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.

Two things are foundational: dissolution and informed judgment—the requirement that whoever holds the final vote attend to the full competing case before casting it. Dissolution is not a universal institutional virtue. Drafting, advocacy, administration, and institutional memory remain permanent because they require continuity. Permanence is confined to the layer that holds no vote; the vote is confined to the layer that does not persist.

The paper develops an architecture that applies these principles by separating drafting law from judging it. Legislative judgment is expressed through temporary citizen panels that hear the strongest competing cases, complete a single task, and dissolve. Unlike fixed-size legislatures, one, several, or dozens of independent panels may evaluate the same proposal simultaneously. Confidence can scale with the importance of the issue while each panel stays small enough to compel attention, reduce groupthink and social contagion, and reveal unexpected disagreement between panels as a signal that something upstream may have gone wrong.

Sortition is the default because it combines unpredictability, reduced self-selection and correlated interests, and deciders who cannot be cultivated in advance. It also delivers the broad representativeness and democratic legitimacy most of its advocates value. But the properties, not sortition itself, are fundamental. Where election, appointment, or another method would serve them better, that method can be used.

Objections, failure modes, and residual costs are treated where each mechanism is set out rather than deferred, and a final part collects the problems that remain unsolved. They are published in the hope that others will solve them: the author would rather see these problems answered than hold credit for having found them. The proposal is comparative. Its standard is not perfection, but whether functional deformation becomes less frequent, less severe, less persistent, and more reversible than it is in existing legislative systems. 

Specification: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22004098

Full paper: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21996367

Filed under: Proposals, Sortition |