European Citizens’ Energy Efficiency Panel

Posted on February 24, 2024 by Yoram Gat

A three-weekend event convenes 150 allotted EU citizens in Brussels for discussing

how individuals, communities, the public and private sector and others can become more energy efficient in a way that makes the most impact on the climate, economy, jobs, health – and energy bills.

This event, which is billed as “putting citizens at the heart of European policymaking”, is an archetype for how citizen assemblies are being used as an exercise in public relations and a driver for meaningless governance process that serves to generate employment and status for a self-serving political, professional and academic elite. The notion that a body of 150 people can meaningfully generate independent ideas about energy management over 3 weekends is transparently absurd. This is even before questions about whether the purview of energy efficiency even makes sense and how any recommendations produced would be handled by the vast professional political apparatus.

No doubt, though, that events like this would then serve as grist for the citizen assemblies industry and would feed a self-congratulating rhetoric about how “increased involvement of citizen assemblies in our democracies” is leading to a renewal of democracy and is a way to address citizen alienation and cynicism. It is indeed a useful contribution to the money-raising operation of this fledgling industry and to the careers of the experts and academics associated with it.

Filed under: Applications, Sortition | 3 Comments »

Ndongo Samba Sylla on the Senegalese exception

Posted on February 19, 2024 by Yoram Gat

Senegal, which “is considered one of West Africa’s more stable democracies and is the only country in the region never to have had a military coup”, has recently been in the news, as its electoralist system is being shaken by the government’s attempt to postpone the upcoming elections.

Back in 2012, the Senegalese economist Ndongo Samba Sylla wrote the following assessment of the situation in Senegal (and elsewhere).

By praising the Senegalese “democratic” model, we are in fact glorifying an oligarchic system based on a legitimacy which, for its effectiveness, is no less artificial. This artificial character derives from the fact that the label “democratic” is conferred more by the certification of established political rating agencies than by an ability to really address the needs of the population. At a time when demagogic flights of fancy regarding the “Senegalese exception” are all the rage on the web, the most needy are quietly suffering in structural poverty which “democracy” will probably never pull them out of.
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Filed under: Athens, Elections, History | 6 Comments »

A citizen lottery for leadership, a real democracy

Posted on February 6, 2024 by Yoram Gat

Carlos Acuña an attorney from El Centro, California, writes in the Calexico Chronicle:

The upcoming national elections later this fall, not to mention the upcoming recall in … gulp, Calexico, bring to mind the legend of Faust. For those unfamiliar with the name a Medieval legend revolves around a man, Faust, who made a deal with the devil. Faust, in exchange for knowledge and the hedonistic life, offered his soul to the devil. The devil gladly agreed. The devil had vacancies to fill, that sort of thing; hell has no homeless; all are welcome.

Faust was not alone. Your garden-variety political candidate pretty much brings Faust to mind. Political office seekers tend to be a self-selecting lot; unlike the ancient Greek system of sortition — reflected in our modern jury system — where citizens got selected at random to represent the population at large in the halls of leadership and political decision-making. Those hungry for power jockey for position; sadly, those who want it most, deserve it least. The Greeks knew it, 2,300 years ago … Hence, their citizen lottery for leadership, real democracy. A side effect from that: the Greeks not knowing who among them would be picked, made sure everyone got a first-rate education, including ethics …
Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Athens, Elections, Press, Sortition | Leave a comment »

Rolling the Dice on Democracy

Posted on February 3, 2024 by Yoram Gat

A new short video discussing sortition lays out the standard discourse around sortition. In doing so, despite the video’s tone that seems rather sympathetic to sortition, it echos the arguments against sortition made by supporters of elections rather naively. Similar arguments were made by elitists throughout the ages, going back at least 2,500 years to Socrates, when they argued against any democratic mechanism. When people argue for the maintenance of their privilege, they always claim that they do so for the general benefit. We are quick to dismiss such claims when they come from our ideological enemies, e.g., advocates of monarchy, theocracy, and most notably from those who argue for the system used in the People’s Republic of China. Shouldn’t this skepticism be applied to those defending elections as well?

Filed under: Elections, Sortition, video | Leave a comment »

Professor Neil explains the principle of distinction

Posted on January 28, 2024 by Yoram Gat

TikToker Professor Neil is, it turns out, a sortition advocate. In a recent clip Prof. Neil lays out the reason that elected government does not represent the interests of the population.

Filed under: Sortition | Leave a comment »

Israeli minister: “Ministers can’t make ends meet”

Posted on January 24, 2024 by Yoram Gat

While criticizing tax increases planned by the Israeli government, it was suggested to the Minister for National Goals, Orit Strock, that ministers should “cut back on all the bounty [they] receive”. Strock replied: “What bounty? No minister receives a fat salary. I know ministers who are unable to make ends meet, despite working hard day and night, and even some ministers who are supported financially by their parents”.

The salary of Israeli ministers is about 4 times that of the average worker, and well into the top decile of incomes.

Filed under: Elections, Press | 2 Comments »

Clay Shentrup: Election by Jury

Posted on January 21, 2024 by Yoram Gat

Clay Shentrup wrote to announce the Election by Jury website he created.

If you were accused of a crime, who would you want deciding your fate?

  • A panel of randomly selected jurors, all of whom have spent multiple weeks sitting in a courtroom, listening to all the relevant facts and arguments put forward by both sides
  • A popular vote open to hundreds of thousands of people in your county, the vast majority of whom only know a few sound bites about the case, which they heard from a biased and one-sided source

The premise behind “Election by Jury” is simple: we believe that our government, just like the criminal justice system, will function better if our representatives are elected after weeks of deliberation by a panel of randomly selected jurors. These jurors would hear from the candidates and their expert-witnesses, deliberate among themselves, and cast their votes in secret.

Here are a few of the most compelling benefits of our proposal:

  1. An “electorate” that is better informed
  2. Better ways of combating misinformation
  3. Breaking away from echo-chambers

Filed under: Elections, Proposals, Sortition | 10 Comments »

Another Crisis-of-Democracy book

Posted on January 20, 2024 by Yoram Gat

Erica Benner is “a political philosopher who has held academic posts at St Antony’s College, Oxford, the London School of Economics and Yale University”. Her new book, Adventures in Democracy: The Turbulent World of People Power, is a contribution to the “Crisis of Demcoracy” genre. In an article in the Financial Times Benner lays out her outlook, rather standard for the genre, which includes a mention of Athens and sortition.

Democracies have always presented themselves as beacons of human progress. In 431BC, the statesman Pericles declared that Athens’s democracy was “the school for all Greece” — while over the past two centuries, democracy warriors everywhere have measured their countries’ success or failure by comparison with western models: American, British, French, Swedish.

It’s harder to do now that these formerly self-congratulating democracies are doing battle with new and older demons. Today, millions of people around the world crave freedom from authoritarian rule. Yet when they hear almost daily that the liberal heartlands are plagued with inflation, strikes, high crime rates, gun violence and ill-informed voters who care little about truth, many of them doubt that democracy is the best alternative.

Note how oppression is carefully left out of what “plagues” the “liberal heartlands”, and how blame for the troubles is laid at the feet of the masses – “ill-informed voters who care little about truth” – rather than at those of the powerful.

Benner concludes with a mention of sortition and some useful bromides:

We see the same urgent need to give more effective authority and voice to people on the ground inside today’s older democracies. There are organisations around the democratic world whose members advocate the creation of citizen assemblies, chosen by lot instead of personality-driven or partisan campaigns, to advise and monitor existing branches of government. By avoiding pathological rivalries among (and within) political parties, such assemblies might stand a better chance of coming up with policies aimed at narrowing the gaps in unbalanced societies.

But even well-crafted institutions can’t function without popular support. Change has to start with our own attitudes. Take other people’s beliefs and discomforts more seriously than ideologies that preach faith in the inevitable progress of whatever you think best. Fight to take power back, of course, from democracy’s most obvious enemies — extremists, insatiable plutocrats and tyrannical leaders. But also take a more modest, closer-to-home kind of responsibility: for getting our own hypercompetitive societies and psyches into better shape.

Filed under: Academia, Books, Press, Sortition | 3 Comments »

Gallup poll: Record Low in U.S. Satisfied With Way Democracy Is Working

Posted on January 13, 2024 by Yoram Gat

Gallup finds that “satisfaction with the way democracy is working” in the U.S. has eroded dramatically over the last 4 decades.

Satisfaction has been declining among both Republicans and Democrats as well as among independents. Satisfaction is highly positively correlated with education in the latest poll, but was less so in the previous poll in 2021.

Filed under: Elections, Opinion polling | 1 Comment »

Mueller, Tollison and Willett advocating sortition in 1972

Posted on December 27, 2023 by Yoram Gat

“Representative Democracy via Random Selection”, a 1972 paper by Dennis Mueller, Robert Tollison, and Thomas Willett in Public Choice Journal is one of the earliest pieces of sortition advocacy in modern times. The proposal made and discussed is a radical one: selecting the legislature by lot. The fairly short paper covers many crucial issues: eligibility for the allotment pool, compensation, body size, etc.

If we accept that some form of national representation is efficient, the remaining task is to decide on the best practical form of such representation. We would like to propose for consideration the selecting of a national legislature at random from the voting populace. Dahl [After the Revolution, 1970, pp. 249-153] recently suggested a similar procedure, although only to give advisory votes, and the idea has historical origins in Athenian democracy and in the work of Rousseau [The Social Contract, 1762, Book IV, Chapter III]. Such a procedure would be a significant improvement over the existing political system in several ways. The incentive for pork barrel activities in order to secure votes would no longer be present since random selection would be independent of geographic base, and for the same reason minorities would be represented in correct proportion to their numbers in the society. Representation by random selection would also return political power to individual voters and give better artivulation of voter preferences in the legislative process without sacrificing the efficiencies of representation. The legislature would not be composed of median position representatives as under two-party, geographic representation. Voter abstention or uninformed voting would not be problems under this proposal, and perhaps voter alienation would be less in this case also. If viewed as a replacement for the current forms of national representation, the random selection system removes direct sanctioning power through the ballot from the voter and replaces this control mechanism with a more subtle method of articulating voter preferences on national issues. We would argue that although the final outcome is not clearcut, such a change in representative procedure could be understood by voters as the formal embodiment of democratic equality in an ex ante rather than ex post sense. One could also argue that the mass media aspect of political campaigning would be less of a problem under the random selection system, although this is not certain since the outcome depends on how this system of representation is meshed with existing political institutions (e.g., the Presidency). Finally, and importantly, it should be stressed that random selection of representatives avoids all of the traditional problems in voting theory of intransitivities in voting outcomes and the like in establishing a system of proportional representation [See Duncan, The Theory of Committees and Elections, 1958, Chapter 11]. The application of voting theory is confined in this case to the operations of the random legislature once selected, and this feature of representation by lot is an important justification for establishing and operating proportional representation in this way.

Filed under: Academia, Press, Proposals, Sortition | Leave a comment »

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