Short refutations of common objections to sortition (part 3)

Posted on June 5, 2015 by Yoram Gat

Part 1 Part 2

11. Elections are a mechanism of accountability. It allows the electorate to reward or punish those with power. There is no way to hold government accountable using sortition.

Using elections as an accountability mechanism is like a bank’s board of directors appointing a new bank manager for a 4-year term and telling him that if he steals the depositors’ money then there is some chance that he will not be re-appointed to run the bank for another term (but he will get to keep the money he took). A manager who sees his job as a means for self-enrichment is clearly better off simply taking the money. No matter how many years of service he can secure if he stays honest, his salary will never amount to what he can steal in a single term.

Besides, if the replacement managers are all as greedy as the current manager, what good would replacing the manager do?

In short, seeing elections as providing an effective means of incentivizing a government to promote the interests of the average citizen is hopelessly unrealistic. It is remarkable that this view is standard in both popular discourse and professional political science literature.

12. The training and service experiences would likely cause people to change their minds about various issues and in this way become unrepresentative.

As the allotted delegates study issues it is indeed to be expected that they will adopt views on matters that they were not aware of before, and occasionally will even come to have opinions that contradict previously held ones. In this sense the allotted become unrepresentative – they are better informed and have spent more time and effort considering various matters of policy than the average citizen does.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Elections, Religion, Sortition | 112 Comments »

Short refutations of common objections to sortition (part 2)

Posted on May 29, 2015 by Yoram Gat

Part 1 is here.

6. Random sampling will occasionally produce unrepresentative samples.

Significant deviation of a sample from the population sampled is in fact very rare. For example, in a population evenly split between men and women, the chance of having fewer than 40 women in a sample of one hundred people is less than 2%. The chance of having fewer than 30 woman is less than 2 in 10,000. And the chance of having 20 women or fewer is less than one in a billion. The current U.S. Senate (a body of 100 people) has 20 women. It is the highest number of women senators in U.S. history.

7. Since there are many population characteristics, the sample would be unrepresentative according to some of those.

Again, because the chance of significant deviation is so small, even if many characteristics are considered the chance that any of them would show significant deviation is small. For example, over one million characteristics would have to be considered before it would become likely that a group which is a minority of a third according any of those characteristics gains a majority in a sample of 200.

8. The lucky few who are selected will often serve personal or narrow interests rather than those of the people.

For policy to be approved by the allotted body, it would have to win a majority. Interests that are personal to one or to a few delegates would not be able to meet this criterion. By the time a proposal wins a majority is has to serve so many personal or narrow interests that it becomes representative. Continue reading →

Filed under: Juries, Sortition | 14 Comments »

Short refutations of common objections to sortition (part 1)

Posted on May 24, 2015 by Yoram Gat

1. It would be madness to appoint public officials by lot. No one would choose a pilot or builder or flutist by lot, nor any other craftsman for work in which mistakes are far less disastrous than mistakes in statecraft.

The problem with this ancient argument against sortition (attributed to Socrates) is that it implicitly assumes that there is some consensus around who should be running the state (those are the pilots, builders or flutists of politics). If there was such consensus politics would be very simple. Politics to a large extent is about identifying whose advice should be taken on which subject. The pretense of elections is that the voters can identify such people. This is a fantasy.

A small group, meeting together and discussing and examining matters in depth, would be able to do a much better job of getting the best advice than the citizens can do as isolated individuals. In fact, most voters already know that – they tend to be very disapproving of elected officials – the very people whom they supposedly selected as being the best suited to handle statecraft.

2. Average people suffer a great many shortcomings (some combination of stupidity, laziness, apathy, greed, selfishness, lack of education, lack of experience, inability to work together with others, etc.).

This dismissive view of the average person is offensive and unsubstantiated by the facts. Continue reading →

Filed under: Athens, Elections, History, Participation, Sortition | 47 Comments »

Arriaga: Democracy Does Not Live by Tech Alone

Posted on May 13, 2015 by Yoram Gat

Manuel Arriaga‘s Foreign Policy magazine article is a well-aimed, much needed corrective to the techno-progressivist formula of popular political theory:

Democracy Does Not Live by Tech Alone

Democracy is in crisis — and more apps won’t save it. Instead, bring decision-making back to the people.

Enthusiasm for reforming our democracies has been gaining momentum. From the pages of FP to the colorful criticisms of comedian Russell Brand, it is evident that a long-overdue public conversation on this topic is finally getting started.

There is no lack of proposals. For example, in their recent FP piece, John Boik and colleagues focus on decentralized, emergent, tech-driven solutions such as participatory budgeting, local currency systems, and open government. They are confident that such innovations have a good chance of “spreading virally” and bringing about major change. Internet-based solutions, in particular, have captured our collective imagination. From Pia Mancini’s blockbuster TED presentation to New Scientist‘s recent coverage of “digital democracy,” we’re eager to believe that smartphone apps and novel online platforms hold the key to reinventing our way of governance. This seems only natural: after all, the same technologies have already radically reconfigured large swaths of our daily lives.

To put it bluntly, I believe that focusing on innovations of this sort is a dangerous distraction. Continue reading →

Filed under: Athens, Books, History, Participation, Sortition | Tagged: , | 1 Comment »

Humor in Article Based on Erroneous Assumption About Athenian Democracy

Posted on May 12, 2015 by Yoram Gat

A rather amusing article in the Onion makes the mistake of assuming that the Athenian democracy was an electoralist system and therefore subject to the same elitist control:

Anthropologists Discover Ancient Greek Super PAC That Helped Shape First Democracy

ATHENS, GREECE—In a finding that provides new insight into the roots of Western civilization, a team of anthropologists from Cambridge University announced Monday the discovery of an ancient Greek super PAC that helped shape the world’s first democracy. “At the same time Cleisthenes first instituted a representative form of government in Athens, it appears that a group of wealthy citizens and merchants created an organization to influence these new voters by bombarding them with around-the-clock political messages,” lead researcher Daniel Rogers said of the early political action committee, named Athenians for a Better City-State, which is said to have received millions of drachmas’ worth of funding in gold, lambs, dates, loaves of bread, and slaves from Athens’ largest and most influential trade groups. “While the committee was prohibited from coordinating directly with candidates seeking public office, AFBCS nevertheless spent astonishing sums on orators hired to stand in the Agora and recite the negative traits of politicians that the super PAC opposed, as well as on writers who were hired to pen slanderous epic poems.”

Filed under: Athens, Elections, Fiction, History, Sortition | Tagged: , | Leave a comment »

Belgiorno-Nettis: Power to the people, unnamed and unadvertised

Posted on May 12, 2015 by Yoram Gat

Luca Belgiorno-Nettis, founder of the new Democracy Foundation, writes in The Sydney Morning Herald:

[M]odern democracy was born of privilege and nurtured through class conflict. Conceived in partisan contest, initially as kings and barons, then as landed gentry in elections, the disenfranchised became chartists, then socialists, and the ultra-disenfranchised became communists. Even though the claims of the working class and the suffragettes have largely been resolved, the saga continues in a fossilised relic of divisiveness. Modern democracy rejected the Athenian ideal of equality, wherein the poor, as much as the rich, were automatically accorded a place in government.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Athens, Elections, Juries, Press, Sortition | Tagged: , | Leave a comment »

The principle of distinction

Posted on May 9, 2015 by Yoram Gat

Filed under: Elections | Leave a comment »

Technology is not the missing ingredient for democracy

Posted on May 9, 2015 by Yoram Gat

An email I sent to the editors of The New Scientist:

To: “letters@newscientist.com”
Subject: Technology is not the missing ingredient for democracy

Dear Editors,

As you write (“A vote for change“, 25 April, 2015), people perceive that “the parties are all the same, the politicians are all the same, they are not like us”. This perception reflects the inherent elitist nature of the electoral process. Within the electoral process people and parties compete for power. Those who manage to win form a select group with those distinct characteristics that allowed them to win: better connections, more wealth, better organizational skills, more ambition, etc. Why would we expect those winners to represent the rest of us?

Since non-representativity is inherent to the electoral process, technology cannot change its nature. Technology may shift power within the system. Those groups that find out how to exploit new technology may be able to gain power at the expense of others who fail to do so. However, the elitist nature of elections will persist. Those new to power will again be a distinctive group with their own particular agenda and interests and will not represent the public at large.

Achieving a democratic system will require a radical change: moving away from our reliance on elections for selection people with power. Representative power can be created by relying on an established scientific method for obtaining representativity: random sampling. When parliament is selected as a random sample of the population then it would truly be “like us” and then it can then be expected to create policy that promotes the interests of the average citizen.

Best regards,

Yoram Gat

Filed under: Action, Elections, Participation, Press, Sortition | 4 Comments »

Items of interest from America’s finest news source

Posted on May 1, 2015 by Yoram Gat

The Onion:

Authorities Believe Man Radicalized While Serving 18 Years In Congress

WASHINGTON—Saying that being confined in such a volatile environment was known to have devastating psychological repercussions, FBI officials reported Wednesday that Ohio man Patrick Kinsey had apparently become radicalized during his 18 years spent inside of the U.S. Congress. “We’ve uncovered evidence that leads us to believe this elected official became heavily influenced by hardline extremists and religious fanatics during his time serving in the country’s legislative branch,” said FBI spokesperson Irene Jessup, adding that the representative appeared to have fallen in with a powerful fundamentalist faction during his first days in the congressional chamber and quickly adopted their strict interpretation of a fringe ideology. Continue reading →

Filed under: Elections, Press | Tagged: , | Leave a comment »

Problem with posting comments – a workaround

Posted on April 26, 2015 by Yoram Gat

Update 2: If you are still having technical issues, please let me know by email.

Update: It seems the issue was associated with the blog’s theme. I have changed the theme and now the issue is resolved. Sorry if the new theme causes any disorientation. This is probably a temporary inconvenience.

There seems to be a problem with posting comments. This seems to affect only users who are logged in to the WordPress. If you are having this issue, log out of WordPress before you start commenting. You can then post the comment without logging in.

If you wish to post a comment while being logged in, that can be done by logging in after having started writing your comment using the little WordPress icon next to the comment box.

If this doesn’t get resolved soon, I’ll ask WordPress support for help.

Filed under: meta | Tagged: | Leave a comment »

« Previous Page — Next Page »