2017, after a minor campaign of harassment, Guardian columnist George Monbiot weighed in on sortition. At the time his verdict was that the idea was nothing short of “a formula for disaster” and instead he offered his readers the usual electoral fixes such as campaign finance reforms, voter education and proportional representation. Well, seven years later, Monbiot has had a significant change of heart:

General elections are a travesty of democracy – let’s give the people a real voice

Our system is designed for the powerful to retain control. Participatory democracy and a lottery vote are just two ways to gain real representation

[G]eneral elections such as the one we now face could be seen as the opposite of democracy. But, as with so many aspects of public life, entirely different concepts have been hopelessly confused. Elections are not democracy and democracy is not elections.
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Filed under: Books, Elections, History, House of Lords, Press, Sortition | Tagged: , , , , | 7 Comments »

Harvard produces a pure specimen of the “deliberative democracy” narrative

Posted on June 3, 2024 by Yoram Gat

Gina Goldenberg, writing for the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation in the Harvard Kennedy School, has produced a highly purified specimen of the “deliberative democracy” narrative. The article is a useful condensed aggregation of the clichés of the “deliberative democracy” genre, notable for what it does not say more than for what it does. Other than the canned vocabulary, the tropes and the omissions, another noteworthy point is the intimate/inspirational style which focuses on the personalities of supposedly brilliant elite actors on whose insights and initiative our future depends (including professionally-staged pictures, of course).

In the excerpt below, I underline terms and phrases that are typical to the genre. I find it a useful exercise to consider what those terms and phrases mean and what alternative phrasings they were chosen over. Also, to reduce the mental burden on the readers, I elide some of the intimate/inspirational verbiage.

Could deliberative democracy ameliorate democratic backsliding? Two HKS students believe it might.

As concerns for the health of democracy mount, Medha Uniyal and Kartikeya Bhatotia consider one particular “experimental democratic practice” that could increase connectivity between citizens and decision-making processes.

In their PAE [Policy Analysis Exercise], [Medha Uniyal and Kartikeya Bhatotia, students at Harvard Kennedy School (HKS)] responded to the sentiment of global democratic decline by looking for untraditional and innovative mechanisms to increase civic engagement and collect deeper citizen input through deliberative democracies. By concentrating on the deliberative model, Uniyal and Bhatotia hope to address some of the challenges that aggregate democracies face today, like extreme polarization and decreased connectivity.
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Filed under: Academia, Deliberation, education, Participation, Sortition | 4 Comments »