Equality by lot

Ian Troesoyer, a sortition activist, has recently been a guest on the Let’s Make Them Pay podcast, where he had an hour long conversation with the host, Scott Bennett. Both participants in the conversation are unapologetic supports of sortition and the presentation of the idea is very good. For those who are either completely or fairly unfamiliar with the idea of sortition, it is a good resource for hearing it discussed and examined.

As I did with one of Troesoyer’s posts on his substack, I’ll go over some points that I believe can be improved in the argumentation. Again, I am offering this as constructive criticism. I pick up the points in the chronological order in which they appear in the video, and since this turns out to be a bit long, it is posted in installments.

1. Stratified sampling (mentioned at 0:02:30 and again at 0:27:20). This is not dwelled upon in the conversation, but the mere mention of stratification is problematic. It may be that some like the the jargon because it gives the discussion a scientific ring. But the use of jargon introduces a suspicion that something untoward is at hand. In the case of the standard current sortitionist practice – what goes under the name of “citizen assemblies” – such a suspicion would be completely justified. In current practice, what is being called “stratified sampling” is a method to cover for the fact that as the process is currently arranged, a large majority of people refuse to take up offered seats. In order to try and obscure this inconvenient fact, and in order to obscure the fact that, as can be expected, refusal rates are correlated with various obvious social characteristics, the body’s makeup is adjusted in various ways so that certain statistical characteristics of the body match those of the population (e.g., the body is set up so that 50% of the members of the body are be men and 50% are women, even if more women refused to take up seats than man did). This makes the resulting body’s make up appear superficially as if it was created by sampling where no rejection of offered seats occured.

However, this practice does not actually fix the problem of high refusal rates which can easily result in distorted representation. The adjustments in no way guarantee that the body members would have the same makeup of opinions regarding the issues that the body handles. They merely make the problem less evident. Thus, “stratified sampling” allows the organizers to claim legitimacy for their sample despite not having made the arrangements necessary to obtain low refusal rates. Thus, it is at best a device that allows the organizers to economize on labor at the expense of the quality of the outcome. It could also be a tool for manipulation of the outcomes.

Reducing refusal rates dramatically can probably be achieved by the simple device of generous pay – something that the “citizen assembly” practitioners avoid, and that the “citizen assembly” literature somehow avoids discussing. Instead of resorting to “stratification” it would be more honest to insist that seats that are turned down must remain vacant and that it is incumbent on citizen assembly organizers to set things up so that refusal rates are low enough to avoid an embarrassing room filled with vacant seats. An allotted assembly that cannot clear this bar cannot claim to represent the sampled population and its proposals or findings should be seen as representing the ideas of the organizers and of allied groups.

2. Elections being aristocratic (0:04:00). Elections were classically described as being aristocratic. There is certainly some truth to that, but it may also be somewhat misleading. It is true that elections necessarily select members of privileged class. Those who are able to put their name on the ballot and either have it widely recognized on its own or have it attached to a widely recognized label (an association to a widely recognized party). This is a privilege that is mechanically and inevitably attained by only a tiny fraction of any large population. This is the “principle of distinction”.

But inevitably selecting someone distinguished is very different from being “aristocratic” if this term is perceived according to its etymology, i.e., rule by the best. According to this perception, elections allow people to select those who are best according to some set of criteria. In fact, this perception is implied in the discussion in the video. Treosoyer mentions in this context the past situation in the U.S. in which the candidate pool officially excluded women and non-Whites, and says that as a result people of high “inherent ability” were excluded. He also says that underprivileged people have their “potential” limited by their circumstances, implying that this is the reason they do not get elected. Deliberately or inadvertantly this argument echos the classic liberal argument for elections. The liberals assert that if we only remove unjust and prejudiced barriers of entry to the pool of candidates, and if only we eliminate the effects of privilege then elections would indeed select for true inherent abilities and, just as the American founding fathers envisioned, they would result in rule by a natural aristocracy.

This however is a misinterpretation of the effects of the electoral mechanism. In fact, the most determinative factor in electability has nothing to do with abilities, inherent or otherwise. Rather, as described above, it is simply a matter of recognition. It may very well be, and it is often the case, that while all the candidates are distinguished in the sense of being wide recognized (personally or by association), none of the candidates is generally perceived as being best or very good at anything. In fact, they may all have negative net favorability among the electorate as a whole and the winning candidate is merely the one who is less unpopular than the other candidates.

Thus it would be more accurate to assert that elections are oligarchical – an arrangement in which rulers are members of an insular ruling class whose perception among the population is not necessarily positive – rather than aristocratic.

Filed under: Sortition, video |