Bouniol: The idea of a Citizens Chamber gains ground

Posted on February 20, 2018 by Yoram Gat

Béatrice Bouniol has been showing some interest in sortition in her stories at La Croix. Last November, on the occasion of the publishing of a new book on the subject of “The Citizens Assembly of the Future”, Bouniol had the following story.

The idea of a Citizens Chamber gains ground

During COP 23, the Foundation for Nature and Man calls on France to make a democratic innovation by establishing a Citizen Assembly for the Future. Facing a crisis of representation, a citizens’ third chamber, an idea which has been discussed for about twenty years, gains ground.

On July 3rd, 2017, speaking in front of Congress, Emmanuel Macron proposed the transformation of the Social and Environmental Economy Council (CESE) into a Chamber of the Future, “a forum of our Republic” aimed at becoming “the crossroad of public deliberation”. Dominique Bourg, president of the scientific council of the Foundation for Nature and Man – created by Nicolas Hulot – having advocated the creation of such a chamber since 2011, was thus pleased at the proposal, but expressed his worry on the pages of La Croix that it could be a mere “rebranding – certainly necessary but far below what is desired.” The programmatic essay that appears today under his direction (Inventing the 21st Century Democracy: The Citizen Assembly of the Future. [Inventer la démocratie du XXIe siècle. L’Assemblée citoyenne du futur, Les Liens qui libèrent/Fondation pour la Nature et l’homme, 2017]) aims therefore to remind the President of the Republic of the conditions required for creating a Citizen Assembly for the Future.


The hall of the Social and Environmental Economy Council, at Iena Square, Paris.

In order to go beyond a feel-good formula, the establishment of a third parliament chamber must rest on an effort of democratic creativity, required by an unprecedented situation. At the age of the anthropocene (a new geological period defined by the impact of humans on their environment), reported by a group of researchers, it is necessary to systematically take into consideration of the impact of laws on the long term, that is, of their influence on the large scale physical and biological evolution of the planet.
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Filed under: Press, Proposals, Sortition | 5 Comments »

Official records lacking in EMA location allotment

Posted on February 17, 2018 by Yoram Gat

Corriere dela Sera writes:

Doubts emerge over EMA ballot and “burnt” voting slips

Various aspects of assignment to Netherlands of EMA headquarters still unclear, also due to lack of official records regarding draw by lot

The assignment of the European Medicines Agency (EMA) to Amsterdam by lot – to the detriment of Milan – was made official at the EU General Affairs Council on 20 November. But it has now emerged that there is no documentary evidence to reassure European citizens everything was done correctly and according to the rules; the procedure displayed unprecedented anomalies and levels of secrecy, culminating in selection by lot. The representatives of Italy and the Netherlands were not even called to supervise the proceedings at close hand. “Even in children’s tournaments the referee allows the two team captains to watch the toss of the coin …”, commented one ambassador present on the day.

No checks
The ballot papers of the three rounds of voting by the ministers were immediately burned, and the speed with which the draw was performed made any checks either before or after impossible. Above all, on 20 November there was an attempt to shroud everything in the utmost secrecy, with not even the draw method made public. Moreover, since last week the EU Council has continued to refuse to give the Corriere any information on how the voting and count took place, let alone on the lot drawing procedure. We have been able to reconstruct what happened thanks to informal interviews with ministers and ambassadors present, who set greater importance on the value of transparency than on being sworn to secrecy.

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

Sortition in the Bulletin of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics

Posted on February 16, 2018 by Yoram Gat

The Bulletin of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics has published a column of mine that deals with the historical and theoretical connections between democracy and statistical sampling:

Democracy and statistical sampling

For about 2,500 years, statistical sampling was closely linked with democracy. “Selection by lot is natural to democracy, as that by choice [i.e., elections] is to aristocracy,” asserted Aristotle in the 4th century BC, following his own first-hand experience at Athens and the conventional wisdom of his time. Montesquieu concurred in the first half of the 18th century. It was only in the last 200 years, as democracy displaced aristocracy as the legitimate organizing principle of politics, that sortition—the delegation of power by statistical sampling—had to be air-brushed out of history and political science. […]

As part of the attempt to dismiss sampling as a political device it is sometimes claimed today that its use in Athens was motivated by the superstition that randomization allowed the gods to make the selection. However, the historical record indicates that the main motivation behind the practice was the law of large numbers. It was expected that sortition would produce a group that would mirror the population in important respects. This was often stated as an expectation of resemblance between the population and the sample in terms of wealth and social status (i.e., that most members would be poor commoners) but it was taken for granted that these characteristics would be correlated with certain interests and beliefs.

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Filed under: Academia, Athens, Elections, History, Press, Sortition | 35 Comments »

equalitybylot.com

Posted on February 15, 2018 by Yoram Gat

equalitybylot.wordpress.com is now available also as equalitybylot.com – and both are supposed to be ads-free.

Thanks, Adam Cronkright, for taking the initiative on this!

Filed under: meta | Leave a comment »

Shallit: The Sortition Solution

Posted on February 7, 2018 by Yoram Gat

Mathematician and professor of computer science Jeffrey Shallit has a post on his blog in which he advocates for sortition. Some excerpts:

The US political system is clearly broken. … Proportional representation is often proposed as a solution to some of these problems. … But this doesn’t resolve the corruption and tribalism problems…

My solution is exotic but simple: sortition, or random representation. Of course, it’s not original with me: we use sortition today to form juries. But I would like to extend it to all legislative bodies.

Here is a brief outline of how it would work. Legislators would be chosen uniformly and randomly from a universal, publicly-available list; perhaps a list of all registered voters.

In each election period (say 2-5 years), a random fraction of all representatives would be completely replaced, perhaps 25-50%. This would allow some institutional memory and expertise to be retained, while insuring that incumbents do not have enough time to build up fiefdoms that lead to corruption.

Sortition could be phased in gradually. For the first 10 years, sortition could be combined with a traditional electoral system, in some proportion that starts small and eventually completely replaces the traditional electoral system. This would increase public confidence in the change, as well as avoiding the problem of a “freshman class” that would be completely without experience.
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Filed under: Academia, Proposals, Sortition | 21 Comments »

Sortition, a play by Selina Thompson

Posted on February 7, 2018 by Yoram Gat

Sortition, a new play by Selina Thompson, is described as follows:

A century after Parliament gave the first women the right to vote, Selina Thompson’s provocative new work turns this moment of democratic history on its head. Sortition is produced by and with Britons under the age of 30 who have never voted and have no intention of voting – ever.

Developed with non-voters from across the UK, along with a team of political provocateurs, experts and troublemakers, Sortition imagines what the country would look like with representatives selected not by election but by lottery – at random. Thompson considers the distinction between using your own voice and electing someone to speak for you in a work exploring how young people make themselves heard in Britain today.

Filed under: Sortition | 10 Comments »

Testimonies of bias by members of the 2016 SA Nuclear Waste Jury

Posted on February 2, 2018 by Yoram Gat

This is about a year-old news, and not very surprising, but still quite valuable. How South Australians dumped a nuclear dump is an article describing how the attempt to build a nuclear dump in SA was stopped, in a large part by its rejection by a citizen’s jury. This citizen jury and its aftermath were covered on Equality-by-Lot at the time (end of 2016).

The article links to a piece by a member of the jury, who paints a picture of a rather blunt attempt to control the selection of witnesses against the pre-published protocol, and then to suppress any objections about this.

Another testimony comes from commenter “Eastern Trisha”:

I was a member of the Citizen’s Jury and it was clear from the outset that they had one answer in mind – proceed with the proposal. They took every opportunity to move the jury towards that predetermined outcome. But the more they pushed, the more the jury became suspicious. They were dismissive and disrespectful of ordinary South Australians at every turn. I learnt a great deal about the nuclear fuel cycle, but I also saw first hand the lengths those in favour of nuclear were prepared to go to win. It was not pretty and it has left me extremely distrustful of the nuclear industry and in awe of the power of local democracy.

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Filed under: Applications, Sortition | 19 Comments »

Words, words…

Posted on January 7, 2018 by Yoram Gat

A pretty informative (and visually attractive) short video in French about how the word “democracy” came to refer to an oligarchical system.

The French and American revolutions overthrew monarchical and absolutist regimes in order to give power to the people to institute “democratic” regimes. The story was beautiful… But digging a little into the subject, we find that the historical reality is very different. While the French and American revolutions rejected monarchy, they rejected democracy at the same time. They are not the point of departure for the power of the people, by the people, for the people but rather for the constitutionalization of a representative regime. “Democracy”, which our representatives like so very much to talk about today, was not part of the design.

The transcript is here.

Filed under: Athens, Elections, History, Sortition | 1 Comment »

2017 review – statistics

Posted on December 24, 2017 by Yoram Gat

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

2017 Page views Posts Comments
Jan 2,475 5 74
Feb 2,764 7 100
Mar 3,463 10 259
Apr 3,189 7 127
May 3,071 9 101
June 3,018 6 92
July 2,458 6 158
Aug 2,364 6 117
Sept 2,881 8 98
Oct 3,036 8 116
Nov 3,643 6 175
Dec (to 24th) 2,468 6 90
Total 34,830 84 1,507

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

Posts were made by 17 authors during 2017. (There were, of course, many other authors quoted and linked to.)

There are currently 322 email and WordPress followers of this blog. In addition there are 279 Twitter followers (@Klerotarian) and 67 Facebook followers.

Searching for “distribution by lot” (with quotes) using Google returns Equality-by-Lot as the 4th result (out of “about 57,100 results”). Searching for “sortition” returns Equality-by-Lot as the 2nd result (out of “about 80,700 results”) – right behind the sortition entry at Wikipedia.

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 | 6 Comments »

2017 review – sortition-related events

Posted on December 23, 2017 by Yoram Gat

This is the end-of-year summary of notable sortition related events for 2017.

Readers wrote that in their opinion the most important sortition-related event of 2017 was the adoption by law in Mongolia of deliberative polling as part of its constitutional amendment process. The opinions in the exit survey of the deliberation poll “help shape the process of constitutional amendment the government undertakes”.

This event seems like a natural part of a decades-long trend of declining confidence in electoral systems and a more recent trend of increasing, if very preliminary and tentative, adoption of sortition-based political devices.

Worldwide, trust in elected government in 2017 remained low and showed no signs of recovery.

As in previous years, French speaking countries showed the most noticeable moves toward seeing sortition as a way to redistribute significant political power. In France, two of the three most successful presidential candidates in the 2017 elections, including the winner, Emmanuel Macron, were politicians who made sortition part of the political agenda. In November, La France insoumise allotted members of its constitutional convention. Sortition was also discussed, again and again in French media. Proposals for using sortition in Belgium and Switzerland received some attention.

Elsewhere in Europe, the allotted Irish Citizens’ Assembly sent its recommendations to the parliament with a referendum to follow. Sortition was also adopted by a branch of Podemos in Spain and was promoted by a party in Austria.

In the English speaking world, academics devoted some attention to sortition in workshops at McGill university and at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Outside of academia, a fairly robust polemic for sortition appeared in the US magazine Current Affairs. A book proposing sortition as an add-on to the electoral system was reviewed in the New York Times.

As another indication of increasing prominence of the idea of sortition in establishment circles, former UN secretary general Kofi Annan mentioned sortition in a speech he gave to the Athens Democracy Forum.

Finally, distribution-by-lot received fairly intense attention in Greece in the context of a debate over the mechanism of selection of flag bearers in schools.

Filed under: Academia, Applications, Press, Sortition | 12 Comments »

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