Luca Belgiorno-Nettis, founder of newDemocracy, endorses Alex Zakaras’s allotted “Citizens’ Senate” in his TEDxSydney talk:
My take on this proposal and exchange with Zakaras are here: The elected legislator’s burden, Lottery and Legislative Powers: A Reply to Yoram Gat, and Limiting the allotted chamber’s powers – a foundational argument.
Filed under: Academia, Athens, Proposals, Sortition | 1 Comment »
A British judge was very unhappy with the jury in a high-profile trial last week:
Vicky Pryce, the ex-wife of the disgraced cabinet minister Chris Huhne, faces a retrial next week over taking speeding points for him because a jury failed to reach a verdict, after suffering what the judge described as “absolutely fundamental deficits in understanding”.
The Guardian seemed to concur:
Mr Justice Sweeney discharged the panel of eight women and four men following more than 15 hours of deliberations, and a day after they submitted 10 questions that indicated they had not grasped the basics of their task,
but assembled a set of professionals defending the jury institution:
Continue reading
Filed under: Academia, Juries, Press | 12 Comments »
Louis Laurent, a Belgian MP, is calling for the use of sortition in order to achieve “true representation” (machine translation with my touch-ups):
Louis Laurent demands the dissolution of “all political parties” responsible, according to him, for the current poor governance, corruption and cronyism at all levels of government.
Laurent demands the creation of a “citizen” parliament assembled by sortition, in order to guarantee true representation.
Filed under: Elections, Press, Sortition | 2 Comments »
Tomas Mancebo wrote to point out an article in a Chilean alternative publication, El Ciudadano, advocating sortition.
Mauricio Vergara writes (machine translation with my touch-ups):
The Greeks discovered the blunder of representative democracy and it took them 800 years to eliminate the oligarchy and institute a distinct democratic design.
The solution was the creation of a large assembly, where members are selected by lot, yes! … A raffle, where those citizens who meet certain requirements have equal opportunity to be selected and to influence the country’s policies as representatives.
Filed under: Athens, Press, Sortition | 3 Comments »
The primary negative effect of the electoral system is the obverse of its ostensible function. This effect is what Bernard Manin called “the principle of distinction” – the delegation of political power to people whose situation and outlook is significantly different from those of the population at large. As a result of this difference, the political elite serves interests that are different from, and often antithetical to, those of the average voter.
However, the electoral system is often presented by academic advocates and by electoral activists and politicians as providing a value to society above and beyond its function for selecting government officials. It supposedly encourages meaningful popular participation in government through voting, informed discussion, organized activism in electoral campaigns and awareness of the importance of compromise and coalition building. In fact, the electoral system encourages none of those patterns – on the contrary: it is antithetical to them. This is due to several characteristics of the electoral system that are not consequences of the principle of distinction.
Filed under: Academia, Elections, Participation, Sortition | 45 Comments »
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.
Continue reading
Filed under: Elections, Press | 1 Comment »
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.”
Filed under: Academia, Athens, Press, Sortition | 2 Comments »
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 »
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