Equality by lot

A review of Hélène Landemore’s Politics Without Politicians by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian makes the predictable points. Substance aside, the very fact that an article in a wide circulation newspaper has the subheading

A Yale professor’s radical proposal to replace elected leaders with ordinary people, chosen by lottery

should be seen as a positive development.

The title of the review prefigures the content:

[C]ould we get rid of Farage, Truss and Trump?

Clearly we need to get rid of some politicians, but not all of them.

No Donald Trump, Nigel Farage or Liz Truss; no Zack Polanski, Jacinda Ardern or Volodymyr Zelenskyy either. No political parties and no elections, but instead a random bunch of ordinary people chosen by lottery to run the country for two-year spells, like a sort of turbo-charged jury service except with the jurors holding an entire country’s fate in their hands.

Hinsliff likes the feel good stories about “the human benefits of participation”.

The best bits of the book, worth reading for anyone interested in combating polarisation, are the unexpectedly moving chapters explaining the human benefits of participation for the French citizen jurors in particular. These range from the forging of lasting friendships and deeper civic bonds to the breakthroughs that can happen when strangers meet face to face and genuinely try to understand each other’s points of view, instead of merely yelling at each other on social media.

Giving people actual policy making power in serious matters, is, however, clearly, absurd.

Where I stopped being convinced is when Landemore leaps from demonstrating that citizen juries have been an effective means of considering specific issues to arguing that they’re capable of running countries, and so elected parliaments can just be abolished.

Some of these are people, after all, work in Tesco[!].

What if, having discovered they’re unexpectedly good at running the country, [the allotted] don’t want to go back to working at Tesco?

With sortition we will no way to express our fury if those hoi polloi if (or, really, inevitable, when) they screw up. It is, it seems, the great advantage of elections that we can feel relief by voting out those who screwed us over the last term in favor of those who screwed us over the term that preceded the last one.

What if they screw up so badly that a furious nation wants them out? Democracy’s greatest safeguard is the right to remove rotten rulers at the ballot box, but instead Landemore proposes a constant rolling programme of referendums on major issues to ensure the lottocrats are doing what the people want.

Really, of course, what we need is experts, experts and more experts.

But perhaps the biggest flaw in the thesis is the mismatch between the knotty ethical problems she describes citizens’ assemblies resolving and the threats Britain faces now: autocracy abroad, rising extremism at home, economic stagnation fuelling both. Issues of social change – abortion or same-sex marriage in Ireland, say, or climate action in France – absolutely do lend themselves to the wisdom of crowds given years to properly unpick an issue. Waking up to discover that Donald Trump has annexed Greenland, your budget has caused a run on the pound or that a killer pandemic has broken out do not. In a crisis, this country rarely finds that it has had enough of experts or experience.

Yes, we hate those politicians (well, some of them). But can anyone really expect that some people picked off of the streets or off of their menial jobs at Tesco would do any better?

Landemore is right that politics can be frustrating, disappointing, downright unedifying: that it’s prone to corruption, elite groupthink, privileging what a handful of very rich people want over what the masses want, and attracting overconfident alpha types who talk over more thoughtful people.

But these aren’t things you can abolish just by abolishing professionals and hoping their amateur replacements don’t develop all the same vices under the same pressures and temptations. (Why wouldn’t vested interests lobby a people’s parliament, just as they lobby the professional kind? What stops power going to the heads of citizen MPs plucked from obscurity to run the country, and turning the revolution sour? Did George Orwell write Animal Farm for nothing?)

The biggest flaw in any political system is ultimately people – those in power but also sometimes the ones who voted for them – and unfortunately they’re the one non-negotiable. Of course it’s tempting, given the state of the world today, to think anyone could do better than this lot. But this book doesn’t make me want to risk finding out the hard way.

Filed under: Academia, Books, Elections, Participation, Press, Sortition |