The left-leaning Jacobin magazine has offered its readers the idea of sortition back in 2018 and then last December had a couple of pieces advocating for sortition – one being an interview with Alexander Guerrero and one being an article by Terry Bouricius. Jacobin now has a debate of sorts [paywalled, but full text here] in which Anand Gopal takes the ostensibly pro-sortition position and Ben Burgis plays the skeptic.
The text methodically checks off the squares on the sortition debate bingo card: “democracy is in retreat”, “big money”, “popular sovereignty”, “democracy is not just [a system that] happens to work out best but [where] the public actually has a right to manage its own affairs”, not wanting to pick your lawyer or book agent[!] at random, “technocratic objections to democracy”, “a multicameral approach, with both lotteries and elections”, “demographic similarities”, “atomized individuals”, “we want a chamber that has a place for parties”, “accountability”, “for a country of 350 million, it doesn’t really make sense to have 350 people sitting in council”, “smaller scales”, “people systematically shirk jury duty”, “[w]ith the Zohran election, there was a tremendous sense that “we did this””, “instant recall”, etc., etc.
As usual, this format of discussion provides no rational way out of the on-the-one-hand-but-on-the-other-hand conundrum. Jacobin‘s readers are left to their own prejudices to decide which hand they prefer – the one with some sortition (but not without elected officials to balance things out), or the one where sortition is deemed altogether undesirable due to this or that principle (even if it may result in better outcomes).
Adam Cronkright
Ali
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Common Lot Sortitionist
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Wayne Liebman
Yoram Gat
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Equality by lot 
I guess one man’s “tired old cliches” is another man’s reasoned debate.
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It’s a shame such “reasoned debate” is not used to settle questions of arithmetic, engineering and other sciences. Imagine how wonderfully those sciences would have developed if we applied such effective methods to them.
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Reasoned debate is actually used significantly in all of those fields. Having come from a physics background, for which I used to frequently attend group discussions in the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, a hub of various experts, reasoned debate represents a significant aspect for how sciences progresses. In The Structure of a Scientific Revolution, by Kuhn, he describes the process in which a scientific community moves from one paradigm to another is based largely on reasons given, rather than direct empirical evidence. In fact, empirical evidence frequently favours the previous paradigm, as more work was put into justifying that previous model.
When Copernicus first presented the heliocentric model, he had very little in the way of empirical evidence to back this up. Predictive power rested, overwhelmingly, in favour of the geocentric model. What Copernicus had to offer was not empirical evidence, but a good reason to question the empirical evidence. The lack of a free and fair public debate at the time (before the days of peer-review), resulted in a unfortunate lack of deliberation, in which the geocentric model would need to justify complexity of their model, despite the powerful predictive power it provides.
Today, many questions in physics lack a definitive answer, as the question on how to unify gravity with quantum mechanics remains open. Deliberation in the scientific community is how scientists decide which paradigms are more likely and worthy to pursue.
It’s also well known that our current paradigm is *wrong*, though useful. Emprical evidence is frequently a strong reason to support a pradigm, but not the only one, and the balancing of reasons is done deliberatively.
While I can speak most directly about physics, I can speak confidently, those less directly, about the importance of deliberation in both engineering, as well as other scientific research.
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[…] Troesoyer’s construction of his argument is very well done (including such nice details as the well-placed scare quotes in the expression ‘the electoral “democracies”’), easily outdoing the large majority of the authors writing on this subject. (As a sample of what passes for discussion of sortition see this recent Jacobin magazine piece.) […]
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What makes a science a science are not the scientific revolutions but rather what Kuhn calls “normal science”. These are the periods between revolutions (and after the initial pre-scientific, pre-paradigmatic phase) where the field works within a shared rigorous framework that provides a foundation for fruitful work and that prevents the kind of useless one-the-hand-but-on-the-other-hand discussion that is demonstrated in the Jacobin piece.
The reason that the fruitless style is the standard in political “science” is because it is not a science at all but has rather never progressed beyond the pre-paradigmatic phase. The reason for that is not because finding a useful paradigm (or at least what is termed “quasi-paradigms”, i.e., rigorous frameworks that compete with each other for dominance in a field) would be so difficult. The reason is that political “science” is not really about science at all. Instead it primarily functions as a propaganda tool, justifying the existing power structures. Having a rigorous framework for discussion runs the great risk of leading to findings that are inconvenient to those in power. This is a risk that needs to be avoided, and thus political science (as opposed to political “science”) needs to be avoided.
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This seems like a very odd claim to make. Science is both. You can’t take scientific revolutions out of science and still have science. If that were the case, we’d still be using a geocentric model of the solar system, with further and further refinements until this time.
Science simply cannot operate without deliberation to interpret the results of normal science and work out the best way for science to move forward. Even within the confines of normal science, there is plenty of deliberation on the proper way to carry it out. What sort of experiments can fully capture the quirks of a paradigm is a challenging problem, and is frequently discussed, and the results interpreted. All of this is deliberated upon, quite frequently. Scientists change their minds and alter the methods of their experiments based on the results of their deliberations.
Many have attempted to produce such objective frameworks, and many have failed. My guess is simply the number of variables involved make it fairly challenging. None the less, science is sitll done. Different governments with different systems are still compared, and statistical analysis on different metrics are performed. The amount of variables and the complexity makes it quite challenging to create basic models of which to prove or disprove, which frees up far more space for interpretation.
Despite the challenges in producing a singular, coherent interpretation of all the facts provides, I doubt that tossing away the gathered facts entirely is going to produce anything better.
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I was surprised when, half way through my PhD (on sortition), the upgrade committee at my university told me to either cite the polsci or the political theory literature. I suppose this would support Yoram’s claim that the academic study of political systems falls short of the ideal standard (although I would disagree that it is just propaganda for the status quo).
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That would surprise me as well. What justification (if any) did they provide?
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None (other than the observation that a PhD thesis is not an encyclopaedia). The empirical work supported the view that politicians pander to voters’ preferences whereas the theorists (on the whole) adhere to Pareto/Mosca/Michels elite theory.
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As someone who read your Ph.D. dissertation, I think it’s really a question of what kind of claim you are making about sortition. There are empirical claims, and then there are normative or theoretical claims. One has to be clear at any one time what type of claim you are making. It’s hard enough to make even one claim really well, let alone ten, and it’s even harder if they all get muddled together.
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Yes indeed — you examined the thesis! I think the disagreement was largely over critiquing the problems of ‘electocracy’. As participants on this blog know, there are differing views.
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Your thesis was how I initially found you. I was desperately looking for anything suggesting a non-majoritarian model similar to my own, trying to see if it was an idea being engaged with. I was using an LLM to assist my search, and your thesis was the closest thing I could find, which had a few lines referencing the idea.
It was a significant find, and moment, in my new and current path.
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Just as well Peter passed my viva voce!
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