Yoram Gat

First meeting of Sortition Ireland

Posted on March 2, 2016 by Yoram Gat

Garreth McDaid has announced the first meeting of an organization he calls “Sortition Ireland”. The meeting is to take place in Dublin on April 12th at 8pm. Virtual attendance will also be possible.

[Via Google Alerts.]

Filed under: Action, Sortition | 2 Comments »

“Real democracy” videos

Posted on February 27, 2016 by Yoram Gat

Tomas Mancebo wrote to draw attention to the following video clips. They seem to be inspired by the ideas promoted by Étienne Chouard.

Filed under: Athens, Elections, Sortition | 2 Comments »

Choice

Posted on February 19, 2016 by Yoram Gat

Filed under: Elections | Tagged: image | 4 Comments »

Charlie Douglass: Guaranteeing gender equality

Posted on January 29, 2016 by Yoram Gat

A post by Charlie Douglass.

Democracy we are told is government by the people. What if many of the people aren’t involved? What if some have a much stronger voice than others?

If a government is to act on behalf of people of every colour, gender, age, and wealth status, then we must either rely on politicians ignoring self-interest completely, or find a way in which a house of parliament can have its members chosen very differently to today. Bias matters because today our parliaments under-represent many groups. Women are under-represented and although some change is happening, the change is slow. Why should the men who are already there be the ones who decide how fast the change is? Why is there so little effort to represent people from below the poverty line?

If you could draw equal representation from across society into a house of parliament, then self-interest matters much less. If a parliament was half female, half male, and contained people from every type of wealth status, then many really important issues would see quick and effective change. Poverty has the attention of many of us, but without power not much is changing. When there is a vote which gives voice to all, then the bias of media barons and political donations can be put in the trash-can where it belongs.

In many countries politics has two houses of government, and the proposal here is to replace the one is which the nation’s leader does not stand. In the USA, France and Australia this is the Senate. In the UK this is the House of Lords, and in Germany it is The Bundesrat. After two terms perhaps this new senate could replace both houses, or the second house could be replaced by sortition also – forming two houses.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Proposals, Sortition | 12 Comments »

Democratic Innovation on Postwaves

Posted on January 15, 2016 by Yoram Gat

Adam Cronkright writes:

This is Adam Cronkright, cofounder of Democracy In Practice, an organization that has been experimenting with random selection of representatives in student governments in Bolivia for the past two years. Independently from Democracy In Practice, I’m putting out a call for contributors and readers of Equality by Lot to participate in and help beta test a new online platform that randomly distributes decision-making/moderating power and responsibility among its users.

I’ve been doing some beta testing for a website called Postwaves. The site is inspired by the Wisdom of Crowds (popularized by James Surowiechi) and uses sortition to share moderator responsibilities evenly among all the members of a forum. That is, each post gets randomly and anonymously sent out to a small portion of forum users who vote independently and anonymously on whether the post is relevant to the large group (NOT on whether or not they agree with the post). If it receives a certain threshold (say 50% of those randomly asked to assess it find that it is relevant) it get’s made public on the forum. So in essence, they are testing a sortition-based, scalable way for online groups to moderate themselves horizontally. The idea is to more effectively filter out noise (i.e. irrelevant content) and allow the best content to be most visible regardless of who posted it (celebrity vs. normal person) or whether the first person(s) that read it gave it a thumbs up or a thumbs down (which can have a disproportionate effect on the opinions of those that follow).
Continue reading →

Filed under: Action, Applications, Sortition | 4 Comments »

Dr. Ron Prestage thanks Congress

Posted on December 29, 2015 by Yoram Gat

Forbes reports:

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 »