Handpicking the candidates – a possibility that remains unaddressed

Posted on April 12, 2025 by Yoram Gat

The Kleroterion is a sculpture by Taryn Simon. It was originally presented at the Storm King art center in New York in 2024. It is now on display at Gagosian Gallery in New York. Alfred Mac Adam, Professor of Latin American literature at Barnard College-Columbia University, reviews the work at The Brooklyn Rail, a website billing itself as “Critical perspectives on art, politics and Culture. Independent and Free”.

Adam explains the workings of the sculpture:

The machine randomly picked one from a group thus avoiding any possibility for corruption. Simon’s recreation, which looks something like a classic PEZ dispenser as Donald Judd might have reconfigured it, stands alone in one room of the gallery. The space is curtained in red drapery, with red carpet on the flooring forming a pathway to the kleroterion. To run the device, each of five viable candidates for office would be assigned a colored lozenge. The lozenges would be inserted into a slot and a crank turned until all but one lozenge were ejected from the machine, declaring the winner.

As Adam describes things, and indeed, looking at the device itself which has very few slots, Simon’s device is quite different from the Athenian kleroterion. Continue reading →

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Mr. Smarty Pants introduces his readers to sortition

Posted on April 12, 2025 by Yoram Gat

It appears that Mr. Smarty Pants Knows is a brief section in The Austin Chronicle which introduces readers to the lesser known words and expressions of the English language. The April 11th, 2025 of edition of this section introduces its readers to the word sortition (among a few other words). The author provides a short rationalization for the mechanism.

Have you ever been selected for jury duty? Sortition is the selection of public officials or jurors at random to get a representative sample. In ancient Athens, they believed sortition was more democratic than holding elections because oligarchs couldn’t buy their way into office.

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Summer Anwer: The Need for Ireland’s Citizens’ Assemblies in a Post Roe America

Posted on April 5, 2025 by Yoram Gat

A post by Summer Anwer, an undergraduate student at American University.

The intention of Dobbs v. Jackson’s Women Health Organization Supreme Court ruling was to give the authority to regulate abortion back to the people and their elected representatives. To uphold this intention and thus validate the ruling, the people’s voices of each state must be prioritized in decision making. States should adopt a form of Ireland’s citizens’ assembly to navigate abortion laws while putting citizens at the forefront of decision-making like the Supreme Court ruling intended.

Ireland’s 35-year battle for abortion rights

In 1983, the Eighth Amendment was introduced to the Constitution and established a constitutional ban against abortion. Following this strict prohibition of abortion was a 35-year battle for safe abortion access.

Several international human rights organizations called on Ireland to repeal the Eighth Amendment. The UN Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights was “particularly concerned at the criminalization of abortion, including in the cases of rape and incest and of risk to the health of a pregnant woman; the lack of legal and procedural clarity on what constitutes a real substantive risk to the life, as opposed to the health, of the pregnant woman; and the discriminatory impact on women who cannot afford to obtain an abortion abroad or access to the necessary information.”

The Citizens’ Assembly of Ireland

In 2012, Ireland created an assembly of majority citizens to discuss important topics and influence the Oireachtas, the Irish parliament. 66 citizens were randomly selected from the electorate. They require no prior knowledge, as they are given time and background information. The result is a truly representative opinion of what Ireland’s future should be. The assembly merely makes recommendations, which parliament is not required to accept. The other 33 people are politicians and the 100th person is Tom Arnold, a prominent economist.

In 2017, the citizens’ assembly voted that the Eighth Amendment also known as Article 40.3.3º should be repealed. They were given four ballots to shape the referendum, which gradually became more specific about the parameters of the potential referendum.. In 2018, the Irish government sent out a referendum for Irish citizens to vote on which asked if they wished to approve the 36th Amendment which would repeal the Eighth Amendment. 66.4% voted yes which allowed the government to introduce legislation permitting abortion in the first 12 weeks of gestation and up to 24 weeks in some circumstances. Within one year of being presented with this topic, the citizens’ assembly was able to completely change abortion policies to allow for safer abortion access. This proves that allowing the people to choose their nation’s policies and giving them a larger voice in decision-making is more efficient and leads to a happier, healthier society.
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Politician criminality, an insoluble electoralist dilemma

Posted on April 3, 2025 by Yoram Gat

The recent judgment against Marine Le Pen in France has been compared to the decision against Georgescu in Romania. In each case a prominent “extreme right wing” candidate in a European country has been barred from participating in an election campaign in which they had a fair chance of winning. In fact, however, Le Pen’s case is much more similar to that of Turkey’s Imamoglu than to Georgescu’s.

First, unlike Georgescu, whose electoral win was retroactively annulled and who was barred from an election that is merely weeks away, Le Pen’s and Imamoglu’s electoral potential in elections that are years away is speculative. Second, and more importantly, while Georgescu was disqualified on openly political grounds, Le Pen and Imamoglu are being disqualified due to being convicted for illegal actions (or may be convicted and disqualified in the case of Imamoglu who has been arrested but not convicted or officially disqualified yet, I believe). The merits of the cases against Le Pen and Imamoglu may (or may not) be very different, but unlike the case of Georgescu, formally these cases are of the same type in the sense that they are both matters of legal determination rather than of setting political limits on candidates.
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Aristocrats and oligarchs: Out. Posties, mums, nurses and neighbours: In.

Posted on March 22, 2025 by Yoram Gat

A story from PA media:

Demonstrators disrupt House of Lords to demand abolition of unelected chamber

Nick Lester and Abbie Llewelyn, PA Political Staff, 20 March 2025

Protesters have disrupted proceedings in the House of Lords demanding the abolition of the unelected chamber.

Protester Lucy Porter, 50, a primary school teacher from Leeds, told the PA news agency she was “campaigning for a house of the people”.

On the Lords, she said: “It’s a symbol of everything that’s outdated. “We don’t have a functioning democracy in this country.”

The leaflets, apparently modelled on an album by the Sex Pistols punk band, had written on them: “Never mind the Lords here’s the House of People.” On the other side it stated: “Aristocrats and oligarchs: Out. Posties, mums, nurses and neighbours: In. Replace the House of Lords to save the UK.”

The protesters said they were acting on behalf of Assemble, an organisation that campaigns for the Lords to be abolished and replaced by a citizens’ assembly.
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Should a Citizens’ Assembly Complement the European Parliament?

Posted on March 20, 2025 by Yoram Gat

A new book with the title “Should a Citizens’ Assembly Complement the European Parliament?” has been published by the European University Institute. The book is made of a 30-page proposal by Kalypso Nicolaidis for setting up a permanent allotted citizen assembly as part of the EU governance structure followed by about 20 short responses from different authors including many who are known names in the sortition milieu.

From a cursory look, the for and against arguments are predictable and well-worn, but someone possessing a strong character and an iron discipline may be able to go through the whole thing and find some new ideas.

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An electoralist crisis in Romania

Posted on March 15, 2025 by Yoram Gat

Over the last few months Romania has been undergoing an electoralist crisis. The crisis was precipitated by the unexpected ascendance of the “far-right populist” candidate Calin Georgescu to the status of front runner in the first round of the presidential elections in November 2024. This round was annulled by Romania’s Constitutional Court.

The Constitutional Court’s unprecedented decision — which is final — came after President Klaus Iohannis declassified intelligence on Wednesday that alleged Russia organized thousands of social media accounts to promote Calin Georgescu across platforms such as TikTok and Telegram.

The court, without naming Georgescu, said that one of the 13 candidates in the Nov. 24 first round had improperly received “preferential treatment” on social media, distorting the outcome of the vote.

Needless to say, despite being dutifully echoed in the Western media, no evidence was provided to the public to back the claims of Russian meddling. Later reports seemed to be rather vague about those claims:

The European Union’s executive has opened a formal investigation into TikTok because of “serious indications” of foreign interference in the recent Romanian presidential election using the video-sharing platform.
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Shareholder democracy using investor assemblies

Posted on March 10, 2025 by Yoram Gat

Luigi Zingales (University of Chicago), Oliver Hart (Harvard University), and Helene E. Landemore (Yale University) write on the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance.

It is interesting to note how in this context the authors are able to enunciate proposals and arguments that are more systematic and thorough than sortition advocates usually manage to achieve in the context of national or local government.

How should asset managers make decisions in today’s world?

Large asset managers, like Blackrock, Vanguard, and State Street, have been quick to recognize the catch-22 they are in: good old value-maximization in the name of a restrictively understood “fiduciary interest” is no longer cutting it. But in turn any explicitly moralized or political use of their concentrated power puts a political target on their backs and subjects them to public opprobrium. Further, while asset manangers can provide expertise on how many dollars will be lost by pursuing an ethical or environment-friendly strategy, they cannot provide any insights, nor do they have any legitimacy, concerning whether the trade-off is worth it, i.e., whether the moral gains exceed the monetary losses, or whether the moral dimension trumps the financial one altogether.

One obvious way out is to offload the moral and political responsibility for value-values tradeoffs to investors themselves. In 2022, BlackRock launched Voting Choice, a program to transfer the right to cast corporate ballots from asset managers back to investors.

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Hoping for the fleet to return from Samos

Posted on March 8, 2025 by Yoram Gat

In an impressive demonstration of the power of the electoralist dogma to twist one’s perception, Pierre Silverberg, writing in the Belgian La Libre, shares his belief that the ascent of the second Trump administration has a close historical parallel.

[Original in French, Google translation with a couple of minor touch-ups.]

From Democracy to Oligarchy

The parallels between the oligarchic revolution in Athens in -411 and the current coup d’état in the United States are striking.

In the Oligarchic Revolution, the Athenian elite decides to seize power, put an end to democratic institutions, and ally themselves with the enemy city, Sparta, to maintain their hold on Athens. Sound familiar? The historical parallels between the Oligarchic Revolution of 411 BC and the current coup in the United States are striking.

2036 years apart, both the Athenian oligarchy and the American elite present the individual and political freedoms acquired by the people as clear signs of moral and civilizational decline that must be acted upon. In both cases, the oligarchs present themselves as the only ones capable of straightening out the country and purging the nation of its excesses. And, naturally, in both cases, the oligarchy feels authorized to override the laws and subvert the system to the detriment of the people.

War as a context

These “oligarchic revolutions” also fit into a relatively similar historical context: war. The Peloponnesian War was a conflict that broke out between Athens and Sparta. Ideologically, Athens represented “progressive” Greece: its democracy was complete, each citizen enjoyed unprecedented individual freedom as well as the certainty of being able to actively contribute to the politics of his City. Thanks to its democratic practice of drawing lots, it is estimated that an Athenian citizen had a 70% chance of exercising a political role at least once in his life. Conversely, Sparta had kept its original constitution and represented “conservative” Greece. The City was a “gerontocracy” governed by two kings and a council of elders, the Gerousia. The people had practically no chance of ever exercising political responsibility and literally had to choose their representatives using an “applause-meter”.
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Ariely advocates for allotted citizen assemblies

Posted on February 28, 2025 by Yoram Gat

Dan Ariely is a fairly prominent Israeli-American behavioral economist who authored some best-selling popular books (and was also involved in dubious research).

Ynet, the website of the popular Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot, has now published an opinion piece by Ariely [Hebrew] in which Ariely proposes allotted citizen assemblies as a way for overcoming divisions in the Israeli public.

Excerpts from the piece [Google translation]:

My proposal for a new Israeli democracy

It already works in the world, why not here? Imagine a situation where one day you receive a letter from the State of Israel. The letter informs you that you have been selected, along with 299 other citizens, to participate in a deep thinking process on one of the biggest problems facing the country. Then, the experts arrive – a variety of voices from all ends of the spectrum

Why is this so important now?

In Israel, the political, social, and values ​​crisis has reached a boiling point. Each side seems convinced that the other is endangering the country. Dialogue has become toxic, and the ability to listen has almost disappeared.

But research shows that if you put people from all groups in a room, give them time to learn about each other and understand the data, they will be able to reach compromises – and, no less importantly, begin to see each other as human beings.

If all you know about your political opponents comes from social media and the belligerent headlines in the media, it’s very easy to think they’re enemies. But when people sit together, really listen, and study the data before forming an opinion – the magic happens. This doesn’t mean that the gaps will disappear, but a process will be created in which people can cooperate and seek common solutions.

Are we ready to think differently about democracy?

I recently met with a German expert who studies citizens’ committees. He told me that there is a widespread perception in representative democracy that once every four years we go to the polls, and that this is what is considered taking civic responsibility. But according to him, the truth is exactly the opposite – going to vote once every four years is not taking responsibility, but giving it up.

A true democracy, he explained, is a situation in which citizens actively participate in public life, frequently and in depth. Not just on social media, not just in protests, but in orderly processes where they can learn, understand and influence. And what’s more – citizen committees are one of the best ways to do this.
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