Equality by lot

Dimitri Courant writes in The Conversation about French opinions regarding allotted decision-making bodies. The original is in French, some translated excerpts are below.

A desire for democracy, not an “electocracy”

The findings are stark from the outset: Only 13% of the respondents trust politics, 17% trust the government and 21% trust the National Assembly. But 80% support a democratic political system.

The French do not reject democracy, they reject electocracy – a form of government which is based on the election of elites with a binding mandate, where the representatives are not held to the preferences of those who elected them.

This rejection does not translate into naive support for citizen assemblies, also called citizen conventions in France. Thus, 67% of those surveyed think that it is good for citizens to participate in those conventions, and 50% trust those assemblies. But among the 35% who do not trust them, 56% percent justify their skepticism with a revealing phrase: citizen assemblies are “a scam which allows politicians to buy time and engage in public relations”.

Therefore, it is not a rejection of deliberative sortition. It is a criticism of “managed consultation” – a model in which the elected choose the topic of the assembly, then pick and choose among its recommendations, or ignore them altogether.

About 53% support replacing the Senate by an allotted assembly

An absolute majority of the French (53%) say they support replacing the Senate with an allotted chamber, with 17% strongly in favor and 36% somewhat in favor. Only 11% are strongly against.

When asked whether citizen assemblies should “write the laws”, 35% answer positively – a non-negligible number. It is worth noting that “writing the laws” does not necessarily imply a transfer of sovereignty – the assembly may very well write a text to be submitted to the approval in a referendum (or by parliament).

Be that as it may, 44% explicitly oppose citizen assemblies writing the laws. The real dispute is therefore not between those who support and those who oppose sortition but between those who want to vest more power in the people and those who want to limit citizen assemblies to a consultative role and have them controlled by the elected.

When the data refutes the theorists

Among the reasons invoked by the French when supporting a legislative role for citizen assemblies, “epistemic” justifications (quality of deliberation, interviewing experts) arrive last. The prominent justifications are “ordinariness”, i.e., the fact that “these are people like me” (43%), the impartiality of the allotted that “do not seek to be re-elected” (44%) and distrust toward the elected (41%).

In other words, the ideas that preoccupy political theorists are different from those that preoccupy ordinary citizens. The debate between lottocrats and consultative sortitionists, which structures a good part of the academic literature, does not correspond to the expectations of the public opinion which tends toward radical democracy [assemblies controlled by the referenda] and hybrid models.

Filed under: Academia, Deliberation, Elections, Opinion polling, Press, Sortition |