A Constitutional Imperative to Implement a Citizen’s Assembly Model within US Governance

Posted on October 10, 2024 by Yoram Gat

A post by Dylan Vargas. Dylan Vargas is a Master’s Student at American University studying International Affairs Policy and Analysis. In his studies he focuses on the interplay between good governance and human rights. He has worked extensively in the Democracy space, including work in four electoral campaigns and two years with the League of Women Voters of the United States advocating for Democracy Reform. This post was written as part of a Human Rights course Vargas is taking at AU.

A Constitutional Imperative to Implement a Citizen’s Assembly Model within US Governance

Outline: The core argument of the post is that the United States should implement a Citizen’s Assembly Model to achieve a more representative and responsive form of governance, as promised by the U.S. Constitution. Current democratic mechanisms are failing to adequately reflect the diverse population they serve, leading to widespread mistrust in government institutions. The implementation of a Citizen’s Assembly — a body made up of randomly selected citizens reflecting the demographic makeup of the country — would ensure that the voices and perspectives of ordinary Americans are better represented in policy-making. This argument addresses Equality by Lot’s debates surrounding political representation, democratic legitimacy, and the crisis of public trust in government. It focuses on the US Constitution, founding documents, US polling/stats, and conversations around democratic and repressive government political theory.

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Filed under: Academia, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Allotting the deck chairs on the Titanic

Posted on October 9, 2024 by Yoram Gat

The Council of Europe, “the continent’s leading human rights organisation”, announces:

A historic milestone for deliberative democracy: Ukraine’s first-ever Citizens’ Assembly successfully launched

Kyiv, Ukraine 8 October 2024

The first weekend of Ukraine’s inaugural Citizens’ Assembly, supported by the Council of Europe, successfully concluded in Zvyahel. This historic event, the first-ever Citizens’ Assembly held under wartime conditions, marks a significant step in advancing deliberative democracy in Ukraine. The CA was organised by Zvyahel City Council with the expert, methodological and financial support of the Council of Europe project «Strengthening democratic resilience through civic participation during the war and in the post-war context in Ukraine».
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Filed under: Applications, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Patrick Deneen on democracy, populism and sortition

Posted on October 2, 2024 by Yoram Gat

Patrick Deneen is a professor of political science at Notre Dame university. He is a fairly prominent public intellectual in US politics, popular especially among the Republican elite. His 2018 book, Why Liberalism Failed, drew quite a bit of attention.

A piece by Deneen has recently been published by the Notre Dame magazine. It is a surprisingly, even impressively, good. The heavy punches just keep coming. Here are some excerpts.

Democracy and Its Discontents

The claim that our democracy is imperiled should rightly strike fear in the souls of citizens, but it ought also to give pause to any student of politics. During most of the four decades I have studied and written about democracy, political scientists, and especially political theorists such as myself, would begin not with a claim about the relative health of democracy, but rather with a seemingly simple question: What is democracy?

Yet according to a dominant narrative among today’s academics, public intellectuals, media personalities and even many citizens, it is largely assumed that we know what democracy is. Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Athens, Books, education, Elections, History, Press, schools, Sortition | 17 Comments »

Sortition on Novara Media

Posted on October 2, 2024 by Yoram Gat

Novara Media is British media organization which publishes videos on YouTube. On August 31st it published a video in which the presenters mocked a certain UK MP. In the context of lamenting the supposed stupidity of that MP, one of the presenters, Aaron Bastani, suggested appointing the entire House of Commons by lot. Bastani seemed fairly well informed about the topic, mentioning the term sortition and the use of the mechanism in Athens.

The argument about sortition generating a more competent body is somewhat unusual since it is conventionally claimed that sortition generates a more representative but less competent body.

The video had over 17,000 views and over 200 comments, but none of the comments as far as I could see picked up on the topic.

I mean you’d be better off, you’d honestly be better off, just the first person you see on the street or in the pub and saying “Look, you’re going to be an MP for a constituency”, they will be better than Esther McVey.

By the way, that’s something I really believe. If you randomly chose individuals and you made them MPs and then they had to form parties and alliances over a period of time, I genuinely believe they would do a better job than than the House of Commons. I know people are going to get upset with me. That’s not anti-politics left populism. It’s called sortition. It used to be the basis of Athenian democracy. I’m saying that it would be superior, with women involved and no slave class. I do genuinely believe it would give us better MPs than the caliber we have right now.

Filed under: Press, Sortition, video | Tagged: , , , , | 1 Comment »

Sortition in New Zealand

Posted on September 28, 2024 by Yoram Gat

A 2022 talk by Prof. Matheson Russell from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, makes the standard case for sortition. Such presentations emphasize amiablity and “empirical findings” at the expense of political power and scientific rigor.

Filed under: Academia, Sortition | Leave a comment »

“Sortition might be the only way”

Posted on September 19, 2024 by Yoram Gat

Reddit user “totalialogika” wrote the text below in the Reddit r/PoliticalScience forum. The commenters on that forum dismissed the text with various versions of “Sir, this is a political science sub. Please go rant somewhere else”. This raises the question of what makes a certain text a piece of “political science” as opposed to “a rant”. Is it merely that the style needs to conform to certain customs, or is there more to it than that?

Sortition might be the only way

We need to rely on Jury Duty rule to eliminate corrupt and sociopathic politicians, especially those who make a career out of their rhetoric.

And for those who claim “expertise” and “experts” are the only thing that can rule. It is expertise to pervert the rule of law and to promote special interests and experts versed in hollow promises and empty talk meant to address emotional and not rational responses from the denizens.

The degeneration of today’s political system in America is the symptom of how inadequate is an archaic system setup by a few million settlers at the 18th Century for the interests of a patriarchal racist and male dominated country, and now inadequate to serve the need of a 350 million people strong superpower. There were of course attempts at putting lipstick on the pig i.e Civil Rights reforms and more access for minorities and women, but those are as ineffectual and “for show”.
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Filed under: education, Elections, History, Sortition | 7 Comments »

Sortition for Hong Kong

Posted on September 7, 2024 by Yoram Gat

David Cottam is a British historian and former principal of Sha Tin College, an international secondary school in Hong Kong, and a columnist in the China Daily Hong Kong Edition. In a recent column he writes about sortition.

Hong Kong, currently a hybrid of democratic and meritocratic government, is ideally placed for developing [a system with an element of sortition]. Like ancient Athens, its compact size and well-educated population would readily facilitate such a move. Introducing an element of sortition into the Legislative Council would answer the call for greater representation of the people without risking a return to the sort of partisan conflict and obstructionism that previously characterized the legislature. This would establish Hong Kong as a model of modern government, truly representing the people but without the vested interests and divisiveness of warring political parties. Such a system would also reflect Hong Kong’s unique amalgam of Western and Chinese influences, combining democratic values with the nonpartisan Confucian values of harmony and social cohesion. Indeed, this could provide an excellent model of government, not just for the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, but for any place wanting to enhance political participation, reduce partisan division, and ensure that the common good rather than party interests always prevails.

Filed under: Elections, History, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 11 Comments »

The Demos citizen assemblies report. Part 2

Posted on August 23, 2024 by Yoram Gat

The first post regarding the recently released report by the UK think tank Demos proposing the use of allotted bodies as part of the British political system is here.

In this part of the post, I highlight some quotes collected by the authors of the Demos “Citizens’ white paper“, from their interviews with former and present ministers and civil servants as well as interviews with members of the public at large. The picture which emerges from those interviews is not new: the elites are frustrated that public is too unruly, and that they are making unreasonable demands on the political system. Some of them hope that allotted bodies could be a tool for getting the people in line.

The people, on the other hand, feel that the elites are self serving at their expense. While the idea of giving decision power to allotted bodies is seen favorably, there is a lot of suspicion that this would be just another elite ploy. A member of the public expresses this attitude so:

Overall, no, I don’t think we’ve got a say. You give your vote to one party. And that’s the end of it, basically, you probably like to believe that you’re doing the right thing by voting for that party. But the proof is in the pudding, and I’ve never seen it happen yet.

A civil servant offers an the explanation for this:

Policymakers, be they the politicians and their advisors or the civil servants, do not look like the country either in all of its entirety, and quite a lot of them will not have had to go to the Jobcentre Plus, or many of them, given the age profile, and particularly younger ones will probably have not had to interact with the social care system yet.

This explanation hints at the principle of distinction – the decision makers are different from the public at large. However, the civil servant does not clarify whether they see this difference as resulting in decision makers lacking necessary knowledge, or a in having different interests and world views. A lack of knowledge can presumably be fixed relatively easily, while the second effect is much more stable.

Naturally, an elected politician thinks this difference between decision makers and the public applies to civil servants but the elected are not like this at all. He or she says:

But if you think about it, [civil servants] don’t engage with people day in day out, having discussions with constituents.

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Filed under: Opinion polling, Participation, Proposals, Sortition | Leave a comment »

Britain is no longer a democracy and democracy isn’t working

Posted on August 13, 2024 by Yoram Gat

Tim Flinn from Garvald in Scotland writes to the East Lothian Courier about sortition, and demonstrates the terminological confusion in which our society finds itself by asserting within the space a few sentences both that “[i]f a democracy is defined a ‘government of the people, by the people and for the people’ then Britain is no longer one”, and that “[d]emocracy isn’t working”.

Your interview with our MP was welcome and he emerged as a sincere and decent man.

I wish him the best, but guarantee that after five years of government, the main issues we have today will have barely been touched.

There will be several reasons for this but an important one is that our democracy is not fit for purpose – for starters, far more of us didn’t vote for Mr Alexander’s winning party than did.

That means his party has the underwhelming support of a minority of the citizens.
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Filed under: Athens, History, Juries, Press, Sortition | Leave a comment »

The Demos institute tries to sell allotted citizen assemblies to the Labour government

Posted on August 7, 2024 by Yoram Gat

The UK institute Demos describes itself as follows:

Founded in 1993 in response to a shortage of new ideas in British politics, we’ve spent three decades cementing our place as a trusted expert on democratic renewal, public service reform and digital rights. As movements, ideologies and governments have come and gone, our commitment to collaborative politics has remained a constant at the heart of the British political landscape.

The institute has a recently published a report titled a “Citizens’ white paper”, written by four authors: Miriam Levin, Polly Curtis, Sarah Castell, and Hana Kapetanovic. The policy proposals revolve around introducing randomly selected citizen bodies of various flavors into the UK political system. For example:

RECOMMENDATION 1: Announcement of five flagship Citizens’ Panels to feed into new Mission Boards

Showcase a new partnership between government and the public by announcing a role for citizens in the Mission Boards: a Citizens’ Panel of 100 randomly selected and demographically representative people for each Mission Board. These Citizens’ Panels will help to refine the priorities within each mission, work through trade-offs and choices inherent in actions considered by Mission Boards, and inform the Missions’ policies to give people a stake in meeting the challenges ahead.

The report suffers from much the same weakness as most of the sortition-related work of academics and institution-related experts. The authors address themselves to established powers in the UK – elected politicians and the civil service. The report is aimed to convince this audience that setting up allotted bodies would be useful them – increasing legitimacy for their decisions, reducing public resistance and distrust.
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Filed under: House of Lords, Proposals, Sortition | 4 Comments »

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