Abizadeh: Representation, Bicameralism, Political Equality, and Sortition

Posted on September 30, 2021 by Yoram Gat

A paper by Arash Abizadeh.

Representation, Bicameralism, Political Equality, and Sortition: Reconstituting the Second Chamber as a Randomly Selected Assembly

Perspectives on Politics, 2020

Abstract

The two traditional justifications for bicameralism are that a second legislative chamber serves a legislative-review function (enhancing the quality of legislation) and a balancing function (checking concentrated power and protecting minorities). I furnish here a third justification for bicameralism, with one elected chamber and the second selected by lot, as an institutional compromise between contradictory imperatives facing representative democracy: elections are a mechanism of people’s political agency and of accountability, but run counter to political equality and impartiality, and are insufficient for satisfactory responsiveness; sortition is a mechanism for equality and impartiality, and of enhancing responsiveness, but not of people’s political agency or of holding representatives accountable. Whereas the two traditional justifications initially grew out of anti-egalitarian premises (about the need for elite wisdom and to protect the elite few against the many), the justification advanced here is grounded in egalitarian premises about the need to protect state institutions from capture by the powerful few and to treat all subjects as political equals. Reflecting the “political” turn in political theory, I embed this general argument within the institutional context of Canadian parliamentary federalism, arguing that Canada’s Senate ought to be reconstituted as a randomly selected citizen assembly.

Filed under: Academia, Elections, Participation, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 4 Comments »

James Kierstead on sortition as a Western idea

Posted on September 21, 2021 by Yoram Gat

James Kierstead is a Senior Lecturer in Classics at the Victoria University of Wellington with an interest in sortition, ancient and modern. He has written a review of the 2020 book Sortition and Democracy: History, Tools, Theories edited by Lilian Lopez-Rabatel and Yves Sintomer soon to be published in Polis: The Journal for Ancient Greek and Roman Political Thought.

Kierstead also wrote some related points in a post on his blog. The post is largely a discussion of a claim made by Lopez-Rabatel and Sintomer in their introduction to the book:

While the practice of divinatory sortition was used in a wide variety of civilizations, the political use of random selection was largely (though not exclusively) developed in the West, where it became particularly widespread and increasingly rationalized. (p. 6)

Kierstead examines the historical evidence in the book – looking at both Western and non-Western history – and tries to assess the validity of the claim.

Filed under: Academia, Books, History, Sortition | 6 Comments »

The politics of sortition: Raisons politiques

Posted on September 17, 2021 by Yoram Gat

The French language journal Raisons politiques has a new issue with a section devoted to sortition. The section comprises of an eponymous editorial by Lionel Cordier, Marie Montagnon, and Théophile Pénigaud as well as 6 papers by Dimitri Courant, Nabila Abbas and Yves Sintomer, Théophile Pénigaud, Nadia Urbinati, Lionel Cordier, and Pierre-Étienne Vandamme.

I have not yet read any of the texts, but the topic seems very interesting: what kind of political visions are being associated with sortition? Examining such questions critically, the French-language discussion of sortition is, as always, ahead of the English-language discussion. Like much of the Anglophone political science, the English-language discussion of sortition is impoverished by its business-orientation and the implied attitude that critical reflection is not necessary because we all know where we are going and we all agree on the important issues and there are only some technical details that have to be taken care of.

If anyone reads any of the articles, a post with an English-language summary and a critical evaluation would be most useful.

Filed under: Academia, Press, Sortition, Theory | 3 Comments »

A proposal of sortition for a student body

Posted on September 8, 2021 by Yoram Gat

In May 2020 Orion Smedley was running for president of the UCLA Undergraduate Student Association. One of the items on his platform was to select USAC councillors using sortition:

Orion Smedley for USAC President

The only way to get a truly representative sample of a population is random sampling (ask a statistician). And presumably we all want a representative government. Enter: Sortition. Sortition is like jury duty, only for legislatures as well. Imagine if your Congress members were ordinary people like you and me instead of career politicians.

Would it work in practice? It worked in Ancient Greece (britannica.com/topic/sortition). But how would it work here?

For starters, we could add a sortition based senate to USAC. While USAC could be the one generating proposals, the sortition senate could be in charge of choosing the proposals. As long as the senate is large enough (by the Central Limit Theorem, at least 30 people) and randomly selected, it would be as though all of UCLA’s undergraduates came together to voice their opinions. It’s the same way that a random spoonful from a well-mixed pot of soup tells us how the entire soup is, no matter how big the pot is; the way USAC is currently selected is closer to not mixing the pot at all and taking spoonfuls from the same spot over and over again, and then being surprised we get the same result every time.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Proposals, Sortition | Tagged: | 1 Comment »

Sortition on the Democracy Nerd podcast

Posted on September 1, 2021 by Yoram Gat

The “Democracy Nerd” podcast has an episode devoted to sortition. The guests are Linn Davis from Healthy Democracy and Madeline McCarren from Democracy Without Elections.

Filed under: Sortition | Leave a comment »

Elections and consent

Posted on August 24, 2021 by Yoram Gat

It has been claimed, notably by Bernard Manin (The principles of representative government pp. 79-93), that the reason that sortition of representatives was never considered, and in fact hardly ever mentioned, by the founding fathers of the Western system was because it conflicted with their commitment to the notion that a just system must be based on consent. The argument is that only elections, which institutionalize the act of explicit selection, are compatible with this principle and thus sortition was ruled out a-priori to such an extent that it was never part of the set of ideas being discussed.

While the commitment of the founding fathers to the principle of consent cannot be realistically disputed, the notion that they saw a strong link between elections and consent is much less convincing. This link is far from obvious since, as Manin notes, the principle of consent long predates the modern era. Such a link would therefore not have been taken for granted by the founders, and presuming that it were important to them it would surely have merited a central place in their rhetoric. In fact, however, Manin cites no primary source which argues that elections are a mechanism of consent. He quotes, for example, John Locke as saying:

And thus that, which begins and actually constitutes any Political Society, is nothing but the consent of any number of Freemen capable of a majority to unite and incorporate themselves into such a Society.

But this, of course, makes no mention of elections. Quite the contrary – it is the consent to the incorporation itself, rather than any particular procedures of the newly formed body, that is crucial.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Books, Elections, History, Sortition, Theory | Tagged: , | 26 Comments »

“Putting the practice of sortition on firmer foundations”

Posted on August 14, 2021 by Yoram Gat

An article in Nature by Bailey Flanigan, Paul Gölz, Anupam Gupta, Brett Hennig and Ariel D. Procaccia proposes a sampling algorithm which produces samples with specified quotas for given subgroups of the population. Since the quotas do not match the proportions of the groups in the population, the probability of selection of each person in the population is not the same. However, the algorithm aims to make those probabilities as equal as possible.

The authors propose the use of their algorithm for selecting citizen assemblies from groups of volunteers. In existing practice, the group of volunteers for a citizen assembly is usually very unrepresentative of the population as a whole and the quotas are used to supposedly compensate for this unrepresentativity and make sure that the selected assembly is descriptive of the population as a whole. The authors claim that “[b]y contributing a fairer, more principled and deployable algorithm [than the previous algorithm used], our work puts the practice of sortition on firmer foundations. Moreover, our work establishes citizens’ assemblies as a domain in which insights from the field of fair division can lead to high-impact applications”.

In my view, while this work may be of theoretical interest in the field of sampling, and while the authors may have the most commendable intentions of promoting democratic decision making, the notion that this work in any way improves the political application of sortition is not only unjustified, but may actually be the opposite of reality.

First, it is obvious that unless absurdly arbitrary and drastic assumptions are made, quotas can in no way compensate for the unrepresentativity of a volunteer sampling group. For quotas to be able to compensate for the unrepresentativity of the volunteer sampling group, it must happen that within each quota group the probability of volunteering is uncorrelated with (informed and considered) opinions on the matters at hand. One would have to have a horribly mechanistic and reductionist notion of what determines individual opinions in order to make such an assumption. Thus, the entire endeavor of quota-adjusted sampling is no more than cosmetics over the reality of bias introduced by low volunteer rates in existing applications of sortition in politics.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 4 Comments »

Victor Bruzzone on sortition

Posted on August 6, 2021 by Yoram Gat

Victor Bruzzone is a doctoral student at the University of Toronto. In a segment on a podcast he makes an argument for a selecting the legislative chamber of government by sortition (starting about 1 hour into the recording). The segment mentions a chapter Bruzzone wrote in a soon-to-be-published book, Liberalism and Socialism: Mortal Enemies or Embittered Kin?, which presumably argues for the same idea.

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

Escoubès and Proriol: Democracy, differently; The art of governing with the citizens

Posted on July 31, 2021 by Yoram Gat

Frank Escoubès and Gilles Proriol are the authors of the book “La démocratie, autrement – L’art de gouverner avec le citoyen” (Democracy, differently: The art of governing with the citizens). In an article in L’ADN they describe the thesis of their book.

There is no doubt that our representative democracy is in trouble. Humiliated, attacked, sometimes rejected: what is going to be its fate in the period between now and the presidential elections of 2022?

The citizens do not feel represented anymore

This is hardly news – our democracy is flawed. The elected are supposed to create the most faithful, the most accurate representation of the citizens, that which a technocracy cannot achieve. The coronavirus crisis has sunk the nail, in silencing the citizens like never before. In the face of that, populism and demagoguery are rising, claiming that they will provide ways for the people to decide everything, all the time, by themselves. Denial the complexity of reality, political irrealism, ideological naivety. In this context, the risk of “democratic retreat” is real. This could be due to an absence of consultation with the citizens (plowing through) or due to a simplistic consultation without a follow-up (an unkept promise). There is therefore an urgent need to “repair the links of trust”.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Books, Initiatives, Opinion polling, Participation, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 5 Comments »

Normal people are stupid. Stop Democratic Reforms before it’s too late!

Posted on July 30, 2021 by Yoram Gat

Democracy by Lottery is a blog about sortition written by “John H”. Here are some excerpts from the latest post.

George Carlin once said, “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that”. And it’s true. You, yes our lovely reader, are another random average person of the world, too stupid to think for themselves and too stupid to govern themselves.

The Status Quo ensures that normal people are not in control

Thank God for the American Republic, which ensures that normal, stupid people will have little to no influence on politics. According to Pew Research, 65% of foolish Americans believe that the federal government is doing too little to reduce the effects of climate change. A Yale 2020 survey also showed that 68% of ignorant Americans favored a revenue-neutral plan to “require fossil fuel companies to pay a carbon tax”.

Thankfully, our elected representatives keep the impassioned grumblings of stupid Americans from affecting policy. Smart and astute Congressmen continue to refuse to pass climate change and carbon taxation legislation. I’m sure these Congressmen have great reasons to delay and delay, because well, Congressmen are simply better than the rest of us. I patiently and enthusiastically wait for the great things Congress will pass, eventually!

Filed under: Elections, Sortition | 1 Comment »

« Previous Page — Next Page »