More on the French Citizen Convention on the Climate

Posted on October 18, 2019 by Yoram Gat

A short video published by CESE (Economic, Social and Environmental Council) – the body which organizes the French Citizen Convention on the Climate – provides some details on the process of sampling used for selecting the 150 citizens that serve in the convention.

The process has been sub-contracted to “Harris Interactive” – a market research company. According to the video, the company produces its sample by calling randomly generated phone numbers and inviting those who answer the phone to participate. The responses of those contacted are equally split between those who definitely accept, those who tentatively accept (pending being able to attend on the days of the convention), and those who reject the offer to participate.

As published earlier, the final sample is made by selecting from those who accept the invitation while matching the makeup of the French population in terms of gender, age groups, education attainment and place of residence.

Also on the matter of the Citizen Convention on the Climate: Loic Blondiaux, political science professor in the Sorbonne and member of the governance committee of the Convention was interviewed by FranceInter radio. He sees the Convention as a historic event. He believes that because the Convention is being organized by a body that is independent from the government it really is a democratic process despite the fact that it was initiated by the government.

Filed under: Academia, Applications, Press, Sortition | Tagged: | 3 Comments »

Comments by members of the Cambridgeshire Citizens’ Assembly

Posted on October 11, 2019 by Yoram Gat

Benjamin Hatton of CambridgeshireLive interviewed members of the Cambridgeshire Citizens’ Assembly:

What did the assembly members think of the process?

As a condition for entry, the media was requested not to identify or speak with any assembly members, except those chosen for interview.

Lisa Eland, 45, from Haddenham, near Ely said: “It was quite interesting. I didn’t quite know what to expect.

“There was a lot of material to be covered, so you really had to focus on so many aspects that you didn’t necessarily contemplate discussing. But it gave everybody the opportunity to listen to other people’s experiences, opinions – you get very caught up in your own little bubble, how things affect you, so it was quite eye-opening listening to other people.”
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Agora Brussels wins a seat in Brussels Regional Parliament

Posted on October 11, 2019 by Yoram Gat

Gabriel Popham reports in openDemocracy:

Agora Brussels [website, Facebook page] started less than two years ago as a grassroots citizens’ movement to reboot democracy in the Belgian capital. Earlier this year Agora ran for the regional elections and managed to gain one seat at the Brussels Regional Parliament.

Agora is a unique political party, in that it doesn’t have any political programme to speak of: its only agenda is to organise a permanent citizens’ assembly, promote its institutionalisation for the region of Brussels, and defend its decisions in Parliament.

Pepijn Kennis, MP for Agora, admits that Agora’s strategy of running in elections might seem counterintuitive at first. “As a movement, we’re very much inspired by the book Against Elections by David Van Reybrouck,” he tells me from his office in the Regional Parliament. Agora shares Van Reybrouck’s view that elections nowadays tend to prioritise short-term thinking at the expense of genuine democracy.
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Filed under: Elections, Press, Sortition | 2 Comments »

Cook: Sortition is an element in a war on civilization

Posted on October 11, 2019 by Yoram Gat

Michael Cook, editor of MercatorNet, issues a strong warning against the Extinction Rebellion movement. Here are some excerpts:

Extinction Rebellion’s loopy politics

The movement’s “Declaration of Rebellion”, a pastiche of America’s “Declaration of Independence”, states: “We hereby declare the bonds of the social contract to be null and void, which the government has rendered invalid by its continuing failure to act appropriately. We call upon every principled and peaceful citizen to rise with us.”

Declaring the “social contract” null and void is a radical step – so radical that either the author did not understand it (unlikely) or he thought that no one else would (likely). Stopping traffic? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet. This is a declaration of war on civilization.

There is but one rational, ethical, and spiritual position on climate change. None other is possible. “The ecological crises that are impacting upon this nation, and indeed this planet and its wildlife can no longer be ignored, denied nor go unanswered by any beings of sound rational thought, ethical conscience, moral concern, or spiritual belief,” the declaration says.

In a democracy, questioning an opponent’s sincerity about his convictions is the ultimate offence. Convictions are tested by rational debate, not by smearing people as venal, wicked or stupid. But this is just what XR is doing.

XR demands that countries go “beyond politics”. “Government must create and be led by the decisions of a Citizens’ Assembly on climate and ecological justice.” Why? Because “Political power in the UK is in the hands of a few elected politicians” says the “Our Demands” page on the XR website. This, of course, is true. Putting power in the hands of elected politicians is called representative democracy and it has a long and successful history of defending political and personal freedom.
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Filed under: Athens, Mass action, Press, Sortition | 6 Comments »

The principles of representative government and the French sortitionists

Posted on September 22, 2019 by Yoram Gat

A fun paper paper by Samuel Hayat, “La carrière militante de la référence à Bernard Manin dans les mouvements français pour le tirage au sort”, Participations 2019/HS (Hors Série) [original in French, abstract in English], tells the story of how Bernard Manin’s book The principles of representative government came to play a role in the sortitionist movement in France. The bottom line, according to Hayat’s telling, is that it is all Etienne Chouard’s doing. Hayat also claims that Manin’s book was not the source of the reformists’ interest in sortition but rather that they, and in fact mostly Chouard himself, used the book, with its impeccable academic credentials, as a legitimating force for their position.

Hayat’s paper seems to serve as the starting point for Antoine Chollet (“Les postérités inattendues de Principes du gouvernement représentatif : une discussion avec Bernard Manin” by
Antoine Chollet and Bernard Manin, Participations 2019/1 (N° 23)”, [original in French, abstract in English]) and for his claim that Manin’s book was misunderstood by both activists and scholars as a polemic in favor of sortition, when in fact Manin is pretty happy with elections, which he sees as mixing democratic and aristocratic elements.
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Filed under: Academia, Books, Elections, meta, Sortition, Theory | 22 Comments »

Sortition in France – discussion and application

Posted on September 20, 2019 by Yoram Gat

Discussion and application of sortition continue to be very active in the Francophone world. Here are some recent examples:

Guyancourt: “Décidons ensemble” [“Let’s decide together”] are forming their list of candidates for the municipal elections by knocking on door number 20 in each street.

From the Popular initiative to sortition: the responses to the crisis of representation – a discussion with Yves Sintomer, Dimitri Courant, and Clément Mabi.

Random interactions in the Chamber: How allocating legislators’ seats at random affects their behavior.

Allotting candidates for the Paris municipal elections.

An allotted citizen council in Sion, Switzerland will publish positions on the propositions on the Swiss ballot.

Filed under: Academia, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 2 Comments »

The cartelization thesis

Posted on September 17, 2019 by Yoram Gat

A paper by Richard Katz and Peter Mair called “Changing models of party organization and party democracy: The emergence of the cartel party” published in Party Politics Journal in 1995 (and based on a 1992 workshop presentation by the same authors) spurred a body of academic work in political science dealing with the “cartelization” of party politics. In the abstract of a 2009 paper by the same authors (“The Cartel Party Thesis: A Restatement”) Katz and Mair write:

The cartel party thesis holds that political parties increasingly function like cartels, employing the resources of the state to limit political competition and ensure their own electoral success.

The thesis sees this cartelization as a phase in the evolution of party dynamics. Earlier phases were the “cadre party” (19th c.), the “mass party” (first half of 20th c.), and the “catch-all party” (second half of the 20th c.). While the mass parties and the catch-all parties competed for votes by presenting competing policies, the thesis asserts, the cartel parties do not. They huddle around a neo-liberal consensus and offer the public no alternatives.

In their 2005 paper “From Catch-all Politics to Cartelisation: The Political Economy of the Cartel Party”, Mark Blythe and Richard Katz explain the cartelization phenomenon as follows:

We argue that two key changes have occurred that have effectively turned parties from maximising competitors into risk averse colluders: the limits of catch-all politics, and the rhetoric and reality of globalisation.

The first factor, according to Blythe and Katz, is that by the 1970’s the policy competition between parties has produced welfare policy that was at the maximum capacity of the state to provide. Supposedly this was the dominant dimension along which parties were competing, and it has now become impossible to compete along this dimension any longer.

The second factor is a reduction in the ability of states to control the economy due to globalization:

In brief, catch-all parties were creatures of the Keynesian era. States were assumed to have primary responsibility for ensuring jobs and growth and were also assumed to be able to marshal fiscal instruments to those ends.

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The French Citizen Convention on the Climate

Posted on September 12, 2019 by Yoram Gat

Le Monde reported on August 26th (original in French):

The citizen convention on the climate: the allotment of 150 participants has commenced

This citizen convention, which is one of Emmanuel Macron’s responses to the “Gilets Jaunes” crisis, will propose measures to combat global warming.

The allotment of 150 Frenchpeople who will take part in the Citizen Convention on the Climate has begun on Monday, August 26th and will last until the end of September, before meeting for the first time at the beginning of October. This citizen convention, aimed by Emmanuel Macron as one of the rseponses to the grand debate that followed the “Gilets Jaunes” crisis, will propose measures to combat global warming, as France is far from meeting its obligations.

Telephone numbers are going to be automatically generated – 85% mobile numbers and 15% landline numbers – and about 25,000 people will be called, in order to select 150. Some criteria have been set in order to get the best representation: 52% women and 48% men, 6 age groups (starting at age 16), levels of educational attainment, a diversity of professions. Regional population will also be taken into account with 4 oversea representatives, as well as representation of urban centers, their surrounding areas and the rural areas.
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Filed under: Applications, Press, Sortition | Tagged: | 64 Comments »

Procaccia: Lotteries Instead of Elections? Not So Arbitrary

Posted on September 7, 2019 by Yoram Gat

Ariel Procaccia, an associate professor in the computer science department at Carnegie Mellon University, has an opinion piece in Bloomberg News advocating sortition. Some excerpts:

Have you ever thought that 535 random people off the street would do a decidedly better job than the duly elected members of the U.S. Congress? If so, you’ve been scooped by a few millenniums; the idea of selecting government officials at random, known as sortition, is neither as outrageous nor as original as it seems.

In the fourth and fifth centuries BC, some of the central organs of the Athenian government were populated by selecting random volunteers. For example, the members of the Council of 500 — whose responsibilities included developing legislation, overseeing the executive branch and managing diplomatic relations — were selected at random for one-year terms.

During the Renaissance, sortition was all the rage. For centuries it played a key role in the process of selecting the Doge of Venice, as well as in populating the branches of the Florentine government. It was also employed widely throughout the Kingdom of Aragon, which is part of modern-day Spain. [King Ferdinand II of Aragon spoke highly of the virtues of sortition. Unfortunately, he also established the Spanish Inquisition and ordered the expulsion of practicing Jews from his kingdom, so he is hardly an authority on governance.] Sortition actually endured as a system of government into the 20th century: San Marino’s two heads of state were selected at random from 60 councilors as recently as 1945. [The two heads of state constitute a non-negligible fraction of the minuscule country’s population.]

Procaccia mentions in quick succession David Van Reybrouck, Terrill Bouricius, citizens’ assemblies, Ireland, and the German-speaking Community of Belgium, and finishes off with:

Admittedly, even the Belgian initiative is still a long way off from a Bouricius-style sortition utopia — and the jury is still out on whether we’d want to go that far. But it’s comforting to think that the best fix for our political chaos may be a bit of randomness.

Filed under: Academia, Athens, History, Press, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Sixty residents chosen for the Cambridge Citizens Assembly

Posted on August 30, 2019 by Yoram Gat

CambridgeshireLive reports:

Citizens Assembly set up to inform Council transport decisions

A citizens’ assembly has been established by the Greater Cambridge Partnership to make recommendations which will inform its infrastructure development plans.

The assembly is made up of 60 residents “chosen through a civic lottery process so that it fairly represents the population”.

It will meet to address the following question: How do we reduce congestion, improve air quality, and provide better public transport in Greater Cambridge?

Its members will also hear from experts and be supported by an advisory group.
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Filed under: Applications, Press, Sortition | 1 Comment »

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