Another deliberative polling experiment

Posted on July 6, 2010 by Yoram Gat

Roger Hickey writes in the Huffington Post about a recent deliberative polling experiment:

In Deficit “Town Meetings,” People Reject America Speaks’ Stacked Deck

On Saturday, the group known as America Speaks (funded by Wall Street mogul Peter G. Peterson and two other foundations) brought together several thousand people in meetings in 18 cities. They gave participants misleading background information about the federal deficit and economic options to achieve fiscal “balance” and future prosperity.

Peterson cannot be pleased with the participants’ mainly progressive policy choices, which will be presented on June 30 to the Deficit Commission that Peterson encouraged President Obama to create.

According to America Speaks’ own press release, when a scientifically selected group of participants picked up their electronic voting devices, they overwhelmingly supported proposals to

* Raise tax rates on corporate income and those earning more than $1 million.
* Reduce military spending by 10 to 15 percent,
* Create a carbon tax and a securities-transaction tax.

This pretty progressive set of solutions emerged from the process many feared would be skewed to the solutions of conservative deficit hawks.

America Speaks was certainly not pushing the discussion in a progressive direction. The background materials — and policy options — provided to participants were anything but fair and balanced, as analysis by economist Dean Baker demonstrated.

[…]

On the face of it, this would seem like a case of democracy in action: the people were given a chance to study an issue and they spoke their minds. They did so despite attempts by the organizers to manipulate them by disseminating misleading information and by attempting to limit the set of policy options being discussed.

But in a complex system, the elites have many opportunities to exert power. Peter Hart of the media watchdog group FAIR comments:

Given the media’s general enthusiasm for Peterson’s propaganda on austerity and Social Security, it’s striking how little coverage these town halls have received. But it’s hard not to conclude that the public rejection of the media’s conventional wisdom is the explanation.

Using deliberative polling on a haphazard basis, rather than as a systematic way to form binding public policy, allows the elites to utilize the polls as a way to legitimize their choice of policy, by highlighting a finely selected subset of the poll results, and ignoring the rest.

Filed under: Experiments, Opinion polling, Sortition | 3 Comments »

Delibartive polling experiment

Posted on July 6, 2010 by Yoram Gat

Keith Sutherland’s article Chinese Democracy: ‘scientific, democratic and legal’ enthusiastically introduces James Fishkin et al.’s paper Deliberative Democracy in an Unlikely Place: Deliberative Polling in China. My own, less enthusiastic, opinion is in the comments to Keith’s article.

Filed under: Experiments, Sortition | 4 Comments »

More sortition advocacy by Marxists

Posted on July 3, 2010 by Yoram Gat

Paul Cockshott writes:

In a modern oligarchy like France, Britain or the USA, what Aristotle called the magistracy is elected. In these elections those with education and money have a huge advantage. The election process is expensive – there are the costs of advertising and campaigning. Historically, in Europe at least, workers’ parties have been able to partly get round this by collecting dues from hundreds of thousands or millions of members. But when standing candidates they usually face the hostility of the privately owned mass media, which is hard to offset.

They are also under pressure to present candidates who are far from being “of indigent circumstances and mechanical employments”. Their first generation of leaders may be of that sort: Ramsay MacDonald or Lula. But later they attempt to present candidates who are educated and polished: Obamas and Blairs. In consequence the elected representatives of popular parties tend to be from higher classes than their supporters. They tend, in consequence, to be markedly cautious in implementing the full rigour of a socialist programme when in office.

Democratic selection by lot suffers none of these disadvantages. It guarantees that the assembly will be dominated by the working classes. It guarantees that the assembly will be balanced in terms of sex, age, ethnic origin, etc. As such it would constitute the most favourable possible grounds for achieving a majority for socialism.

Filed under: Athens, Elections, Sortition | 1 Comment »

How democratic was Athens?

Posted on July 1, 2010 by Yoram Gat

Back and forth on this subject on a Marxist blog.

Filed under: Athens, Sortition | 4 Comments »

Lotteries for Education, a book by Conall Boyle

Posted on June 19, 2010 by Yoram Gat

Imprint Academic’s Keith Sutherland announces that Conall Boyle’s new book: Lotteries for Education would be out soon. Available also from Amazon.

Filed under: Distribution by lot | 1 Comment »

The Lottery, a film by Madeleine Sackler

Posted on June 19, 2010 by Yoram Gat

From the film’s website:

In a country where 58% of African American 4th graders are functionally illiterate, The Lottery uncovers the failures of the traditional public school system and reveals that hundreds of thousands of parents attempt to flee the system every year. The Lottery follows four of these families from Harlem and the Bronx who have entered their children in a charter school lottery. Out of thousands of hopefuls, only a small minority will win the chance of a better future.

Directed by Madeleine Sackler and shot by award-winning cinematographer Wolfgang Held, The Lottery uncovers a ferocious debate surrounding the education reform movement. Interviews with politicians and educators explain not only the crisis in public education, but also why it is fixable. A call to action to avert a catastrophe in the education of American children, The Lottery makes the case that any child can succeed.

Filed under: Distribution by lot | 4 Comments »

An early modern sortition proposal

Posted on May 21, 2010 by Yoram Gat

I would rather be governed by the first two thousand people in the Boston telephone directory than by the two thousand people on the faculty of Harvard University.

— William F. Buckley, Jr., 1965

Filed under: Sortition | 6 Comments »

Sortition in The Economist

Posted on May 14, 2010 by Yoram Gat

Jorge Cancio emails:

fyi: Ancient Athens online – are we getting mainstream?

Filed under: Athens, Experiments, Sortition | 3 Comments »

Stratified sortition

Posted on May 13, 2010 by Yoram Gat

One of Dahl’s objections to an allotted parliament is that “as anyone familiar with the laws of probability knows”,

the chances are by no means negligible that a sample of five hundred might deviate by a considerable margin from the mean of the whole population, occasionally we might find ourselves with a highly unrepresentative legislature subject to no authority except the next lottery.

He adds: “I cannot think of a better way to discredit the idea and democracy itself.”

Joel Parker, following Peter Stone, points out that, in reality, the laws of probability show quite the opposite. In fact, when using simple random sampling, the chance that a sample of 500 people will have a majority of members from a group that makes up 45% of the population is merely 1%. If the group makes 40% of the population, that chance drops to less than 3 in a million. That group can be defined geographically, ethnically, ideologically, or by any other characteristic – it is still very unlikely to command a majority in an allotted parliament unless it has a majority in the population, or is very close to having such a majority.

Still, one could ask for more, and find one’s request fulfilled. By using a stratified sample – i.e., a sample which allocates a fixed number of seats to pre-identified groups – one can assure exact representation of those groups (that is, having their proportion in the sample be identical, up to rounding, to their proportion in the population). This can be done without giving up the requirement of equiprobability (i.e., the requirement that each person has the same chance of being picked). For example, if representation of geographical areas is considered important, the country can be divided into geographical units, each containing the same number of people, and have one person allotted from each unit. In a similar way, exact representation by any characteristic – whether objective or self-identified – can be obtained.

It is interesting to note that, unlike a majoritarian system, stratification in a sortition system is not prone to gerrymandering. No group can expect to increase its representation by changing the stratification units. The only effect of such a system is to reduce the variation along a certain characteristic of the sample – the expected proportion in the sample is always the same.

Filed under: Sortition | 7 Comments »

A government composed of fledgling lawmakers

Posted on May 3, 2010 by Yoram Gat

Gordon S. Wood, a professor emeritus of history at Brown, writes at the New York Times to warn the displeased U.S. voters about the dangers of booting out the incumbents.

The article is quite interesting for the elitist conception of “democracy” it presents. The couching of this conception in democratic terms produces unintended irony at several points in the article, such as:

[T]he men who led the revolution against the British crown and created our political institutions were very used to governing themselves.

The author sums his message in the last sentence of the article:

[P]recisely because we are such a rambunctious and democratic people, as the framers of 1787 appreciated, we have learned that a government made up of rotating amateurs cannot maintain the steadiness and continuity that our expansive Republic requires.

Filed under: Elections, History, Opinion polling | 2 Comments »

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