Equality by lot

Back in 2013 The Nation magazine reviewed David Greaber’s book The Democracy Project and as a result made a brief assessment of sortition, which was mentioned by Greaber in the book. “That sounds nice, but it’s far easier said than done,” wrote The Nation. According to the magazine’s search engine, sortition has been mentioned on its pages 3 times since. One of those is a 2021 interview with Hélène Landemore in the context of her 2020 book Open Democracy.

The Nation is now publishing a long review by Osita Nwanevu of Landemore’s latest book, Politics Without Politicians. Conincidentally or not, the title of the review, “Can We Save Democracy?”, is rather similar to the title of the 2021 interview, “Can ‘Lottocracy’ Save Democracy From Itself?”.

Nwanevu starts with a copule of paragraphs of dubious relevance referring to a painting by Hieronymus Bosch, to atom bombs and to a play by Norman Mailer. He then issues a dire (but not unfamiliar) warning:

The solution to the flaws of electoral representation that Landemore presents in Politics Without Politicians is simple and bold: The bums in Washington should be thrown out of office—not just those from one party, but all of them. And not just in the next election, but forever. “Electoral democracy is beyond repair,” she declares. “A system based on electoral representation is no longer—if it ever was—capable of delivering either democratic or good governance.” Instead, she argues, we the people should finally take it upon ourselves to rule directly.

That message has drawn the praise of luminaries from Lawrence Lessig to Thomas Piketty. “This thought-provoking book,” Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu has declared, “argues that the solution to dwindling support for our political institutions is more democracy, not less.” It is truly unfortunate that the book does no such thing. Read carefully and within the context of Landemore’s other work, Politics Without Politicians instead makes the case that we must rescue the democratic idea by wringing the democracy out of it. Landemore’s proposals really would disempower the politicians. But they would also, just as surely, disempower you.

The review summarizes the book’s bottom line as follows:

To its credit, Politics Without Politicians assembles quite a lot of evidence, empirical and anecdotal, that minipublics are useful and even inspiring bodies that prove ordinary people can play a meaningful role in the crafting of public policy. But Landemore is making a larger, more audacious argument: Electoral representation is so fatally flawed that government by minipublic should replace politicians and elections altogether. The ideal democratic government, she explains, would consist of “a central agenda-setting and legislative chamber based on lot,” while also allowing the public to vote on “relatively frequent referenda” of ambiguous authority. “My favored system thus does away with politicians entirely,” she writes, “by centering a large parliament-like assembly of randomly selected citizens as the primary site of legislative power.”

If this is indeed the book’s message, and the book’s title lends credence to the claim that it is, then this seems like a significant disambiguation of Landemore’s position relative to Open Democracy (even if a non-negligible amount of the unhelpful deliberative democracy rhetoric is still present in the new book as well, it seems).

Nwanevu’s critique covers well trodden ground:

Landemore’s certainty that we can’t [elect “politicians decent enough to govern well”] drives the book. And many of her readers, understandably, will come to share her pessimism—enough so that they might fail to notice that Landemore’s project is the obliteration of democratic rights. In the ideal system she hopes to see, the ability to vote for one’s representatives or to seek public office would be eliminated. And the “possibility of doing the governing yourself” through sortition, in her words, would clearly be very remote in a country like the United States, for instance—with an adult population of roughly 270 million people, it would be extremely unlikely that any given person would be randomly selected for a national assembly small enough to allow for deep deliberations.

In the end, Landemore’s hope is that democratic government by consent, as conventionally understood—the distribution of some formal political power to all citizens in a given society on the basis of “one person, one vote”—might be replaced someday with a system that “distributes power … on the basis of ‘one person, one lottery ticket,’” given the fact that all citizens would have at least a nominal chance of being chosen for her assemblies. But a losing lottery ticket, of course, is just a piece of paper—arguing that assemblies distribute power even to those who aren’t selected for them is akin to saying that Mega Millions makes everyone who buys a ticket richer.

So somehow having a one-in-270-million chance of ruling is just a piece of paper, but having a one-in-270-million say of which elite faction is going to rule you is a precious democratic right.

Despite offering this formalistic argument, it turns out that Nwanevu does realize that the lottery ticket and the chance to personally rule are not what sortition is about:

Conceptually, the fact that most people wouldn’t end up in one of Landemore’s assemblies is also supposed to be offset by the representativeness of the chosen few.

But with considerable help from poor arguments by sortition advocates, Nwanevu manages to replicate some standard anti-sortition talking points:

With some careful statistical work and algorithms, she argues, each assembly could reflect the demographic characteristics of the wider population as closely as possible. You might not be in the assembly or able to choose who is, the bulk of the public will be told, but someone close to your demographic profile will be there saying and doing things similar to what you probably would have said and done.

While this is the principle at work when survey researchers attempt to take snapshots of raw public opinion through samples in polls, the implication that people who share the same race, gender, or class are functionally interchangeable for the purposes of democratic representation discounts the role that individual personalities, judgments, and experiences would be sure to play in actual political debates within these assemblies. Two people of the same overall demographic profile might behave quite differently in a debate, and might have vastly different experiences, hold different worldviews, or respond to arguments and information in different ways.

This, of course, reflects a misunderstanding of the way sortition works. Demographics are irrelevant. “Experiences”, “worldviews” and ways to “respond to arguments and information”, like any other attribute of the population, will be faithfully represented in the allotted body.

What’s more, one cohort of assembly members might contain more individuals with direct knowledge of a given subject than another that could have been drawn. One side of an argument might be better represented by more charismatic, eloquent people in one potential cohort than in another. Because of all this, two different randomly chosen assemblies, told to discuss and debate the same subject or policy, might reach two different conclusions. Which one would truly represent the public at large?

The claim is then that at least one of those two hypothetical bodies which are reaching two different conclusions, being too ignorant to properly form an opinion (despite having every opportunity to seek information and expert advice), or being swayed by “charisma” and “eloquence”, is unable to represent their own values and interests. Of course, the allotted, if they wish, could ask someone (perhaps some “decent enough politician”) to help them break out of their ignorance or out of their charisma- and eloquence-induced bias. But it appears that in the author’s democratically-minded opinion the allotted would be too irrational to do so, and thus they should not be considered fit for self-rule.

[O]ther dilemmas that sortition poses [are] the privileges that deliberative spaces afford those with the time, resources, and physical ability to deliberate at length [and] the power that biased moderators or administrators might wield over the assemblies[.]

But of course all of these “dilemmas” are not inherent flaws but matters that should guide the institutional design: Time and resources should be provided to all the members of the allotted body, and moderators (if any) and administrators should be controlled by the allotted themselves. One wonders why these dilemmas are not an issue (or at least not as severe an issue) when it comes to elected bodies. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Nwanevu thinks the average citizen is too much of a simpleton to be trusted.

Nwanevu then makes a brief half-hearted defense of the 500,000 elected officials in the U.S. and finishes the review with a (rather banal but quite justified) assault on the tropes of “deliberative democracy” – politics is not about discovering facts and finding “correct” solutions. This point has of course nothing to do with sortition, but unfortunately sortition has been tied to “deliberative democracy” and so can be tarred by association to this ideology. Interestingly, when finding targets for this assault Nwanevu does not limit himself to Politics Without Politicians but mines previous books and articles by Landemore. Perhaps the latest book is less committed to “deliberative democracy” than Landemore’s previous work and is more coherent in its argumentation, and therefore it is less vulnerable to opportunistic counter-arguments that are irrelevant to the merits of sortition.

The last few sentences of the review are worth quoting as a sample of the spectacular act of projection that is typical of many arguments against sortition that pretend to be motivated by noble democratic ideals but are in fact no more than an underhanded defense of the status quo:

There are people who believe in the value of human choice and people who do not. There are people who believe in the dignity and worth of all human beings and those who—out of prejudice or for profit—are working to undermine the idea that there is anything of significance about the human being as such. And those of us who bear existential and not merely instrumental commitments to democracy and the continued development of human agency will only prevail if we present democracy as an ideal that can genuinely empower us anew—ideally, on a sounder and surer basis than “one person, one lottery ticket.” Anything less risks, among other things, driving the masses further into the arms of our worst politicians.

Filed under: Academia, Books, Deliberation, Elections, Participation, Press, Sortition |