Equality by lot

Edmund Griffiths is a long-time advocate for sortition. Griffiths revisits the topic in the context of the new party that is in the process of formation in the UK.

The most immediate topic is the matter of a founding conference. It seems that the plan is to somehow have a procedure of mass voting: “one member one vote, it looks like having an accessible way of engaging which is both in-person and hybrid [online, presumably -YG]”. But of course the final up-or-down vote is a small part of the decision making process.

Griffiths writes:

As in most plebiscitary systems, nearly everything would come down to how the questions were worded and presented; the faceless masses, atomized and unable to suggest amendments, would vote as they were invited to. This hybrid-OMOV system would thus devolve almost all the real decision-making power on the people who hold it now—the new party’s still-invisible leadership. Naturally we don’t know all their names. But it is hardly a secret that at least some of them are (a) independent bigwigs; I would not be astonished to learn that the others include (b) leading members of left groups who have worked with the bigwigs in front organizations; and there could even be a handful of (c) mouthy individuals among them.

[I]n fairness, you could do worse. I am proud to count (a) bigwigs (well, small-time bigwigs), and (b) left group factional operators, and (c) let’s call them people who don’t hate the sound of their own voices, among my friends. But if we want something more representative, something genuinely democratic, there is only one easy and obvious way to get it: just pick the delegates at random out of the entire membership.

Griffiths then fleshes out his proposal a bit:

[I]t makes most sense to allow the delegates to co-opt anyone they think might be able to assist them, with the right to speak but not to vote. It is hard to imagine the conference not agreeing to hear Cde Sultana, Cde Corbyn, and any other of the leaders who don’t mind stooping to visibility. In fact, the best way would probably be to treat anyone as co-opted who received support from a decent minority (say 10%) of the delegates. Similarly, draft resolutions could need some reasonable number of delegates’ signatures to be put to the conference.

How many delegates should there be? That is a trade-off between deliberativeness and representativeness. Ten would certainly be too few: it would give you really participatory debate, each delegate able to speak multiple times on every question, a conference where people actually conferred; but it might be quite seriously unrepresentative of the membership as a whole. And ten thousand would certainly be too many: it would be superbly representative, it would include every shade of opinion and every sociological cross-tab in due proportion, but the weekend would consist of set-piece platform speeches and plebiscitarian up/down votes. Something in the low three figures might strike the right balance.

Thinking beyond the conference, Griffiths writes:

It would be possible to accept the argument that sortition is the best available way to organize this particular conference under these particular circumstances, while still intending to switch over to election once the party is up and running and a proper branch structure is in place. I think that would be a step backwards[.] [Roles requiring professional competency or a large investment of time and effort] should be filled by election […] or by some combination of election and sortition.

The general organizational principle ought to be: wherever possible, rotation; failing that, sortition; only failing that, election; other systems (appointment, self-selection, ‘what I have I hold’, inheritance, purchase), never.

Full use of sortition and rotation, in a party of hundreds of thousands, would be a school of self-organization and self-government on a scale this country has never seen; its mere existence might prove part of the ‘route to socialism that is neither simply electing a parliamentary majority nor storming the Winter Palace’[.]

Filed under: Deliberation, Elections, Participation, Proposals, Sortition |