Equality by lot

The UK institute Demos describes itself as follows:

Founded in 1993 in response to a shortage of new ideas in British politics, we’ve spent three decades cementing our place as a trusted expert on democratic renewal, public service reform and digital rights. As movements, ideologies and governments have come and gone, our commitment to collaborative politics has remained a constant at the heart of the British political landscape.

The institute has a recently published a report titled a “Citizens’ white paper”, written by four authors: Miriam Levin, Polly Curtis, Sarah Castell, and Hana Kapetanovic. The policy proposals revolve around introducing randomly selected citizen bodies of various flavors into the UK political system. For example:

RECOMMENDATION 1: Announcement of five flagship Citizens’ Panels to feed into new Mission Boards

Showcase a new partnership between government and the public by announcing a role for citizens in the Mission Boards: a Citizens’ Panel of 100 randomly selected and demographically representative people for each Mission Board. These Citizens’ Panels will help to refine the priorities within each mission, work through trade-offs and choices inherent in actions considered by Mission Boards, and inform the Missions’ policies to give people a stake in meeting the challenges ahead.

The report suffers from much the same weakness as most of the sortition-related work of academics and institution-related experts. The authors address themselves to established powers in the UK – elected politicians and the civil service. The report is aimed to convince this audience that setting up allotted bodies would be useful them – increasing legitimacy for their decisions, reducing public resistance and distrust.

In particular this is expressed in the motivation the report offers for the proposals being made. The standard rhetoric about public apathy and disenchantment, short-term thinking, a disconnect between decision makers and the public, and the specter of populism is employed. Supposedly, changes are needed in order to face “policy challenges [which] will require personal sacrifice”. So the issue that so far the politicians have been pandering to the people and due to electoral concerns have not inflicted enough pain on the public?

In this context, a government taking a traditional approach to policy making risks losing public support and the political capital gained in an election, as it is forced to make the tough decisions and compromises that will be needed to build a secure future for the country. And it is doing this against a backdrop of rising populism, which promises shallow and disingenuous solutions that won’t address the scale of the challenges before us.

To invest in public services, grow the economy or transition away from fossil fuels, we need to find new ways to reach compromise, we need to create partnerships between politicians and the public to navigate this difficult terrain.

Contrary to received wisdom in Westminster, people aren’t apathetic: they do care.

The implication is that the public can expect its quality of life to further deteriorate, and needs to be involved because the politicians would be too timid to break the bad news to the voters. The bit about “partnership between politicians and the public” is another absurd rhetorical contortion. In a democracy the politicians are supposed to serve the public, not to function as an independent party that promotes its own agenda. The relationship between the politicians and the public is that of an agent to a principal, not of a partner.

In addition to the formulaic and contorted introduction, much of the report (parts 2 and 3) is devoted to long tables and lists discussing various aspects of the proposed process. Lacking a coherent theoretical organizing framework, these discussions are arbitrary and tedious. Details about the how allotted bodies should be constituted and how they should function must be determined on an ongoing basis by the allotted bodies themselves rather than be laid out in advance by self-appointed experts with unsubstantiated claims to authoritative knowledge. It is only the broad principles that must be established ahead of time in order to get the process of self-design and self-redesign going.

The most interesting sections of the report are the sections in its first part which are based on interviews with members of the political elite and on interviews and surveys of members of the public at large. In those sections those interviewed express their opinions on the current system and on proposed changes. I’ll present some of those opinions in the second part of this post.

Filed under: House of Lords, Proposals, Sortition |