Equality by lot

Edmund Griffiths, a long-time sortition advocate, has been pushing for sortition in the infighting-torn YourParty. It turns out he’s been writing a book called Sortition and Socialist Democracy to be published by Palgrave Macmillan. Griffiths also has a new article in the Morning Star discussing the sortition-related ongoings at YourParty, and in particular the fact that it turns out that the number of allotted delegates in the YourParty conference is going to be 13,000.

Your Party launch conference: the sortition of the 13,000

EDMUND GRIFFITHS makes a robust defence of sortition, the chosen method of picking attendees for the new left party’s inaugural conference from the membership at random, but sounds the alarm on the eye-watering number of suggested delegates

[A]n especially exciting plot twist [in the YourParty thriller] came in mid-September, with the announcement that delegates to the inaugural Your Party conference will be chosen by sortition.

This system — where members of decision-making bodies are picked at random — is most familiar from its use in ancient Athens and in a modern jury. The Athenians, indeed, seem to have regarded it as simple common sense that democracies choose their ruling bodies using a lottery: only oligarchies prefer to elect them.

Of course, some people in Athens did oppose sortition. Plato, a dissident intellectual with oligarchic sympathies, was more than sceptical about it. And Platonist opinions — sometimes even backed up by purely Platonist arguments — have been voiced among supporters of Your Party too.

Plato himself wanted society to be run by an enlightened “philosopher king” or by a team of carefully trained “guardians.” Anti-sortitionists in Your Party tend to want elected delegates, on the basis that the conference will then be made up of “our best fighters” or the “leading activists of the left.”

Only two actually viable ideas have been put forward for how to run this conference. One is sortition. The other is “one member, one vote” (OMOV), in the form of a livestreamed debate followed by a series of online polls.

It is helpful to compare both proposals to the ideal democratic gathering: all the members getting together over a long weekend, discussing the issues in full, and then voting on them.

An organisation with tens of thousands of members obviously cannot do that. OMOV and sortition both keep parts of the ideal, and both lose parts.

OMOV keeps the idea that everyone gets a vote — but instead of allowing people to debate and discuss together, it limits their participation to a few yes/no votes.

Sortition keeps the genuine debate; but instead of inviting everybody, it invites a statistically representative sample.

If one Your Party member in five lives in London, then about a fifth of the randomly selected conference delegates will turn out to be Londoners.

Similarly, if half the membership are trade unionists, then trade unionists will make up roughly half of the conference. If 1 per cent have a pet budgie, you will get something like one budgie owner for every hundred delegates.

And a sample that looks like the membership can be expected to behave like the membership. Unlike OMOV, where the real power is in the hands of whoever sets the questions, sortition is a close approximation to what you would get if the whole membership could reason together and then decide.It is even too many to be a properly representative sample.

Attending a conference in another part of the country costs money. Everyone from outside Liverpool will incur travel costs, often substantial. People coming from further afield may need overnight accommodation, even if they are only being asked to attend for one day. Many will need childcare.

Your Party’s total assets, as declared to the Electoral Commission, come to £855,000 in cash. It could easily cover the expenses for a few hundred delegates (which is the sort of number that could participate meaningfully); it would struggle to do it for 13,000.

So the attendance will be heavily slanted in favour of people who can pay for train tickets and a night in a hotel out of their own pockets.

As a matter of urgency, democrats (and sortitionists in particular) should urge the leadership of Your Party to reconsider.

They should also resist the semi-Platonist fallback position: sortition is OK for now, but we should switch back to elections as soon as possible. No system of election can give you decision-making bodies as representative as the ones produced by sortition.

Writing in 1956, the Trinidadian Marxist thinker CLR James connected Athenian sortition to Lenin’s vision of a society in which “every cook can govern.”

Your Party has the opportunity to start making that vision a reality, by incorporating sortition (and plain rotation) at every level of its organisational life. But 13,000 cooks in one cookshop would almost certainly spoil the broth.

So the sortition-based launch conference is an inspiring initiative. It holds out the promise of something new and radically better in British politics. But the half-botched way it is being done risks squandering that potential entirely, if not discrediting the whole idea.

Why should it be unlike anything else about Your Party?

Filed under: Applications, Books, Sortition |