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 »

Equality by Lot 2023 statistics

Posted on December 24, 2023 by Yoram Gat

Below are some statistics about the 14th year of Equality-by-Lot. Comparable numbers for last year can be found here.

2023 Page views Posts Comments
Jan 2,611 7 12
Feb 2,845 10 68
Mar 3,343 9 68
Apr 3,274 9 27
May 2,417 9 26
June 2,558 6 45
July 2,502 5 14
Aug 3,604 4 74
Sept 3,020 9 64
Oct 2,894 10 28
Nov 2,118 8 9
Dec (to 24th) 1,781 7 7
Total 32,967 93 442

Note that page views do not include visits by logged-in contributors – the WordPress system does not count those visits.

Posts were made by 12 authors during 2023. (There were, of course, many other authors quoted and linked to.)

This blog currently has 161 email followers and 362 WordPress followers. (As part of the upheaval at Twitter/X, automatic publishing to Twitter has been discontinued and “Twitter followers” are no longer being counted.)

Searching for “distribution by lot” (with quotes) using Google returns Equality-by-Lot as the 2nd result (out of “about 80,000 results”), but it is not among the first few dozen results when searching for “sortition” (out of “about 3,740,000 results”). On the other hand, asking ChatGPT “what are good websites about sortition?” does return (for me, at least) Equality-by-Lot as one of the recommendations.

Happy holidays and a happy new year to Equality-by-Lot readers, commenters and posters. Keep up the good fight for democracy!

Filed under: Distribution by lot, meta, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Sortition in 2023

Posted on December 22, 2023 by Yoram Gat

Equality-by-Lot’s traditional yearly review post.

In terms of interest in sortition, 2023 saw a continuation of the trend of previous years. Throughout 2023, there was a steady beat of activity around the world proposing or reporting the application of sortition in various ways for various purposes, along with a stream of condemnations and warnings against the idea.

This included some fairly high profile pieces, with the most notable one being an op-ed in the New York Times. Among the most high profile applications was the French End-of-Life panel. The head of the CESE, the institution that organized this body, proposed expanding the use of allotted bodies.

While the The academics continued their back-and-forth, sortition found a new fairly high-profile advocate in Martin Wolf, the chief economics commentator at the Financial Times, who was introduced to the idea by Nicholas Gruen.

An even more influential sortition advocate this year was Yanis Varoufakis, who put allotted citizen councils as a main component of his democratization agenda. His organization, DiEM25, created a deliberative democracy collective devoted to discussing this idea.

Two notable books dealing with sortition published this year were the late Maurice Pope’s The Keys to Democracy that was originally written in the 1980’s and Yves Sintomer’s The Government of Chance.

This activity indicates a level of interest that is generally comparable to that of the last couple of years. There is a persisting sense of recovery of the prevailing elections-based system from the crisis of 2016 which diminishes any immediate interest in sortition as a tool for contending with popular discontent. As long as there is no widespread unrest, it is likely that interest in sortition will continue to simmer. However, it is important that sortition activists continue to look for ways to spread awareness of the idea in the population so that when a new crisis does occur, sortition is a present viable alternative to the status quo. If it is not, then in all likelihood anti-democratic sentiments would gain ground as a result of popular frustration. Examples of such outcomes already appeared in 2023 in Argentina and the Netherlands.

Filed under: Academia, Applications, Books, Elections, Press, Sortition | 2 Comments »

Upcoming drawing of a Michigan redistricting commission member

Posted on December 21, 2023 by Yoram Gat

The U.S. state of Michigan has an allotted redistricting commission. Following the resignation of Dustin Witjes, one of the commission’s four Democratic members, a replacement member is going to be allotted on January 3rd. The allotment is going to be live-streamed on the internet.

Following Witjes’ resignation on Wednesday, [state Rep. Ann] Bollin said it was long overdue.

“His prolonged absence from Michigan while collecting pay as a member of the redistricting commission is unacceptable. This situation has exemplified a lack of accountability and a disregard for the responsibilities tied to this crucial role,” she said.

With Witjes’ resignation, the Michigan Department of State will host a random selection at 3:30 p.m. Jan. 3 to choose a replacement.

The Michigan constitution requires new commissioners to be randomly selected from the remaining pool of semi-finalist applicants who affiliate with the same party as the departing commissioner.

“Of the 200 semi-finalists randomly selected in June 2020, there are 52 remaining who affiliate with the Democratic Party,” stated a release.

The drawing will be livestreamed on the MICRC’s social media accounts.

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

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