A Pew poll conducted in July this year probes the views of U.S. citizens about the motivations of politicians. There is widespread agreement that politicians are in it for money, ambition and fame.
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This is the yearly call for input for the year’s end review. As in previous years, I would like to have a post or two summarizing the ongoings here at Equality-by-Lot and notable sortition-related events over the passing year. Please respond in the comments below with your input. You are invited to refresh your memory about the events of the passing year by browsing Equality-by-Lot’s archives.
For previous years’ summaries see: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010.
Filed under: Distribution by lot, Sortition | 2 Comments »
Martin O’Leary, Studio Community Lead at Pervasive Media Studio, Watershed, writes in Arts Professional magazine.
An ancient practice of balloting is being put to use in application processes with the twin aims of reducing unpaid labour and increasing fairness
In the world of funding schemes, many organisations have experimented with random selection, led by the New Zealand Health Research Council in 2013. These experiments have been intended to increase the variety of work funded, by reducing the need to write ‘safe’ proposals. Organisations like the Swiss National Science Foundation, Innovate UK, the Nigerian government, and the Volkswagen Foundation, have all trialled random selection processes for funding science and innovation.
In the arts, there have been several schemes from large organisations like Jerwood Arts, as well as smaller, more DIY organisations like The Uncultured. Alongside aiming to increase the variety of projects funded, random selection is seen as a fairer way of distributing funding, which reduces the power differential between artists and funders.
Reducing unpaid labour
For the last year at Watershed in Bristol, we’ve been experimenting with random selection across a range of our programmes, as an alternative to more traditional selection processes for applicants. We were initially inspired by Jerwood Arts and their 1:1 Fund, in which they introduced randomness to increase the fairness of their application process. We’ve found the real benefit of the system comes in reducing the stress and unpaid labour demanded from applicants.
Before we introduced random selection, our annual winter residency programme typically received up to a hundred applications, competing for two or three places on the programme. Each of these applications included a written project proposal, which could take days to produce. By our estimates, adding up the total time spent across all applicants, we were asking for months of unpaid work — far more than the amount of funded time we offered to successful applicants.
In our new model, we ask applicants to complete a simple form to confirm their eligibility. Then we randomly select a pool of twelve applicants who form a shortlist for the residencies. Each of these applicants has time with our team to discuss their idea, after which they write up a full proposal and have a more formal interview. Because of the limited numbers, we’re able to pay a small stipend to everyone on the shortlist to cover their time preparing the full proposal.
Three models: total, early, late
When we talk about random selection, people often assume we’re giving out residencies entirely at random, removing ourselves completely from the process. This is a version of the process that we call ‘total’ random selection. It’s the simplest way of doing things, and it has real advantages in terms of speed and transparency. However, it’s a difficult process to control, and may lead to undesirable outcomes.
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Jack Graves writes in the East Hampton Star:
An Op-Ed in The Times not long ago [the author presumably refers to this. -YG] suggested that the ballot in this country be replaced by “sortition” — appointment by lot, which democratic Athens used in the 5th and 4th centuries B.C.E. to stock its populous Council, Assembly, and jury courts.
While the level of participation was very high, putting to shame our apathetic turnouts, Athenian democracy wasn’t at the root all that democratic: Women had no voice, neither did resident aliens, who could not own property; there were slaves, as many as 100,000 in the 4th century, it’s estimated in Thomas N. Mitchell’s “Athens: A History of the World’s First Democracy,” and in its Golden Age an aristocratic general and gifted orator, Pericles, essentially called the tune.
Socrates, who was to be sentenced to death for impiety, wasn’t a fan, nor were Plato and Aristotle, though he saw some potential good in it. Socrates said, “It is absurd to choose magistrates by lot where no one would dream of drawing lots for a pilot, a mason, a flute player, or any craftsman at all though the shortcomings of such men are far less harmful than those that disorder our government.”
Frankly, I see no reason why sortition would work any better in the United States, a vastly larger country, than the representative democracy (or democratic republic, if you will) that we already have; though it’s clear that the Electoral College has skewed things, according to smaller states’ disproportionate power, and, because of the winner-take-all allocation of electoral votes, focuses presidential campaigns on battleground states.
Filed under: Athens, Elections, History, Press, Sortition | 3 Comments »
Chris Forman, PhD, an Author, and Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts was interviewed on the Unity Now podcast and discussed his advocacy for Deliberative Democracy and how it relates to his work in physics. Forman discusses how he inadvertently created a deliberation process, how this process can be adopted in the West, and how we can protect it from power-hungry individuals.
Filed under: Deliberation, Elections, Sortition | 2 Comments »
ِA proposal by Sam Mace for randomization in university admittance. Conall Boyle’s work on this idea gets a mention.
It’s Time to Sort the University
University is the gateway to a better life. But the gap between elite and non-elite institutions and their admissions contradicts our self-convinced myths about meritocracy that we have developed. The best and the brightest do not necessarily attend our highest caliber and best funded institutions. Instead, all too often, it is the most well connected, the richest, and a lucky few others who are allowed to grace so many hallowed halls.
The reasoning behind the expansion of universities in the 20th century was to dramatically alter people’s economic and social status. But today, what kind of university someone goes to all too often determines their life path. Attending an Oxford or a Harvard may radically change a young person’s life, whereas for someone attending a Bradford or an Alabama State, this is far less likely to happen. Given the increasing pressures on funding for humanities and other scholarly subjects such as ancient history and classics, attending certain universities will soon include an irrevocable decision on what a student can study.
Therefore the question must be not just how many people can go to university but how fair is the admissions process for the very best universities. This question and similar ones about the role of universities has not just been asked by progressives but also by conservatives such as Christopher Lasch and Patrick Deneen. The fear of elite concentrations of economic, social, and cultural capital is keenly felt across the ideological spectrum. It is a problem that plagues the Anglosphere.
The exams to assess who gets a spot at university are more ruthlessly competitive than ever before. We use invigilators to ensure fairness and tie ourselves in knots over the ethics of using tools such ChatGPT, yet few of us are questioning the fairness of the admissions system in the first place. The enormous demand for the most prestigious universities sparks an ugly reality of fraud and inequality.
Continue reading
Filed under: Academia, Books, Distribution by lot, education, Press, Proposals | Leave a comment »
An op-ed in the Belgian La Libre.
How allotted citizen assemblies could have prevented the failure of the fiscal reform
By Eric Jourdain
Whereas the necessary fiscal reform plan is figured in the government agreement, the seven parties of the Vivaldi government have not reached an agreement. It is time to put the brakes on the particracy, to reanimate democracy and to give an unexpected role to the prime minister.
On July 22nd, our prime minister Alexander De Croo was extremely disappointed. He published an open letter in the written press deploring the fact that “the political class is sometimes so preoccupied by its own matters that it forgets the people and the causes that it must serve”. This was after the failure of the fiscal reform, when the prime minister realized with bitterness that the seven parties which compose the Vivaldi coalition would not reach an agreement on approving yet another version of the fiscal reform presented by the finance minister.
The reform project did figure in the federal government accord presented in September 2020, which explicitly planned for a balanced budget and the reduction in the fiscal pressure on the workers (employees, civil servants and self-employed).
In a country which has the ambition to reach a work participation rate of 80%, one would think that this reform would serve the general interest. In fact, more people at work translates automatically to an increase in contributions to social programs and to fiscal revenue, and a decrease in social expenses by the community.
How to allow a prime minister to resolve this impasse in the future?
By adding a few articles to our constitution specifying the following points:
In case of a positive vote, that would mean that the prime minister and the Citizen Assembly have together prevented an impasse, and possibly a governmental crisis. This would get around the harmful effects of particracy.
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Filed under: Academia, Elections, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 1 Comment »
An argument against sortition that is fairly common among academics is that allotted bodies are not representative because the acceptance rates of offered seats are low. It is often claimed that “experience has shown” that “less than 10%” of people are willing to serve on allotted bodies. Such a finding, it is claimed, is grounds for not using sortition at all, for limiting the powers of allotted bodies, or for various forms of meddling in the way allotted bodies are made up.
Despite the fact that it is sometimes admitted that acceptance rates change depending on the circumstances, the “fact” of low acceptance rates is largely treated as being an immutable, if unfortunate, obstacle to the representativity of allotted bodies. In fact, however, it is obvious that acceptance rates can be easily increased, quite possibly reaching fairly close to 100%, if compensation for acceptance is high enough. How many people would refuse to commit a few weekends to participating in an allotted body if they are paid a few months’ worth of the median salary for their efforts? The answer to this question is obviously that (while we can probably make a good guess) we do not know for sure. But equally obviously it would be fairly easy to find out by running a few experiments.
It is a small miracle then that all those who busy themselves with attacking sortition by arguing that low acceptance rates make allotted bodies unrepresenative have not argued strongly for running such experiments. One may suspect that complaints about low acceptance rate is a tool for resisting the democratic power of sortition, rather than a real concern coming from people with a genuine interest in democratizing society.
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Filed under: Academia, Experiments, Opinion polling, Press, Sortition | 5 Comments »
Filed under: Elections, Press, Sortition | 1 Comment »
Joe Mathews writes in The San Francisco Chronicle about an allotted European People’s Assembly.
How government by lottery could save our democracy
Recently, I spent a long afternoon on a dusty and rocky Athens hill called the Pnyx for the first meeting of a novel assembly inspired by the past.
If its members can establish their [new People’s Assembly] in the governance of Europe, it might change everything we think we know about democracy.
“Citizens of Athens, citizens of the world,” declared Kalypso Nicolaidis, a Franco-Greek scholar who helps lead the assembly and is chair in global affairs at the European University’s School of Transnational Governance, “we would like to invite you to change yourselves.”
Around the world, democracy is seen as a system in which the public, through elections, chooses its representatives. But the People’s Assembly wouldn’t consist of elected politicians. Instead, it would be composed of everyday people, chosen by lottery processes that ensure that the body is a demographic mirror of the people it represents.
These wouldn’t be just the people of one city or one province or even one nation. The People’s Assembly would be a transnational body, with members selected by lottery to represent all of Europe. There’s no body like that on Earth.
But what truly sets apart the idea — and what would make it revolutionary — is its permanence.
Continue reading
Filed under: Academia, Athens, Press, Sortition | 1 Comment »
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