Yoram Gat

Dr. Ron Prestage thanks Congress

Posted on December 29, 2015 by Yoram Gat

On Friday, Congress repealed the country-of-origin-labeling rule (COOL) on beef and pork after the World Trade Organization (WTO) imposed $1 billion in retaliatory import tariffs against United States if the rule was not overturned.

90% of those surveyed in 2013 favored country-of-origin-labeling for fresh meat sold in stores.

Dr. Ron Prestage, president of the National Pork Producer’s Council, released a statement expressing gratitude to Congress for repealing COOL. “I know tariffs on U.S. pork would have been devastating to me and other pork producers,” he said.

Filed under: Elections, Opinion polling, Press | 41 Comments »

2015 review – statistics

Posted on December 28, 2015 by Yoram Gat

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

2015	Page views	Posts	Comments
Jan	2,648	15	256
Feb	3,453	10	284
Mar	3,168	8	169
Apr	2,497	7	137
May	2,947	13	124
June	2,593	5	137
July	1,933	5	72
Aug	1,966	5	94
Sept	2,592	11	136
Oct	2,455	10	189
Nov	2,109	12	185
Dec (to 28th)	1,671	6	109
Total	30,032	107	1,891

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

Posts were made by 15 authors during 2015. (There were, of course, many other authors quoted and linked to.)

There are currently 223 email and WordPress followers of this blog. In addition there are 137 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 16,900 results”). Searching for “sortition” returns Equality-by-Lot as the 3rd result (out of “about 62,200 results”).

Happy holidays and 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 | 2 Comments »

2015 review – sortition-related events

Posted on December 24, 2015 by Yoram Gat

This is a review of notable sortition-related events of the year 2015.

Brett Hennig wrote to mention citizens’ assembly pilots and the Irish constitutional assembly which led to the marriage equality vote.

In my mind the two most notable sortition-related events of 2015 were:

In Mexico, the Morena party allotted of some of its congressional candidates among the party rank-and-file. This was covered on Equality-by-Lot here (English version), here and here.
Leading Belgian politicians from various parties proposed changing the selection method of the Belgian upper house to sortition. This is the most high-profile proposal of its kind of the modern age.

Continuing the trend of previous years, those developments happened in the non-English speaking world. However, they are a reflection of a wide-spread disillusionment with elections – a sentiment that is as common in the English-speaking world as it is outside of it.

In the US this sentiment found an electoral outlet in the surprise strength of the campaigns of two presidential candidates which are perceived as being outside of the electoral establishment – Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. This fact was observed in a relatively well-noticed academic paper in Science journal by Fisman and Markovits about the way class affects policy choices. The authors drew from their work some conclusions that come close to an indictment of the electoral method.

Filed under: Academia, Elections, Experiments, House of Lords, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 15 Comments »

2015 review – images

Posted on December 22, 2015 by Yoram Gat

Images that appeared on Equality-by-Lot in the passing year.

Filed under: Elections | 6 Comments »

The choice is clear

Posted on December 21, 2015 by Yoram Gat

Filed under: Elections | 46 Comments »

Prinz and Garry: Democracy is due for an overhaul – could lawmaking-by-jury be the answer?

Posted on December 18, 2015 by Yoram Gat

In an article in The Conversation, Janosch Prinz and John Garry, both from Queen’s University Belfast, advocate for legislation by ad-hoc allotted bodies.

They start off by recounting a standard list of instances of electoral disfunction:

Many will agree that, in practice, democracy leaves a lot to be desired. The system often falls short of its ideals: whether it’s the US congress causing a total government shutdown; Australian prime ministers being ousted by internal party politics; or the UK’s disproportionate electoral system allocating only one seat to a party which received close to 4m votes.

This misses the point. None of these examples is an indication of a problem inherent in elections. The problem with electoralist systems is not that they don’t function but that they function in favor of electoral elites and their allies rather than for the average person.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Ballot measures, Elections, Juries, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 2 Comments »

Call for 2015 review input

Posted on December 12, 2015 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.

Again, I suggest having some sort of an award for sortition-related activity, advocacy, or writing, where the awardee is selected by a vote among Equality-by-Lot readers. Nominations are hereby solicited as well.

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

Filed under: Distribution by lot, meta, Sortition | 3 Comments »

The Dunning–Kruger effect and its implications for voting

Posted on November 28, 2015 by Yoram Gat

The Dunning–Kruger effect

is a cognitive bias wherein relatively unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than is accurate.

The effect is named after David Dunning and Justin Kruger of the department of psychology at Cornell University who published a paper in 1999 which described a series of experiments which they conducted which demonstrated the effect.

In an interview, Dunning described his understanding of the effect as follows:

Dunning: [I]f you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent.

[Interviewer:] Why not?

Dunning: If you knew it, you’d say, “Wait a minute. The decision I just made does not make much sense. I had better go and get some independent advice.” But when you’re incompetent, the skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is. In logical reasoning, in parenting, in management, problem solving, the skills you use to produce the right answer are exactly the same skills you use to evaluate the answer. And so we went on to see if this could possibly be true in many other areas. And to our astonishment, it was very, very true.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Elections, Experiments | 38 Comments »

“Direct democracy” vs. sortition

Posted on November 27, 2015 by Yoram Gat

In June 1998 Filip Palda, an economist who seems to have been at the time preoccupied with proposing democratic reforms, published an article in The Next City magazine in which he advocated the introduction of a plebiscitary mechanism to Canada. In the article, Palda recounted the standard arguments for “direct democracy”.

Under the present all-or-nothing approach to selecting government policies, the benefits of political specialization are lost. Most governments campaign on a bundle of services that includes health, education, welfare, transportation, the environment, and security. One party may be good at protecting the environment, but terrible at health care. Its rival may be good at health care but reprehensible on the environment. Instead of voting for a party while holding our noses, unbundling public services allows us to vote with a clear conscience, at all times. […]

Direct democracy — any form of voting that bypasses representatives — has another benefit, too; it allows voters to correct individual laws that representatives have passed to their detriment, without getting rid of the government. In April, hepatitis C victims lost their claims for compensation in our federal Parliament, their appeals falling on the deaf ears of a government riding high in the public’s esteem. If Canadians had the right of initiative, they might have succeeded in repealing the law, giving the public both the government and the laws it wanted, without the anguish that followed.[…]

Referendums and initiatives cut these middlemen out of power and let people decide issues for themselves. It is also natural for the public to continue its methodical, cautious, centuries-old drive for greater political freedom. They temper democracy’s worst aspects — the unaccountability of politicians — and bring out what is ultimately its best — the common sense of the common people.

In a letter to the magazine, Simon Threlkeld suggests that allotted legislative juries would be a superior alternative to plebiscites:
Continue reading →

Filed under: Ballot measures, Juries, Proposals, Sortition | 2 Comments »

An interesting online discussion of sortition

Posted on November 14, 2015 by Yoram Gat

A fairly interesting discussion of sortition can be found here. The top post makes an argument for sortition which is based on the idea of using randomness to deny an opponent a winning strategy. I pursued a similar line of thought here.

Filed under: Sortition | Leave a comment »

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