Machiavellian Democracy

Posted on April 14, 2011 by keithsutherland

John P. McCormick’s new book (Machiavellian Democracy, CUP, 2011) is a fascinating attempt to appropriate insights from Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy (1513-17) in order to moderate some of the worst excesses of modern ‘democracy’ – in particular the Florentine’s advocacy of class-based magistracies to constrain the oppressive ‘humor’ of the grandi (political elite). Machiavelli’s template for this is the institutions of the Roman republic, especially the People’s Tribunes. Roman Tribunes were elected exclusively from plebeian ranks and were charged with popular advocacy; McCormick’s suggestion is that a modern equivalent (for the US) might involve fifty-one tribunes selected by an annual sortition from the whole population (apart from the wealthiest 10% of family households). The powers of the tribunes would be three-fold (p.184):

1.     To veto, by majority vote, one piece of congressional legislation, one executive order and one Supreme Court decision p.a.

2.     To call one annual referendum p.a. which, if ratified, would take on the force of federal statute.

3.     To initiate impeachment proceedings against one federal official from each of three branches of government. McCormick is particularly attracted to the Roman practice of political trials – any citizen could publicly accuse magistrates of malfeasance and this would prompt a hearing in a voting assembly, which could comprise the entire citizenry.

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The Triumph of Election

Posted on April 11, 2011 by keithsutherland

Why did the American founders ignore the case for sortition? It was well known at the time that sortition was one of the primary mechanisms of Athenian democracy and this explains why Madison and his Federalist chums (who were no democrats) ignored it. But even Antifederalists (who argued the democratic case for descriptive representation) failed to propose sortition as a means to establish a legislature that was a ‘portrait in miniature’ of the whole community. According to Bernard Manin it was philosophy – in the form of the Natural Right theory of consent – that was the principle cause of the ‘triumph of election’ (Manin, 1997, Ch.2). But is this true?

James Fishkin points out that the etymological root of ‘deliberation’ (deliberationem) is ‘weighing’ (2009, p.35), so when a randomly-selected assembly member of an allotted chamber (AC) ‘like me’ weighs up the arguments and judges accordingly then I am descriptively represented. But is it possible to take this further and argue that I thereby consent to the judgment of a randomly-selected assembly? The argument for this further claim would need to take the following lines (paraphrasing Fishkin, 2009):

  1. Someone ‘like’ me would, ex hypothesi, exercise judgment in the same way that I would myself. The argument does not require a definition of the ‘likeness’ criteria (age, gender, occupation, political preferences etc.), as the randomization process in principle reflects the incidence of any quality in the general population.
  2. The number of representatives ‘like me’ in an allotted assembly would be proportionate to the number in the general population. If the sample is not sufficiently fine-grained to accurately reflect the distribution of any quality deemed to be salient to the exercise of political judgment then the sample numbers would need to be increased accordingly: only a relatively small sample would be needed to provide an accurate gender balance, whereas the proportional representation of, say, albinos or molecular microbiologists would require a larger sample. The rapid growth of the polling industry is a testimonial to the accuracy and validity of the probability sampling principle.
  3. Therefore the aggregate judgment of the allotted assembly would represent the considered judgment of the whole population. This was the principle behind the nomothetai (legislative assemblies) introduced in fourth-century Athens.
  4. All electors are currently deemed to consent to the results of a general election, whether or not ‘their’ candidate was victorious; so the same principle should apply to the result of a vote in an allotted assembly (the only difference being the employment of one or other of the two mechanisms – election or sortition – that constitute a ‘ballot’.) Although one might argue that the ‘consent’ involved is at best tacit, hypothetical (or some other form of ‘useful fiction’), the same is true in both instances of the ‘ballot’.

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What Sortition Can and Cannot Do

Posted on March 3, 2011 by keithsutherland

There is considerable disagreement regarding the political potential of sortition. Dowlen (2008) argues that sortition is not primarily a system of representation as its invention in classical time predates the discovery of probability. Fishkin (2009) has long advocated sortition as a method of deliberative polling but has not (to date) suggested that it should be incorporated permanently into the system of governance. A host of writers (including the present author) have argued that sortition should either replace or supplement the institutions of electoral democracy as part of a mixed constitutional settlement. At the opposite end of the spectrum to Fishkin a small number of brave souls (mostly active on this blog) have argued for the wholesale replacement of electoral democracy by sortition. In this post I argue that, for purely conceptual reasons, the role of sortition can only be one, albeit an essential, part of a mixed constitution and that the attempt to extend its usage beyond this role undermines any claims that it may have to be a democratic mechanism. My case is based on some partially developed arguments in Pitkin (1967).

In her book The Concept of Representation, Hannah Pitkin argues that there are a variety of aspects to representation – aesthetic, symbolic, formalistic, descriptive and active – the latter two being the most relevant to political representation. Descriptive representation involves “standing for” and requires a degree of identity between the representative and her constituency, as evidenced by contemporary demands for all-women candidate shortlists and positive discrimination on account of ethnic minorities. Random selection is the best way of achieving descriptive representation, hence James Fishkin’s choice of this method for his Deliberative Polling programme. On the other hand, Active representation requires the representative (in a similar manner to a trustee or advocate) to act in the interests of her constituents; there is no intrinsic need for the representative to in any way mirror their identity, thereby justifying electoral representation in single-member constituencies. According to Pitkin, descriptive representation does not cover what the representatives do, while active representation is indifferent to who does it.
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Equality by Lot

Posted on February 27, 2011 by keithsutherland

Over the last two decades a number of books and journal articles have advocated the integration of sortition into constitutional practice (as opposed to the purely advisory role of Deliberative Polling and citizen juries on electoral reform). With the noted exception of Callenbach and Phillips’ Citizen Legislature all of the proposals have been subject to powerful criticisms by Yoram Gat, the moderator of this blog. Gat has been remarkably consistent in his criticisms, his prime objection being that the proposals are insufficiently radical as, by retaining a statutory role for the plural institutions of liberal democracy, they fail to adhere in full to the principles of Athenian-style sortive democracy – i.e. equality by lot.

What Gat has failed to do to date, however, is to provide us with a detailed and comprehensive constitutional programme of his own, nor pointed us towards any material that he has published elsewhere, so as a result his own proposals have not been subject to comparable scrutiny. Having corresponded with him at considerable length – offline as well as on this blog – he has been admirably consistent with his views, making it possible to reconstruct such a model from our exchanges alone, and I have been alarmed at how illiberal the model has turned out to be. If the man that I construct in this post turns out to be only made of straw, then I apologise in advance and look forward to Yoram’s corrections in the commentary section, but I’m entirely confident that his personal commitment to equality will ensure that he will not seek to exercise his moderator powers by suppressing this post.
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Inshallah

Posted on February 15, 2011 by keithsutherland

Our ongoing debate on Egypt got me thinking about the connection (or lack of it) between sortition and religion. Fustel de Coulanges’ 1864 account, that lot was the revelation of divine will, was discredited by Headlam in 1891 and nobody has sought to revive it. Similarly, as Conall Boyle points out in his edition of Gataker, lotteries were only acceptable in the Judaeo-Christian tradition in so far as they didn’t involve claims about divine revelation.

On the other hand Oliver Dowlen argues that the disappearance of lot may well be connected with religious factors, as sortition appears to have been a victim of the Reformation:

There are many reasons why the process of selecting nominators by lot might have been lost in the transition from Venice to the New World. . . The drawing of the lottery was very much a public process, witnessed by the whole community or reggimento. To the puritan settlers this could have seemed a very foreign, bizarre public ritual which smacked of superstition – even Catholicism. The secret ballot, on the other hand, conformed to the Protestant ideal that the private individual should be alone in his judgement and answerable only to God. (Dowlen, Political Potential of Sortition, p.163)

The question that I’m leading up to – and it’s no more than that – is would sortition-based politics be more acceptable to Muslim sensibilities than (Western) electoral politics, and might this possibly account for the failure of electoral democracy in the Arab world?

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The Party’s Over: Blueprint for a Very English Revolution

Posted on February 3, 2011 by keithsutherland

Greg requested an outline of my structural proposals for the introduction of sortition, so here goes. It’s a talk I gave recently to the University of Brighton Philosophy Society. The focus is the UK parliament, but the principles are more general.

It’s become a commonplace that our political arrangements are in bad shape. Party leaders know we’ve twigged that there is no connection between manifesto commitments and actual policies, yet for some reason we don’t call their bluff – those of us who still turn out to vote give politicians the benefit of the doubt by maintaining that polite fiction called democracy. Party membership has declined catastrophically since the middle of the last century – parties now do little more than reflect what focus groups say we want, rather than continuing to stand for a particular manner of thinking, or specific socio-economic interests. So what is the point of the party?

The argument that I want to put forward this evening is that tinkering around with the electoral system by introducing AV or proportional representation is just re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. What is needed is clear thinking, we need to bring to bear the tools of the philosopher via:

  • A clear analysis of the relevant concepts and categories
  • A thorough understanding of the history of political thought

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The Enfranchisement Lottery – a commentary

Posted on December 18, 2010 by keithsutherland

I assume that everyone has by now read Claudio López-Guerra’s excellent paper. It was circulated on Conall Boyle’s email list and is available from the author: claudio.lopezguerra@cide.edu. The paper compares the enfranchisement lottery with universal suffrage and concludes that, although the former is clearly an improvement from an epistemic point of view (ensuring that voters are properly informed), universal suffrage wins on account of being more conducive to political stability. I would like to make the alternative case – the epistemic benefits come out on top because political stability is ensured by factors other than the ‘perceived fairness’ of universal suffrage.

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Law in Action

Posted on November 11, 2010 by keithsutherland

The armchair constitution-building on this forum has been, for the most part, abstract and speculative, so I’d like to bring it down to earth with a specific case-study. The recession in the UK has been serious and the consensus amongst economists is that any enduring recovery will be export-driven, as the home market is still highly indebted. In the last two years the domestic market in China has grown rapidly and most countries are now targeting their exports in that direction (the UK currently accounts for only 1% of Chinese imports). But China has an appalling human rights record, leading some to say that the UK should have a similar policy to China as with South Africa in the apartheid regime. Thus we have a classical political dilemma, so let’s explore possible outcomes in the light of three constitutional models:

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Strange Days

Posted on July 22, 2010 by keithsutherland

Went to see The Doors biopic (highly recommended) the other day and was surprised to catch Jim Morrison saying something like “We don’t need an elected president, we need a jury democracy”. As this was the prelude to the notorious Miami concert rant nobody picked up on it as it was overshadowed by the resulting obscenity trial.

Morrison was famously well-read but it was more Rimbaud and Nietzsche than Herodotus. This would suggest that sortition-based ideas might have been circulating in the student radicalism movement at the time of the Vietnam war protests.  Can anyone cast any light on this, and did anyone else catch Morrison’s remark in the movie?

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