Artist Taryn Simon created a statue inspired by the kleroterion. It is on display at the Storm King art center in New York state.
Artist Taryn Simon (American, b. 1975) has imagined an election machine based on surviving archaeological fragments of the kleroterion, an ancient device from the beginnings of democracy in Athens.
Filed under: Athens, Sortition | Tagged: Art | 2 Comments »
Google DeepMind, whose AI product AlphaFold2 won the 2024 chemistry Nobel prize for the company’s founder, Demis Hassabis, has now applied its technology to create a tool they call the “Habermas machine”. The tool is described as working as a “caucus mediator,” generating summaries that outline areas of agreement of people making up a discussion group. An excerpt from an article in the MIT Techology review:
AI could help people find common ground during deliberations
Groups using Google DeepMind’s LLMs made more progress in discussing contentious issues. But the technology won’t replace human mediators anytime soon.
Reaching a consensus in a democracy is difficult because people hold such different ideological, political, and social views.
Perhaps an AI tool could help. Researchers from Google DeepMind trained a system of large language models (LLMs) to operate as a “caucus mediator,” generating summaries that outline a group’s areas of agreement on complex but important social or political issues.
The researchers say the tool — named the Habermas machine (HM), after the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas — highlights the potential of AI to help groups of people find common ground when discussing such subjects.
“The large language model was trained to identify and present areas of overlap between the ideas held among group members,” says Michael Henry Tessler, a research scientist at Google DeepMind. “It was not trained to be persuasive but to act as a mediator.” The study is being published today in the journal Science.
Filed under: Academia, Deliberation | 2 Comments »
Alex Guerrero, Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University and a longtime sortition advocate, has written to announce that his book Lottocracy: Democracy Without Elections (Oxford Press) is now out. It is available now in the UK from the publisher, and available for pre-order everywhere on Amazon.
The book, which has been more than a decade in the making, also has a website, https://www.lottocracy.org/, where highlights, excerpts and other information can be found.
I asked Alex what was new or different about his book compared to previous books advocating sortition. He called out 5 points:
- I provide a more detailed and empirically informed set of concerns about electoral representative democracy and a more detailed and multidimensional diagnosis for why electoral democracy isn’t performing well. In doing this, I make the case that there are no straightforward “fixes” for what ails electoral democracy. Chapters 2-6 raise these empirically informed concerns; Chapter 7 considers possible solutions and suggests they will be inadequate.
Filed under: Academia, Books, Proposals, Sortition | 32 Comments »
Following a piece previously published in The Conservative Woman which was “less than enthusiastic” regarding citizens’ assemblies, a reader of the magazine wrote with her first hand experience as an allotted juror in a citizen jury convened to discuss assisted dying policy in the UK.
The testimony is very interesting and shows the typical inquisitive, perceptive, sensible and open-minded attitude one may expect from a random member of the public (as opposed to the tendentious single-minded attitude exhibited by the opinion writer who authored the previously published piece). While describing the jury process rather favorably and rejecting the label “choreographed charade” that was used by the opinion writer, the testimony quite reasonably expresses displeasure with the fact that the process was presented as being a decision-making process while in fact all decisions were being taken elsewhere and independently of the ongoings in the jury.
My involvement began on February 29, when a letter about the jury arrived. It was addressed ‘To the Resident’ and mine was one of 7,000 addresses selected at random. The jury was to consist of 30 people. Those willing to participate were asked to register on the website of the Sortition Foundation, which had been engaged to recruit jury members ensuring they were broadly representative of the population.
Filed under: Applications, Press, Sortition | 7 Comments »
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.
Filed under: Academia, Sortition | 1 Comment »
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 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 »
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: democracy, elections, news, politics, sortition | 1 Comment »
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 »
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 »
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Equality by lot 