Equality by lot

Sabine Hossenfelder is a physicist and fairly prominent YouTube figure with over 1.5 million followers. Her clips are about the physical sciences, but she occasionally strays outside this area. Her most recent video is titled “Is the USA a Democracy or a Republic?”. The analysis she offers is not too perceptive in my mind, but it does have the advantage of mentioning the idea of selecting political decision making bodies using a lottery. This idea gets a brief teaser in the introduction and a bit more detail toward the end of the video.

Naturally, most of the thousands of comments to the video focus on the democracy vs. republic matter, but at least one comment does pick up on the sortition idea:

Problem with representative democracy is that strangers, who do not know you, cannot represent you. The premise is simply false.

Voting is entering a contract, asking to be ruled by a handful of strangers. Extending them Power Of Attorney, four years into the future … If you sign that, whatever happens, you have no right to complain, because you accepted the deal.

Here is what we should do instead : Government by lottery

1000 citizens randomly selected. 200 replacements selected every year, giving five years in government for each. Then perhaps a quarterly online voting session for the rest of us; Yes/No to the bill with slimmest decisive vote, in the 1000-man parlament during that quarter.

This setup would be next to immune to many of the problems plaguing our system today … For example:

1) Four most controversial bills can only be passed/rejected via popular vote.

2) Candidates won’t need a party-organisation, media-attention or donors to get elected. So, party leadership, media and money become powerless.

3) Predicting who is likely to get into government is impossible, so special interests have no way of preparing candidates, and no incentives to keep them close post term.

4) All 1000 have incentive to make society better, as they soon return to where they came from.

However … the most impactful difference would probably be the fraction of psychopaths in government, automatically going down to population average (~2%).

This comment got some replies including the following:

Why exactly they would have incentive to make society better?

To which the original commenter answered:

Because a political career isn’t possible … everyone will go back to their old life after 5 years, and can never be in government again.

So, while in government, every candidate’s life in society, as an average citizen, will be in the back of their head … “We should make that as good as possible, right?”

Besides, randomly selected candidates have ordinary families and friends … probably not the high-society, private school, gated community and celebrity socializing many current politicians are part of.

Filed under: Elections, Press, Sortition |