Short refutations of common arguments for sortition (part 2)

Posted on November 17, 2021 by Yoram Gat

Part 1 is here.

The two arguments presented below pin the problem with elections on the voters.

4. The masses are rationally ignorant. Therefore any system that relies on their judgement would not function well. Sortition does not rely on mass judgement.

According to this argument elections present a variety of choices to the voters, with some of these choices being on the whole materially better than others as measured by the interests and values of the voters. The voters, however, each knowing that the impact of their vote is tiny, are too selfish (or more politely, too busy taking care of their private business) to spend the time and effort to determine which candidate or party are better than others. Instead they hope that others would do the work for them, and in this way they would save the effort of figuring out which alternatives are the better ones but at the same time they will enjoy the good outcomes of other people’s choices. But since everybody, or at least the large majority of voters, follow the same calculation, almost everybody is uninformed and as a result when they arrive at the voting booth, they often select poor alternatives.

All this sounds very sophisticated and has the stamp of approval of the economists and rational-choice theorists. The argument suffers, however, from at least two severe problems. First, the assumption that the electoral alternatives present to voters a meaningful choice is theoretically problematic. Since the electoral choice is between elite factions, the range of choice must be severely limited. The factions of the elite all share certain elite values and interests that any of them will promote if and when they are in power. The promotion of those values and interests is often made at the expense of the values and interests of the general population, making the policies pursued by government – regardless of the elite faction in power – detrimental to the general population.
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Filed under: Academia, Elections, Sortition, Theory | 17 Comments »

Waxman and McCulloch: The Democracy Manifesto

Posted on November 16, 2021 by Yoram Gat

Wayne Waxman, a retired professor of modern philosophy, and Alison McCulloch, a scholar of philosophy and retired journalist (as well as a contributor to this blog), have just published a book named The Democracy Manifesto: A Dialogue on Why Elections Need to be Replaced with Sortition.

The Democracy Manifesto is about how to recreate democracy by replacing elections with government that is truly of, by and for the people. Written in engaging and accessible dialogue form, the book argues that the only truly democratic system of government is one in which decision-makers are selected randomly (by sortition) from the population at large, operating much the way trial juries do today, but 100% online, enabling people to govern together even across great distances. Sortition has a storied history but what sets The Democracy Manifesto apart is its comprehensive account of how it can be implemented not only across all sectors and levels of government, but throughout society as well, including the democratization of mass media, corporations, banks, and other large institutions. The resulting Sortitive Representative Democracy (SRD) is the true heir to ancient Greek democracy, and the only means of ensuring ‘we the people’ are represented by our fellow citizens rather than by the revolving groups of elites that dominate electoral systems. In the process, the book grapples with myriad hot topics including economic issues, international relations, indigenous rights, environmentalism and more.

Filed under: Academia, Athens, Books, Elections, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 32 Comments »

Meyer-Resende: Citizen assemblies do not address the biggest problem in democracies

Posted on November 13, 2021 by Yoram Gat

Michael Meyer-Resende writes in the EUobserver:

[M]any climate activists want to expand democracy. They are deeply frustrated with the insufficient response to the threat of global heating.

There is much talk that the old institutions of representative democracy are not good enough to meet the challenge. “Politicians simply can’t see past the next election,” says the group Extinction Rebellion. The role of citizens is reduced to voting once every four or five years. Or so the argument goes.

That is why one idea has gained much enthusiasm among climate activists: citizen assemblies.

In these assemblies, people who are drawn by lot from pre-defined groups that broadly represent society, hear from experts, discuss what should be done about climate change and adopt recommendations, or even decisions.
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Filed under: Press, Sortition | Tagged: | 1 Comment »

Short refutations of common arguments for sortition (part 1)

Posted on November 6, 2021 by Yoram Gat

Some years ago I wrote a set of posts refuting several standard arguments against sortition (1, 2, 3, 4).

It seems useful, however, to refute some oft-offered arguments for sortition as well. These are arguments that provide a poor foundation for the idea of applying sortition in government. Such arguments are made, and repeated reflexively, by academics, by members of the sortition-milieu, by sortition activists, in the press, and by others who discuss sortition. Often, in addition to being factually or logically unsound, these arguments also lead to advocacy of the application of sortition in ways that are bound to lead to a failure to realize the full democratizing potential of sortition, and in some cases are bound to lead to complete discrediting of the entire notion.

The first three arguments presented (and refuted) here all deal with supposed superior competence of an allotted chamber over an elected one. All suffer from essentially the same flaw. In fact, the advantage of an allotted chamber over an elected one is not that it is more competent but that it is more representative.

1. Allotted bodies would carry out real deliberation whereas elected bodies are the setting for partisan performances and grandstanding.

This argument is a favorite of propounders of “deliberative democracy”. According to this argument, a major reason that public policy is poor is that it is not determined through meaningful deliberation. Supposedly, the elected are too busy electioneering, or are too stubborn ideologically to deliberate with each other and develop good, common sense, widely popular policy. But why would a government with a majority in the legislature avoid deliberating within itself – in public or behind closed doors – in order to produce policy that would make it popular? Are they too stupid? If what they seek is “good policy”, or even if they just seek reelection and if deliberation could produce policy options that would make them more popular and increase their chance for reelection, why would they be unable to engage in such deliberation?
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Filed under: Academia, Elections, Proposals, Sortition, Theory | 20 Comments »

The Core Assembly

Posted on October 27, 2021 by Yoram Gat

The Core Assembly is an allotted body described by its organizers as follows:

The Core Assembly brings together 100 people from around the world, a snapshot of the planet’s population.

They will learn about and discuss the climate and ecological crisis, and present proposals at the COP26 climate conference in November 2021.

The members of the body were selected using a multi-stage process involving both allotment and co-optation:

Step 1. Global location lottery: On June 24, we selected 100 points on the globe by lottery, using a NASA database of human population density. The 100 points produced by this lottery (also called a sortition) are the locations from where we recruited participants for the Core Assembly. In the future we hope to perform this global lottery with 1,000 points. The data and the open source code used to do this are freely available.
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Filed under: Applications, Press, Sortition | 11 Comments »

Sortition by elimination

Posted on October 22, 2021 by Yoram Gat

Worries are sometimes expressed about the impossibility of generating a sample of people at random in a way that cannot be manipulated by powerful actors. Sources of physical data are either too predictable to be of use or require machinery that is too arcane or sensitive to be effectively publicly verifiable. Social sources of data – such as the stock market or blockchain transactions – may be influenced powerful forces in society. Many randomizations that rely on explicit and symmetrical inputs from the public as a source of randomness have to utilize aggregation procedures that may allow those with advance knowledge of others’ inputs to manipulate the outcomes. With the prevailing mood of generalized distrust in institutions, a randomization mechanism would have to be completely open and verifiable to have a reasonable chance of inspiring confidence.

My proposal for such a mechanism is a simple elimination procedure which works as follows. At the outset, one candidate is eliminated. This candidate then gets to eliminate another, who then gets to eliminate another, and so on. The selection thus proceeds by sequential elimination of candidates until only one, or however many appointees are desired, remain.

This procedure is easily verifiable by any observer since it is self-contained and does not involve secrets, fancy machinery or fancy calculations. All the decisions involved are made in the open and cannot be foreseen in advance.

In addition to being manipulation resistant, this procedure has the advantage that it involves all interested citizens in the selection procedure and allows them to influence the outcome. By creating a new form of mass political participation, this procedure addresses the oft-heard objection to sortition that it deprives people from having influence over the appointment of decision makers.

In fact, while, like any form of mass participation, the impact made by any single decision-maker is minute, this form of participation is more meaningful than electoral participation because the choice made by each person – who to eliminate – is entirely unrestricted. This is in contrast which the electoral choice which is restricted a-priori by a primaries process in which the field of candidates is drastically narrowed-down. In the proposed procedure, citizens are completely free to make their elimination choices as they see fit, even if it may be seen as a sign of good citizenship to make this choice at random.

A minor technical point: The first candidate to be eliminated, the starting point of the elimination chain, can be chosen arbitrarily – this is not a position of decisive power, but rather the opposite, a position of disadvantage. If no other procedure is found suitable, an election can be used to select this person.

Filed under: Participation, Proposals, Sortition | Tagged: | 18 Comments »

Neil Mackay: Only sortition could save the UK

Posted on October 20, 2021 by Yoram Gat

Neil Mackay writes in The Herald of Scotland (paywalled, but full text available here):

BRITAIN feels wobbly, shaky. The killing of MP David Amess is just the latest event to unmoor us a little more from stability. In truth, the whole of the Western world feels shaky. Democracy seems to quiver wherever you look. The smart money is on Trump returning to Washington. France toys with the far right. The European project looks ready to implode. China looms over the once dominant West, threatening to eclipse America.

How did we get here? Just 20 years ago we were enjoying ‘the Great Holiday from History’ – the end of the 1990s when stability, peace and prosperity (at least in the West) seemed on an ever upward trajectory. Today, only the flagrantly optimistic don’t fear the future.

Perhaps historians – centuries from now, if humanity makes it that far – will call this period ‘the Great Disruption’, when everything was in flux and the world seemed broken.

Here in Britain, though, matters look even more dark and dangerous than in other democracies – aside perhaps from America with Trump waiting in the wings.

We’ve had two MPs assassinated in five years. The country is quite literally coming apart as Scottish independence and Northern Ireland threaten to turn the Union into a failed project. England is utterly divided between remainers and leavers. We’re facing a Winter of Discontent – a breakdown of functioning business. Britain has become a byword for treachery among our closest neighbours. After the Aukus deal, France views Britain with contempt. Dublin warns Britain cannot be trusted following threats to rip up the Northern Ireland protocol – a treaty negotiated by Number 10 but now up for destruction because it no longer suits.

Hate, division and conspiracy isn’t just stoked online – it now comes dished up in our mainstream media, from once reputable papers to broadcasters. Commentators fuel rage and seek scapegoats; the comment sections of newspaper websites drip with venom. In Scotland, the worst elements of unionism and nationalism make you fear how any future referendum – if it ever happens – might be conducted. Politicians – themselves the victims of so much hate – also stoke rage, with loose, dangerous language. Words in parliament profoundly affect the nature of British debate.

We’re an ailing state. What worries the mind is that an ailing state can become a failing state – and failed states turn very dark very quickly.

It’s not that the major forces currently at play in politics are wicked: Euroscepticism, unionism, nationalism – they’re all legitimate positions to hold. It’s how we’ve conducted the debate around these issues which has broken Britain so badly.

We are all better individually than the collective mess we’ve made, and we must all share some portion of responsibility for what’s happened, because we’ve all played our part in one way or another.
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Filed under: Press, Proposals, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Sortition on Reddit

Posted on October 12, 2021 by Yoram Gat

Reddit user subheight640 is a sortition advocate. He (or she) has been posting about sortition on multiple Reddit forums. His posts – such as this one – have garnered approvals from hundreds of users and has engaged a great number of people in discussions on this topic. This seems like a fairly effective way to get sortition more widely known and considered.

Filed under: Action, Sortition | 20 Comments »

Shadi Hamid on sortition

Posted on October 1, 2021 by Yoram Gat

Shadi Hamid is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and a contributing writer to The Atlantic. He seems to have recently discovered sortition through the writings of Hélène Landemore and he is quite excited. (He still seems quite confused in his terminology about what should be called “democratic”, but ideas die hard.)

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

Mueller on Landemore

Posted on September 30, 2021 by Yoram Gat

Jan-Werner Mueller, Professor of Politics at Princeton University and author of the recent book “Democracy Rules”, wrote an article in which he reviews Hélène Landemore’s book Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century (along with a couple of other books that he devotes less space to).

Luckily Mueller’s review focuses on the better points made by Landemore (e.g., that elitism is inherent to elections) rather than on the less convincing parts of the book. (For a detailed review of the strengths and weaknesses of Open Democracy see my series of posts devoted to this book.)

Mueller’s objections to allotted chambers are the following:

  1. Alotted “bodies also can end up favoring the privileged, either because those who feel unqualified will abstain or because more educated and eloquent participants will dominate the debate.”
  2. A sortition-based system “promises inclusion and openness, but it ultimately excludes all who have not been chosen in the process of random selection. In large countries, many people will never get a turn (indeed, serving would amount to winning the lottery).”
  3. A “lottocracy might fail to fulfill one of the functions that elections reliably serve: the peaceful resolution of conflict through vote counting. If one accepts political realists’ argument that elections are always essentially conducted in the shadow of civil war, the counting process serves to demonstrate the relative strength of each conflicting party.”

Mueller concludes:

In any case, one need not go as far as abolishing elections to see that sortition chambers could play a useful role in situations where highly fraught moral issues need to be debated (as in Ireland’s abortion decision), or where conflicting parties need to set the terms of competition. That could apply to the shape of election districts, salaries for legislators, the overall size of parliaments, or any other issue where professional politicians have a conflict of interest.

Filed under: Academia, Books, Elections, Press, Sortition | 6 Comments »

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