Americans don’t like the Congresspeople of their own districts

Posted on July 22, 2014 by Yoram Gat

Approval ratings of U.S. congress have been stuck at single digits or low double digits for years. However, Americans tend to like Congresspeople elected in their own districts and states more than they like Congress as a whole.

A recent Rasmussen poll found that Congresspeople are quite unpopular even in their own districts:

[O]nly 25% of voters think their representative in Congress deserves reelection […]. Forty-one percent (41%) now say that representative does not deserve to be reelected, but 34% are undecided.

(This is still much better than Congress as a whole whose approval ratings are at 8%.)

Other findings from the poll:

70% think most [incumbents] get reelected because election rules are rigged in their favor, not because they do a good job representing their constituents.

[O]nly 14% of voters think most members of Congress care what their constituents think, and only slightly more (21%) believe their congressional representative cares what they think. These numbers, too, have been trending down over the last four-and-a-half years and are now at new lows.

Sixty-nine percent (69%) think most members of Congress don’t care what their constituents think, while 17% are not sure. Fifty-three percent (53%) say their representative doesn’t care what they think, but 26% are undecided.

Filed under: Elections, Opinion polling | Tagged: , , , | 2 Comments »

Allocating speaking spots on mass media

Posted on July 16, 2014 by Yoram Gat

FAIR’s survey of cable news discussion programs reveals predictable demographic biases:

A survey of major cable news discussion programs shows a stunning lack of diversity among the guests.

FAIR surveyed five weeks of broadcasts of the interview/discussion segments on several leading one-hour cable shows: CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360° and OutFront With Erin Burnett, All In With Chris Hayes and the Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC, and Fox News Channel’s O’Reilly Factor and Hannity.

[…]

Male guests widely outnumbered women on every show (730 to 285), making up 72 percent of the guest lists. Just 5 percent (46) of cable news guests were women of color. […] Women of color (about 18 percent of the US public) were strikingly underrepresented on most shows […] Non-Latino white men, on the other hand, were overrepresented on every show.

But, of course, the bias is not only gender- and race-based:

The largest category of guests were other members of the media: 55 percent of the guests were either journalists (400) or pundits (159). Current and former government officials were the next largest category, accounting for almost 10 percent of guests (107). There were 37 military guests (current and former), 35 representatives of think tanks and 32 academics. Other prominent guest categories were lawyers (21) and business representatives (17).

Such biases give certain groups in the population disproportional voice in politics, meaning they are undemocratic. The way to achieve proper representation is to allot speaking spots on mass media, giving each person the same chance of getting their worldview represented.

Filed under: Distribution by lot, Press | 1 Comment »

Dixon: Why Elections Still Matter, Except When They Don’t

Posted on July 8, 2014 by Yoram Gat

An excerpt from an article by long time political activist Bruce A. Dixon:

Can electoral campaigns morph into social movements?

The short answer is no. We have to avoid and actively argue against the delusion that electoral campaigns build social movements. They don’t. I used to believe that under some circumstances they could. But I’ve seen twenty or more campaigns close up, in many of which some or the key participants hoped to morph into permanent bottom-up organizations capable of running themselves and holding candidates accountable. For reasons that require a book chapter to explain, it almost never works. I think I’ve seen it happen, sort of, once in my entire political life.

Electoral campaigns have been the graveyard of social movements, not once, but many, many times.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Elections | Tagged: , , | 31 Comments »

Donald McCabe: Choose House by Lot

Posted on July 3, 2014 by Yoram Gat

An item from the Vergne bibliography:

Choose House by Lot

Published by The New York Times: March 15, 1991

To the Editor:

In “Expanded Congress Would Help Women” (letter, Feb. 24), Prof. Wilma Rule suggests a complicated scheme for the selection of members of the House of Representatives so that women and minorities may be fairly represented. As I understand the methods she recommends, however, there is no guarantee of any such effect. In any case, she ignores a simple means of choosing Representatives that would have the desirable results she wants, as well as others.

If members of the House were chosen by lot, instead of being elected (with still only one member for each district), the laws of statistics would assure that every part of our population would be represented very nearly proportionally. In addition, veto power over legislation would belong to a body that was not composed of professional politicians, who would have no interest in being re-elected and would therefore be subject to limited influence.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Athens, Elections, History, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 1 Comment »

The Vergne lotteries literature database

Posted on July 1, 2014 by Yoram Gat

Antoine Vergne has shared his database of lotteries related literature. The database currently contain 365 items touching on a variety of topics related to distribution-by-lot and sortition, covering theory, practice, history and advocacy, and ranging in time from antiquity to the present.

For those who are interested to access the list, it is available in bibliographical format and as a report.

The database is managed as a Zotero library. Readers who wish to help manage and extend the database are invited to leave contact information below or to email me (the address is here).

Filed under: Academia, Books, Distribution by lot, History, Juries, meta, Press, Proposals, Sortition | Tagged: | 5 Comments »

I pester George Monbiot once more

Posted on June 19, 2014 by Yoram Gat

About a year ago I wrote to George Monbiot about sortition. At the risk of becoming a nuisance, I have just written to him again:

Again, sortition

Dear George,

Having just read your article “An Ounce of Hope is Worth a Ton of Despair”, I feel compelled to write to you again about a subject I have written to you about before: sortition.

As you may remember, sortition is the democratic alternative to elections. Instead of choosing decision makers by voting – which inevitably leads to having decisions made by members of an ambitious and well resourced elite – why not select decisions makers as a statistical sample of the population? Why not put some of those people who “consistently hold concern for others, tolerance, kindness and thinking for themselves to be more important than wealth, image and power” in a position where they can set policy instead of forcing them to choose between members of a self-serving elite?
Continue reading →

Filed under: Action, Elections, Press, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Alex Guerrero: Against Elections

Posted on June 13, 2014 by Yoram Gat

Alex Guerrero has a new paper forthcoming: “Against Elections: The lottocratic alternative”.

The paper begins as follows:

It is widely accepted that electoral representative democracy is better — along a number of different normative dimensions — than any other alternative lawmaking political arrangement. It is not typically seen as much of a competition: it is also widely accepted that the only legitimate alternative to electoral representative democracy is some form of direct democracy, but direct democracy — we are told — would lead to bad policy. This article makes the case that there is a legitimate alternative system — one that uses lotteries, not elections, to select political officials — that would be better than electoral representative democracy.

Filed under: Academia, Elections, Sortition | 17 Comments »

Philo Judaeus advises against sortition

Posted on June 7, 2014 by Yoram Gat

Philo Judaeus was a Hellenistic Jewish philosopher who lived in Alexandria, in the Roman province of Egypt, in the first century BC and first century AD. The following passages are taken from Philo’s A Treatise on Those Special Laws Which Are Contained Under and Have Reference to the Eighth and Ninth, and Tenth Commandments.. In them he repeats the competence argument against sortition which Xenophon attributes to Socrates. Philo adds an argument against sortition and in favor of elections from Biblical authority.

XXIX. (151) Some persons have contended that all magistracies ought to have the officers appointed to them by lot; which however is a mode of proceeding not advantageous for the multitude, for the casting of lots shows good fortune, but not virtue; at all events many unworthy persons have often obtained office by such means, men whom, if a good man had the supreme authority, he would not permit to be reckoned even among his subjects: Continue reading →

Filed under: Athens, Books, History, Religion, Sortition | Tagged: | 20 Comments »

Manuel Arriaga: Rebooting Democracy

Posted on May 15, 2014 by Yoram Gat

A review of Manuel Arriaga’s Rebooting Democracy: a citizen’s guide to reinventing politics

Rebooting Democracy is a short and enjoyable book (available at Amazon; the first 50 pages are available online). Its introduction explicitly positions it as being motivated by the sentiments of the Occupy protests and the author’s proposals as responding to those sentiments. Like the Occupy protests Arriaga’s message is to a considerable extent anti-electoral:

[V]oting out one politician or party to bring in a different one will not solve our problems. Time has made it clear that this is not merely an issue of casting. If the play stinks, replacing the actors will not make it any better.

The first two chapters present an explanation of why the Western electoral system does not serve “us”. Arriaga summarizes his explanation with the following two points:

1) We have delegated power to the political class and hardly supervise it.

2) As voters, we are condemned to unreflective and easy-to-influence decision-making. Even if we were inclined to effectively supervise politicians, this would severely limit our ability to do so.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Books, Elections, Initiatives, Proposals, Sortition | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | 27 Comments »

Democratic accountability, part 2

Posted on May 2, 2014 by Yoram Gat

Part 1 describes what “democratic accountability theory” is.

“Accountability” has a generalized positive connotation. Surely it is better when power is held accountable than when it is unaccountable or arbitrary. Scratching the surface, however, various considerations make it evident that the appeal of “electoral accountability” is illusory.

  • First, an “accountable government” is presumably self-evidently superior to an “unaccountable government” whose mandate is permanent and therefore cannot be replaced. But the charm of accountability seems less clear when the alternative is a different “unaccountable” government – a government whose mandate is temporary and cannot be renewed. If elections are the only method of accountability then such a limited mandate government is not accountable either. Accountability, it turns out, is not about replacing government any more than it is about permanent government. For some reason, a government must be re-electable to be “accountable”. It is the ability to award the prize of re-election that makes a government electorally accountable. If a prize cannot be awarded, or cannot be withdrawn, the spell of accountability is nullified.

    • Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Elections, Sortition | Tagged: , , , | 210 Comments »

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