The Blind Break and the Invisible Hand, Part 1

Posted on October 15, 2013 by keithsutherland

Last week’s sortition workshop at Queen Mary, University of London was entitled Sortition and the Consolidation of Democracy. The host and academic convenor was Oliver Dowlen, who was a research fellow at QM, and most of the papers adopted the Dowlen-Stone ‘Lottery Thesis’ that the primary value of sortition is as a prophylactic to protect the political system from factionalism and corruption — a principle that Dowlen and Stone attribute to the arational ‘Blind Break’ introduced by the lottery mechanism. The main focus of my commentary is Peter Stone’s (draft) paper, ‘Democracy and Good Government’ (Stone, 2013), but my arguments are addressed to all three signatories of the ‘Dublin Declaration’ (Delannoi, Dowlen and Stone, 2013),* which, whilst acknowledging that sortition is also a way of instituting ‘descriptive’ representation, concluded that this was a ‘weak’ use of the lot. My claim in this commentary is that the ‘Blind Break’ is a) politically conservative (sortition is capable of protecting the integrity of any political system, not just democracy) and b) philosophically tautological (its ‘strength’ is entirely reliant on the pre-definition of the Lottery Principle).
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Filed under: Sortition, Theory | 12 Comments »

On theory and pragmatics

Posted on October 8, 2013 by keithsutherland

For some time the sharp disagreements — often ending up as slanging matches — between different members of this forum has intrigued me. If we are all part of the tiny community that is interested in, or even believes in, sortition, then why do we so often come to blows and indulge in name-calling? This post is an attempt to unpack this issue and, hopefully, help us deal with disagreements better in the future. That’s not to say that we should seek consensus, only that we should understand why others might find our own views difficult to stomach.

Theory

Let’s start with the name of this blog — Equality by Lot. Equality is a mathematical abstraction (“no equality without equations!”), which morphed, over time, into a normative ideal. The first philosopher to develop a normative understanding of equality was Plato, but his treatment of equality appears very strange to modern sensibilities. Plato distinguished “mere” arithmetic equality from equality of value, in which each person should receive according to his desert (geometric equality). This has some parallel in Christian thought via the Parable of the Talents (“For to everyone who has will be given, and he will have abundance, but from him who doesn’t have, even that which he has will be taken away.”) However modern Christian sensibilities privilege the (alternative) biblical view that we are all (arithmetically) equal in the eyes of God. This is the view that Jefferson adopted for the first draft of the Declaration of Independence, but that wily old fox Franklin argued that a secular version would be better (“we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”). Of course this is complete nonsense as all the evidence points to the differences (biological and environmental) that we inherit at birth. But no matter, the transition was made from a religious gloss on a mathematical construction to a secular normative ideal.
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Filed under: Distribution by lot, meta, Sortition, Theory | 24 Comments »

On Netiquette

Posted on August 3, 2013 by keithsutherland

A recent comment on this forum chided me for intemperate criticism of the Trinity Dublin report, to which I can only hold up my hands and plead guilty. It occurred to me, though, that a general post outlining some of the frustrations that led up to these remarks might possibly help prevent a future recurrence.

So far as I’m aware, Equality by Lot is the only internet forum dedicated to sortition, my sole research interest for over ten years. The value of such forums is the opportunity to discuss with other people with an interest in the field in order to develop and enhance one’s own understanding and correct one’s prejudices and misunderstanding. I’ve found this forum invaluable in this respect and my thinking on sortition is now completely different from ten years ago.
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Filed under: meta, Sortition | 75 Comments »

The Eyes of the People: Democracy in an age of spectatorship

Posted on July 28, 2013 by keithsutherland

Jeffrey Edward Green’s book of the above title (OUP, 2010) is a tightly-argued, highly-readable and courageous attempt to defend the indefensible – a normative theory of passive spectator democracy. The book swims against the current of democratic theory by claiming that all other normative theories (including the deliberative and participatory variants) are doomed and misguided attempts to establish democracy as the voice of the people (vox populi, vox dei). Green is agnostic as to whether this was possible in classical Athens, but it’s entirely impossible in large modern states. However as well as being impossible, it’s undesirable, as most citizens have no settled political views; besides which, electoral democracy, as Dahl famously put it, establishes rule by minorities. So much for the general will.

Green’s alternative is the ‘ocular’ tradition whereby the people don’t speak, they hold a watching brief over the political elite. The theory has its origins in the writings of Max Weber and was developed (and distorted) by Carl Schmidt and Joseph Schumpeter. Unlike with Bernard Manin’s ‘audience democracy’, Green makes no attempt to argue that the current ‘metamorphosis’ of representative government maintains any of the putative virtues of the classical theory of democracy (partial autonomy of representatives, trial by discussion etc), it is simply a way of identifying political charisma (a Weberian sociological term). Green denies that elections are an indirect way for citizens to influence public policy and agrees with Schumpeter that they are simply a way of selecting political leaders, although it is hard to understand Winston Churchill’s 1945 defeat by the decidedly uncharismatic Clement Attlee in any way other than the aggregation of policy preferences.
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Filed under: Academia, Elections, Initiatives, Proposals, Theory | 1 Comment »

Spectator call for nomothetai to decide Britain’s membership of the EU

Posted on May 30, 2013 by keithsutherland

Sir: Peter Jones (25 May) is right to draw an unfavourable comparison between ancient and modern democracy, but he is focusing on the wrong institution. The Athenian council was merely the secretariat for the general assembly, and the legislation passed by the assembly was often as erratic as modern referenda. After the restoration of democracy in 403 bc, legislation was entrusted to nomothetai — large randomly selected juries that, unlike modern parliamentarians, were obliged to listen to the arguments of well-informed advocates for and against the proposed law before deciding the outcome by secret vote

If David Cameron wants the people do decide. . .

read on: http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/letters/8921081/letters-285/

This proposal, written in response to André Sauzeau’s proposal for minimal reforms, was submitted as an article (see below) and originally accepted for publication by the Spectator, but ended up cut down into a short letter. The Spectator website has a comments section, so suggest we use that as an opportunity to kick-start the conversation on sortition there, rather than commenting on this forum.

Full article:

Put the EU on Trial

By Keith Sutherland

The answer to Britain’s EU problem is not a public referendum, it’s an adversarial judicial inquiry in front of a large citizen jury, selected by lot

The success of UKIP in the recent elections has led to unprecedented soul searching within the political class in general and the Conservative Party in particular, with no fewer than three former cabinet ministers arguing that Britain should leave the EU. David Cameron has committed the party to a referendum on EU membership, but the public often just use referenda as an excuse to put two fingers up to the government. There is an urgent need to find a more reliable mechanism to allow the people to make a well-informed decision on what is arguably the most important issue in contemporary politics.
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Filed under: Action, Athens, Juries, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 11 Comments »

Minimal Reforms

Posted on April 23, 2013 by keithsutherland

AhmedRTeleb:

“What minimal reforms would you like to see implemented given the reasons you advocate for sortition?”

The subject of this sentence is “minimal reforms”, so this would indicate an emphasis on practical implementation (or, even, incrementalism), as opposed to a blueprint for the New Jerusalem, Utopia, New Atlantis, Aleatoria or the Republic of Politdoche. The latter would require a different strand with a focus on utopian literature, revolutionary pamphlets, polemical tracts, diatribes and science fiction. I suggest also that if we are going to comment on other people’s suggestions we should avoid the use of sarcasm, sloganising and name-calling. (Note, though, these are only suggestions, rather than [authoritarian] edicts.)

Filed under: Action, Applications, Initiatives, Proposals, Sortition | 19 Comments »

Putsch: Iceland‘s crowd-sourced constitution killed by parliament

Posted on April 11, 2013 by keithsutherland

Extracted from Thorvaldur Gylfason’s blog:

Following its spectacular plunge from grace in 2008 when its banking system crashed, Iceland invited the people of Iceland to draft a new post-crash constitution designed inter alia to reduce the likelihood of another crash. A National Assembly was convened comprising 950 individuals selected at random from the national registry. Every Icelander 18 years or older had an equal chance of being selected to a seat in the assembly. Next, from a roaster of 522 candidates from all walks of life, 25 representatives were elected by the nation to a Constitutional Assembly to draft a new constitution reflecting the popular will as expressed by the National Assembly. Believe it or not, the Supreme Court, with eight of its nine justices at the time having been appointed by the Independence Party, now disgraced as the main culprit of the crash and in opposition, annulled the Constitutional Assembly election on flimsy and probably also illegal grounds, a unique event. . .

Filed under: Elections, Initiatives, Sortition | 7 Comments »

The Party’s Over: Metamorphoses of Democratic Government

Posted on January 11, 2013 by keithsutherland

Abstract: The contrast between ancient Greek democracy as direct rule by the people, and modern democracy as indirect rule by elected representatives is in need of modification (Hansen, 2013). (Lane, 2012) has characterized Aristotle’s ideal democracy as ‘proto-Schumpeterian’ and (Hansen, 1999) has described the 4th-century Athenian development of randomly-selected legislative courts as a conservative reaction against the direct rule of the assembly. In a new paper (Hansen, 2013) outlines the change of democratic emphasis over three centuries in Athens: elective (sixth century), direct (fifth century), and sortive, viz. selection by lot (fourth century).

(Manin, 1997) has suggested that modern representative government has also evolved over three stages: parliamentary democracy, party democracy and finally ‘audience’ democracy, in which politicians appeal directly to the public in a similar manner to stage actors (and where the audience writes the script in real time). In audience democracy, as with direct democracy, political parties are superfluous. In this paper I argue that both the classical (direct) and modern (audience) models of democracy are inherently unstable and suggest that modern democracy may well parallel ancient democracy in evolving to a ‘sortive’ stage, where citizen juries, selected by lot, play a key role in the determination of legislative outcomes, and the role of political parties is limited to innovation and advocacy.

This is the abstract for my paper for the Political Studies Association annual conference, The Party’s Over (March 2013). I’d greatly appreciate any feedback, full text available here.

Filed under: Academia, Athens, History, Sortition | 18 Comments »

Metamorphoses in Democratic Governance

Posted on December 19, 2012 by keithsutherland

When the Athenians reintroduced democracy in 403 the aspiration was to return to the ‘ancestral constitution’ – the lost golden age of Solon and Dracon (Hansen, 1999, p.175) – democracy type one in Aristotelian parlance. Fifth-century democracy had allowed the people’s judgment to be corrupted by demagogues in the Assembly, hence the wish to recover respect for the laws:

In 403 the Athenians returned to the idea that the laws, not the people, must be the highest power and that the laws must be stable, even if not wholly entrenched. (p.174)

Henceforth the powers of the Assembly would be limited to issuing temporary/specific decrees (psephisma), whereas any change to general/permanent laws (nomos) would be subject to trial by a jury of nomothetai. These were to be composed of persons selected randomly from the group of 6,000 older male citizens who had sworn the Heliastic Oath. The main purpose of the nomothetai was the overtly conservative one of ensuring that proposed changes were consistent with past laws – only if ‘there is no [relevant] law I will give judgment in consonance with my sense of what is most just’ (Heliastic Oath, quoted on p.170).
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Filed under: Athens, History, Sortition | 13 Comments »

Problems with Deliberative and Allotted Decision-Making: Path-Dependency and the Polya Urn

Posted on December 10, 2012 by keithsutherland

According to Robert Goodin (2008), one problem with a deliberative forum (allotted or otherwise) is that:

conversations, seen as serial processes with dynamic updating, can easily be path dependent. The outcome of the conversation depends upon the sequence of conversational moves, particularly those early in the conversation that set it off down one path rather than some other. (p.114)

A path-dependent process displays the following features:

Unpredictability. Because early events have a large effect and are partly random, many outcomes may be possible. We cannot predict ahead of time which of these possible end‐states will be reached.
Inflexibility. The farther into the process we are, the harder it becomes to shift from one path to another.
Nonergodicity. Accidental events early in a sequence do not cancel out. They cannot be treated (which is to say, ignored) as ‘noise’, because they feed back into future choices. Small events are remembered.
Potential path inefficiency. In the long run, the outcome that becomes locked in may generate lower pay‐offs than a forgone alternative would have. (p.112)