7. “Idiocracy” (39:20). Bennett brings up the matter of people expressing a lack of trust in the knowledge or intelligence of their fellow citizens and asks Troesoyer if he has “any anxiety over handing normal people power over their lives”. Troesoyer responds that sortition would force society to improve its system of education (presumably so that people have more knowledge and are more intelligent).
This response is problematic because it in effect accepts the classical elitist notion that people’s ability to rule depends on their education. The correct response to Bennett’s question appears to me to be: “Any change involves risk, so some anxiety is natural. But I support democracy and that means that I believe that people should have power over their lives. Others may surely believe otherwise, but then they are opponents of democracy, and they should acknowledge that”.
As for the role of education: Education should primarily be seen as a good on its own. Any additional effects, such as better governance or technological improvements would be side benefits. Education should not in any way be seen as a qualification for self-rule. To take an obvious example, an illiterate person would be a better representative of their own interests (and quite likely of other illiterate people) than a literate person would be.
8. “Mature democracies” (48:15). As he is making an important point about the lack of good reasons to expect any of the commonly-proposed fixes for electoralism to provide meaningful democratization, Troesoyer uses the standard liberal narrative of “democratic recession” about “a serious problem with democracy affecting every mature democracy around the world, […] sliding toward authoritarianism”. This narrative is counter-productive.
First, the use of the term “mature democracies” to describe electoralist systems reinforces the false notion that electoralism is somehow, in its pure and unadulterated form, inherently democratic. This notion is further reinforced by the claim that those systems are now “sliding toward authoritarianism”. This claim implies the existence of a mythical past golden age in which those systems functioned as desired, and which, for some unspecified reason, possibly the fickleness of the public, or the inexplicable rise of demagogic politicians, was lost to time.
If the sortitionist argument is that elections are inherently oligarchical, then we must dislodge the entrenched conventional wisdom that elections are democratic – in some ideal form, if not in practice. Every time we use the common coin of “mature democracies” or “Western democracies” we reinforce this conventional wisdom instead of undermining it. Every time we accept that the problem with current politics is “sliding toward authoritarianism” or “growing polarization” or “populism” and any of those tropes, we accept the framing of a glorious electoralist past which can be revived and in this way weaken the claim that electoralism is inherently anti-democratic and that democracy requires replacing elections with sortition.
9. Sortition in the judiciary (56:30). Finally, Bennett raises the question of using sortition in the judiciary. Strengthening the sortition-based elements that are already in place seems like the natural way to go, and Troesoyer takes this route when he suggests having a jury select from different opinions written by judges, while also allowing the jury to select “none of the above” and have an allotted body write its own opinion.
But if we accept that an allotted body can write their own opinions, why do we need the selection from a set of opinions phase? This adds complication to the process and while not adding any clear benefits, adds the potential downside of giving an elite group a disproportional influence on the process. The fact that the jury can vote for “none of the above” reduces, but far from eliminates, that disproportional influence. Of course, the allotted opinion-writing body can and should consult with experts on various topics when writing its opinions, but the experts should always be – in this case as in all cases – providing input to be used or ignored by the allotted as they see fit rather than have an official proposal-generating role.
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Yoram:> To take an obvious example, an illiterate person would be a better representative of their own interests (and quite likely of other illiterate people) than a literate person would be.
Why?
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> Why?
Are you asserting the opposite? Or aiming for deliberate ambiguity?
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I take the (politically incorrect) view that the prefix in “il-literacy” indicates a deficiency (ditto “dis-ability”). My own literacy is confined to English and a smattering of French, so if I want to benefit from knowledge expressed in (say) Spanish or Chinese it would be in my interests to consult a native speaker (or Google translate). As for the claim that I would make a better representative of others who shared my disability, Hanna Pitkin pointed out 60 years ago that there is no obvious connection between descriptive representation and the representation of interests.
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I hope folks watch the Idiocracy section to see how much more compelling Ian’s actual response is than either Yoram’s grotesque caricature of it or his “correct” alternative.
Ian first compares the concerns to those voiced in historic opposition expansion of voting rights and says that the concerns are unfounded. Then, after discussion CLR James’ writing about sortition, he wraps in historic arguments against self-governance in colonies, where colonizers cited lack of education as a rationale for opposing independence. He labels that argument with color and insists “No. Empowerment should come first.” And then he suggests that empowerment (via any mechanism) would drive clarity about the value of education for a populace. There is no hint of a suggestion that political decision makers need a formal education, just that education can help the population as a whole becomes more self sufficient.
Ian is arguing clearly and persuasively against the “elitist notion that people’s ability to rule depends on their education.” He does so by casting the idiocracy argument as in line with historic arguments of slavers, misogynists, and colonizers – a concrete, savvy, effective, and inviting appeal. Contrast that with the abstract, condescending, scolding, proffered “correct response,” which hinges on extracting a confession of bad faith. All zeal, no appeal.
Bummer. This could be a cool site, but the hitman vs. strawman bit gets old fast.
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Ethan:> This could be a cool site, but the hitman vs. strawman bit gets old fast.
Yes indeed, it’s tragic really.
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Ethan, Thank you for expanding on Ian’s argument. It reminds me of something Mortimer Adler wrote – though I am sure others have said it similarly. The illiterate surely know it is desirable for them or their children to obtain an education, but this may be infeasible (or very difficult) for the poor to obtain, unless the state pays for it or subsidizes it. Nor will the wealthy vote to subsidize it; only the poor or other non-wealthy can be counted on to vote for an education subsidy. At least in the U.S., purported literacy requirements for voting have been used to exclude blacks from voting.
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@Carl, Historically as far as I’m aware, education was advocated as an elite interest to indoctrinate the poor and working class. This is the claim made by Agustina Paglayan (UC San Diego, Political Science & Public Policy).
>The introduction of broadly accessible primary education was not mainly a response to industrialization, or fueled by democratic ideals, or even aimed at eradicating illiteracy or improving skills. It was motivated instead by elites’ fear of the masses—and the desire to turn the “savage,” “unruly,” and “morally flawed” children of the lower classes into well-behaved future citizens who would obey the state and its laws.
Education is pervasive because the wealthy and powerful *do* want to subsidize it.
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Yoram,
I think critique can be positive. Your critique has been helpful to me. However, I do think that a more generous reading of the interview would indicate that…
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John, I don’t claim to be an expert on education history. I suspect Paglayan’s 2024 book provides only one interpretation among many. In the book blurb, “Paglayan shows that governments invested in primary schools when internal threats heightened political elites’ anxiety around mass violence and the breakdown of social order.” This is consistent with the hypothesis that the rich won’t fund education for the poor, unless the poor start to make trouble for the rich (or the poor vote for it). In addition, both the poor and the rich desire that their fellow citizens be “well-behaved” and “obey the state and its laws.”
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Above “Anonymous” to John was me.
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Ian,
I recognize that, unlike many other participants in the discussions about sortition, here and elsewhere, you are committed to democratic values. I believe that precision in how we think about democracy and about sortition and how arguments for sortition are constructed is important for the promotion of sortition as a democratizing force and for preventing the corruption of this hugely important idea. My critique of your arguments is thus not due to me being “ungenerous”. My points aim to align the arguments you make with the democratic values, which I believe we hold in common.
[I’ll probably address some of the other comments above later.]
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Also on the subject of education, most democrats believe in equal opportunity. For children, this requires adequate or more-than-adequate access to education resources while growing up. In the U.S., local schools are usually funded through local property taxes. The result is that schools in rich districts are well funded; schools in poor districts are poorly funded. In principle, state taxes could supplement or supplant local funding sources so as to equalize spending on schools in all districts, but this is usually not done. Only about 17 of 50 states use some progressive formula to (partially) equalize the funding across school districts.
Perhaps this is a democratic political equilibrium where people living in middle districts see little or no advantage in transferring funds from rich districts to poor districts, if middle districts would still receive about the same funding level for schools. If it is a democratic political equilibrium, perhaps the same result would hold regardless of whether states are run by electoral democracy, direct democracy, or sortition democracy. In the U.S., several states (including California) permit direct democracy initiatives that could (provided enough signatures gathered and voters agree) institute any school funding reform that the voters desire.
Alternatively, one could argue that sortition democracy might do better, perhaps by instituting some more progressive funding formula in all states. If so, why so? It is difficult to argue that unequal funding is due to lack of good information about relative funding levels or general lack of interest in ensuring children receive a good education. So how would sortition make a significant difference on this issue?
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Ethan,
> I hope folks watch the Idiocracy section to see how much more compelling Ian’s actual response is than either Yoram’s grotesque caricature of it or his “correct” alternative.
By all means, people should watch the video. It is a pretty good one, like all of Ian’s material. I also provide timestamps to allow readers to easily find the segments to which I refer. When watching the video (and when reading arguments for or against sortition in general), the reader should be attentive to the assumptions being made. Here and elsewhere I am pointing out that often the arguments being made for sortition are in fact based on anti-democratic assumptions. I think that in the present case this is inadvertent. Ian in fact does not hold anti-democratic positions and would prefer to change his arguments so that the anti-democratic assumptions are not implied. In other cases the anti-democratic assumptions do in fact reflect the authors’ underlying anti-democratic ideology.
> Bummer. This could be a cool site, but the hitman vs. strawman bit gets old fast.
This is a cool site. It is a site where intellectual rigor is pursued, where arguments are dissected and wishy-washy formulas are challenged and refuted. The last thing this site needs is to be converted into another forum where inane, elitist, status quo preserving, on-the-one-hand-but-on-the-other-hand, “reasoned debate” clichés are endlessly and uselessly rehashed. Such forums abound and they may be very useful for academics to promote their careers but they are intellectually deadening and politically worse than useless. This site aims to be much more than “cool” and interesting – it aims to contribute to democratizing society.
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Yoram:> Sutherland, who asserts that illiterate people are “disabled”
To be clear, my argument was that the preface in “il-literate” presupposes a lack that descriptive representation cannot automatically overcome. I accept Carl and John’s observations but it’s impossible to refute axiomatic statements (“x is the best advocate of her own interests”) with argument and/or evidence.
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Carl,
> the rich won’t fund education for the poor, unless the poor start to make trouble for the rich (or the poor vote for it).
Oops – that last bit in the parentheses is a reversion toward the electoralist dogma. In an electoralist system, the poor cannot set their prefered policy. They can only “vote for” something that is offered by some faction of the elite. The question is why was education for the poor offered at all.
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Carl,
> Alternatively, one could argue that sortition democracy might do better, perhaps by instituting some more progressive funding formula in all states. If so, why so? It is difficult to argue that unequal funding is due to lack of good information about relative funding levels or general lack of interest in ensuring children receive a good education. So how would sortition make a significant difference on this issue?
Because presumably a large majority does believe that everybody should get a good education, and it is only the electorlist system with its inherent oligarchical structure that prevents those values from being converted into policy. (This is the case with healthcare as well, by the way.)
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I disagree with the notion that an electoral system is inherently oligarchical or that elites determine who may run for or win office. Candidates for public office are free to offer any policies on education or healthcare or any other issue, if they believe doing so will win them enough votes. Indeed, candidates for public office offer a wide variety of policies, far wider than any elite might desire or approve. Education for the poor was offered by candidates, because the poor and middle class wanted it and voted for it, not simply because the rich generously (or grudgingly) decided to provide it.
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> I disagree with the notion that an electoral system is inherently oligarchical or that elites determine who may run for or win office.
Electoralism is inherently oligarchical not because “the elites determine who may run for or win office” but because, regardless of elite volition, elections mechanically and unavoidably allow only members of the elite to be elected. This effect, sometimes called “the principle of distinction”, is the most fundamental and central attribute of electoralism. It was first articulated by Bernard Manin in his book Principles of representative government (1995).
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Yoram:> elections mechanically and unavoidably allow only members of the elite to be elected.
Note Yoram reduces Carl’s “elites” to the singular case and ignores his point that voters ultimately have the whip hand. We should also acknowledge that Manin’s principle of distinction makes no necessary connection with “the rich”, as voters choose between a variety of distinctive candidates. I can’t speak for America, but in the UK political success and wealth are not directly correlated and voters generally select by party, not person (most candidates are not particularly distinctive, distinguished or wealthy). We should not fall into the trap of replacing a couple of lines from Aristotle Politics on oligarchy and democracy with a similar (mis)understanding of Manin. Political theory has little time for axiomatic and deductive reasoning.
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Thank you, Keith. In America, partisan labels still matter, but elections are currently corrupted by unlimited amounts of unregulated private campaign finance and dark money. Even so, it is not a simple matter for even a rich person to “buy” an election — voters and candidates have their own ways of fighting back — but it does heavily tilt the field. Electoral democracies elsewhere are not obligated to accept this particular deficiency.
Yoram, If I am a high school drop-out accused of a crime, who is most likely to represent me best before a court? a) my friend who is also a high school drop-out (just like me!), b) a lawyer who graduated college and law school and passed the bar exam (so distinctive!), or c) me, myself, and I (so direct!). [Hint for high school drop-outs: b is the correct answer.] [Extra credit for college graduates: What implications does this have for rational voting in an electoral democracy?]
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Carl,
First, it is worth noting that you just shifted your ground. One comment ago you were arguing that elections are not oligarchical – that normal people can be elected. Now you are arguing that even if they are oligarchical, and that the choice of credible candidates is limited to an elite, then this is all for the best since the hoi polloi would be best served by having experts in charge.
As for this new argument, far from it being new, it is in fact, of course, at least 2,500 years old. It is, however, as fallacious today as it was when Socrates made it (and when, it seems, his fellow Athenian citizens were not at all impressed with it). The problem with this argument is that the question of governance is not analogous to the question of whether an accused would want to use the services of a professional lawyer (or whether the owner of a ship would want to use a professional pilot to navigate his ship, as Socrates put things). This question assumes that there is a professional whose advice “we all” trust and whose advice we want to follow.
But if this were the situation, then it would not matter who has decision making-power since whoever has decision-making power would inevitably consult with that agreed-upon professional and would follow their advice. Thus the entire question of who makes decisions presupposes that there is some disagreement about what is the best course of action – including who would be the best person to consult with.
What you (and Socrates) are in fact arguing for is the imposition of decision-makers on people who do not in fact agree that these decision-makers would promote their interests.
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Yoram, you appear to have misunderstood what I am saying. All four paragraphs in your response are irrelevant to what I said. I never said “the choice of credible candidates is limited to an elite.” Just as I might hire a plumber to advise me (or perform) my plumbing, or hire a medical doctor to advise me (or treat me) on health matters, so do groups of people find it useful to hire (vote for) skillful people to represent their views, opinions, and interests on legislative or political matters. Not everyone likes the same plumber, or the same medical doctor, or votes for the same political candidate or party. I never said I agreed with Socrates (or Plato) that there is only one right way to do governance or only one small set of skillful people who qualify.
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Carl,
Your argument is almost verbatim the argument made by Socrates. If you’re not saying that having experts as rulers is a good thing, then what is your point?
By the way, Socrates did not assert that “there is only […] one small set of skillful people who qualify” either. This assertion is an implicit assumption of his argument (the state of ship should be navigated by skilled pilots), just like it is an implicit assumption of yours (our business should be handled by qualified professionals – e.g., lawyers).
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My example of lawyers in a courtroom only pertains to the courtroom, not other aspects of public governance, for which additional expertise aside from lawyering is often quite useful. I am aware of Plato’s argument placed in the mouth of Socrates, and I will simply repeat that I am not saying this (or implying it). The voting public determines what level or type of talents or expertise it desires in its leaders.
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Manin’s “principle of distinction” is agnostic regarding what characteristics voters would, or should privilege (talents, expertise, character, gift of the gab). And I never tire of quoting Ledru-Rollin (1848): “there go the people, I must follow them because I’m their leader”.
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Yoram,
Do you think that convening Civic Assemblies with the buy-in from any kind of elected power is worth doing? (I can guess your response to arguments such as “working alongside electeds” is good, but what about the value of spreading and demonstrating that randomly selected people can effectively work together, albeit within the constraint of needing to make “good recommendations” that will be favorably looked upon by electeds)
I find a major hurdle when I talk to people about sortition is beyond the moral argument that people should make their own decicions. They often want to fight purely on the issue of whether or not random people are any “good at it”, so to speak. Of course, they are all implicitly judging these people by what they themselves consider to be the good, or would consider to be the good if they thought long and hard about a given a issue.
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Hi Max,
Judging a system of government by its outcomes rather than based on any formal criteria makes a lot of sense to me. (It is something I’ve actually been arguing here for on this blog.) Sortition should be thought of as a promising means toward good outcomes rather than an objective. So, yes, wanting to discuss the prospects of sortition of delivering good outcomes is a good idea.
What seems unlikely is that “experiments” with elite-controlled allotted bodies would be a good way to establish a good track record for allotted bodies. The elites certainly have no interest in setting up a process that would result in democratization of society. So unless we believe that the elites are foolish enough to work against their own interests, we should not expect an elite controlled process to end up in widespread support for transferring power from the elected and their allies to meaningfully democratic allotted bodies.
The way forward with sortition, in my opinion, is to find specific, limited functions where the elected and other elites are highly mistrusted, or have a very clear conflict of interest. (For example, setting up and enforcing the rules of ethics for elected officials.) For those cases support for an independent power base for those functions would be very high, and applying sortition to such specific limited functions would arouse little apprehension. Then popular political pressure should be mobilized to set up independent permanent allotted bodies for those specific functions. It would be hard for the elected and their allies to resist such pressure because their resistance would seem self-serving. Once such bodies are set up, they would serve as much better test cases for sortition than any elite-sanctioned bodies could.
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Yoram, Regularly meeting citizen juries or assemblies for “setting up and enforcing the rules of ethics for elected officials” might not appeal to corrupt or captured officials, but it should be possible to generate enough public pressure to “force” elected officials to go along. I should think that almost any use of citizen juries or assemblies that does not immediately threaten the jobs of elected officials can probably get passed by legislatures, if the public can be persuaded to want it enough. Also, there are some states where sortition (or any other proposal) can be put to a direct vote, if enough people sign a petition. The immediate issue is lack of public knowledge of sortition as a sensible alternative, rather than hostility on the part of elected officials.
Hence, the immediate priority is to get sortition into the public consciousness as a viable supplement to elected or appointed offices, not as an immediate replacement for elected officials. Only after the public has had experience with sortition (for a few decades, at least) can we sensibly discuss the possibility of replacing elected officials with some kind of sortition as a selection or governing mechanism. In my view, a hybrid involving various elements of direct democracy, electoral democracy, and sortition democracy is likely to work better than any of these three alone. Hence, the day when sortition replaces elections may never arrive, and it certainly won’t arrive right away – so the elected need not fear sortition as part of a hybrid.
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Yoram:> Sortition should be thought of as a promising means toward good outcomes rather than an objective. . . a good way to establish a good track record for allotted bodies
Establishing what is or isn’t a “good outcome” or “good track record” isn’t a trivial matter. Opinion polls can be manipulated and election can also play a role in judging the performance of governmental bodies over time. If a small sortitional body is charged with oversight, it cannot be assumed that this will necessarily converge with public opinion (hence the need for very large juries in Athenian governance).
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