Equality by lot

A recent blog posting…

http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/2010/01/29/taking-back-our-government-jury-duty-for-all/

…advocates sortition to select all American federal elective offices–the President, the Vice President, the Senate, and the House. The proposal is a (quite understandable) reaction to the Supreme Court’s recent radical decision to lift all restraints on corporate “free speech” (thereby constraining the free speech rights of everyone else).

The proposal has generated a lot of comments, which is a good thing. I mostly have quibbles about the proposal. For example, I wouldn’t rely upon income tax records for fear that those at the bottom might be underrepresented. Why not rely on voter registration, combined with a much more aggressive effort at achieving universal registration? Also, the proposal calls for curtailing lobbyists from outside the area a representative or senator represents. I suspect such proposal would be ineffective, and that other measures (for example, the restoration of a robust and vibrant media) would be needed here. Finally, I’m not very keen on selecting the President and the Veep this way. In the past, sortition has almost always been used to fill collective bodies. Obviously, this helps to guard against the variances in quality that random selection can induce. Pick one name at random, and you may get an idiot, a nut, or a teabagger (but I repeat myself). Pick 12 names, and you might get 1 or 2 cranks. Pick 435 names (i.e., fill the U.S. House by lot), and the odds of getting a large number of nutters is infinitesimally small (unless a majority of the citizenry are nutters, in which case you have bigger problems on your hands).

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This blog…

http://www.madalcapital.com/elections-by-random-lottery-a-polemic-for-sortition

…makes a case for sortition by relying on Ernest Callenbach and Michael Phillips’ A Citizen Legislature (reprinted by Imprint Academic, 2008).

The Callenbach/Phillips case, which this blogger repeats, stresses the fact that a randomly selected legislature would “look like” the public at large, and therefore would “truly” represent the people. It’s the second half of that claim which leaves me a bit unsure. Is it really true that a random sample of “the people” speaks with the same voice as “the people?” Maybe, but it seems to me that it requires an argument. And the argument might prove hard to make. After all, we all would presumably justify at least some exclusions from a random draw–children and the insane are the obvious candidates–but then those exclusions mean that a random sample will no longer “look like” the population-at-large. So I think there’s more theorizing to be done here. (Of course, I do political theory for a living, so it’s not surprising that I’d say that.)

For further reflections on this topic, see the introduction I wrote to the reprinted edition of Callenbach and Phillips’ book.

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It turns out that the paper by Filimon Peonidis that I discussed in my last posting is in fact online. Check it out–

Corresponding citizens, International Journal on World Peace, March, 2009 by Filimon Peonidis

Thanks to Professor Peonidis for providing me with this source.

[ Edited to replace wrong link – Yoram Gat ]

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In my last posting, I discussed a paper by Filimon Peonidis, a paper that offered a novel proposal for introducing random selection into our government. Turns out he has thought about sortition before. The March 2009 issue of International Journal of World Peace features an article by him entitled “Corresponding Citizens.” I can’t find it online, but the journal can be found at

http://www.ijwp.org/download/volume-xxi-2009/ijwp-26-1/

Basically, Peonidis proposes sortition as a means of reining in the conduct of the major world powers. The big boys on the international scene (primarily the U.S. and Britain) have an enormous influence on the rest of the world through the policies they enact. This is true even when they are not literally sending in the troops to other countries. But democracy requires people to have a say over the decision-making bodies that affect them. Therefore, the rest of the world needs a say in how the U.S. et al. are governed. How can this be done? Take the U.S. case, says Peonidis (p. 58). Whenever the U.S. has a presidential election, have each country in the world select a random sample of citizens (say, 1% of each country’s electorate). Then have the voters in each sample vote for which presidential candidate they’d like to see win. That candidate gets 1 electoral vote for every country whose random sample gives him/her a plurality. With 191 U.N. member nations besides the U.S., that means adding 191 electoral votes to the current 538 votes in the electoral college. Those 191 electoral votes would go to whichever candidates most impressed the international community (or a random sample therefrom.)

As with his other paper, Peonidis’ proposal is very thought-provoking. It is interesting that he regards it as more practical and less “utopian” than a functioning and democratic world government. Indeed, he recommends it for that reason. I’m not so sure. As an American, I suspect the wretched “tea bagger” community would love his proposal just as much as they love world “guvmint,” and their ability to interfere with constructive international engagement is breathtaking. I am similarly skeptical of this proposal working in countries that are currently nondemocratic. Wouldn’t a random sample of voters from China simply follow orders from the Chinese government? (It’s hard to imagine China participating in the program under any other terms.) There’s nothing democratic about allowing authoritarian governments (as opposed to their peoples) influencing America’s elections. Peonidis recognizes the problem, but seems to regard it as small and easy to address (p. 62). Again, that seems pretty utopian to me.

Kudos to Peonidis for putting two such interesting proposals on the table! Nice to see that sortition still remains on the mind of at least some Greeks!

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I’ve finally had the chance to read Filimon Peonids’ interesting paper “Bringing Direct Democracy in a Representative Assembly: The Case of Allotted MPs.” The paper, as I mentioned before, can be found here–

http://www.demokrati.uio.no/arrangementer/konferanser/2010/Peonidis-AllotedMPs-2009.pdf

The paper’s novel argument is that people should have the chance to cast a vote for “select somebody at random” when they elect their legislatures. After each election is held, a number of legislators should be randomly drawn that is proportionate to the number of citizens voting for this option. (Obviously, this solution requires some form of proportional representation.)

Two things struck me while reading the paper. First, the author has a somewhat unusual understanding of “popular sovereignty.” As far as I could tell, the author is completely unconcerned about the fact that legislatures don’t “look like” the people they serve. The fact that sortition ensures the presence of a diverse cross section of people in a legislature is therefore not a reason for liking it. What bothers the author is the fact that ordinary people have effectively zero chance of getting into the legislature. If popular sovereignty means that everyone who wants to participate in government has a chance of doing so, then indeed sortition can help. Of course, in the United States sortition would only give the average person one chance in several million of being selected for a randomly-selected seat in Congress, which doesn’t sound much better than the chance that a real-life “Joe the Plumber” can get elected to Congress. (It’s rather like the fact that by not buying a lottery ticket, my chance of winning is only slightly smaller than my chance of winning if I buy one.) But this argument is less applicable in a smaller country like Greece, where there will be many fewer potential candidates in the pool.

Second, the author seems to have the all-too-familiar fear of popular participation. If voters were sufficiently disenchanted as to elect a randomly-selected majority, then said majority might run amuck and do nutty or evil or fascist things or something. Peonidis seems convinced that this is more likely to happen with a randomly-selected legislature than with an elected one. I for one am skeptical that this is anything but a prejudice. Governments get elected with “mandates” all the time, and they manage to do astonishingly stupid things that betray the constituencies that elected them. (See also: Obama, Barack.) Would a randomly-selected majority do worse? Maybe, but it’s far from an obvious point.

In any event, some version of this danger will always be present so long as the randomly-selected legislators hold the balance of power in the legislature. (And if any party has an effective majority without randomly-selected legislators, expect the former to ignore the latter completely.) But if the inexperience or ignorance of randomly-selected legislators is really a concern, there are ways around it. Why not select a new crop of randomly-selected legislators for each major piece of legislation? Say that X% of the people vote to have candidates selected by sortition. Then before the legislature takes up the topic of health care, a number of legislators equal to X% of the legislature gets selected. Give them the kind of resources that Jim Fishkin/Ned Crosby/Peter Dienel give their randomly selected bodies, and then let them join the legislature as voting members, but just for that one bill. Then when the legislature considers the fight against global warming, repeat the process all over again by filling X% of the legislature with an entirely new random draw. Surely this could provide the advantages of random selection while assuaging the fears of Peonidis. And it would increase the chance that any volunteer would get randomly selected at some point, which would surely advance Peonidis’ conception of popular sovereignty.

As you can see, I don’t really agree with the paper’s conclusion. But it’s an awfully good effort at stimulating further thought–even among people who who are already interested in sortition.

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Found the following paper recently:

Bringing direct democracy in a representative assembly: The case of allotted MPs
by Filimon Peonidis
http://www.demokrati.uio.no/arrangementer/konferanser/2010/Peonidis-AllotedMPs-2009.pdf

Gotta love google alerts. I shall try and post some thoughts on the paper soon.

Filed under: Sortition | 2 Comments »