Demiocracy: Less is more

Posted on November 6, 2024 by Roger Knights

Once our “allotteds” have had their names drawn, what role should they play? I suggest that of elector rather than officeholder, for these reasons.

Most importantly, imposing a low burden on the participating-allotteds means that many of them will be available to oversee officeholders for the entirety of their terms, not just at Election Day. (Electors will see, over a private Internet channel, monthly reports from “their” officeholders and their critics. For which they will be well paid.)

Electors can throw their weight around during inter-election periods by signaling to their officeholders, e.g. via straw votes, their preference regarding bills up for debate. So there is not much real loss of power in being an elector.

Perhaps the most important advantage of elevating the allotteds only to electorhood is that it leaves existing officeholders in place, at least until the next election. This will arouse less opposition from members of the status quo, and make for a smoother transition.

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Ballotocracy: A step beyond lottocracy

Posted on November 3, 2024 by Roger Knights

We all know what lottocracy means: Sample Sovereignty. In other words, the elevation of a representative sample of the whole community to legislative seats, replacing elected legislators.

The case for this replacement seems strong:

Per Rousseau, there is less of a “representative” interference between the whole body and the legislators, meaning the General Will is more truly ensconced, and its actions more democratically legitimate.

Democracy means the rule of the considered common sense of the community. But a mass-electoral system gives each voter such a tiny influence on election results that most pay little consideration to political affairs. And an electoral system implies party government, which roils the waters and impairs considered consideration of the issues. And the influence of professional party politicians, pelf (money), propaganda, and the press (more generally, the media) further shapes and restricts the democratic dialogue. This is only a partial list of the demerits of what I call DeMockery (a mockery of democracy). Many others have noted them too.

The public, according to polling, seems disillusioned to an unprecedented level with DeMockery and ready for a change.

And yet there have been no powerful movements toward full lottocracy. Only randomly chosen advisory entities have been created. (And even they have shown flaws, as in Ireland recently.) The public and public intellectuals apparently need a strong inducement to move beyond today’s mass-electoral system.

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Dawkins’ Office-seeks-the-man electoral college, Roger Knight’s “Demiocracy”

Posted on October 29, 2024 by Roger Knights

Richard Dawkins writes in The Spectator:

The Electoral College is nonsense

In an ideal world, I wouldn’t have chosen an election year for my American book tour. It’s not that I dislike elections generally. And — praise be — a population of 300 million Americans has managed to raise one presidential candidate who is not a convicted felon awaiting sentence.

No, my problem with American elections — and it viscerally distresses me every four years — is the affront to democracy called the Electoral College. I’ve done the math. The Electoral College can hand you the presidency even if your opponent receives three-quarters of the popular vote. Of course that’s a hypothetical extreme. The familiar reality is that campaigns ignore all but a handful of “swing” states.

A genuine electoral college, however, could work rather well. Voters in every state would elect respected citizens to meet in conclave to find a president — like a university search committee or the College of Cardinals. They’d headhunt the best in the land, interview them, study their publications and speeches, exhaustively vet them — and finally after a secret ballot announce the verdict in a puff of white smoke.
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Democracy Without Shortcuts, A Critique. #2:  Deference to a lottocracy needn’t be “blind”

Posted on August 14, 2024 by Roger Knights

Christina Lafont, in her 2020 book, Democracy Without Shortcuts, routinely asserts that, because a minipublic excludes the mass public, the mass public must “blindly defer” to its decisions. Those words at face value imply that the mass public would be blindsided by its decisions. That is not her full meaning, but I’ll criticize that part of it first.

There are four mechanisms by which the public could descry and/or influence the machinations of a lottocracy.

1a. By pairing and “checking” any lottocratic legislative chamber with an elected House.

Any legislation considered in, or passed by, a lottocratic House would be subject to public scrutiny when it reached the elected House, and even before that, during election campaigns for that House. The public would not be taken unawares (for what it is worth). The majority of lottocratic reformers, as far as I know, are only asking for this single-House, or half-a-loaf, power, so Lafont is not justified in insinuating that any empowered lottocratic legislature would be scarily secretive and all-powerful. It would only be influential, and it would have to negotiate openly in compromise-seeking conference committees with its elected counterpart.

1b. By allowing the mass public to veto, by referendum, objectionable minipublic measures. Or by requiring their endorsement, by referendums, by the public.
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Demiocracy, Chapter 21: “Wide” mass electorates attract and empower Propaganda

Posted on July 1, 2024 by Roger Knights

Already weakened by the vast impersonal forces at work in the modern world, democratic institutions are now being undermined from within by politicians and their propagandists. The methods now being used to merchandise the political candidate as if he were a deodorant positively guarantee the electorate against ever learning the truth about anything. —Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, 1958, VI.

We vote, indeed we perceive political reality, through the people with whom we are in contact. Most of us are reached by the mass media only in a two-step process, by way of other people’s perceptions and reactions to them. —Hanna F. Pitkin, The Concept of Representation, 1967, p. 223.

… it has also become evident that if one acts ruthlessly …, cleverly organized propaganda can accomplish swift and drastic changes in opinions and attitudes, especially in difficult and critical situations; it can … also instill patently false ideas about actual conditions. — Daniel Boorstin, The Image, 1961.

Regarding one of those Pernicious P’s, Wikipedia says the following [2024-07-01] about the influential author Edward Bernays and his book, Propaganda (1928):

[Bernays] outlined how skilled practitioners could use crowd psychology and psychoanalysis to control them [the masses] in desired ways. Bernays later synthesized many of these ideas in his postwar book, Public Relations (1945), which outlines the science of managing information released to the public by an organization, in a manner most advantageous to the organization.

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Democracy Without Shortcuts, A Critique. #1: A false equivalency is drawn between electoral misanthropy and electoral misogyny 

Posted on June 29, 2024 by Roger Knights

Among the major handicaps a reformer can encounter is the opposition of the indignant virtuous …. —E.S. Turner, Roads to Ruin: The shocking history of social reform, 1960.

Cristina Lafont’s 2020 book, Democracy Without Shortcuts, unfairly attacks lottocracy as invidiously exclusionary. A false equivalence is asserted between lottocrats’ current “existential” criticism of the political capability of mass publics and misogynists’ past “essentialist” criticism of the political capability of women (and sometimes of other marginalized groups). Lafont writes, for instance:

… The empirical evidence provided to supposedly ‘prove’ women’s ignorance, irrationality, apathy, and irresponsibility, and the arguments put forth to perpetuate their subjection to others in the not too distant past, are remarkably similar to the arguments and evidence currently provided by the ‘voter ignorance’ literature.
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Demiocracy, Chapter 20: True democracy needs Depth more than it needs electoral Width

Posted on June 23, 2024 by Roger Knights

The imbecility of men is always inviting the impudence of power. —Emerson, Representative Men, ch. 1.

The incompetence of the masses … furnishes the leaders with a practical and to some extent a moral justification. —Robert Michels, Political Parties, 1915, 111.

The weaker the interest and knowledge of the electorate, the more decisive become the efforts of organized groups in molding opinion. This situation alone implies a tendency toward oligarchy within democracy …. —Herbert Tingsten, The Problem of Democracy, 1965, p. 102.

Democracy is the most difficult of all forms of government, since it requires the widest spread of intelligence, and we forgot to make ourselves intelligent when we made ourselves sovereign. —Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History, 1968, p. 273.

Proxy Electors will be better informed than effectively “imbecilic” mass-voters, because they will be focused on a single responsibility. They will not have a dozen other political issues competing for their attention. They will instead be exposed to opportunities to delve deeply into their sole topical area, such as online lectures by experts, testimony by insiders and whistleblowers, audiobooks by investigative reporters, etc. Much of it should soak in.

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Lafont Proposes Institutionalized, Advisory Mini-publics

Posted on May 29, 2024 by Roger Knights

Yoram published some anti-lottocracy paragraphs from Christina Lafont recently. It spurred me to read her book and compose a rebuttal, which I’m in the midst of. In the meantime, here are paragraphs from the book in which she urges the integration of advisory mini-publics in current mass democracies, from pages 148-159.

5.2. Deliberative Activism: Some Participatory Uses of Minipublics

Contestatory Uses of Minipublics

[The] considered majority opinion [of a mini-public] differs from current [mass] majority opinion [and] could give minorities a powerful tool to challenge consolidated majorities […].

[A] distinctive and very valuable feature of minipublics is their superior ability to secure effective inclusion of marginalized voices. […] This could lead to more nuanced positions on polarizing issues or it could prompt a general reconsideration of popular but unjust views […].

[I]n order to maintain their legitimacy, all such uses of minipublics would need to ensure the independence of the institutions in charge of organizing them.
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Demiocracy, Chapter 19: Advantages of this army-of-Davids (multiple-Demi-legislature) arrangement

Posted on April 23, 2024 by Roger Knights

1. There would be less susceptibility to emotional proposals too motivated by fear or hope. Proxy electorates, which are specialized (expert on some topic), seasoned (from years of semi-monthly oversight sessions), and “select” (sifted upward through multiple ballotteries) at the state and national levels, would have more information, and would have acquired greater insight through discussion and debate. So they would more realistically assess what is possible (including adventurous proposals that just might work but affront conventional wisdom) and be less likely to divert down false trails and garden paths, and to ignore possible second-order effects. Their lesser credulity would insulate them from panics and propaganda. Their greater experience would simultaneously deliver aspiring politicians from the temptation to take advantage of their immaturity—of the virtual standing invitation that big-electorate, big-arena voters present to be played for Suckers. This inbuilt temptation of mass susceptibility eternally fuels the demonic dynamic—the co-dependent tragedy and farce—of DeMockery. (Its hidden “root,” to repeat, is its seemingly righteous, too-“wide,” electorate.)

2. Demiocracy’s decentralization would make a putsch more difficult, especially if it includes decentralization of the executive branch. (I.e., substantial independence of the executive departments from the chief executive, via PE-election of their heads.) Thus making tyranny less likely, a big concern of the Founders. Also insulating the government from a potty (barmy) POTUS. (“There is, of course, no such thing as a harmlessly mad emperor.” —Gore Vidal, Julian, Ch. 19.)

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Demiocracy, Chapter 5b: Three Long-Term Cases of sortition from a nominated sample, Like Demiocracy’s “Ballottery”

Posted on April 18, 2024 by Roger Knights

Amish Religious Practices

Amish ministers and deacons are selected by lot out of a group of men nominated by the congregation. They serve for life and have no formal training. Amish bishops are similarly chosen by lot from those selected as preachers. — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish_religious_practices.

The Amish employ something akin to what I call a ballottery to select ministers. The congregation (= the general public) nominates (= ballots for) those it considers worthy, and a lottery selects a minister from among those worthies. A second lottery (structurally similar to what I call a “stacked” ballottery) selects a bishop from those selected ministers.

It should be obvious that if those clerics were selected at random from the congregation, they would not perform as well as those drawn from a democratically pre-approved group, and that they would have less legitimacy because of that poorer performance, and of the mechanical way they had been chosen. These considerations of competence and legitimacy apply equally to the next two cases below.

It will be objected that these cases all have to do with the the choice of executive officeholders. But the importance of elevating competence and credibility still applies to deciding on the method of choosing legislators and electors, although incapacity among them would not be as blindingly obvious. Nevertheless, that is hardly a reason to prefer mediocrity, or accept it. Indeed, its subtler manifestation is an even stronger reason to guard against it.

PS, from Wikipedia:

(Note that the Greek word for “lot” (kleros) serves as the etymological root for English words like “cleric” and “clergy” as well as for “cleromancy”.)

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