In recent years, a number of theorists have turned to the Athenian practice of sortition to inspire proposals for democratic reform. Some simply propose that politicians can be appointed by random selection, thereby producing a statistically representative sample of the population (Callenbach and Phillips, 2008). Others, however, seek some way of combining lotteries with the more familiar modern practice of voting. I shall confine my comments to two recent proposals. López-Guerra (2011) suggests abolishing universal suffrage, instead having only a randomly-selected sub-set of the populace vote in elections. Continue reading →
Ben Saunders has a paper and a review recently published:
Democracy, Political Equality, and Majority Rule, published in Ethics Vol. 121, No. 1 (October 2010), pp. 148-177. Abstract: Democracy is commonly associated with political equality and/or majority rule. This essay shows that these three ideas are conceptually separate, so the transition from any one to another stands in need of further substantive argument, which is not always adequately given. It does this by offering an alternative decision-making mechanism, called lottery voting, in which all individuals cast votes for their preferred options but, instead of these being counted, one is randomly selected and that vote determines the outcome. This procedure is democratic and egalitarian, since all have an equal chance to influence outcomes, but obviously not majoritarian.
Peter Stone called attention to the 2010 book, Sortition: Theory and Practice, edited by Oliver Dowlen and Gil Delannoi. (Conveniently, Amazon UK, at the link above, allows to peruse some of the book’s contents online.)
With my personal interest in statistics, I found Antoine Vergne’s sortition-related literature survey – in which he offers some quantitative data – particularly interesting. Vergne defined a corpus of 199 texts starting with 2 published in 1956 (one of which presumably is C. L. R. James’s ‘Every Cook Can Govern’) and ending with 9 texts published in 2008. The texts are about evenly split between ‘descriptive’, ‘exploratory’, and ‘advocative’ texts. Vergne claims that the historical trend “makes it clear that there has been a growing interest in sortition”.
To me, the most prominent sortition-related event of the year had been Joe Klein’s blog post suggesting to replace Obama’s budget commission with a Fishkin-style Deliberative Poll. This has been, I think, the most widely read mention this year of the idea of policy setting by a body selected by random sampling. It has generated a small amount of attention.
It is a sad state of affairs that a poorly argued blog post by a person of such low intellectual and moral standing would easily attract more attention than all the high quality material about sortition that is available. It is a reflection of the elitist nature of mass media today, and highlights the need for fundamental reform of this institution.
Some statistics about the first year of Equality-by-Lot:
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
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 6 authors during 2010, with two of those authors making only one contribution. (There were, of course, many other authors quoted and linked to.)
There are currently 14 email subscribers to this blog.
Searching for “distribution by lot” (with quotes) using Google returns Equality-by-Lot as the second result (out of “about 24,400 results”). Searching for “sortition” returns Equality-by-Lot as the 39th result (out of “about 30,000 results”). Searching for “kleroterion” returns Equality-by-Lot as the 18th result (out of “about 2,030 results”).
As usual, the presentation is made in such a way as to imply that sortition was used solely in the courts, eliding its more crucial, and less familiar, roles in government.
Claudio López-Guerra, an assistant professor at the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics (CIDE) in Mexico City, has a new paper, “The enfranchisement lottery“, part of an upcoming book on the right to vote.
Abstract:
This article compares the ‘enfranchisement lottery’, a novel method for allocating the right to vote, with universal suffrage. The comparison is conducted exclusively on the basis of the expected consequences of the two systems. Each scheme seems to have a relative advantage. On the one hand, the enfranchisement lottery would create a better informed electorate and thus improve the quality of electoral outcomes. On the other hand, universal suffrage is more likely to ensure that elections are seen to be fair, which is important for political stability. This article concludes that, on balance, universal suffrage is prima facie superior to the enfranchisement lottery. Yet the analysis shows that the instrumental case for the ‘one person, one vote’ principle is less conclusive than democratic theorists usually suppose.
As 2010, the first year of Equality-by-Lot, comes to an end, I thought it would be appropriate to have some sort of review. Any ideas about how to conduct this review are welcome, but here are my thoughts.
One element of the review can be a statistical summary of some sort: a count of posts, comments, contributors, etc. The WordPress system provides some data, and other data I can collect manually. Another part of the review could be a list of 2010 posts and comments on this blog that are worth mentioning again. In order to form this list, I invite anyone who posted an entry or a comment on this blog to select their one favorite post (that is, the post or comment that they wrote and that they hold most dear), and to either send me an email with a link or link to it in the comments here. You can also add a short paragraph explaining why the post or comment are of particular interest. I will collect all the entries and compile a list that will appear the review.
Finally, please also write in the comments or through email about any 2010 event, news item, website, or any other item related to sortition or distribution-by-lot that occurred or appeared over the last year. A list of those could be the third part of the review post (or posts).
The comments section of the review post could be used as a discussion forum about the past and future of the blog in particular and of the sortition and distribution-by-lot ideas in general.
Randomization is a standard solution in problems of game theory. In this context, randomization is used to baffle an adversary, who would be able to counter any deterministic strategy (assuming that that strategy was known to her) more effectively than she would be able to counter a randomized strategy. Thus, randomization is a maximin strategy: it guarantees the randomizer the best possible worst-case outcome. Sortition – a randomized strategy for selecting political delegates – can be advocated on similar grounds.
In a standard conception of the problem of selecting delegates, the people can assess the quality of any possible delegate set. They do so and then choose the delegation that maximizes that quality. Thus, in this conception, delegation is a maximization problem.
An alternative conception is one where the quality of potential delegations is difficult to assess. In such a situation, selecting a delegation requires some way to handle the uncertainty. Continue reading →
Face it, virtually no one can get elected without prostituting themselves out to big business or the rich. The Citizens United case made it impossible to ever elect an honest, competent person who will represent the people. What we need is a lottery system that selects people at random, say from their social security numbers.
Matt Kosko, a student at the University of Pittsburgh, writes a letter to the students’ newspaper, The Pitt News:
To the Editor,
Election season is upon us, and the gatekeepers of respectable opinion at The Pitt News are once again insisting on the “crucial” importance of the SGB election (of course, every election is claimed to be “crucial” by those who fetishize representative government). But if I may, I’d like to dispute the idea that elections have anything to do with students “exercis[ing] their democratic power,” as the editors insist.
All the way back to Aristotle, it used to be understood that elections are a mark of aristocracy, where a few of the “best” people are selected to rule over the undifferentiated masses; free elections in representative systems produce governments that are in fact highly unrepresentative of the population at large in terms of race or class. In contrast, selection by lot is a principle of democracy as in the ancient Greek democracies, where officials were chosen randomly from the population. If we want to make our student government democratic, we would do well to abolish the elected SGB and replace it with a body chosen by lot among the student population.
This body would have no legislative power, just the power to enforce decisions ratified by a majority of students.
Adam Cronkright
Ali
Ahmed R. Teleb
avanderven
avergne
Alex Kovner
azakaras
Brett Hennig
campbellwallace
Simon Threlkeld
Nick Coccoma
codyhipskind
Common Lot Sortitionist
Conall Boyle
constitutionalism
davidschecter
Ethan McCutchen
graytmatter
gtridimas
Henry Tuttle
H.J. Hofkirchner
HpR
Carl Lundgren
James Kierstead
John Burnheim
jgarry20151
Jochen Krattenmacher
johnedwardtaylor
johnhuang865
Jonathan Crock
keithsutherland
Jacob Richter
kkoreilly
lukewhito
SimonPek
Nathan El
Nicholas Gruen
Owen Shaffer
Patrick Chalmers
Paul Gölz
peterstone
Pierre-Etienne Vandamme
pronfeld
Emil
rcaze
richwbrown
Roger Knights
roslynfuller
Pierre-Etienne Vandamme
shaharavin
tbouricius
Ted Wachtel
Joshua Laferriere
theodorestathis
towardsautonomyblog
Wayne Liebman
Yoram Gat
Oliver Milne
