Images that appeared on Equality-by-Lot in the passing year.
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Dedieu and Toulemonde: Taking political chances with sortition
Posted on December 18, 2016 by Yoram Gat
Franck Dedieu, a professor at the IPAG Business School, and Charles Toulemonde, a research engineer, write in Le Croix.
This short and readable essay is critical of sortition, or at least of the proposals currently discussed in France, but is not completely hostile to the idea. The authors avoid some of the most common knee-jerk anti-sortition arguments and make some interesting and valuable points.
Taking political chances with sortition
29 November 2016, Franck Dedieu and Charles Toulemonde
Machiavelli attributed to chance more than half of human actions. Free choice and individual will would therefore control the minor part of history. Miserable fate! And yet, over the last several years, and more so over the course of the present presidential campaign, the idea of drawing by lot representatives of the people made a breakthrough in the political agenda.
A proven system
In 2012, Ségolène Royal imagined citizen juries supervising the elected officials. Today, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of France Insoumise, has relied partially on chance last October for selecting delegates to his convention.
Arnaud Montebourg, a candidate in the primary of the left, wants to do the same for selecting the members of the senate. The environmentalists of the EELV, the activists of the Nouvelle Donne party and the members of the Nuit Debout movement of the spring of 2016 have crowned sortition with all the political virtues. This idea of a horizontal Republic is based on a simple argument: the elected, having become the professionals of politics, are living in a closed vessel in an increasingly inbred system and do not represent the social and sociological realities of the electorate. However, as usual in politics, we must be wary of silver-bullet ready-made solutions.
Controversial legitimacy?
On reflection, this stochocracy (from the Greek stokhastikos, randomness, a term used by the philosopher Reger de Sizif) moves away from democracy, rather than approaches it. There is a risk that sortition would strengthen the foibles of the very “electoral oligarchy” is denounces. How will the two political classes share power? Will the “elected deputies” regard themselves as equal to the “loto-senators”? The “chosen” will have the upper hand of the electoral legitimacy while the “commoners” will only have the legitimacy of the lucky draw. What a distance between the Oath of the Tennis Court of the deputies of the Third Estate and the oath of the casino of the Mélenchonists!
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Filed under: Academia, Elections, Press, Sortition | 23 Comments »
Canadian Senator advises against an allotted Senate
Posted on December 15, 2016 by Yoram Gat
Paul J. Massicotte, a senator representing De Lanaudière, Quebec, responds to a piece by Prof. Arash Abizadeh advocating changing the selection procedure of the Canadian Senate to sortition.
Massicotte offers a modern version of the Socratic argument against sortition:
Who wants to play hockey for Team Canada at the next Olympics? Who knows — there could be plenty of openings if the NHL won’t let its players take part in the 2018 Winter Games. But imagine if Team Canada just randomly grabbed people from the lineup at Tim Hortons for its Olympic hockey squad. The results would obviously be disastrous. So, why would we expect anything better if we replaced the Senate with an assembly of citizens picked at random?
Forget skill and hard work — this may be your lucky year if your name is drawn from a hat.
Sounds silly, right?
It is an indication of the precarious position of the Canadian Senate with its non-electoral appointment procedure that the Senator feels that the proposal to appoint the Senate using sortition requires a refutation. It is a feeling that, as far as I am aware, no elected member of parliament has ever shared in modern times. With some luck, however, it may not be too long before arguments against sortition are offered by elected parliamentarians in the French-speaking world.
Filed under: Academia, Athens, History, House of Lords, Press, Sortition | 8 Comments »
Lawson and Jenke: The solution to the ills of citizen juries is more citizen juries
Posted on December 9, 2016 by Yoram Gat
Emma Lawson and Emily Jenke, CEOs of democracyCo which ran the citizens’ jury on nuclear waste storage in South Australia, write in The Mandarin (full article accessible here):
The nuclear waste storage facility citizens’ jury of 350 people — which we convened — recently returned a verdict that didn’t neatly advance the government’s agenda. Some have since argued that citizens’ juries don’t offer a useful approach to democratic decision-making. After all, the jury voted down the government’s proposal that a nuclear waste storage facility be hosted in SA. It is widely understood that the government wanted further consideration of this issue.
However, after six days of formal deliberation and countless additional hours of reading and analysis, a large portion of the jury (66%) found that this was not a proposal the state should pursue.
Filed under: Applications, Elections, Press, Sortition | 2 Comments »
Belgiorno-Nettis: “[The government] has stopped listening”
Posted on November 24, 2016 by Yoram Gat
Luca Belgiorno-Nettis, the founder of newDemocracy Foundation, which designed and oversaw the nuclear dump citizen jury process for the South Australian government, has an article in the Sydney Morning Herald in the aftermath of the jury’s decision to reject the proposed dump. Belgiorno-Nettis softly criticizes SA Premier Jay Weatherill’s newly-announced intention to have a referendum on the dump:
From the time the royal commission report was handed down earlier this year, the South Australian government has been trying to listen, very carefully, to its community.
But now it has stopped listening, even after the citizen jury concluded their deliberations. A referendum has now been floated as a way to finally determine the question; never mind the most recent lessons from the Brexit experience. The jury tried to find common ground. A referendum won’t.
Filed under: Applications, Elections, Juries, Press, Sortition | 7 Comments »
Will the Australian citizen jury process survive the nuclear dump decision?
Posted on November 13, 2016 by Yoram Gat
The SA jury on the nuclear dump proposal has handed out its report eliciting significant press coverage and a flurry of reactions. The Online Opinion reports:
Where to now, for Premier Weatherill’s nuclear dream?
On November 6th, to the surprise of all, South Australia’s Nuclear Citizens Jury came up with a report that overwhelmingly rejected the government’s plan for importing and storing high level nuclear waste. Over four days of witness hearings, and deliberations, the 350 members of the jury were tasked with producing an answer to this question:
Under what circumstances, if any, could South Australia pursue the opportunity to store and dispose of nuclear waste from other countries?
The jury’s answer:
Under no circumstances should South Australia pursue opportunity to store and dispose of nuclear waste from other countries for reasons of consent, economics, trust and safety.
But while the Online Opinion is worried about nuclear dreams, another dream is just as much in jeopardy: the dream of Citizen Juries. It seems very likely that Weatherill has promoted the CJ idea because he believed it would be useful for his political agenda, of which the nuclear dump was a part. It seems very likely that those who offered Weatherill the idea, some of whom got to run the process, implied that this would indeed be the case. It also seems likely that other elected politicians have been watching this process with some interest in order to determine to what extent CJs could be used as a tool in their own political box.
In the wake of this outcome, the academics and the political operatives and entrepreneurs would have to go back to the drawing board. They will have to work hard to explain to the politicians how they will re-engineer CJs to guarantee that such unwelcome outcomes will not re-occur.
Filed under: Applications, Elections, Juries, Press, Sortition | 11 Comments »
Antoine Bevort: Chouard and democracy: an intellectual and political fraud
Posted on November 4, 2016 by Yoram Gat
The following is my translation of a recent article Antoine Bevort in the online French publication Mediapart. Like Tommy Lasserre’s Sortition in politics – the false good idea, which appeared in Mediapart two years ago, the article is a critique of Chouard and his proposals. Bevort makes some similar points, but, unlike Lasserre, doesn’t focus solely on sortition, and when he does discuss sortition he often deals with implementation details rather than with the principle itself to which he is not wholly hostile. Bevort also relies much less than Lasserre on canned Leftist rhetoric. As a result of those differences more of his punches land on target.
Chouard and democracy: an intellectual and political fraud
29 June 2016 Antoine Bevort
Étienne Chouard presents himself as the scholar of “real” democracy. His proposal of allotting of a constitutional assembly is however a fraud. It incorporates general principles which can be embraced, at least in part, but rests on largely specious argumentation, eventually leading to a strange and dogmatic conception of democracy.
Chouard considers himself the guru of “real” democracy. He feels he has found the “cause of causes” of the political crisis (“the political disempowerment of the citizens”) and proposes as a solution the allotment of a constitutional assembly. In his analyses, Chouard invokes general principles which can be embraced at least in part, but advances mainly through theoretical and historical shortcuts, simplifications or even misinterpretations, and through blunt claims and assertions. His dogmatic propositions are based on largely specious argumentation and lead eventually to a strange philosophy of democracy.
In order to deconstruct this rhetoric of mystification, we use a conference video available online[i], a text on the Gentils Virus website whose contents are very similar to those of the conference, as well as on the wiki of this organization, and particularly on the constitution drafted by Chouard. We first discuss his analysis of the existing political system, his claims that “we are not living in a democracy yet” and that “an electoral system is not a democracy”. Then we examine his conception of the “true democracy”, and his proposal of drawing by lot a constitutional assembly. We conclude with the mode of action which Chouard, the Gentils Virus (GV) and Les Citoyens Constituants (LCC), two organizations which promote his ideas, are pursuing.
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Filed under: Athens, Ballot measures, Elections, History, Juries, Participation, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 31 Comments »
“A little bit manipulated”
Posted on November 3, 2016 by Yoram Gat
The Adelaide news website InDaily has a report by Bension Siebert about discontent in the ranks of South Australia’s citizens’ jury on nuclear waste storage:
Some members of the 350-person jury have told InDaily they voted for a group of witnesses to present information about nuclear waste storage but the facilitator of the process, DemocracyCo, subsequently invited additional witnesses without explicit jury consent.
DemocracyCo concedes it did add further witnesses after a voting process, but says that is “standard practise” in citizens’ juries.
Juror Brett Aylen, an architect, told InDaily: “I do feel like I’m being a little bit manipulated by the process.” He said DemocracyCo facilitators were surprised by the jury’s witness selections and wanted to “balance it up by adding in some of the more pro-nuclear witnesses”. “They seemed a bit surprised at our selections,” he said. “If they had have declared that position in advance [that more witnesses may be added] it would have been more acceptable.”
Filed under: Applications, Juries, Press, Sortition | 5 Comments »
Workshop on sortition for the Canadian parliament at the CSDC
Posted on November 2, 2016 by Yoram Gat
The Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship (CSDC) at the department of Political Science of McGill University is holding a workshop under the title “Representation, Bicameralism, and Sortition: With Application to the Canadian Senate” on December 9.
This workshop will bring together social scientists and philosophers with two aims: critically to evaluate our theoretical and empirical knowledge of the relative merits and defects of using sortition to select representatives to the second legislative chamber of bicameral representative democracies like Canada; and to contribute to public debate in Canada about Senate reform by evaluating the desirability of reconstituting the Senate as a randomly selected Citizen Assembly.
Papers will be presented by Equality-by-Lot contributors Peter Stone and Alex Guerrero, as well as by McGill professor Arash Abizadeh. It turns out that Prof. Abizadeh gave a seminar on “Democracy, Representation, and Sortition” in the 2016 winter semester.
Filed under: Academia, Proposals, Sortition | 1 Comment »
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