Equality by lot

I’ll start by introducing myself. My name is Henry Tuttle. My background is outside political theory. I spent about thirty years in the casino business, where designing systems around intelligent people looking for exploitable rules is normal. I developed most of what follows from first principles with very little initial exposure to the sortition literature.

I’ve been developing a legislative architecture around a fairly simple question: “what is each political mechanism actually good at, and where should it get out of the way?”. My answer is FILA: Functional Integrity Legislative Architecture.

FILA uses sortition for informed judgment, but not for everything. Proposal generation is open. Filtering is designed to handle large numbers of proposals without unnecessarily eliminating potentially valuable ones. Expertise and advocacy are provided by people selected for those functions. Binding decisions are made by temporary, single-task citizen juries that hear the competing cases, vote, and dissolve.

The basic idea is to separate functions rather than asking one institution to do everything, and to avoid creating persistent decision-makers or unnecessary gatekeepers where they provide little value.

The abstract to my paper follows. Links to the full paper and to a shorter specification are below. I’d be very interested in criticism, particularly structural problems or failure modes I’ve missed.

For centuries, debates over legislative reform have largely focused on choosing the right people or the right method of choosing them. This paper argues that these are secondary questions. The more fundamental question is whether that function is best served by a permanent body.

A legislature can lose its function without looking broken. Committees convene, votes are recorded, and procedures run as written. What is lost is functional integrity—the capacity to do what the institution exists for. A permanent body can be studied, profiled, courted, and worn down from outside, while incentives and institutional self-preservation deform it from within. Call that functional deformation: sustained divergence between what an institution exists to do and what it actually does, whether driven from outside or generated from within. Capture is one member of the family, not the family. Functional integrity is the property it consumes. No law need be broken. Permanence does not guarantee capture, exploitation, or drift, but it guarantees the conditions in which they accumulate.

If this diagnosis is correct, many familiar debates over elections, campaign finance, term limits, and representation are addressing symptoms rather than causes.
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