The American Democrat by James Fenimore Cooper

Posted on October 11, 2023 by Yoram Gat

It turns out that the American author James Fenimore Cooper (1789 – 1851), primarily known today for the novel The Last of the Mohicans, wrote in 1835 a book of political theory titled The American Democrat. The book is a rather interesting document of the political views of the “democratic” elite of his time, which are remarkably similar to the views of the “republican”, explicitly anti-democratic, elite of a generation or two before – i.e., of the American founders.

Underneath the similarity, it is clear that there are now new concerns. While the founders expended most of their efforts optimizing and justifying “checks and balances” and considered their sentiment against the rule of the mob as an easy case to make, Cooper is concerned with dispelling any misapprehensions about the equality of men – indicating that democratic ideology is gaining political power in the early 19th century. Cooper explains to his readers that if men were really thought to be equals elections would be replaced with sortition:

The absolute moral and physical equality that are inferred by the maxim, that “one man is as good as another,” would at once do away with the elections, since a lottery would be both simpler, easier and cheaper than the present mode of selecting representatives. Men, in such a case, would draw lots for office, as they are now drawn for juries. Choice supposes a preference, and preference inequality of merit, or of fitness. (p. 79)

Filed under: Books, Elections, History, Sortition, Theory | 2 Comments »

The Keys to Democracy by Maurice Pope

Posted on October 7, 2023 by Yoram Gat

Maurice Pope’s book The Keys to Democracy is the third book ever written advocating the use of sortition as a major component of a modern government. (The two earlier ones being Ernest Callenbach and Michael Phillips’s A Citizen Legislature and John Burnheim’s Is Democracy Possible?, both first published in 1985. Pope, who seems to have started writing at about the same time, was apparently unaware of either.) The great strengths of Pope’s writing are his independence of thought and his evident sincerity. Coming early into the field, and being a classicist rather than a political scientist, Pope was clearly breaking new ground, following his own logical train of thought. He was thus free from the burden of formulaically making connections to prior writings and from the petty-political considerations of self-promotion. This unique situation made a thoroughgoing impact on the book as a whole.

Authors of works about sortition (including Pope) generally share the ostensible aim of achieving some measure of democratization of society. But while this general aim is broadly shared, the consensus ends there because the detailed aims and the proposed mechanisms for achieving them vary widely. At the conservative end, the problem with the existing system is conceived as some sort of sclerosis. The main symptom of the problem is fatigue, or a lack of confidence. Sortition-based institutions are then seen as a way to infuse the system with new blood or new vigor, rejuvenating a system that is essentially sound but has for various reasons, that generally remain vague, fallen into a bad state. Associated with this view of things are generally quite modest proposals – advisory bodies that “help” current decision makers make more informed decisions. Even those more informed decisions are perhaps less important than the mere fact that allotted citizens are widely recognized as having had a part in the process. Indeed, what exactly the problems are with the current outcomes of the process and what are the expected improvements in terms of policy is usually not specified. In fact, sometimes the entire point is to have the allotted citizens themselves become more informed rather than making any changes in decision making. Writings in this vein tend to be heavy with references to the canon of “deliberative democracy” and light on the idea that democracy is a regime of political equality.
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Filed under: Academia, Athens, Books, Elections, Fiction, History, Juries, Participation, Press, Sortition | 10 Comments »

A New Zealand farmer proposes sortition, but “strictly tongue-in-cheek”

Posted on October 5, 2023 by Yoram Gat

From the NZ Herlad‘s “The Country” section:

Election 2023: Jane Smith thinks about ancient Greek voting options we might prefer

No-nonsense North Otago farmer Jane Smith is the last person you’d expect to get swept up in a TikTok trend but she may have inadvertently created an alternative version of “How often do you think about the Roman Empire?”

In Smith’s case, the question is “How often do you think about ancient Greece?”

The sheep farmer told The Country’s Jamie Mackay that she’s so tired of Kiwi politicians and election campaigning that she had gone back in time, in an attempt to find a more palatable way of choosing leaders.

Admitting that this was all strictly tongue-in-cheek and “off the top of my head” Smith listed her favoured election processes from Ancient Greece.

Sortition – lottery system

Sortition is when officials were in large part chosen by lottery.

“So, a wee bit like jury duty,” Smith said.
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Filed under: Athens, Elections, Press, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Santa Monica, CA: Allotted panel to guide airport’s future

Posted on September 27, 2023 by Yoram Gat

A report in the Santa Monica Lookout:

Randomly Chosen Panel Should Guide Airport’s Future, Officials Say

By Jorge Casuso

September 25, 2023 — The future of Santa Monica Airport should be hammered out — not by the usual community activists and civic volunteers — but by randomly selected “everyday people,” City officials told the City Council Monday.

The information item from top Public Works officials proposes using a democratic lottery to “engage new residents through a randomized selection process,” instead of relying on “the same self-selected individuals.”

After meeting in person for six weekends over the course of some nine months starting next fall, the panel would make recommendations to the Council for the 227-acre site that under a 2017 agreement with the FAA would cease to operate as an airport at the end of 2028.

The panel will be charged with what City officials have said “is likely to be the most transformative urban planning event of the century for the City”.

The lottery system — which is not common in North America — “would result in a panel that demands broad demographic representation, and minimizes the influence of special interests,” said the report from Public Works Director Rick Valte.

Previous long-range planning efforts by the City have “suffered tremendous opposition from vocal community members whose resistance to key elements of each plan — or even the entire plan itself — resulted in protracted land use battles,” the report said.
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Filed under: Applications, Press, Sortition | 7 Comments »

Josine Blok reviews Pope’s The Keys to Democracy

Posted on September 23, 2023 by Yoram Gat

Josine Blok, a historian from Utrecht University, has a review of Maurice Pope’s The Keys to Democracy in H-Soz-Kult. In the last two paragraphs of the review, Blok gives her opinion about the substance of the book:

The quality of the argument is in my view quite uneven. Some of the political analyses and in particular the historical sections suffer from oversimplification, generalisation, and special pleading. For instance: “The political ideals and most of the political practices of Western civilisation go back through Venice and ancient Rome to classical Greece.” (p. 115). No, they don’t, this is simply not true, nor is Pope’s account of how sortition got “lost” in the course of history. On p. 123, Pope contends: “It would be possible […] to define history itself as the story of how experts have been proved wrong. For otherwise […] it would not be history at all, but current practice. […examples in] the history of science. Being history, it is possible to tell which side was wrong.” This view of history is simply bizarre. If Pope resorted to such sweeping statements to help easy reading, I don’t think they are the proper means to that end.

But, making up for such drawbacks, Pope offers excellent observations on deliberation as a crucial ingredient of democracy and on the potential of sortition to prevent oligarchisation (the “law of Michels”), meritocracy and other problematic forms of hierarchy. Sortition enables implementing the equality of citizens and bringing their engagement in policy making about. Importantly, Pope points out that sortition, whenever it is employed, must be rigorous and compulsory to be effective, and allotted bodies must be selected from the whole population (p. 167; complemented by the outstanding comment by Potter in the appendix). He underlines that allotted panels of citizens must have moral authority and real responsibility (to which should be added a transparent system of accountability). Written with an open, engaging style, The Keys to Democracy is set to win a wider audience for its important and pressing message.

Filed under: Academia, Athens, Books, Deliberation, Elections, History, Opinion polling, Press, Sortition | 2 Comments »

Jacquet: Explaining non-participation in deliberative mini-publics

Posted on September 16, 2023 by Yoram Gat

A highly cited 2017 paper by Vincent Jacquet reports about the outcomes of interviews with 34 people who turned down offered (potential) participation in one of three allotted bodies in Belgium: the G1000, the G100 and the Citizen Climate Parliament (CCP).

Explaining non-participation in deliberative mini-publics

Abstract: This article investigates citizens’ refusal to take part in participatory and deliberative mechanisms. An increasing number of scholars and political actors support the development of mini-publics, that is, deliberative forums with randomly selected lay citizens. It is often argued that such innovations are a key ingredient to cure the democratic malaise of contemporary political regimes because they provide an appropriate means to achieve inclusiveness and well considered judgment. Nevertheless, real-life experience shows that the majority of citizens refuse the invitation when they are recruited. This raises a challenging question for the development of a more inclusive democracy: Why do citizens decline to participate in mini-publics? This article addresses this issue through a qualitative analysis of the perspectives of those who have declined to participate in three mini-publics: the G1000, the G100 and the Climate Citizens Parliament. Drawing on in-depth interviews, six explanatory logics of non-participation are distinguished: concentration on the private sphere, internal political inefficacy, public meetings avoidance, conflict of schedule, political alienation and mini-public’s lack of impact on the political system. This shows that the reluctance to take part in mini-publics is rooted in the way individuals conceive their own roles, abilities and capacities in the public sphere but also in the perceived output of such democratic innovations.

The main findings appear in Table 3 of the paper, titled “The six explanatory logics of non-participation in mini-publics”. This table summarizes the findings of an analysis in which explanations were categorized into types (“logics”) and the frequency of explanations of each type being mentioned was recorded (often, being 10 or more times out of 34, or less often, otherwise).
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Filed under: Academia, Applications, Sortition | 22 Comments »

The deliberative cure

Posted on September 9, 2023 by Yoram Gat

In an article in The Boston Globe, James Fishkin and Larry Diamond recount the story, a rather familiar and standard one, of how the participants in a deliberative body became “depolarized” and more democratic.

When our nationally representative sample of 600 (selected by NORC at the University of Chicago) deliberated for a weekend about these issues, Republicans often moved significantly toward initially Democrat positions and Democrats sometimes moved just as substantially toward initially Republican positions. The changes were all consonant with basic democratic values, such as that everyone’s vote should count and that our elections need to be administered in a nonpartisan way.

The novelty of Fishkin and Diamond’s latest deliberative workshop is that it was done on the cheap. The participants met online, saving travel and real-estate costs as well as reducing the commitment required of the participants, and where previously moderators had to be hired, moderation was now taken care of by AI magic:
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Filed under: Academia, Applications, Deliberation, Elections, Participation, Press, Sortition | 7 Comments »

Irish higher education minister laments the cruelty of random selection

Posted on September 1, 2023 by Yoram Gat

It turns out that entry to higher education programs (“courses”) in Ireland is determined by attaining some cutoff grade. Due to “grade inflation” many programs find themselves over-subscribed and select candidates via a lottery. The Irish higher education Minister Simon Harris expressed his misgivings about the use of random selection:

Random selection can be a particularly cruel and difficult way that you get the max points perhaps required, but you still find yourself not guaranteed a place in the course.

Mr. Harris’s empathy toward the anguish of those with good grades not having a guaranteed place is rather moving. Such students must be more anguished, it seems, than those who are denied a place in a program because they do not meet the cutoff grade.

For more on the convoluted elitist logic behind such statements, see my three part review of Connal Boyle’s book Lotteries for Education.

Filed under: Academia, Applications, Books, Distribution by lot, education, Press, schools | Leave a comment »

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences recommends citizen assemblies

Posted on August 19, 2023 by Yoram Gat

In 2020 the American Academy of Arts and Sciences published the report of its Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship.

The report is a useful example of how the liberal U.S. establishment views the state of the political system and for the kind of ideas it generates for institutional reforms. A set of self-appointed reformers, highly credentialed by the establishment, functions as the tribunes of the people. The report is ostensibly based on “listening sessions” held with various groups in the U.S., but of course the entire exercise is controlled from beginning to end by elite actors and it is completely up to the commission members to select the makeup of the groups “listened to” and to channel their “input” into the a set of recommendations. In fact, regarding the makeup of the groups in the “listening sessions”, the report specifically asserts that “[t]he intent of this strategy was not to collect a statistically representative sample, but to cast a wide net and surface the personal experiences, frustrations, and acts of engagement of a diverse array of Americans”.

The Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship was established in the spring of 2018 at the initiative of then Academy President Jonathan Fanton and Stephen D. Bechtel, Jr., Chair of the S. D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation. Mr. Bechtel challenged the Academy to consider what it means to be a good citizen in the twenty-first century, and to ask how all of us might obtain the values, knowledge, and skills to become still better citizens. Since 1780, projects that work to bolster American citizens’ understanding of and engagement with the institutions of their government have been a hallmark of the Academy’s work.

The background for the commission’s work is a grim picture of disintegration of social cohesion and distrust in institutions. As is standard practice, the real-world causes of this situation are left unclear. Abstract economic issues like inequality and mobility are mentioned, and it is asserted (citing Gilens and Page) that “[c]ongressional priorities, studies have shown, now align with the preferences of the most affluent”. However, real-life, specific outcomes of those “congressional priorities”, such as food insecurity, lack of medical care, indebtedness, declining life spans, or incarceration rates are not discussed.
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Filed under: Academia, Applications, Elections, Opinion polling, Proposals, Sortition | 2 Comments »

Under sortition, no matter what your cause is, you have no lever to force the government to act

Posted on August 4, 2023 by Yoram Gat

Adam Lee writes a polemic for sortition in OnlySky, a website billing itself as being “dedicated to protecting America’s secular democracy through reality-based journalism, storytelling, and commentary”. Lee covers standard ground – Athens using sortition and rejecting elections, the statistical representativity of allotted bodies, the unrepresentativity of elected bodies, Ireland’s use of sortition. (One thing that I have not heard before is that Ireland will soon have another constitutional referendum for adopting or rejecting a proposal by the allotted constitutional convention, this time for deleting Article 41.2 of the Irish constitution which is concerned with making sure mothers do not neglect “their duties at the home”.)

Lee offers two potential problems with a sortition-based system. The first is the statistical possibility of unrepresentative samples:

What if we choose 100 representatives by lot and get 75 QAnon-believing evangelicals? A legislature that’s far out of the mainstream could wreak tremendous harm or radically reshape society in disastrous ways.

The other is problem is that

even if [the system is] representative, it wouldn’t necessarily be responsive. People mounting a campaign on issues that matter to them is one of the safety valves of democracy. If there’s a problem that the government is ignoring—anything from potholed streets to rampant gun violence to unpopular wars—someone can, and probably will, run for office on a platform of fixing it.

Under sortition, that’s impossible. No matter what your cause is, you have no lever to force the government to act. You have to sit back and hope that someone who shares your views gets chosen on the next go-round.

Lee concludes:

Despite these problems, I can see real potential for sortition—if not as the sole basis for government, then maybe as a component of it. What if, instead of a House and a Senate, we had one democratically elected chamber and one made up of citizens chosen by lot?

Filed under: Athens, Elections, History, Press, Sortition | 29 Comments »

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