Tom Hodgkinson, editor of The Idler, invokes Plato on the pages of The Independent:
[I]f Boris [Johnson] knew his Plato, which he ought to, having been to Eton and everything, then he would recognise in the protests, riots and strikes that have marked this year a sign that the people ain’t happy with the situation. He would also recognise himself as being a member of the short-sighted oligarchy – oligarchy meaning “control by a wealthy minority”. Reading Plato’s Republic, I was struck by the parallels with a typical cycle that he describes. In Platonic terms, it would seem that an oligarchy has taken over UK plc, and that this oligarchy has made too many loans, thereby pauperising the people, and now fails to see what is happening right beneath their noses: that the people are talking about revolution. The good news, though, is that a real democracy may be in store:
Plato writes that when the pursuit of riches remains unchecked, resentment breeds:
[…]
This is the situation that will lead to social upheaval: “Democracy originates when the poor win, kill or exile their opponents, and give the rest equal rights and opportunities of office, appointment to office being as a rule by lot.”
This is what the people want: a real democracy, government by the people, and not by a clique comprising top politicians and CEOs. […]
Filed under: Athens, History, Sortition | 46 Comments »
A new paper about lotteries in education mentions some familiar names.
Abstract: It has been over 40 years since Connecticut amended its Constitution to ensure citizens a right to a free public education. Despite the constitutionally prescribed right, dramatic inequities in educational conditions continued to characterize the state’s K-12 educational system, especially between suburban/rural white and urban minority school districts. In the 1970s plaintiffs challenged the prevailing mechanism for allocating education funds with a host of court cases that tackled the thorny question of how much financial responsibility the state should assume to equalize the spending disparities between school districts. Prodded by court decisions, many formulas and approaches have been proposed by the Connecticut General Assembly in response to the various legal challenges yet the state has never fully funded the cost sharing formula nor lived up to the 50-50 cost sharing arrangement envisaged by some policymakers. The situation remains at an impasse with the latest court action, CCJEF v. Rell (2005), to be resolved no sooner than 2014 by most accounts.
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Filed under: Distribution by lot, schools | Leave a comment »
The Sydney Morning Herald, which seems to have a certain interest in citizen juries, reports:
O’Farrell dismisses citizens’ jury after Greiner jumps gun
THE chairman of Infrastructure NSW, Nick Greiner, has been spruiking about a citizens’ jury to recommend which projects the government should build – without having the approval of his board.
Sandy Olsen, the spokeswoman for the board of Infrastructure NSW, said yesterday it ”has not discussed adopting the model of using citizens’ juries”.
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Filed under: Press, Proposals, Sortition | 4 Comments »
A 1984 draft paper (that apparently never made it to publication) by Theodore C. Bergstrom and Hal R. Varian is called Government by Jury. Its abstract is as follows:
We consider a simple model of social choice where the voters find it costly to determine their true preferences. Since the influence of an individual voter decreases as the group size increases, each individual finds it optimal to invest less time in contemplating his values in larger groups than in smaller groups. This suggests that a desirable social choice mechanism might be to randomly choose a relatively small group of electors to make social decisions, since they would then have more incentive think carefully about the issues. We investigate this idea of “government by jury” in a simple mathematical model and establish some of its properties.
Unfortunately, the paper makes the rather radical assumption that the interests of all the members of the group are identical, except for the fact that each is trying to minimize the personal effort put into reaching a well informed decision. Thus, according to this model, each person would rather have someone else make all policy decisions for them, provided the decision-maker has somehow been motivated to study the policy problems. This assumption limits the scope of the model drastically and makes any results irrelevant to most political situations.
Nevertheless, the paper is interesting for being perhaps the first formalization of a sortition-based government situation, and provides a possible starting point for richer models.
Filed under: Sortition | 3 Comments »
Daniel Baron of the Institute of Sociology, RWTH Aachen University introduces his article, The Power of the Lot: Are People Obliged to Participate in Political Lotteries? as follows:
While empirical research in the field of aleatoric democracy usually focuses on the deliberative outcomes of these procedures (Fishkin & Luskin 1999; Fishkin et al. 2000), theoretical approaches mainly ask whether political lotteries, compared to traditional ways of recruiting political personnel (esp. elections), are just or not (Stone 2007, 2009). Further discussions broach the subjects of political representation, equality or input- and output-legitimacy (Buchstein 2009a). Down to the present day, a key question to ask when focusing the problem of legitimacy of aleatoric democracy has been most widely ignored: whether laypersons chosen by lot should be compelled to participate in the committee where they have gained a seat, or whether sortition should be founded on the principle of voluntariness.
Filed under: Juries, Sortition, Theory | 15 Comments »
I have created an advertising campaign on Google with the following ad:
Clicking on the ad currently takes you to the home page of this blog, but it would probably be better if the target was an “introduction to sortition” page. Such a page can be created and added to the tabs at the top of the blog (next to the “Home”, “About the Kleroterians”, “Contributors” and “Literature” tabs).
If anyone is interested in collaborating on creating such a page (possibly something along these lines), please let me know. Comments on the text of the ad are also welcome.
Filed under: Sortition | 5 Comments »
Washington law establishes the Washington state citizens’ commission on salaries for elected officials which
[s]tudies the relationship of salaries to the duties of members of the legislature, all elected officials of the executive branch of state government, and all judges of the supreme court, court of appeals, superior and district courts, and shall fix the salary for each position.
Number of appointments by Governor: 16
Term in Years: 4
Compensation: Expenses only
Qualification: Members are selected by lot by the Secretary of State from registered voters in each congressional district, each of which has one representative member. The other members are selected jointly by the speaker of the house and the president of the senate, and their names are submitted to the Governor for appointment. Five members must have experience in personnel management, one each from the following sectors: business, professional personnel management, legal profession, organized labor, private institution of higher education; one recommended by the state Personnel Resource Board; and one recommended by majority vote of the presidents of the state’s four-year institutions of higher education. No member may serve more than two full terms.
Number of yearly meetings: 6
Filed under: Sortition | 12 Comments »
The Sydney Morning Herald writes about newDemocracy, “a mix of business people, academics and former politicians” and its agenda, filling in some interesting information about the founder of the group:
“You can march in the streets and make a noise but that’s not enough,” newDemocracy founder Luca Belgiorno-Nettis said. “You have to show more direction.”
Mr Belgiorno-Nettis, a multimillionaire director of Transfield Holdings whose family is one of Australia’s great migrant success stories, conceived of the research body seven years ago with the idea of improving the democratic process.
Perhaps the most promising idea to come out of the think tank is a proposal to include everyday citizens in forming groups which would consider some of the issues governments wrestle with each day. Known variously as citizens’ juries or citizens’ parliaments, they could make recommendations on topics big and small.
Imagine, for example, if you wanted to extend your home. Instead of lodging a development application with the council, your plans could be assessed by a panel of your peers along with some experts to advise them.
Mr Belgiorno-Nettis believes the application of the citizens’ jury can work equally well on questions of health care, education, tax reform and infrastructure as well as newer concerns such as climate change.
“Perhaps I am being a little ambitious but I would like to get to a point where we could run citizens’ assemblies, parallel to the Senate, in NSW,” he said. “It might sound a far-fetched now but, if there are well-minded people behind it and there is public support for it, well, why not?”
Filed under: Press, Proposals, Sortition | 4 Comments »
A New York Times/CBS opinion poll finds that only 9% of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing, and only 10% feel that they can “trust the government in Washington to do what is right”. Both of those numbers are the lowest on record.
Filed under: Elections, Opinion polling, Press | 1 Comment »
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Equality by lot 