A semi-direct model for a more participative democracy

Posted on April 2, 2011 by Yoram Gat

Armando Vieira offers a reform program with some of the high-tech participative characteristics offered by Matteo Martini:

Abstract

Here I propose a new political system that will become possible in a society where all its citizens will be connected to the Internet. Its main philosophy is inspired in the free market mechanism, and I will call it semi-direct democracy. The main points of this model are: i) the substitution of political parties by a set of non-profit political organisations specialized to deal with most aspects of the executive and the legislative power; and ii) the introduction of a constant electronic scrutiny by the citizens of the activities of these organisations. The emergence of this system will be enhanced by the increasing need for more representativity and transparency in public affairs, on one hand, and the increasing incapacity of the actual political system to deal with an increasingly complex society, on the other.

Keywords

Semi-direct democracy, e-government, e-democracy.
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Filed under: Participation, Proposals | 14 Comments »

I-Democracy

Posted on March 30, 2011 by Yoram Gat

In the following post Matteo Martini presents a proposal for government reform. Martini’s criticisms of the electoral system are similar to those made by sortition advocates, but his proposed remedy is different.

A system-nation can be defined as “democratic” if the actions taken within such system-nation are according to the will of the people who are part of such system.

A major problem with current governments, including the so-called “democratic” ones, is that the actions of the government of a nation are not according to the will of the majority of the population of that nation: some of the laws that most of the people would like to see brought forward are not even discussed, while the government passes laws and does things that are not according to the will of the majority of the electorate.
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Filed under: Elections, Participation, Proposals | 49 Comments »

Expecting More Say

Posted on March 26, 2011 by Yoram Gat

Expecting More Say is a 1999 report of the Center on Policy Attitudes analyzing the U.S. public’s dissatisfaction with its government. The report includes findings from a public opinion survey. One of the questions in the survey was as follows:

Imagine that a group of 500 American citizens was selected from all over the country to be representative of the entire US population. This group then met and were informed on all sides of the policy debate on a number of public policy issues and had a chance to discuss these issues. They were then asked to make decisions on what they thought was the best approach to these issues.

Do you think the decisions of such a group would probably be better or worse than the decisions that Congress makes?

66% of respondents thought the decisions by the representative group would be better, 15% thought they would be worse.

Filed under: Opinion polling, Sortition | 2 Comments »

Conall Boyle on university admittance: (1) why lotteries?

Posted on March 26, 2011 by Yoram Gat

I do not for one moment disagree with the principle that Merit alone should determine university entrance. Rather it is the form of merit used that I would disagree with.

Conall Boyle, Lotteries for Education

In Lotteries for Education Conall Boyle presents a case for using lotteries to supplement standardized test scores as the criterion for admission to universities. He first informs us that it is an empirical fact that such test scores (somewhat inconsistently, I think, covering both IQ tests and subject area exams) are not only the best predictor of university academic performance and graduation rates (explaining about 50% of the variance), but the only predictor of any validity (interviews and extra-curricular activities, for example, having no predictive power at all). Having made this point, Boyle sees it as his main task to convince his readers that having standardized test scores as the only entrance criterion should be avoided.

This task Boyle approaches in various ways throughout the book. In the ultimate chapter three arguments are presented:

  • A lottery is a “practical and efficient” way to handle borderline cases. That is, it is an easy way to differentiate between applicants whose scores are identical, or are so close that differences in their expected academic performance are negligible.
  • Accepting the top-scoring quota every year creates “inter-temporal unfairness” in the sense that the cutoff point will fluctuate from year to year. That is, a student with score x would be admitted one year, but another student with an identical score would not be admitted the next year.
  • “Balancing risk”: Boyle argues the risk of accepting students who fail to graduate should be balanced against the risk of the students who are not accepted but who would have graduated had they been accepted.

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Filed under: Books, Distribution by lot, schools | 6 Comments »

The imperceptible selection

Posted on March 24, 2011 by Yoram Gat

Sani Caleb, a lawyer and the head of the Clinic for Educational Rights at the Academic Center for Law and Business in Israel, writes in haoketz.org, a blog dealing with social issues, advocating for the use of lotteries to allocate seats in Israeli public charter schools:

The imperceptible selection

Despite the guidelines of the Ministry of Education and the judicial rulings, many schools continue to decide in effect who will win a place and who will be left outside

It was recently made public that the Ministry of Education instructed the public charter schools (the School for Nature and Environment and the School for the Arts, etc.) to avoid administering entrance exams to students entering first grade. […]

The prohibition of selection exams upon entrance to schools follows, inter alia, from the proven direct association between the social-economic status of a family and its cultural background and the educational achievements of its children. Therefore grouping students based on their educational achievements into “better” and “not as good” schools deepens the gaps and the inequalities. In order to bypass the prohibition, many schools employ inventive ways to select students, such as acquaintance interviews with the students and their parents, observations and diagnoses. The procedure is different, but in most cases the goal is unchanged – to allow the schools to decide, each school according to its own criteria, the identity of the students that are admitted. Continue reading →

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

Thomas Henry Huxley: Government: Anarchy or Regimentation

Posted on March 17, 2011 by Yoram Gat

In Government: Anarchy or Regimentation (1890), Thomas Henry Huxley writes (p. 399, footnote 1):

[I]t would not be far from the truth to say that the only form of government which has ever permanently existed is oligarchy. A very strong despot, or a furious multitude, may, for a brief space, work their single or collective will; but the power of an absolute monarch is, as a rule, as much in the hands of a ring of ministers, mistresses, and priests, as that of Demos is, in reality, wielded by a ring of orators and wire-pullers. As Hobbes has pithily put the case, “A democracy in effect is no more than an aristocracy of orators, interrupted sometimes with the temporary monarchy of one orator” (De Corpore Politico, chap. ii. 5). The alternative of dominion does not lie between a sovereign individual and a sovereign multitude, but between an aristacrchy and a demarchy, that is to say, between an aristocratic and a democratic oligarchy. The chief business of the aristarchy is to persuade the king, emperor, or czar, that he wants to go the way they wish him to go; that of the demarchy is to do the like with the mob.

Filed under: Theory | Leave a comment »

More from Pluchino et al.

Posted on March 16, 2011 by Yoram Gat

A new article by Pluchino et al. is linked to in a recent edit to the Wikipedia entry for sortition (possibly by Pluchino himself):

Accidental Politicians: How Randomly Selected Legislators Can Improve Parliament Efficiency

by A. Pluchino, C. Garofalo, A. Rapisarda, S. Spagano, M. Caserta

We study a prototypical model of a Parliament with two Parties or two Political Coalitions and we show how the introduction of a variable percentage of randomly selected independent legislators can increase the global efficiency of a Legislature, in terms of both number of laws passed and average social welfare obtained. We also analytically find an “efficiency golden rule” which allows to fix the optimal number of legislators to be selected at random after that regular elections have established the relative proportion of the two Parties or Coalitions. These results are in line with both the ancient Greek democratic system and the recent discovery that the adoption of random strategies can improve the efficiency of hierarchical organizations.

Filed under: Sortition | 19 Comments »

They are simply not ready for free and fair elections

Posted on March 6, 2011 by Yoram Gat

Bernard Lewis, “renowned Islamic scholar”, shares with the readers of the Jerusalem Post what he undoubtedly thinks is a real-politik theory of democracy, the product of his decades of study:

The Arab masses certainly want change. And they want improvement. But when you say do they want democracy, that’s a more difficult question to answer. What does “democracy” mean? It’s a word that’s used with very different meanings, even in different parts of the Western world. And it’s a political concept that has no history, no record whatever in the Arab, Islamic world.

In the West, we tend to get excessively concerned with elections, regarding the holding of elections as the purest expression of democracy, as the climax of the process of democratization. Well, the second may be true – the climax of the process. But the process can be a long and difficult one. Consider, for example, that democracy was fairly new in Germany in the inter-war period and Hitler came to power in a free and fair election.

We, in the Western world particularly, tend to think of democracy in our own terms – that’s natural and normal – to mean periodic elections in our style. But I think it’s a great mistake to try and think of the Middle East in those terms and that can only lead to disastrous results, as you’ve already seen in various places. They are simply not ready for free and fair elections.

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Filed under: Elections, History | 9 Comments »

Big shot, Nobel prize-winning, New York Times-op-ed-writing, Princeton-teaching economist vs. person-on-the-street

Posted on February 24, 2011 by Yoram Gat

Paul Krugman, on the way to a rather funny punchline, takes an off-handed swipe at the irrational person-on-the-street. Apparently, Americans can’t decide how they want to make ends meet. They don’t want to cut spending and they don’t want to increase taxes. Krugman himself knows better. He is not worried about current deficits, but in the long run he thinks a VAT (a version of a sales tax, which he admits would be regressive but is not particularly concerned about this) would be the way to go.

This position is a classic noblesse oblige maneuver. While ostensibly attacking those other elite members – those who have no sense of social duty – Krugman is effectively asserting that policy should not be set by the irrational masses. And, sometime in the not too distant future, regressive taxes would be the solution.
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Filed under: Opinion polling | 10 Comments »

Paul Cockshott: Ideas of Leadership and Democracy

Posted on February 18, 2011 by Yoram Gat

Paul Cockshott is offering the Greek political structure as an alternative to the Roman model:

When the American revolutionaries were trying to establish their state – and that is the stable form of bourgeois state that has survived – they looked at historical models. And there were two models available for them, there was Rome and Athens. They had to choose between these, and it is actually no accident that they chose Rome, that the United States constitution is largely based on the Roman ideas of constitution – it’s a republic, it’s not a democracy. It was constructed as a state by slaveholders who saw what had been the most stable slaveholder state in the past: Rome. And they modeled their state on that.

But there’s another model, and that’s the Athenian model of direct democracy, and the Greeks, over a period of hundreds of years, developed mechanisms to prevent aristocratic domination of the state. Continue reading →

Filed under: Athens, Elections, History, Sortition, Theory | 60 Comments »

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