Voters don’t trust elected officials. One of the ways this phenomenon manifests itself is by popular support for variousforms of regulation of the officials’ political activity. The fact that this sentiment doesn’t get reflected in policy – just like public opinion regarding the salaries of elected officials – is a blunt failure of the electoral responsiveness dogma.
Rhetoric being cheaper than policy, some promises to regulate lobbying do get made:
I am in this race to tell the corporate lobbyists that their days of setting the agenda in Washington are over. I have done more than any other candidate in this race to take on lobbyists — and won. They have not funded my campaign, they will not run my White House, and they will not drown out the voices of the American people when I am president. Barack Obama, 2007
This promise was not, of course, translated to policy. But that aside, even as rhetoric this is rather tepid. Hammering lobbyists publicly – one of the only groups of people more widely distrusted than elected officials themselves – should have been an easy way for candidates and incumbents to win votes. But doing so would involve not only offending benefactors who finance the politicians’ campaigns but also offending former and future colleagues who happen to currently be on the other side of the revolvingdoor.
A Noosa Community Jury of 24 randomly selected citizens will be used to consider certain complex and weighty local issues. Council could either ask for a recommendation, or in some circumstances Council may agree beforehand to implement the jury’s decision.
Mayor Noel Playford says the Community Jury will not take over the Councillors’ role, but will complement their work when everyday citizens, given time and access to all the information they need, in independently facilitated forums, can make an informed decision that earns community trust.
A citizens’ jury statistically reflecting the whole community will be randomly selected by an independent agency, not by the Council.
“These are the vital ingredients” Mr Playford said, “random selection, time and access to information and facilitated forums, independent of the Council.”
The Mayor described the jury as “innovative, genuine democracy”.
“In the de-amalgamation battle, our community was not just fighting for the return of their council, but also for a bigger say in local decision-making.”
The new democratic structure in Noosa will be organised in partnership with the newDemocracy Foundation, a respected, national research foundation made up of former leading politicians and academic experts in the field. Continue reading →
J’ai pas voté is a documentary by Moise Courilleau and Morgan Zahnd. It is “an autopsy of French democracy aiming to create a new opportunity for growth of a new era of political organization”. Among those featured are Loic Blondiaux, Yves Sintomer, Jean-Paul Jouary, Jacques testard, Bernard Manin, Etienne Chouard, and Hervé Kempf.
A discussion with Etienne Chouard and David Van Reybrouck under the title “The tired democracy – what are the solutions?” was held in Brussels in April. A video of part of the meeting is available. Unfortunately, the audio quality is rather poor.
Below is Ahmed Teleb’s English summary of the talk (Thanks!). Continue reading →
The virtue-based justification of electoralism implies an indirect connection between public opinion and policy. According to this justification, the public identifies people it trusts and puts them in office. Those people then determine policy as they see fit. According to this theory, then, the connection between policy and popular opinion is mediated by character judgments.
The rewards-based justification, on the other hand, implies a direct connection: elected officials wish to please the public in order to be re-elected and thus pursue policy that matches public opinion (in the sense that if they pursue policy X, then there exists no alternative policy which would win higher approval ratings).
It ignores the epistemic difficulties facing voters. In reality voters’ ability to determine the effects of government policy is very limited. They are therefore unable to tell whether government policy matches their world view and promotes their interests.
It assumes that politicians lack policy preferences of their own. The theory assumes that politicians want to be elected simply and solely for pleasure of being in office rather than to promote any specific policy.
Those defects indicate why the rewards-based theory cannot be expected to explain policy setting by elected government. However, those defects do not apply to the rewards-based theory in the limited context of campaign rhetoric. Continue reading →
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.
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.
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 →
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 →
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.
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).
Adam Cronkright
Ali
Ahmed R. Teleb
avanderven
avergne
Alex Kovner
azakaras
Brett Hennig
campbellwallace
Simon Threlkeld
Nick Coccoma
codyhipskind
Common Lot Sortitionist
Conall Boyle
constitutionalism
davidschecter
graytmatter
gtridimas
H.J. Hofkirchner
Hanspeter Rosenlechner
James Kierstead
John Burnheim
jgarry20151
Jochen Krattenmacher
johnedwardtaylor
johnhuang865
Jonathan Crock
keithsutherland
Jacob Richter
kkoreilly
lukewhito
SimonPek
Nathan El
Nicholas Gruen
Owen Shaffer
Patrick Chalmers
Paul Gölz
peterstone
Pierre-Etienne Vandamme
pronfeld
Emil
rcaze
richwbrown
Roger Knights
roslynfuller
Pierre-Etienne Vandamme
shaharavin
tbouricius
Ted Wachtel
Joshua Laferriere
theodorestathis
towardsautonomyblog
Wayne Liebman
Yoram Gat
Oliver Milne
Equality by lot 