Yoram Gat

Chouard: An allotted referendum chamber

Posted on January 5, 2019 by Yoram Gat

Etienne Chouard, who has been the most vocal and consistent French advocate for sortition, is having somewhat of a day in the limelight in the context of the Gilets Jaunes protests. Chouard’s other major procedural proposal is the Popular initiative (in french: Referendum d’initiative citoyenne, often referred to as RIC).

A major issue with the popular initiative process, which is practiced in Switzerland and in various US states, is the ballot qualification process. In order to cut down the number of proposals on the ballot to a reasonable number, some hurdle has to be introduced. This hurdle is usually set as the collection of a large number of signatures. This makes qualification resource intensive and thus much easier for elite interests than for the average citizen.

In an interview (original in French), Chouard lays out an interesting alternative:

Chouard: “The RIC makes it possible for a group of people, or for a single person, to pose a question for the whole of the people. One of the first questions to ask ourselves is how many people can legitimately pose a question. In Italy, in Switzerland, it is 100,000, 500,000. It could be a million. It is for us to decide. […] I would say that a single person should be able to pose a question.”

Of course, the immediate consequence of this proposal, unlimited RIC without a minimal quota, is chaos. To handle this issue, the blogger proposes a “referendum chamber” whose members are allotted ordinary citizens, as in the Athenian democracy.

Also worth noting, and commending, the way Chouard affirms his democratic convictions in response to the standard question about the danger that his proposed system would produce bad policy:

I am a democrat. That means that I support the people deciding their destiny themselves and making the most important decisions themselves. At the same time if we are really democrats and honest, then we must expect that from time to time there would be issues, which can be important ones, about which the people would make decisions that would not be the ones we would make.

The full interview (almost an hour) is available as a video.

Filed under: Initiatives, Mass action, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 14 Comments »

Le Figaro: Allotted French-people to participate in the national debate

Posted on January 4, 2019 by Yoram Gat

Le Figaro (Dec. 21st, 2018) [original in French]:

“The Yellow Vests”: Allotted French-people to particpate in the national debate

The government wishes to have French-people selected via sortition participate in each region in meetings organized in the framework of the great debate promised as a response to the “Yellow Vests” crisis, announced [French PM] Edouard Philippe today. On the eve of a sixth Sunday of mobilization in France, the government and the coalition are hoping that emergency measures being adopted and the promise of this great debate will allow to diffuse the crisis.

“We believe that it would be wise to proceed with the appointment, the selection, the meetings which, in each one of the regions, could bring together about 100 French citizens chosen by lot, at random, which will discuss the result of this debate and participate in some way in this debate”, said the Prime Minister during a visit to Haute-Vienne.

“The idea is to have within those group some French-people which are not necessarily those most involved in public life, in the public debate, being able to give their opinions in the debate and to give their opinions regarding the proposals”, he added.

Filed under: Applications, Mass action, Press, Sortition | 3 Comments »

The DNC to allot primary debate slots

Posted on December 28, 2018 by Yoram Gat

The Democratic party has announced its planned schedule for primary debates for the 2020 presidential race. To handle the possibility of there being many candidates, the DNC plans, if necessary, to split the field into two groups, and having those groups debate in two consecutive nights. The split will be at random:

If necessary, depending on the number of candidates who meet the threshold, the DNC is prepared to split the first two debates in June and July into consecutive nights, said DNC Chairman Tom Perez. If that happens, the lineup will be determined by random selection, which will take place publicly.

“It’s conceivable that we have a double-digit field,” Perez told reporters on a conference call. “That is why we are planning for that contingency.”

Pacific Standard magazine gives some background and analysis:
Continue reading →

Filed under: Applications, Distribution by lot, Elections, Press | 1 Comment »

More sortition in the Guardian

Posted on December 25, 2018 by Yoram Gat

In October, the Guardian published an excerpt from Tim Dunlop’s sortition-advocating book “The Future of Everything”. Today, James Bridle offers the readers of the Guardian to apply sortition to the Brexit issue. (Of course, he is not the first with this idea.)

How can we break the Brexit deadlock? Ask ancient Athens
James Bridle

Citizens’ assemblies have their roots in sortition – selecting citizens at random to fill public posts – which was once central to democracy

In the central marketplace of ancient Athens, around 350BC, there stood a machine called the kleroterion. This was a six-foot-high slab of stone that had a series of slots on the front, and a long tube bored down from the top to the base. Those up for selection for the various offices of state would insert metal ID tags, called pinakia, into the slots, and a functionary would pour a bucket of coloured balls, suitably shaken, into the top of the tube. The order in which the balls emerged would determine who took which role, some for the day, some for a year.

Filed under: Athens, Press, Proposals, Sortition | Leave a comment »

2018 review – statistics

Posted on December 25, 2018 by Yoram Gat

Below are some statistics about the ninth year of Equality-by-Lot. Comparable numbers for last year can be found here.

2018	Page views	Posts	Comments
Jan	2,655	2	65
Feb	3,165	12	211
Mar	2,216	9	163
Apr	2,038	5	30
May	2,570	13	118
June	2,421	11	178
July	2,095	2	64
Aug	1,961	6	43
Sept	2,490	6	109
Oct	7,746	15	80
Nov	3,286	8	106
Dec (to 25th)	2,423	6	25
Total	35,066	95	1,192

Note that page views do not include visits by logged-in contributors – the wordpress system does not count those visits.

Posts were made by 16 authors during 2018. (There were, of course, many other authors quoted and linked to.)

There are currently 377 email and WordPress followers of this blog. In addition there are 347 Twitter followers (@Klerotarian) and 67 Facebook followers.

Searching for “distribution by lot” (with quotes) using Google returns Equality-by-Lot as the 3rd result (out of “about 30,200 results”). Searching for “sortition” returns Equality-by-Lot as the 6th result (out of “about 140,000 results”) – preceded by the sortition entry at Wikipedia, links to Brett Hennig’s Sortition Foundation, and a link to Tim Dunlop’s article in the Guardian.

Happy holidays and a happy new year to Equality-by-Lot readers, commenters and posters. Keep up the good fight for democracy!

Filed under: Distribution by lot, meta, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Chalmers: The nakedness of elections

Posted on December 20, 2018 by Yoram Gat

Patrick Chalmers writes:

TOULOUSE, France — In the Danish fable “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” it was a little boy who pointed out what no adult dared expose: The king was naked; his court, a cast of pompous fools beguiled by tricksters.

It’s time to do the same with our own reified system of government — representative democracy and its so-called free and fair elections.

Shocking? Of course it is. We’ve been taught to hold our voting rights as sacred — that despite our political system’s many flaws, representative democracy is, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, “the worst form of government, except for all the others.”

But what if there were, after all, a real alternative? What if there were something less corruptible than pure democracy by election? That something needn’t replace periodic elections, or at least not at once, but it could certainly guard us against their worst failings. Not least of those is the grossly outsized influence of narrow interests at the expense of everyone else’s.

Filed under: Athens, Elections, History, Press, Sortition | 8 Comments »

2018 review – sortition-related events

Posted on December 20, 2018 by Yoram Gat

This is the end-of-year summary of notable sortition related events for 2018.

Sortition received some increasing attention in the English-speaking world in 2018. The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College has announced the creation of the Bard Institute for the Revival of Democracy through Sortition. Richard Askwith and Tim Dunlop published books advocating for sortition. Selina Thompson put on a sortition-themed play and organized a sortition-themed workshop. Van Reybrouck’s Against Elections was (dismissively) reviewed in the New York Times. Sortition was featured in the Left-leaning magazine Jacobin as well as on BBC radio, and was mentioned in the Washington Post. Canadian scientist and environmentalist expressed interest in drawing politicians from a hat.

Brett Hennig’s TED talk about sortition was featured by TED on their main page, generating a spike of interest in the idea, including by Beppe Grillo, co-founder of the Italian electorally successful Five Star movement. Another spike of interest in sortition followed media reports about the arrest of a sortition advocate who allegedly planned to blow himself up in an attempt to draw attention to the idea.

Late in the year, sortition was on the agenda of two mass-action movements: UK’s Extinction Rebellion and France’s Gilets Jaunes.

Earlier in the year elites continued to express their dissatisfaction with the way elections are turning out. A proposal was made to use sortition to improve citizen behavior. Former UK prime minister Gordon Brown made a similar suggestion in the context of Brexit. The Ireland abortion referendum that approved the recommendations of an allotted chamber was held as an example to emulate.

Reports about sortition being used or advocated at local government appeared in the press. An initiative for appointing judges by lot is under way in Switzerland. Charlie Pache, a Swiss sortition activist, promotes single issue allotted citizen panels. Academic conferences about sortition were held in Belgium and in the US.

In France, the discussion has moved beyond the initial stage of unfamiliarity into some substantive discussion of the details of applications of sortition. A member of La France insoumise who was allotted to its electoral committee expressed disillusionment with the process. Other FI activists claim that “so far, the allotted have had no real power”. Michel Quatrevalet, a power industry professional in France, complains that the so-called participatory democracy process that was part of the process for the creation of a French multi-year energy plan was a sham.

Filed under: Academia, Books, Elections, Mass action, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 11 Comments »

Hennig: Citizens’ Assemblies and the next democratic revolution

Posted on December 16, 2018 by Yoram Gat

Brett Hennig writes in the New Internationalist magazine:

Is this the beginning of another winter of discontent? The Extinction Rebellion that hit London in the weeks around 17 November might be the spark that lights the tinder box of our democratic malaise. Thousands of people blockaded bridges, disrupted traffic, and engaged in non-violent acts of civil disobedience to demand the UK government truthfully address climate change, and convene a national citizens’ assembly to create ‘a democracy fit for purpose’.

Meanwhile, across the channel, the ‘Gilets Jaunes’ (Yellow Vests) protestors have grabbed enough attention – perhaps by causing enough havoc – to get an invitation to meet the French Prime Minister. Their demands? Initially that the government address the rising cost of living (specifically a rise in fuel tax), but the protest has morphed into a broad movement that has, according to several reports, also demanded ‘the creation of a citizens’ assembly to replace the [French] Senate’ or ‘the creation of a citizens assembly to put forward demands that would then be submitted to referendum’, among many other disparate propositions.

Whatever the diverse causes of, and messages from, these two very different protests, it appears that the demand for a citizens’ assembly is crossing cultural barriers and being promoted as the preferred democratic tool of a new generation of activists.

Filed under: Mass action, Press, Sortition | 3 Comments »

Call for 2018 review input

Posted on December 16, 2018 by Yoram Gat

This is the yearly call for input for the year’s end review. As in previous years, I would like to have a post or two summarizing the ongoings here at Equality-by-Lot and notable sortition-related events over the passing year. Any input about what should be included is welcome – either through comments below or via email. You are invited to refresh your memory about the events of the passing year by browsing Equality-by-Lot’s archives.

For previous years’ summaries see: 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010.

Filed under: Distribution by lot, meta, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Fishkin: Random Assemblies for Lawmaking? Prospects and Limits

Posted on November 11, 2018 by Yoram Gat

James Fishkin’s contribution to the September 2017 workshop “Legislature by Lot” was titled “Random Assemblies for Lawmaking? Prospects and Limits”:

Abstract
A randomly selected microcosm of the people can usefully play an official role in the lawmaking process. However, there are serious issues to be confronted if such a random sample were to take on the role of a full-scale, full-time second chamber. Some skeptical considerations are detailed. There are also advantages to short convenings of such a sample to take on some of the roles of a second chamber. This article provides a response to the skeptical considerations. Precedents from ancient Athens show how such short-term convenings of a deliberating microcosm can be positioned before, during, or after other elements of the lawmaking process. The article draws on experience from Deliberative Polling to show how this is both practical and productive for the lawmaking process.

Keywords
Athens, corruption, Deliberative Polling, elections, minipublics, nomothetai, representative democracy, sortition

In arguing for short term “Delibertive Polls”, Fishkin offers three problems with long-term allotted chambers: (1) lack of technical expertise, (2) potential for corruption, and (3) not maintaining what he calls “the conditions for deliberation”.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Athens, Deliberation, Elections, History, Participation, Proposals, Sortition | 11 Comments »