Yoram Gat

Vote! or others will choose for you.

Posted on January 19, 2013 by Yoram Gat

The Israeli elections are three days away and the campaign is reaching its inevitable crescendo. Something called “movement for social media” is adding its contribution to the cacophony with a celebrity clip whose message is “Vote! or others will choose for you.” (In Hebrew ‘vote’ and ‘choose’ are the same word.)

The campaign organizers explained back in October that it was prompted by falling voter turnout rates in Israel. Voter turnout has dropped from close to 80% throughout the second half of the 20th century to under 70% in the three elections of the first decade of the 21st.
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Filed under: Elections, Press | 1 Comment »

Prof. Irad Malkin: Democracy without democracy

Posted on January 4, 2013 by Yoram Gat

Prof. Irad Malkin, a professor of Ancient History in Tel Aviv University, writes in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz (my translation):

The days of democracy are short and few. In ancient Greece it lasted 200 years and its age in the modern era is similar. Modern democracy draws is ideological roots from ancient democracy, mainly from Classical Athens: since the people is sovereign, the government is called democratic, said Pericles the leader of Athens. But modern democracy does wrong to the basic democratic idea of equality and accessibility, since it chose to adopt some of the democratic ideas of Athens and reject the way in which Athens sustained its government. The Athenians did not think that it was possible to disconnect the governmental mechanism from its guiding principle; for the mechanism is what guaranteed democracy, the sovereignty of the people, the accessibility and the rotation: democracy, said Aristotle, is ruling and being ruled in turns.

So what did we forget? What did we give up? The lottery. More than anything else the democratic government relied on the lottery rather than on voting. Magistrates, cleric and jurists (that served as judges in Athens), and even government ministers – all were selected by lottery – and there was no “prime minister”. Please do not smile: “The rule of the people has the fairest name of all: ‘equality before the law’ (isonomia)… In this government, officials are selected by lot, and are held accountable and proposals are brought before the people… for all things are possible for the majority.”

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Filed under: Academia, Athens, Press, Sortition | 2 Comments »

“Put the right man in the right job”

Posted on January 1, 2013 by Yoram Gat

Burin Kantabutra writes to the Thai Nation:

Random assignments will make situation worse

Police chief Adul Saengsingkaew refuses to reconsider his order to select officers randomly from a pool of 4,000 specialist investigators nationwide and send them to fill vacancies in the strife-ridden South. This lottery is wrong from top to bottom.

The concept of a national police force goes directly against former prime minister Anand Panyarachun’s “Seven Pillars of Sustainable Democracy”, one of which is decentralisation. A police force must, by its nature, be localised, for each region differs from others – especially the South. For example, how many cops in Bangkok or Isaan speak Yawi and understand Islam and its culture? How will they communicate effectively with locals, let alone investigate? The cops from each region should be drawn from, and be accountable to, the region’s citizenry, through its elected representatives. Not only the police lottery, but the department itself, is built upon a false premise, one of national homogeneity.

Not surprisingly, those who are forced to do anything will not be willing workers, and are likely to be ineffective – further aggravating the volatile situation down south. Continue reading →

Filed under: Distribution by lot, Press | 4 Comments »

2012 review – sortition-related events

Posted on December 29, 2012 by Yoram Gat

There were 100 posts on Equality-by-Lot in 2012. Reviewing those posts, here is what appears to me most noteworthy.

The most notable sortition-related news of the year was the petering out of the 2011 protest movement in the West (Occupy/OWS/Indignados). While in several Arab countries the 2011 protests (“The Arab Spring”) led to significant changes in government structure, in the West the protest movements seem to have dissipated without having a noticeable impact on governmental institutions, power distribution or policy.

A fundamental reason for the failure of the Western protest movement is that in contrast to the Arab movement the Western protesters lacked a clear agenda of institutional reform. The agenda of the Arab protest movement was aimed explicitly at dismantling the existing power structure and setting up a structure that was generally modeled after the Western electoral model. The Western protest on the other hand did not offer an agenda for institutional reform. Having not presented an agenda for reform, it is hardly surprising that no reform took place.

What the protest movement lacked is a proposal to move away from an electoral system toward a sortition-based system.

On the positive side, going over the posts of the past year I was struck by how many different sortition advocates have appeared (or, to be more accurate, have become known to me) during the year, including a few semi-high profile figures:

Ètienne Chouard (and here, here, and here), Lawrence Lessig, David Chaum, Jacques Rancière, Clive Aslet, Jim Gilliam, Loïc Blondiaux, and Andrew Dobson and other readers of the Guardian.

Happy New Year, and best wishes for 2013.

Filed under: Academia, meta, Press, Sortition | 12 Comments »

2012 review – statistics

Posted on December 22, 2012 by Yoram Gat

Below are some statistics about the third year of Equality-by-Lot. Comparable numbers for last year can be found here.

2012	Page views	Posts	Comments
Jan	1,740	10	122
Feb	2,030	9	116
Mar	2,009	11	131
Apr	1,474	8	93
May	2,008	10	101
June	1,333	7	57
July	1,642	5	10
Aug	1,758	11	200
Sept	1,483	7	140
Oct	2,505	4	120
Nov	1,474	9	55
Dec (to 22rd)	1,627	9	106
Total	21,083	100	1,251

Note that page views do not include visits by logged-in contributors – the wordpress system does not count those visits.

The system reports that posts were made by 9 authors during 2012, with one of those authors making only one contribution. (There were, of course, many other authors quoted and linked to.)

There are currently 69 email and WordPress followers of this blog. (The figure 107 displayed on the home page includes those 69 followers as well as “Facebook followers”. I am not sure what Facebook followers are.)

Searching for “distribution by lot” (with quotes) using Google returns Equality-by-Lot as the third result (out of “about 33,600 results”). Searching for “sortition” returns Equality-by-Lot as the 8th result (out of “about 98,900 results”). Searching for “kleroterion” returns Equality-by-Lot as the 6th result (out of “about 5,210 results”).

2010	Page views	Posts	Comments
Jan	288	8	30
Feb	242	12	29
Mar	417	7	28
Apr	252	5	16
May	344	6	18
Jun	259	6	15
Jul	324	9	20
Aug	372	7	93
Sep	550	10	38
Oct	704	6	97
Nov	1091	10	133
Dec (thru 23rd)	458	6	41
Total	5301	92	558

Filed under: Distribution by lot, meta, Sortition | 14 Comments »

Bill Harper: A Beginner’s Guide to Sortition

Posted on December 18, 2012 by Yoram Gat

Filed under: Books, Proposals, Sortition | 9 Comments »

Call for 2012 review input

Posted on December 13, 2012 by Yoram Gat

This year, as in the last two (2011, 2010), I would like to create a post or two summarizing the sortition- and distribution-by-lot-related developments of the year and the activity here on Equality-by-Lot.

Please use the comments to give your input on what you think are the most mention-worthy events or essays of the past year.

Filed under: Distribution by lot, meta, Sortition | Leave a comment »

I like you as a voter

Posted on December 5, 2012 by Yoram Gat

Ever since Socrates

It is a long standing tradition to deride sortition for putting in power unqualified people. The critics of sortition interviewed by Kevin Hartnett carry this tradition to the present.

Whether it is because the average person is incorrigibly incompetent, or just because they are inexperienced, the bottom line is the same: you just cannot hand power to the average person and expect good government. Socrates put it this way:

[N]o one would care to apply [sortition] in selecting a pilot or a flute-player or in any similar case, where a mistake would be far less disastrous than in matters political.

The straightforward argument is that the unqualified would simply make poor decisions:

There are ways in which we want our elected officials to look like us and then there are other ways in which we want them to be better than us. We actively try to select for some skills and talents when we choose politicians. (Susan Stokes, professor of political science at Yale University)

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Filed under: Academia, Athens, Elections, Press, Sortition | 16 Comments »

The case for governing by lottery

Posted on December 2, 2012 by Yoram Gat

Kevin Hartnett has an article about sortition in the Boston Globe “Ideas” section.

The performance of our elected officials has led many people to wonder whether we might as well just pluck people at random and send them to Washington. For a small but fervent group of political philosophers, that’s not a joke—it’s a serious idea.

The piece focuses mainly on the ideas of Alexander Guerrero, who is a professor at the department of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, and who, we learn, has an upcoming book on sortition called “The Lottocratic Alternative”. Others mentioned as proposing various ways to use chance in politics are Richard Thaler, and Peter Stone (“a lecturer in political science at Trinity College in Dublin and contributor to Equality by Lot, a blog about lottocratic politics”) and Scott Wentland.
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Filed under: Academia, Press, Sortition | 17 Comments »