This continues my review of Ian Troesoyer’s discussion of sortition with Scott Bennet, host of the Let’s Make Them Pay podcast. Part 1 is here.
3. Values and interests vs. epistemic limitations (0:13:15). Troesoyer is concerned about “class bias” in elected government. To demonstrate it, he brings up a favorite example of Terry Bouricius. A body full of landlords would make different decisions than a body in which renters are represented. This is obvious and uncontroversial. But what is the mechanism behind this effect? The straightforward mechanism refers to values and interests. Landlords promote the values and interests of landlords, renters promote the values and interests of renters. Yet, Treosoyer presents this as a matter of “bias” or “limited perspectives”. According to this telling, the landlords are “trying to do their best”. They are very much open to representing the values and interests of the renters, but due to their limited perspective they are unaware of how things look like from the renters’ perspective and thus ignore their values and interests. Bennet goes as far as saying that just there being one or two renters in a body full of landlords would “make such a difference”. (Treosoyer agrees, but not too enthusiastically, if I am not mistaken.)
Leaning heavily on the supposed epistemic difficulties of the elected decision makers in arriving at “good decisions” is a standard trope of “deliberative democrats”. (A typical example of this tendency is Alex Guerrero’s book Lottocracy.) The epistemic effect may (or may not) exist, but emphasizing it and de-emphasizing the effect of the conflict of values and interests is unjustified. Presumably the appeal of this tendency is that it sounds less crass and confrontational, and avoids presenting the electoral elite and its allies as outright exploiters. Instead it presents them as well-meaning simpletons. The well-meaning landlords, for example, despite their openness to renters’ perspectives, have never had the idea of calling a few renters to appear before their body to express those perspectives.
But why would we want to avoid the idea that the electoralist rulers are exploitative? We, the people, are in a very high stakes struggle with them. Why should we be reluctant to point out that they exploit us for their own benefit? Nobody in the West would be reluctant to say that the rulers of countries who have been designated as official enemies – say, those at the top of the Chinese, Russian or Iranian systems – are cynically exploiting the their people. It is considered an obvious fact. Anyone who would say that Xi, Putin or Khamenei really want to do what is best for their people but are hampered by a limited perspective would be considered a fool or an apologist. Until we stop thinking better of our elected rulers than we think of other people’s rulers (elected or not), we have not freed ourselves from our mental chains, from the electoralist stranglehold on our political thinking.
4. Rational ignorance (0:15:40). “The problem is rational ignorance. If you are going to understand sortition, that is the fundamental problem that sortition solves.” Again, the focus on rational ignorance as a problem with electoralism is a common trope, although not among the “deliberative democrats” this time, but among the “rational choice” crowd.
I have refuted the importance of rational ignorance as a source for the shortcomings of electoralism here. Cognitive constraints are a fundamental effect, but they only explain why an egalitarian all-to-all politics is impossible and thus some sort of a small decision making body is needed at all. Again, the fact that elections do not produce policies that serve the average person is directly attributable to the principle of distinction, and appeals to rational ignorance should be avoided in this context. To paraphrase Treosoyer:
The problem is the principle of distinction. If you are going to understand sortition, that is the fundamental problem that sortition solves.
Adam Cronkright
Ali
Ahmed R. Teleb
avanderven
avergne
Alex Kovner
azakaras
Brett Hennig
campbellwallace
Simon Threlkeld
Nick Coccoma
codyhipskind
Common Lot Sortitionist
Conall Boyle
constitutionalism
davidschecter
Ethan McCutchen
graytmatter
gtridimas
Henry Tuttle
H.J. Hofkirchner
HpR
James Kierstead
John Burnheim
jgarry20151
Jochen Krattenmacher
johnedwardtaylor
johnhuang865
Jonathan Crock
keithsutherland
Jacob Richter
kkoreilly
lukewhito
SimonPek
Nathan El
Nicholas Gruen
Owen Shaffer
Patrick Chalmers
Paul Gölz
peterstone
Pierre-Etienne Vandamme
pronfeld
Emil
rcaze
richwbrown
Roger Knights
roslynfuller
Pierre-Etienne Vandamme
shaharavin
tbouricius
Ted Wachtel
Joshua Laferriere
theodorestathis
towardsautonomyblog
Wayne Liebman
Yoram Gat
Oliver Milne
Equality by lot 
Yoram:> But why would we want to avoid the idea that the electoralist rulers are exploitative? We, the people, are in a very high stakes struggle with them.
Hmm, so it’s Marx (not Mill) after all. The distinction between the unitary elite and “we, the people” is long past it’s sell-by date, especially as the latter choose the former.
LikeLike
Heh. You never tire of sniffing out Marxists…
I see myself as a classical Populist. As Mansbridge and Macedo write:
But if you see this as Marxism, have a blast.
As for sell-by dates, Populism seem to me much more useful and relevant today than the worn-out and discredited elitist ideologies of establishment Western politics.
LikeLike
Yoram, I wish you would stop blatantly misrepresenting the content of my book.
I am not a deliberative democrat. I explicitly disavow any commitment to deliberation as a necessary condition of legitimacy or anything else (see p. 19 and p. 214 of my book for the most explicit statements).
I do not think elected officials are only bad because of epistemic reasons. Indeed, I very explicitly discuss the way in which elections select elites with not only epistemic limitations, but also with notably different and conflicting interests, values, and priorities (I discuss this concern throughout the book under the heading of ‘agential’ limitations as distinct from ‘epistemic’ limitations). See Section 6.1, “Unrepresentative Representatives, Agential Trouble,” in which I detail this distinct, non-epistemic concern at length. Much of Chapter 14 “Lessening Distortion, Improving Agential Performance” is about how lottocracy will do better because it avoids selection of elites who have distorted priorities, values, and interests. I very much do not “de-emphasiz[e] the effect of the conflict of values and interests.”
The fact that I mention two things that are bad does not mean that I think one of them is not very bad. Two things can be very significant and very bad.
I can only think that, despite reviewing my book, you did not actually read it.
This is also revealed by your misleading use of my term ‘wild’ lottocracy in your review, suggesting that it somehow implies that I don’t think people are able to do well on their own, rather than just being the name for unmoderated discussion (which I think could be perfectly good in some actual contexts).
It is also revealed by your suggestion in the end of the review that I somehow want or intend to impose my vision of lottocracy on people, despite my spending the entire final chapter of the book very clearly stating how inappropriate that would be and how it very much has to be the kind of thing decided on by the people whose political system it will be.
LikeLike
Just to make this very explicit, let me quote myself from p. 106:
“Captured elected representatives will do poorly at looking out for our interests or being responsive to our concerns. They are likely to work for the interests of the elite, rather than deferring either to what their political community prefers or what would be in the interest of the political community. They are likely to engage in actions that harm many for the sake of benefitting those who are already among the best off in the political community, perhaps through means that are themselves immoral. And all of this will be done not just by an individual here or there, but by entire groups of effectively captured representatives, who will work together both to minimize electoral consequences and effectively deceive and manipulate the public about what they are doing and why. In places like the US with two dominant political parties, it is plausible that on some issues both dominant parties will be similarly captured, so that work on that issue is done entirely in the shadows and in a way that is out of line with norms of responsiveness and broader concern to improve the situation of members of the political community.
A second, related concern focuses on the distinctive characteristics of the group who ends up seeking out these elected roles, whether or not capture plays any part of the explanation. If those elected are a non representative, much wealthier, more “elite” and privileged subset of the population in terms of socioeconomic status, education, occupational experience, immigration status, disability status, and much else, this will almost certainly result in distortions in terms of the attention, priorities, and actions of elected officials—particularly if they are operating with no spotlight of accountability on them. One worry here is that those who are seeking out political power in this political context are doing so for purposes of personal enrichment. As detailed in previous chapters, it is a political environment with high levels of conflict, plausible deniability, ignorance, and distraction, all of which make it ripe for raiding and profiteering and for creating a legal and regulatory situation in which one’s personal corporate and financial interests will run wild. Those seeking power who have these interests and background motives will be unlikely to focus on the full range of moral-political problems that affect the political community. Thus, capture might be the explanation, or it might be the uncaptured preferences and priorities of the elected officials that directly lead to this kind of distorted political agency. And, of course, it might be a story on which these external and internal factors point in the same direction.”
Does this sound like someone who thinks it is only ‘epistemic difficulties’ that are causing trouble? If anything, I think these agential difficulties are so obvious that they don’t actually require all that much by way of explanation or discussion. But they are absolutely a central part of the story I tell.
LikeLike
Yoram,
Mansbridge, Macedo and Guerrero all speak of “elites” (plural). Although some elites are elected, others (especially intellectual and cultural) are self-selected, that’s why I have written polemics against the attempts of deliberative democrats to further bolster the chattering classes. The public sphere was a bourgeois creation and was subsequently “transformed” (i.e. destroyed) by the extension of the franchise, mass media etc etc. The insistence by Habermas and his disciples that sortition should only have an indirect role to play in democratic politics is a further attempt to undermine the rule of the demos.
LikeLike
Hi Alex,
> I wish you would stop blatantly misrepresenting the content of my book.
I of course do not feel I am. But since we’ve been over this at length in the thread I’ve linked to, I won’t go over it again here.
If you are interested in writing a post on Equality-by-Lot specifically addressing the issue of what is the primary causal mechanism behind the exploitative policies generated by elected bodies – pursuit of narrow values and interests or epistemic limitations – you would be very welcome.
LikeLike
I don’t know the literature well enough to take a position on the epistemic-versus-agential argument, but I wonder whether both sides may still be focusing too much on how the deciding body is selected.
To me the more important question is how long it remains the deciding body.
It could be elected, appointed, randomly selected, or raised from the dead by necromancers. If the same group continues exercising authority long enough, relationships accumulate, routines develop, assumptions harden, incentives change, and people outside the institution learn how to influence it. Eventually it is no longer functioning as intended.
That is why in my architecture I treat random selection as useful but secondary. The more important mechanism is dissolution.
If the body’s job is simply to reflect the informed will of the public on one legislative question, it does not need long-term institutional memory, the power to generate proposals, or responsibility for maintaining a continuing agenda. Those functions genuinely require persistence and can remain in permanent institutions.
The deciding body needs to hear the competing case, make the decision, and disappear before it has time to become functionally deformed.
That seems to me a different question from whether elections or sortition select better people. The selection method affects the body’s starting conditions. Persistence determines whether those conditions have time to change.
LikeLike
Nicely put Henry, I fully agree.
>If the body’s job is simply to reflect the informed will of the public on one legislative question, it does not need long-term institutional memory, the power to generate proposals, or responsibility for maintaining a continuing agenda. Those functions genuinely require persistence and can remain in permanent institutions.
Yes, and democratic norms would suggest that election (suitably modified) is the appropriate mechanism for legislative agenda setting. As for the need for continuity in the executive branch, that’s a topic for another day.
LikeLike
> “elites” (plural)
Aha! So it is the single letter “s” that separates the legitimate (or at least acceptable) populists from those horrid Marxists. It takes so little.
To me it seems obvious that the difference between “elite” and “elites” is a matter of context. Naturally, there are elite factions with somewhat differing values and interests. So when focusing on those differences and the associated inter-elite conflicts it makes sense to talk about “elites”.
However, often, and most often in the context of the “morally charged battle of the people against the elites”, the elite factions are very much aligned in terms of their values and interests and can thus be usefully considered as a united body.
LikeLike
(Maybe it’s worth pointing out that the same context-dependence is true for any organized group of people. The members of the group are sometimes aligned in terms of values and interests and thus they work together and can be considered as a unified body, and sometimes they have diverging values and interests and should be more fruitfully considered in parts, or even as individuals.)
LikeLike
Yoram:> the elite factions are very much aligned in terms of their values and interests and can thus be usefully considered as a united body.
Can you give provide some concrete examples?
LikeLike
To again state the obvious, when it comes to democratization, i.e., to changes that are aimed at decreasing inequality in society, the elites all have an interest in maintaining the status quo since it is this status quo that provides them their elite status.
LikeLike
That’s just a rephrasing of your original claim, not a concrete example.
LikeLike
What do you mean by a concrete example then?
How about the wall-to-wall support among elites for elections and opposition to sortition? Is that “concrete”?
LikeLike
Whilst most elected politicians are sceptical about sortition, there is growing support from media and intellectual elites. That’s why I insist on the plural case, and it’s not at all clear that the interests and preferences of different elite categories overlap. We are shortly to publish a 25th anniversary edition of Gordon Graham’s Case Against the Democratic State — the author and the four (elite) academic commentators are opposed to electoralism. The Journal of Sortition has an editorial board comprised of thirty-five elite academics. And what about the chasm between the current US Government and the intellectual elites at Ivy League universities? Or the sharp differences between Republican and Democratic elites over the culture wars and other cleavages? I think you will struggle to find support for your elite-vs-the people trope beyond MAGA and similar populist movements.
LikeLike
> Whilst most elected politicians are sceptical about sortition, there is growing support from media and intellectual elites.
Can you offer any evidence for this claim?
Having tiny number of academics on the board of a sortition magazine is certainly not evidence for “growing support” for sortition among academics.
Even those very, very few academics who do support sortition in one way or another seldom, if ever, support it in a way that can be expected to meaningfully democratize society. How many academics propose a system in which an allotted chamber is as powerful and independent as a typical elected chamber? I can’t think of a single one, but maybe I am missing someone?
As can be expected, when it is promoted by academics, sortition is often discussed in a way which promotes their own importance in an elitist system. It is the academics who get to set the rules and limits which the allotted must abide and which control the relations between the allotted bodies and the elected power structure.
LikeLike
>there is growing support from media and intellectual elites.
You have published many posts on media interest in sortition (the only negative one I can recall was the editorial in the New York Sun). Regarding intellectual elites, some 15 years ago I proposed a panel on sortition at a political theory workshop and was met with a blank stare. Nowadays sortition is mentioned frequently in mainstream journals, and the authors often assume there is no need to explain what it is, as the term is now common currency. Google scholar logs 8,310 results for “sortition” and academia.edu 2,437 papers (similar numbers on ResearchGate).
>Having tiny number of academics on the board of a sortition magazine is certainly not evidence for “growing support” for sortition among academics.
Gordon Graham rewrote the final chapter of his 25-year-old polemic against electoral democracy to advocate sortition as an alternative, and both of the commentators so far (Craig Smith and Gerard Casey) agree with him. None of these authors have any connection with JoS.
>How many academics propose a system in which an allotted chamber is as powerful and independent as a typical elected chamber?
Most academics believe that a full-mandate sortitional chamber would be undemocratic (see, for example, my own PhD thesis). Or else they are baby-steps pragmatists (see, for example, Terry’s new book, where he advocates a ‘peeling’ strategy).
>It is the academics who get to set the rules and limits which the allotted must abide.
Really? Academics would be surprised to hear how powerful they are.
LikeLike
> You have published many posts on media interest in sortition
Just like the members of the editorial board of the journal of sortition, the smattering of sortition-related items in elite media is a no more than a curiousity. Rather than a demonstration of elite support for sortition, it is a demonstration of the exact opposite. And just like the academics, the large majority (if not all) of the media items are far from proposing to set up a parliament-like allotted body. Again, this is about shoring up the existing system rather than promoting meaningful democratization.
> Google scholar logs 8,310 results for “sortition”
“Theocracy” has 89,000 results and “astrology” has 246,000 results. The fact that you resort to such meaningless statistics just demonstrates that your devotion to the idea that the intellectual elite is independent from the elecotralist elite is pure dogma rather than based on evidence.
> Most academics believe that a full-mandate sortitional chamber would be undemocratic
Exactly.
> Academics would be surprised to hear how powerful they are.
An academic can dream. One day the powerful will realize how important and useful academics are and they will finally get their due respect and share of power.
LikeLike
It would actually be interesting to have a survey of political scientists regarding their positions on sortition and compare their opinions to those of average citizens and those of politicians.
LikeLike
>> Most academics believe that a full-mandate sortitional chamber would be undemocratic
>Exactly.
The trouble is Yoram that you are pretty much in a minority of one when you advocate such a programme (and it has nothing to do with a conflict between elite interests and “the people”).
LikeLike
[…] Parts 1 and 2 are here and here. […]
LikeLike
Henry,
You wrote
>”To me the more important question is how long it remains the deciding body.”
Absolutely very important… but if the system assures that only wealthy white men of a specific religion, who are members of one social club have a chance of serving, their term of office is not the key. I agree that many sortition advocates have failed to focus on duration of service, but whether those selected are like the population and share those interests and perspectives has to be seen as the MOST crucial factor. We might look at the Italian city republics of the past, and acknowledge that their use of sortition (only among elite families) was focused on defeating corruption, with no interest at al in enabling democracy at all.
We can also look at the impact of term limit laws in various U.S. states and note that they have had no significant impact on politicians serving elite interests.
Restricting the terms of office is very important in a sortition democracy (perhaps essential), but absolutely inadequate.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Terry,
No argument on the pool. If only a narrow slice of the population can be selected, rotating them accomplishes little.
But I’d distinguish term limits from what I’m describing. A term-limited seat is still a seat – the chamber stands, the parties stand, the staff and lobbyists stand, and the person was elected and courted long before arriving. What I have in mind has no seat at all.
The part of your model I keep coming back to is the Review Panels. They serve long enough to build up expertise, and as I understand it they hand the Policy Jury a proposal to accept or reject. You separate rule-making into its own body for what seems to me the right reason – a body that writes the rules it decides under has an incentive to write rules that suit it. That reasoning seems to apply here too. Not holding the final vote reduces what a Review Panel is worth to someone trying to buy an outcome, and I agree it reduces it. But whoever writes the only option has most of the power in the room without needing a vote.
You were also right that my architecture was missing a rules-setting function, and I’ve added one (along with your peeling option, which I’ve cited) but as a temporary jury drawn fresh and dissolved afterward. Where I didn’t follow you is the volunteer pool. One of your own objections to elections is that people who seek power aren’t a random draw, and that the self-selection is what entrenches oligarchy. Drawing a rules body from willing members of previous minipublics selects twice for that disposition – people who served, and then put their hand up to serve again. It’s a far weaker filter than an election, with no money or campaign or party attached, but it’s the same kind of filter, and it sits on the bodies that shape what everyone else votes on.
Where we differ most is using a random panel for the drafting. Random selection buys representativeness, and that’s exactly what I want in the body that decides. But drafting is a skill. You wouldn’t want a representative surgeon or a representative mechanic, and legislation seems no different to me. The body that drafts isn’t what makes the law democratic – the Policy Jury already does that – so the competence given up in drafting doesn’t buy anything back.
Opening the drafting up doesn’t cost representativeness either. Yes, most of what gets submitted will come from the same organized interests that dominate drafting today, and I have a filtering mechanism for that — imperfect, but I think generally effective. But nobody is shut out. Anyone can submit, down to a minority of one, and a panel that rejects a proposal can open the question to competing ones heard side by side. That isn’t a sample of the public. It’s the public.
LikeLike
Henry:> You wouldn’t want a representative surgeon or a representative mechanic, and legislation seems no different to me.
Sure. That’s why (in liberal societies) we choose our surgeons and mechanics, so why should people not choose those who are proposing legislation on their behalf?
>Anyone can submit, down to a minority of one, and a panel that rejects a proposal can open the question to competing ones heard side by side. That isn’t a sample of the public. It’s the public.
What is the subject of your last two sentences? Is it the review panel or is it ho boulomenos? If the former, then it’s a self-selecting oligarchy, if the latter, we shouldn’t forget that the demos is a singular entity (res publica), rather than random individuals.
LikeLike