Timo Rieg is skeptical about citizens’ councils

Posted on April 29, 2023 by Yoram Gat

Below is an extended excerpt from a translation of a piece by Timo Rieg (originally in German).

Everything speaks for the drawing of lots – called “aleatoric democracy” as a method of social control, after the Latin word for dice “alea” and known, among other things, from Asterix: “Alea iacta est,” “the die is cast,” or in the classic German phrase “die Würfel sind gefallen.”

But precisely because everything speaks for the democratic drawing of lots, the current hype about citizens’ councils must make one skeptical. For the strengths of aleatory democracy are a frontal assault on the real ruling aristocracy.

In its egalitarianism, the drawing of lots takes no account whatsoever of party careers; it knows no hierarchy, no compulsory factions, no empty election promises. Parties and lobbyists may exist even in an aleatory democracy, but they would forfeit most of their current influence on public life as a whole.

Of course, it is not impossible that professional politicians in particular, some of whom have known for many decades about the insane autonomy of parties, might long for a change of system and therefore be open to experimentation (some politicians and ex-politicians have written entire books about this).

Good lobbyists could be trusted to convince drawn citizens of their positions; good lobbyists do not rely on political backrooms, on covert influence, on strong-arming. But there will be only a very small minority willing to give up their special role for the sake of a fair democracy.

It is therefore to be feared that some advocates of aleatory democratic citizen participation are wolves in sheep’s clothing. After all, hardly any of the protagonists of this new civil rights movement would like to make their own influence or their own (economic) advantages dependent on a lottery, which means: giving up special rights in favor of the general public.
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Another Herefordshire citizen council letter to the editor

Posted on April 24, 2023 by Yoram Gat

The Herefordshire citizen council for the climate has been the subject of a couple of critical letters to the editor of the Hereford Times last year. In a new letter, Frank Myers MBE from Ross-on-Wye is critical of the process as well, and in particular is unhappy about the fact that the identities of the members of the council are not made public.

Why won’t Herefordshire Council name Climate Assembly members?

LAST year a Citizen’s Climate Assembly was formed. Some 50 or so members were recruited and each were paid £300 for their participation.

The group was chosen, with the help of the infamous Sortition Foundation, in such a way that almost 90 per cent had preconceived concerns about climate change.

As we approach the local elections I think it is important to know how many of these people have put themselves forward for election for posts where they are paid nothing.

So I asked Herefordshire Council for their names and the council refused to disclose them.

So we are not allowed to know but Councillor Ellie Chowns, the leader of the Greens, who chaired the foundation proceedings, obviously knows their identity and has had the opportunity to share the Green message with them.

Is this democracy?

Filed under: Applications, Elections, Press, Sortition | 7 Comments »

Varoufakis explains how citizen councils can revolutionize democracy

Posted on April 21, 2023 by Yoram Gat

It was recently noted here that Yanis Varoufakis, former finance minister of Greece and leader of the Greek MeRA25 party, proposed a “monetary supervision jury” for controlling the central bank. It turns out that for Varoufakis citizen councils should serve in similar roles controlling public sector entities across the state bureaucracy.

A short clip on the YouTube channel of the DiEM25 movement shows a segment from a speech by Varoufakis in the Greek Parliament advocating for wide use of citizen councils, “mostly allotted but with elected members as well”. Varoufakis proposes that such bodies should select the managers of public sector organizations and monitor their performance. According to Varoufakis deliberative citizen councils would provide an alternative to both the corruption and inefficiency of capitalism and the corruption and inefficiency of statism by combining “the best of the state with civil society”.

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Beaudet: Let us push the frontiers of democracy

Posted on April 20, 2023 by Yoram Gat

Thierry Beaudet is the President of the French Economic, Social and Environmental Council (CESE), the body which organized the French allotted bodies which discussed environmental policy and end-of-life policy. He has now published a book in which he advocates the use of sortition as a tool of democracy. The book is described by the publisher as follows:

The trappings of our democracy are falling apart: elections are no longer adequate for the task, and there is general distrust toward every authority and every power. Facing this crisis, new political practices assert themselves, practices which engage and refer to the citizen body. Citizen participation, still in its beginning in our country, must develop, through sortition, the exercising of collective deliberation, the systematic collaborative construction of public policy. Thierry Beaudet, the President of the Economic, Social and Environmental Council, proposes that we learn how to remake democracy and to discuss together substantive issues rather than keep rehashing divisions in a vacuum.

Filed under: Applications, Books, Deliberation, Participation, Sortition | 1 Comment »

The Times alarmed about the radical proposals of the Sortition Foundation

Posted on April 13, 2023 by Yoram Gat

The Times writes:

Group that wants to abolish MPs wins government cash

Even Extinction Rebellion believes the Sortition Foundation’s ideas are too radical

The taxpayer has been funding a group that campaigns for the end of parliamentary democracy and which even Extinction Rebellion considers to be too radical.

The Sortition Foundation has provided recruitment services for parliament and other governmental bodies, helping them to organise “citizens’ assemblies” that are used to inform decision makers on issues such as climate change.

Participants are paid to take part and chosen through a process of “stratified random selection” so that assemblies, made up of between 20 to 200 people, are representative of communities in the UK and can be used to guide government policy.

The not-for-profit company was awarded £26,000 by the Department for Environment, was among the beneficiaries of a £120,000 contract from the House of Commons and received £10,000.

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Electoral body members selected via sortition in Mexico

Posted on April 5, 2023 by Yoram Gat

A sortition procedure was used in Mexico to select the president and three council members of the Mexican National Electoral Institute, reports Mexico News Daily:

[Guadalupe Taddei Zavala] will replace Lorenzo Córdova at the helm of Mexico’s electoral agency next week after her name was drawn out of a transparent lottery box in the Chamber of Deputies in the early hours of Friday morning.

If that sounds like an unusual way to appoint the country’s electoral chief, that’s because it is.

Party leaders decided to use sortition – also known as selection by lottery and selection by lot – to elect the new INE president and three new electoral councilors since none of the candidates had the support of the required two-thirds of lawmakers in the lower house of Congress.

An agreement between the parties that would have allowed that level of support for four consensus candidates never materialized. As a result, sortition was used to elect an INE president and councilors for the first time.

The Morena party, which along with its allies has a simple majority in the Chamber of Deputies, were likely happy to resort to drawing lots because the majority of the 20 candidates for the four positions – all of whom were nominated by a “technical committee” earlier this month – are close to their party, the newspaper El País reported.

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A democratic rock bottom

Posted on April 4, 2023 by Yoram Gat

Guillaume Drago, a law professor at Université Panthéon-Assas Paris II writes [original in French] the following in the Catholic monthly journal La Nef.

A democratic rock bottom

It is the time, it seems, of “participative democracy”, which has been described as “the collection of methods aiming to involve the citizens in the process of political decision making” [L. Blondiaux, on the site vie-publique.fr], and which could be defined as the direct participation of citizens in the creation of rules, and in particular legislation. It surely involves that when it concerns the “Citizen Conventions” for the climate and for the end-of-life question.

The composition of these “conventions” is the product of allotment which is supposed to be representative of the French population. The institution which organizes these conventions is the Economic, Social and Environmental Council (CESE, pronounced “se-zeh”), with a “governance committee” which, it is easily understood, is there to steer the discussions in the desired directions and an “oversight body”, for the end-of-life convention [The role of the oversight body is defined on the site of the “convention”: “The oversight body is tasked with ensuring respect for the essential principles of the Citizen Convention: sincerity, equality, transparency, respect for the speech of the citizens. The body also verify that the conditions guarantee the independence of the Citizen Convention”.] The assessment of a legal scholar of the use of “citizen conventions” cannot avoid being severely negative, for several reasons.

The first is that these bodies are neither constitutionally nor legally recognized. No provision of our constitution discusses such a device for preparing or for participating in deciding laws or regulations. The law is silent on this type of device and it is unclear why the members of parliament would wish to give up some of their legislative power in favor of the citizens whereas those citizens have duly elected the members of parliament in order to represent them… For those two “conventions”, a simple letter of the prime minister to the president of the CESE is all that justifies their existence. They are then associated with what one of the sites of the “conventions” calls the “third Assembly of the Republic, and a legitimate player acting as an independent constitutional assembly, whose task is to be a juncture of citizen participation”. Good heavens! Such responsibility!
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Bertrand Russell on Athenian democracy

Posted on March 31, 2023 by Yoram Gat

In his 1945 book History of Western Philosophy Betrand Russell writes the following (p. 74):

Athenian democracy, though it had the grave limitation of not including slaves or women, was in some respects more democratic than any modern system. Judges and most executive officers were chosen by lot, and served for short periods; they were thus average citizens like our jurymen, with the prejudices and lack of professionalism characteristic of average citizens.

It is remarkable that the reason given for the Athenian system being more democratic than modern systems is not the standard superficial argument about the Assembly voting directly on laws. Russell’s appeal to the fact that Athenian judges and officers had, as a result of being chosen by lot, the same outlook as the average citizen is an adumbration of Manin’s pure theory of elections (“the principle of distinction”).

Filed under: Academia, Athens, Books, Elections, History, Sortition, Theory | 1 Comment »

Maurice Pope’s The Keys to Democracy is now available

Posted on March 18, 2023 by Yoram Gat

Hugh Pope writes:

I’m writing to share details about the publication of the book that has been my special project over the past 18 months: The Keys to Democracy: Sortition as a New Model for Citizen Power, by my late father, the classicist Maurice Pope.

The back story: my dad wrote the book in the 1980s, but, perhaps because it was ahead of its time, his usual publishers wouldn’t take it. We had thought the work was lost well before he passed away in 2019. But two years ago, while sorting through his library, my mother found the typescript.

As my brother Quentin and I edited the text, we consulted several experts and were urged on by messages back telling us that the book was “masterful”, “bold”, “visionary” and more (you can see all their endorsements here). Dr. Hélène Landemore of Yale University and Cambridge classicist Dr. Paul Cartledge generously wrote a preface and an introduction. With many such helping hands, we found a publisher at UK philosophy specialists Imprint Academic. The book went on sale on 7 March.

Back in the 1980s, few others proposed that randomly selected citizens could, after proper information and deliberation, reach better decisions than elected politicians. This open field is perhaps one reason for the book’s unique and accessible combination of the history, mathematics, philosophy and future of sortition. My dad’s ideal – in which random selection could be the decision-making heart of all branches of government – also makes him more radical than most other thinkers writing today.
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Sintomer: The Government of Chance

Posted on March 17, 2023 by Yoram Gat

French political scientist Yves Sintomer has published a new book dealing with sortition called The Government of Chance: Sortition and Democracy from Athens to the Present.

The publisher, Cambridge University Press, provides a(n apparently auto-translated) book description:

Electoral democracies are struggling. Sintomer, in this instructive book, argues for democratic innovations. One such innovation is using random selection to create citizen bodies with advisory or decisional political power. ‘Sortition’ has a long political history. Coupled with elections, it has represented an important yet often neglected dimension of Republican and democratic government, and has been reintroduced in the Global North, China and Mexico. The Government of Chance explores why sortation is returning, how it is coupled with deliberation, and why randomly selected ‘minipublics’ and citizens’ assemblies are flourishing. Relying on a growing international and interdisciplinary literature, Sintomer provides the first systematic and theoretical reconstruction of the government of chance from Athens to the present. At what conditions can it be rational? What lessons can be drawn from history? The Government of Chance therefore clarifies the democratic imaginaries at stake: deliberative, antipolitical, and radical, making a plaidoyer for the latter.

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Filed under: Academia, Athens, Books, Deliberation, Elections, Juries, Sortition | 5 Comments »

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