Equality by lot

Where’s the Democracy?

The annual British Academy lecture was delivered this week by M.H. Hansen, a leading authority on Athenian democracy and the ancient Greek polis. Professor Hansen’s thesis was that Montesquieu’s doctrine of the separation of powers – the model used by the founders of the American constitution – is well past its sell-by date. This is because a) the leaders of modern ‘democracies’ have assumed powers that are normally associated with seventeenth-century absolute monarchs and b) because the prerogative of modern legislatures is regularly usurped by the judiciary.

Positive action or a portrait in miniature?

Trevor Phillips, the head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, claimed on Sunday that it is time for “positive action” to end the predominance of “white, middle-class lawyers” in parliament. Speaking ahead of an online conference, Human Rights in the Post-Election UK, he called on the three main party leaders to ensure that the next generation of MPs more accurately reflects the social makeup of the population.

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Excerpts from an email exchange between Keith Sutherland and me:

YG:

As Peter wrote recently (and I agree), “there’s more theorizing to be done here,” but it is quite clear to me that it is going to be much easier to make a coherent theory of representation of interests by sortition than a coherent theory of representation of interests by elections.

KS:

I think the two concepts are so distinct that they require different mechanisms. Most successful constitutional settlements involve a variety of institutions, so I’m puzzled why you want one element (a randomly-selected chamber) to fulfill all of them, if only to benefit from the checks and balances afforded by a plurality of institutions. But perhaps that’s all too Madisonian for your tastes!

YG:

“Checks and balances” is too often a pseudonym to preserving existing power. When a policy is backed by the majority’s informed and considered opinion, then giving a minority veto power over that policy is oligarchical. Calling that minority “experts” does not change that.

KS:

Agreed, that’s why in my model, voting powers are restricted exclusively to the allotted house. However, although allotted MPs have all the power, the role of knowledge and expertise is given its due place in guiding the debate. If you think that is reactionary and Madisonian, then so is our entire education system.

An arrangement in which “experts”  are “guiding the debate” is incompatible with the claim that in that system “MPs have all the power”.  Whoever is “guiding the debate” has an enormous amount of power. This, for example, is the power of the mass media elites in our present society. In fact, voting on legislation proposals that someone else writes, based on information that someone else provides leaves the voter with very little power. Again, this is essentially the situation that the voters are in in the present system.

The allotted delegates voting on a proposal written by the “experts” would face a situation similar to the one that the members of U.S. Congress are currently facing when voting on the healthcare legislative proposals that are being put before them. Consider a hypothetical member of Congress who, like a majority of the American public, is unhappy with the current healthcare situation and at the same time is unhappy with the proposed legislation. That Congressperson would like to vote against the proposed legislation, but those who “guide the debate” provide an all-or-nothing situation in which if the present proposal fails, the status quo will be maintained indefinitely into the future. The Congressperson eventually votes for the legislation, preferring the resulting system to the status quo, and thus does his part in a political theater in which those “guiding the debate” can claim that their unpopular proposals are legitimate since they get approved by a majority of votes.

Any “mixed constitution”, meaning a sortition system in which the allotted chamber votes on proposals designed by a non-representative body rather than coming up with its own, would perpetuate, in a new form, the existing theater of democracy.

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Google Alerts notified me about the appearance of the Common Lot Productions website. We have already had the founder of Common Lot Productions drop us a note.

From the “press kit” and the “how might sorititon work?” page on the site it is possible to learn a little about the Common Lot sortition proposal. Two elements seem problematic to me:

• The Common Lot sortition proposal sets a qualification for the inclusion in the candidate pool of attending a two year long part time “civics training”, and then passing an exam “in order to demonstrate [understanding of] how the legislative process works.”
• The proposal also suggests setting the salary of the allotted legislators to be equal the median household income.

A qualification of any kind for inclusion in the sortition candidate pool creates a bias in the representation. Setting the bar at attending a two year course, for example, makes it very likely that people of limited resources would be significantly underrepresented in the candidate pool. It is not clear at all that the resulting bias would translate to improved policy results.

A salary equal to the median household income is, it seems to me, completely inadequate to compensate allotted legislators for the inconvenience involved. Like the qualification condition, this may make service in the legislature an occupation that only the relatively wealthy can afford. Furthermore, in a society in which status is connected to income, this sets the status of the legislators uncomfortably low – especially since many of the people they will be dealing with can be expected to be very rich.

In general, the parameters of a sortition-based system have to be carefully considered. It may be that the two features of the proposal discussed above seem to the proposers to be common-sense measures that would increase the chance of acceptance of the proposal. Such tactics, however, are, in my opinion, counter-productive.

At this early stage advocacy for sortition should be about popularizing the principle, rather than about promoting specific detailed proposals. The time for committing to specific details will, hopefully, arrive, once the principle of sortition is established. In the meantime, discussion of those details should occur in an investigative, open-minded manner.

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Martin Wilding Davies invited responses to his proposal for a sortition-based government system (as he outlined it in comments to Keith Sutherland’s post on opendemocracy.net).

The main features of his proposal, as I understand it, are:

1. The system relies on two legislature bodies: the Assembly and the Forum.
2. The Assembly is chosen as a random sample of the population and serves for a period of “up to 3 months”. Service will be mandatory and will carry some material and honorific rewards.
3. The method of selection of Forum members is not fully specified, but it is clearly meant to be, at least to some extent, an elite body. Its term of service is not specified.
4. The Forum will set the public policy agenda by generating legislation proposals. These will then come before the Assembly which will either accept or reject them, but will also be allowed to “amend” the proposals.
5. Decisions in both the Forum and the Assembly will be arrived at “by consensus”.
6. Another group with some political power will be “advocates”. These are judges who will “make the case for or against specific actions or requirements, [present] evidence, [call] expert witnesses and representatives of interest groups”.
7. “Policy will be implemented by a professional executive recruited by headhunters and appointed, scrutinised and where necessary replaced by the National Assembly.”

Here are my thoughts: Continue reading →

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Keith Sutherland posts a sortition-related piece on Open Democracy:

http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/keith-sutherland/mixed-constitution

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