Ahmed R. Teleb

Sortition and Legitimate Coercion

Posted on March 30, 2015 by Ahmed R. Teleb

In an address called “What is Political Science For?” at the 2013 American Political Science Association’s Annual Meeting, APSA President Jane Mansbridge mentioned sortition as one of the new areas being studied for grounding legitimacy. She referenced Fishkin & Ober in her footnote to the statement. The thrust of her talk is that political scientists (democratic theorists especially) should turn their focus away from preventing tyranny and towards creating “legitimate coercion” because the world is facing rather formidable collective action problems that cannot be solved otherwise. Together with Waldron’s “Political Political Theory” article it leads me to believe that there is some movement in the field towards the questions that we often discuss here on Equality by Lot. Below are some excerpts from the full article found here.

This address advances three ideas. First, political science as a discipline has a mandate to help human beings govern themselves. Second, within this mandate we should be focusing, more than we do now, on creating legitimate coercion. In a world of increasing interdependence we now face an almost infinite number of collective action problems created when something we need or want involves a “free-access good.” We need coercion to solve these collective action problems. The best coercion is normatively legitimate coercion. Democratic theory, however, has focused more on preventing tyranny than on how to legitimate coercion. Finally, our discipline has neglected an important source of legitimate coercion: negotiation to agreement. Recognizing the central role of negotiation in politics would shed a different light on our relatively unexamined democratic commitments to transparency in process and contested elections. This analysis is overall both descriptive and aspirational, arguing that helping human beings to govern themselves has been in the DNA of our profession since its inception.

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Filed under: Academia, Sortition, Theory | Tagged: American Political Science Association, collective action problems, legitimacy, legitimate coercion, Political Science | 9 Comments »

New Democratic Seeds / Gentils Virus Manifesto

Posted on January 26, 2015 by Ahmed R. Teleb

The Chouardists are at it, this time with a new site (in five languages) calling for an allotted constitutional assembly. They explain their project in six “chapters” that you can see along with a visitor count on the left margin. Here is the main page followed by the first part. They have also included what appears to be an endless number of videos of Chouard and some other resources.

It is the explicit proposal which should rally the millions of citizens whose political impotency is programmed in the constitution.

Because it is not the role of the people in power to write the rules of their own power

“We want a democratic Constitutional Assembly, therefore randomly drawn.”

By reading the 6 chapters of this website, you will understand that if you want to change anything in the mechanisms of our current society, you will have to make this message your one and only claim: from its application the rest will follow. To understand the strength of this message, please take a few minutes to read through the six chapters of the website, they are very short.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Action, Applications, Initiatives, Proposals, Sortition | Tagged: Democratic Seeds, Etienne Chouard, Gentils Virus, Le Message | 12 Comments »

Sen. Elizabeth Warren could be a sortition spokesperson

Posted on December 26, 2014 by Ahmed R. Teleb

Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s recent remarks on the Senate floor have been viewed half a million times. She decries the coziness of the big banks with government and names names, coming close to Russell Brand and unknowingly making a case for the use of lot.

The questions these sort of sharp, honest protests raise are the following. Must someone as sophisticated as Sen. Warren draw the connection between contributor-driven electioneering and corruption or could one simply attribute it to the acts of an unscrupulous few who break the rules? When does a critic of a system ceased to simply criticize the system’s non-conformity to its own ideals and begin to question the system itself?

Filed under: Applications, Elections, History, Press | Tagged: Elizabeth Warren, Russell Brand, Senate | 2 Comments »

Wilding’s Multibody Sortition in the UK

Posted on December 21, 2014 by Ahmed R. Teleb

In a Huffington Post article a few days ago, Martin Wilding introduced the public to the idea of allotted panels and assemblies in a scheme somewhat similar to that of Terry Bouricius. He addressed the typical objections to sortition and urged people to organize local meetups to discuss the idea.

Wilding calls for local Community Assemblies consisting of deliberative Forums and voting Plebiscaries, a judicial Advocacy, and a Citizen’s Advice Bureau–mostly selected by lot I believe.

What if you could vote to exchange your right to vote for an equal opportunity to participate directly in government? How about if that meant an end to the political parties of which the data suggests you’re unlikely to be a member and the career politicians in whom opinion polls suggest you have no trust?

[…]

The status quo is not sacrosanct. The rules by which we are governed are not set in stone. If you feel your representatives don’t, in fact, represent you, you have the means to change the system that keeps them in business.

Or you could just carry on voting for the least unappealing option and hope that somehow things will change of their own accord.

There were a few comments on the comment thread of the article. I haven’t seen if there have been any responses elsewhere online. This could be a good place to discuss the scheme suggested and the article’s reception.

Filed under: Action, Initiatives, Sortition | Tagged: UK, Wilding | 4 Comments »

A Citizen Jury in Action: Report from Morris Rural Climate Dialog

Posted on July 19, 2014 by Ahmed R. Teleb

Speaking of Citizen Juries, I’ve wanted to share something about this “Rural Climate Dialogue” since I attended as an observer last month in a small town in the Minnesota prairie. Below are excerpts from the participants. The the full report includes a statement to the public drafted entirely by the 15 randomly selected participants and an explanation of the CJ process as facilitated by the Jefferson Center.

Personally, I was quite impressed by what these regular people–the youngest a high school teenager, the eldest in her 80s–were able to do. They actually listened, engaged each other, and decided together. Unanimity was not required but almost always reached. Even their writing-in-committee was well done.

I was very impressed with this group’s ability to come together as community members, as neighbors, and talk about these things in an open, civil, and friendly manner.

I have to admit when I came here when people talked about climate [change] I thought ‘oh come on’ – did I ever learn a lot. I am grateful.

I think I’ll be a little bit more active and learn a little bit more in the future as a result of that. The overall experience was wonderful and the people were great.

We are the ones responsible for making these decisions…I’m thrilled and honored to be a part of a process that reminds me why this grand [democratic] experiment continues. And it’s not been perfect, and it will not be perfect, but we can always make it better, and things like this are a start. Thank you for the opportunity.

Filed under: Action, education, Experiments, Juries, Participation, Sortition | Tagged: citizen deliberation, Citizen Jury, Jefferson Center, Morris Minnesota | 9 Comments »

“Academic Choice Theory” in Political Science?

Posted on June 30, 2014 by Ahmed R. Teleb

There is a rather brilliant satire on the Naked Capitalism blog about how the incentives (positive feedback loops) create a systemic bias among economists to expound theories that support the status quo or the biggest wallets. Sortition and rotation of economists is suggested as a remedy.

What kinds of proposals could help to minimize value destruction by academic economists? You are quite right that from the point of view of the public this issue looms large. Even in most Western democracies, more than half of the total GDP is allocated according to principles promoted by agents subject to Academic Choice dynamics, i.e. economists. One simple remedy to the large negative externalities generated through their academic entrepreneurship could be to shrink the size of the sector of academic economists.

Another approach is indicated by the game theoretic insight that winning strategies in competitive games usually involve a random element. Following this principle, ever since antiquity trials have been decided by juries who are chosen by lot. We should therefore strongly consider periodically repopulating economics departments with people selected at random.

I wonder how many political scientists see a kind of “academic choice theory” in operation in the profession?

Filed under: Academia, Sortition, Theory | Tagged: academic choice theory, economics, rational choice theory | 1 Comment »

The Warm, Fuzzy Side of Sortition: When Deliberation Goes Right

Posted on April 21, 2014 by Ahmed R. Teleb

Has anyone read Tom Atlee’s Empowering Public Wisdom: A Practical Vision of Citizen-Led Politics? Chapter 5 is called “Citizenship and Randomly Selected Ad Hoc Mini-Publics.”

Tom’s been an advocate of sortition for decades and it seems there hasn’t yet been a discussion of his thought on Equality by Lot. Beyond being a long-time advocate of “Citizen Deliberative Councils” and other sorts of minipublics, he has deep insights into group dynamics—the conditions under which groups go beyond simple bargaining and reach something closer to creative wisdom.

In my humble opinion, there’s an inadvertent academic bias on this blog that leaves out significant work from activists and non-academic writers like Tom. I think it would serve us well to do otherwise.

To that end I will list some brilliant ideas I’ve gleaned from his latest book, Empowering Public Wisdom (2012), and from reading some of his blog.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Applications, Books, Experiments, meta, Sortition | Tagged: group dynamics, group faciliation, group wisdom, Tom Atlee | 18 Comments »

Epistemic Democracy and Sortition

Posted on January 28, 2014 by Ahmed R. Teleb

In order to spark a discussion of the significance or relevance of “epistemic democracy” to the use of randomly selected assemblies, juries, or other minipublics, I paste my (very positive) review of Democratic Reason. A short paper by David Estlund called “Introduction to Epistemic Approaches to Democracy” names at least four flavors of epistemic democracy. I believe Landemore’s is it’s “purest” form and therefore a good one to discuss.

How relevant or significant is the epistemic approach? How relevant or significant is the work on diversity and group decision making? How much does all this depend on empirical work not yet done by political scientists?

What empirical studies are out there that Kleroterians would recommend to other sortinistas and to the general public?

Review of Democratic Reason

This book follows the recent trend in democratic theory termed “epistemic democracy” in a novel way. Rather than relying on liberal philosophy or an analogy with science, it begins with results in mathematics, decision theory, psychology and cognitive science. It also mentions an evolutionary basis for the superiority of group decision making.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Books, Sortition, Theory | 49 Comments »

Skin-in-the-game Argument: Citizen Warriors and Origins of Democracy

Posted on January 16, 2014 by Ahmed R. Teleb

In First Democracy: The Challenge of an Ancient Idea, Paul Woodruff argues that democracy became and remained the Athenian form of government for mainly two reasons:

1) It ended class warfare and created a harmonious community.

but perhaps more importantly,

2) It provided free citizen warriors (in the form of naval rowers) who identified with the state and were therefore willing to make sacrifices for it.

Woodruff says that if so many rowers were not needed for Athenian navies’ ships, elites may not have allowed the people (the many) to wield as much power as they did.

Being not at all a historian, I ask those who know more about ancient history to agree or disagree with the above assessment.

Did military need provide the conditions for democracy in Athens?

Does the state (or elites) today need something in exchange for genuine democracy?

What would today’s state (or elites) want from the people in return? Citizen consumers?

[I hope there is something less cynical than my last suggestion.]

Filed under: Athens, Books, History | 46 Comments »