It is to its great detriment that sortition has become somehow tied to the ideology of “deliberation”. At best, “deliberation” is a distraction from the democratic thrust of sortition. It is often worse, an elitist idea that is in conflict with that democratic thrust. The talk of “deliberation” implies that groups of people are unable to spontaneously self-organize and coordinate in order to reach mutually beneficial arrangements. That unless experts set things up quite right – verify diversity of the forum, make sure the “shy” don’t get left out, facilitate the discussion, set up the correct incentives – then “deliberation” won’t happen and as a result “unwise” decisions will be made. “Deliberative democracy” is therefore an anti-democratic idea that all those who wish to see sortition used to democratize society, rather than to bolster the existing oligarchical arrangements or to modify the existing oligarchical arrangements into different oligarchical arrangements, should distance themselves from, both in their own minds and publicly.
I was again reminded of the harmful effects of the “deliberation” ideology by reading a post by Ethan McCutchen. There is a lot to agree with in the post, like the outright rejection of elections:
[W]e can’t and shouldn’t trust the old process, but not because we’re a nation of villainous idiots. The problem is not the voters but voting itself. Elections will not evolve from a source of feckless discord into one of fruitful discourse. Re-glorifying voting won’t somehow usher in a new era of healthy deliberation. Elections will not bring us back together. Elections are not the antidote; they are the poison.
To be clear democracy is not the poison, elections are.
Unfortunately, the author does his arguments the great disservice of forcing them into the “deliberative democracy” template:
Today, the ancient tradition of democracy by lots, or sortition, is undergoing a revival – and an upgrade from Athens’ flawed system. Process pioneers all over the world have been experimenting with mini-publics, panels of citizens chosen at random. The purposes of these mini-publics vary widely, as do their processes and their names (citizen assemblies, citizen juries, Bürgerrat, etc), but in all cases, participants gather for facilitated sessions of learning and deliberation.
In this context, it turns out that random citizens deliberate far better than elected ones.
But with the right framing, productive deliberation in diverse groups is not just possible but routine. Appropriate facilitation reliably makes participation in mini-publics a profoundly rewarding, even moving, experience. If random citizens can learn to understand each other, converge around solutions, and feel more fully human along the way, what is it that prevents our elected representatives, our chosen ones from doing it too? In a word: elections.
The problem with elections is not just that they fail to identify the best for the job, though wow do they fail.
Nor do legislators’ deliberations fail because elections are terrible at achieving balanced representation, though oh boy are they.
But poor representation doesn’t explain poor deliberation; if anything, deliberation should be easier among more homogenous groups. And, indeed, on the rare occasions when these same disproportionately rich, white, straight, tall, male, urban, educated, extroverted, silver-haired and silver-tongued types find themselves together in a room with the right incentives, they can typically work together just fine.
Sadly, when elections are involved, the incentives are almost always horribly wrong.
And that is the core reason why the elected deliberate so poorly: elections poison discourse. Elected officials have strong incentives to focus their attention on donors and lobbyists and branding and past and future soundbites and almost no incentive to listen to each other with humility. Elections make deliberation a quaint little sidebar to a grand aristocratic game. The game penalizes listening, connection, depth, personal growth, and complexity; and it rewards caricature, hyperbole, gotchas, zingers, wingers, and all flavors of cynicism.
All of this makes the common falacious assumptions about the electoralist system being dysfunctional. That elected officials are too busy with their partisan electoralist machinations to get anything done at the policy level, or at least to get anything “wise” done. But this is absolutely not the case. The electoralist system is perfectly functional. It works great for the elected officials themselves and for their allies. Growing income and wealth concentration is not due to not getting anything done. It is what is getting done. Furthermore, it is getting all this done while at the same time distracting the population from this exploitation by the electoral-partisan theater. It is the epitome of wisdom, as far as the electoralist elite is concerned.
The electoralist elite – the “disproportionately rich, white, straight, tall, male, urban, educated, extroverted, silver-haired and silver-tongued types” – always “find themselves together in a room with the right incentives”. And as a result they do “work together just fine”. Like every other group, and without any need for facilitation, experimentation or management by experts, they do “deliberate”. That is, they coordinate and cooperate in achieving mutually beneficial goals, and they do achieve those goals very effectively. Their achievements are our reality.
Filed under: Deliberation, Elections, Sortition |
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Equality by lot 
Yoram:> It is to its great detriment that sortition has become somehow tied to the ideology of “deliberation”.
Yes indeed. The term “deliberative democracy” (DD) was coined in 1980 by Joseph M. Bessette, his principal focus being elite deliberation amongst elected officials in Congress. If citizens are to deliberate, it should, in true Madisonian fashion, be through their elected representatives, insulated from the whims of an ‘unreformed and unreflective’ citizenry (Bessette, 1994, p.2).
The shift of focus to citizen deliberation was inspired, in part, by Jurgen Habermas, who claimed that deliberation should be confined to the (voluntary) ‘public sphere’, and the modern deliberative democracy movement might well be seen as the reincarnation of the eighteenth-century (bourgeois) coffee house, thereby increasing the influence of the (already overrepresented) chattering classes.
The democracy element in DD originally focused on the procedural norms required to generate the ‘ideal speech situation’, hence the need for trained facilitators. This was then conflated with Robert Dahl’s throwaway remark that a randomly selected group of citizens would constitute a ‘minipopulus’, and this could be viewed as an ‘attentive’ public, the decisions of which would be better than the real thing.
Unfortunately, Dahl’s model required 1,000 or so for a representative sample, and it’s not clear how such a large group could deliberate (in Bessette and Habermas’s sense). So this was scaled down to small samples that are then stratified on a limited number of variables, to make them more ‘representative’. Unfortunately, typically 95% of those invited to participate turn down the offer, and this might well be a significant population parameter.
When we launched the Journal of Sortition a couple of years ago it was intended to address the conflation of the two variants of democracy involved in sortition and deliberation.
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Yes, there’s something uncomfortable when I see the huge lists of organizations involved with all their typical boards and advisors and funders across the nonprofit world. They’re incentive (and mine) is to get a career out of running assemblies. If they all demand that these events be run by experts and have certain kinds of requirements, it does help make themselves necessary.
Anyway, when presented with opportunities to facilitate or organize assemblies or deliberations, I’m not sure when it’s worth taking baby steps or when one should perhaps refuse to be part of a process.
For instance, I just recently worked with Engaged CA to facilitate a number of online, 2.5 hr deliberations on the impact of AI to workers in California. Do I think 2.5 hours is a sufficient time to think about such a topic? Do I think this is going to be taken seriously by the state of California? I don’t know. Did I get paid? Yes. Do I think these groups were representative of Californians? Not really, they were people who volunteered on a particular website and then randomly selected from that pool. However, it did provice a chance to at least, in my introduction, to explain a bit about sortition.
If we do not have the political power to just grant a sortition body direct legislative power, then concessions have to be made to the elected bodies, if any kind of sortionish process is going to occur.
In defense of stratified sampling, there is some kind of bias definitely introduced in who checks and responds to mailed postcards. I don’t know if stratified sampling as is currently done is the absolute best solution, but there’s a consenus among practitioners and from city legislatures that it doesn’t hurt.
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I’ll also add that I think one can be agnostic as to how self-aware electeds are at the effects of their deliberations. I think many earnestly think they’re fighting a fight for their side. They’re definitely all fighting to keep their careers going! And that is a battle. But yes, the system empowers a class, the class’s shared interests are preserved.
And we want a system that empowers a class representative of the people. I honestly think that we don’t need to worry too much about deliberativeness dereailing us. If we achieve sortition, that is, a system where randomly selected groups are given power, then they can do what they please with moderators.
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Thanks for responding!
I’m happy to grant that elected bodies are typically quite capable of producing outputs.
The essay is not really about legislative output; it’s centered on political systems’ impacts on polarization. I’ve found depolarization a more approachable introduction to sortition for many than arguments about policy alignment. A lot of what I write is aimed at messaging that will broaden sortition’s appeal. It would be a fair critique that the writing style may narrow the appeal back down again :).
The relevant assessment of poor deliberation in elected bodies is about the quality of deliberative discourse between parties and the absolute inappropriateness of electoral systems for leading the resolution of politically polarized countries like the US. Sure, effective deliberation can still happen *within* parties and coalitions. And there is occasional horsetrading between them. But there is little in plenary/committee settings (especially public ones) that approximates the sincere listening and learning and earnest problem-solving that takes place in sortition bodies. (Yes, this problem is exaggerated in the US system.)
Terry Bouricius writes extensively in Democracy Without Politicians about the deliberative shortcomings of elected bodies. Elected leaders pay little attention to testimony except to hunt for opportunities to score political points. As the literal chosen ones, they are less open to learning than ordinary citizens. Etc.
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I’m not sure how this piece inspired such invective for facilitation with such light mention of it. (Or, for that matter, chagrin at the bastardization of the term “deliberative democracy” without using the term at all. Bessett and Habermas and the like don’t own the word “deliberation”.)
> The talk of “deliberation” implies that groups of people are unable to spontaneously self-organize and coordinate in order to reach mutually beneficial arrangements.
It does? To whom? Who hears “deliberation” and thinks helicopter facilitation? It means weighing things thoughtfully, sometimes individually, sometimes in groups. Even sortition bodies with no group interaction feature individual deliberation. If not, then you just have a poll.
I support facilitation in many contexts and have been a part of groups that benefited heavily from it. It was a good user experience; as a participant I find it can be very helpful when others manage process details and let me focus on content. (“Facilitation” can convey a pretty wide range of interventions, many of which are just about deciding when to break into smaller groups or minimizing ad hominem commentary.) And it seemed worth mentioning facilitation here, because it’s common practice to date.
But the vast majority of deliberations I’ve been part of in my life have not been facilitated, and unfacilitated deliberations in sortition bodies are often quite appropriate.
I can believe overfacilitation happens and would be interested in evidence of patterns of intrusive facilitation or other problematic guidance. I’m sympathetic to organizers who work within considerable resource constraints and must push for deliverables on tight timelines, but that can’t justify steering.
And, fwiw, when I spoke of the healthy incentives of CAs, I didn’t mean that facilitators had created artificial incentives, I meant that they LACK the destructive incentives of electoral systems which are very real (separately from and in addition to alignment concerns).
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Ethan:> Terry Bouricius writes extensively in Democracy Without Politicians about the deliberative shortcomings of elected bodies. Elected leaders pay little attention to testimony except to hunt for opportunities to score political points. As the literal chosen ones, they are less open to learning than ordinary citizens. Etc.
What about the incident in Terry’s book where he refers to witnessing the exchange between competing teams of lobbyists on a topic where his Vermont state legislature commerce committee had no particular views? He describes it as deeply informative. The key point is that the advocatess (in this case lobbyists) and jury (in this case elected committee members) should be distinct.
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Max:> And we want a system that empowers a class representative of the people. I honestly think that we don’t need to worry too much about deliberativeness dereailing us. If we achieve sortition, that is, a system where randomly selected groups are given power, then they can do what they please with moderators.
That’s a very strong claim, and there is an awful lot of devilry in the detail (for reasons that we have debated at length on this forum).
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Yes, exactly! The point of that story is that it was an exceptional experience in 20 years in the legislature. And that it was not a “political” (read: “election-related”) issue.
So hooray! Elected representatives can plausibly muster high quality deliberation so long as the topic is not perceived to be of any interest to the public (and therefore of no use for campaign spin). In other words, their deliberative capacity for any given topic is inversely proportionate to the topic’s proximity to the their source of perceived legitimacy.
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Sorry, 10 years in the legislature, I guess. 20 in electoral politics.
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Manin’s decision to segue from his original deliberative democracy focus to debate format validated the inclusion of politicians, so long as the exchange was removed from campaign considerations. This would presuppose a change in the relationship between proposers and deciders along the lines of suggestions by Alex Kovner, Kai O’Reilly, Jason Rose and others.
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I want to push back on this forcefully.
There are lots of great discussions to be had about how best to frame deliberation in sortition-selected groups: when to center group deliberation and when to center individual, whether and when and how to facilitate, how to integrate non-deliberative social interactions, etc.
For most, the term’s denotation has kept close to its etymological roots of weighing. And, from that frame, deliberation is not a distraction from the democratic thrust of most uses of sortition, it’s deeply integral to them.
We can’t all weigh everything, so we pick a representative few to do so. If there’s no deliberation and we just want impulsive reactions, we may as well vote.
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Are you under the impression that the growing adoption of civic assemblies stems from allegiance to Manin?
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Bernard Manin’s paper “On Legitimacy and Political Deliberation” (1987) helped launch the deliberative turn in democracy studies. I think we agree on the etymology of deliberation as “weighing” and that democracy should give this right to a representative sample of the target population. The only issue is who gets to perform the speech acts if the advocacy is to reflect the discursive diversity of the citizenry.
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I agree with you Ethan, it’s frustrating to have one’s best efforts at making sense summed up as tendentiously as in this post.
I do share the post’s hostility to professionals all lining up to supervise the deliberations of the hoi polloi – and have proposed a way in which a ‘council of elders’ drawn from an alumni of citizen jurors would govern the citizens’ jury thus making it self-sovereign.
But we need structures of deliberation – as we have in legal juries – because institutions need to be built around the kind of governance we want, and not the fond hope that people will work it all out from scratch the moment they’re assembled.
We have plenty of powerful people seeking to manipulate outcomes so we want to build an institution capable of resisting that – as we have in the law.
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Nick:> But we need structures of deliberation – as we have in legal juries
When I did jury service 15 or so years ago, the deliberation was entirely unstructured — the judge just told us to appoint a spokesperson and arrive at a verdict. The principal structural difference between legal juries and CAs is (in the latter case) the lack of distinction between pro- and con- advocates and jury.
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Honestly, that seems quite important for discourse here.
I think it’s fair to say that vernacular usage of the term leans more towards “group” than “individual” deliberation. That’s true of how I used it in this essay (though I’ve tried to be more precise in more recent writing), and it’s true of usage in the field. But I don’t think the notion of individual deliberation strikes most as an unfamiliar idea.
I don’t think it’s fair to suggest that the term deliberation itself has come to embed a particular process model as this post claimed. It seems to want to pick a battle with facilitated deliberation. You seem to want to pick one with group deliberation by sortition bodies. But deliberation itself is being made the enemy.
To be clear, I’m a process pluralist and empiricist who would be happy to see experimentation with the processes you’re describing. So as I understand it, the distinction is not that I don’t want sortition used for individual deliberation, it’s that you don’t want it used for group deliberation, even unfacilitated.
So, if it’s important to turn this into another conversation about your model, you could still engage with the ACTUAL content of the essay. You might contest the claims about how elections contaminate group deliberation (eg, how PR or minority proposals would mitigate the problem) or about how group deliberation in sortition bodies help. Or you might contend (plausibly) that individual deliberation in trials would shift incentives for elected officials to engage in healthier cross-partisan public deliberation.
Or, I suppose, we could just continue portraying this essay as a shill for oligarchic process manipulators.
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As the term deliberation has two completely different meanings, I prefer to disambiguate it by referring to a) advocacy and b) judgment. As the argumentative theory of reason posits different cognitive modules for each, it’s also sensible to allocate the functions to different agents. We all agree that (given exacting constraints) the aggregate judgment of a large randomly-selected body will approximate that of the target population.
That leaves the problem of advocacy, where the speech acts of the agents need to match the ideological diversity of the citizen body. The best way of achieving this is via a modified electoral process, rather than leaving it to random information cascades. The exchange between elected advocates would be better described as debate, rather than deliberation.
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I can respect the value of allocating advocacy and judgment functions to different agents, even if I’m not willing to elevate that constraint to a sine qua non for all sortition applications.
But I don’t think anyone uses the term “deliberation” to refer to judgment-free advocacy. Deliberation (weighing) always involves judgment, but there’s a lot of variability in the extent to which different processes invite deliberators introduce their perspectives (along with advocacy dynamics) to the group. Some designs have no social interaction at all. Court juries use group deliberation that often involves advancing personal perspectives, so you can say there’s an element of advocacy, though clearly they’re not the primary advocates. Many CAs, like the Oregon CIRs, don’t stray terribly far from that approach and predominantly weigh the arguments of outside advocates. (Yes, the selection of those advocates is a major concern with many possible solutions, but to stay on topic, the conflation of advocacy and judgment is not so far from that of court juries). Other CAs involve a lot more idea generation from participants and relatively little adversarial testimony and more fully conflate the roles.
In other words, there aren’t two completely different meanings, there’s a continuum of the extent to which advocacy is incorporated with the necessary component of judgment under the banner of deliberation. To favor minimizing that conflation is a fair position, but insist on a firewall in all applications seems extreme and impracticable and, importantly, it runs counter to our most effective strategies for speeding the adoption of sortition.
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We need parliamentary procedure, and nothing else. No facilitators.
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The act of teaching citizen deliberators parliamentary procedure (or any other group process) would be, in the parlance of process practitioners, and act of facilitation.
In that sense (which honestly is the most workable framing), the question isn’t whether there is facilitation but how it is structured. No facilitation means no support organizing meeting dates, no support for temperature-taking votes, no provision of water clocks, nothing. I don’t perceive the removal of all of that support as empowering.
I do understand the push to minimalize mid-deliberation interventions, even if I don’t share it for all applications (especially those with highly limited time resources; you don’t want rushed participants to spend all their time figuring out their process). But the extreme of “no facilitators” doesn’t really serve the deliberators the way it’s intended.
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On the topic of facilitation… we do need a best-guess starting design, but then just leave that decision, and its steady refinement to a sortition-selected Rules Council. Such a body would not deal with policy matters, but only deal with monitoring difficulties and successes of mini-publics and propose rules changes (such as expand, eliminate or adjust facilitation) to a decision making jury. A democratic self-correcting system of improvement.
As for Keith’s assertion that elections assure that proposals proportionally “match the ideological diversity of the citizen body.”… That is nonsense. Most citizens have no consistent ideology. And those that do, often completely change their off-the-cuff policy opinions after giving the topic much serious thought, or learning any new information. Leaving agenda setting to party elites (often atypical), who are skilled at whipping up fears and hatreds to win votes, is a very bad idea (probably as bad as the current election-based agenda-setting process).
Citizens’ Assemblies have found that when diverse everyday people come together randomly, they often find far more agreement than any parties would admit to. The door for proposals should be open to anyone in the society who wants to help (ho boulomenos in Ancient Greek democracy) by participating in one of a huge array of small Interest Panels. Excluding great ideas by EITHER limiting idea generation to elite politicians, or to those few people who get randomly selected, would be a mistake. Random Review Panels can filter or combine the wide range of ideas coming from Interest Panels down to a final draft law that will be ratified or rejected by a large Policy Jury.
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One other serious problem with the idea of limiting policy proposals to political parties that have no power or final authority, is that it seems unlikely more than a tiny percentage of citizens would bother to vote in such elections. In the US we often have two thirds of people sitting out Congressional elections, where real power is at stake. If those who get elected only had permission to propose rather than pass legislation, I don’t know if anybody other than a handful of fanatics and policy extremists who would bother to vote.
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By the way… this is Terry Bouricius… somehow after logging in to WordPress it assigned me this weird name.
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Hi Ethan,
It’s great that you joined the discussion.
I find your statements rather self-contradictory regarding what “deliberation” means. When you defend your claim that the elected do not engage in deliberation you raise the bar and it is a group, ideally public, activity:
> there is little [deliberation] in plenary/committee settings (especially public ones) that approximates the sincere listening and learning and earnest problem-solving that takes place in sortition bodies.
But later you lower the bar and say that deliberation can happen individually:
> It [- deliberation -] means weighing things thoughtfully, sometimes individually, sometimes in groups. Even sortition bodies with no group interaction feature individual deliberation.
It seems to me that you are similarly equivocating regarding what “facilitation” means.
But more importantly, you do not address my main point. The point is that according to democratic ideology people capably represent their own best interests. People who have power use this power effectively to pursue their objectives. When the power is wielded by a group, this naturally and unavoidably involves coordination between the members of the group.
To put this another way, asking whether “deliberation” is going on is equivalent to asking whether “thinking” is going on (indeed in your lowered bar statement above, you essentially equate “deliberation” with “thinking”). Asking this question is meaningless unless one works with the assumption that unless properly guided many people cannot represent their own best interests: they do not deliberate, they do not think.
If you feel that this is indeed the case – that without proper guidance from others many people do not think – then you are continuing a long and storied tradition of elitism. If not, then as far as I can see all the talk about “deliberation” is doing a disservice to your democratic message.
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Ethan:> I don’t think anyone uses the term “deliberation” to refer to judgment-free advocacy.
According to Bernard Manin, “deliberation” has two distinct meanings:
Terry:> As for Keith’s assertion that elections assure that proposals proportionally “match the ideological diversity of the citizen body.”… That is nonsense. Most citizens have no consistent ideology.
That’s true, in the sense of a coherent set of beliefs and preferences, but people often feel strongly about specific policy areas. If the proposal threshold in the parliamentary body were lowered this would lead to a burgeoning of small specialist parties, who would then have to work together on an ad hoc basis to make legislative proposals. I would suggest that Terry’s rejection of electoral democracy is the result of his long exposure to the two party system, which none of us are seeking to preserve. For my review of his book (and Ethan’s response), see: https://sortition-agora.co.uk/post/on-poachers-and-gamekeepers-response-to-review-article
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Yoram:> According to democratic ideology people capably represent their own best interests.
You’ve made that claim repeatedly over the years, could your provide us with some empirical (rather than ideological) support?
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To clarify, Manin’s second meaning applies to a group that performs both functions (which doesn’t apply to our model, which is based closely on 4th Century Athenian nomothesia). That’s why I propose we drop the word deliberation, in favour of advocacy and judgment.
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