Oligarchical intents

Posted on February 11, 2023 by Yoram Gat

A piece by Eva Talmadge in The Guardian presents its audience with idea of sortition. To what extent such an article covers new ground for the reader would be interesting to try and find out. The article itself links to a 2018 Guardian article proposing a Brexit citizen assembly.

The article quotes some of the usual sortition suspects – Claudia Chwalisz, Peter MacLeod, and Peter Stone, and presents the standard deliberative rhetoric around citizen assemblies about how people are more informed and reasonable when they deliberate and about the potential of citizen assemblies “to help fractured societies not only work on complicated problems, but learn how to live with one another”.

Sandwiched in, however, Chwalisz does contribute a quite subversive idea:

As the ancient Greeks and others recognized, elections are a way of constituting an oligarchy. When the French and American revolutions led to the establishment of the institutions that today we call democratic, the word ‘democracy’ was never used – the intent was for them to be oligarchic, concentrating power in the hands of the few.

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Filed under: Academia, Applications, Press, Sortition | 21 Comments »

Ephraim David on sortition

Posted on January 23, 2023 by Yoram Gat

Prof. Ephraim David is a historian of Classical Greece at the Haifa University in Israel. In a 2021 paper, published in the journal Advances in Historical Studies, David discusses sortition in Ancient Athens in the context of recent interest in sortition as a mechanism which can complement or replace elections in modern political systems.

The abstract of the paper is as follows:

Though considered the most democratic method of allocating citizens to office in Classical Greece, sortition (selection by lot) has never been adopted on a large scale by modern democracies (except for juries) and has fallen into oblivion. Recently, however, some political theorists, motivated by deep disappointment with current electoral practices, have been advocating a return to sortition without being sufficiently aware of the complexities involved in their ancient Athenian model. This study tries to explain the roots and ideology of sortition, the ways in which it operated in Athens and the causes of its functional success there for almost two centuries. Proposals of returning to a similar system should pay due attention to the significant role played by elections alongside the lottery in Classical Athens and the precautions taken there to prevent possible harm. In my view, the optimal formula for reform would be a political compromise combining, in one way or another, elections with sortition among volunteering candidates from various quarters of the civic society, selected in due proportions so as to be statistically representative of the demos. Selection by lottery should apply only to groups of people (e.g., committees and councils)—never to individual magistrates.

As the abstract indicates, David is somewhat conservative, emphasizing various aspects of the Athenian system that, as he presents things, guaranteed that “[d]espite the widespread use of sortition, Athenian democracy was far from being a dogmatic ‘lottocracy'”: election of generals and reliance on other forms of expertise, age qualifications, the voluntaristic way in which the allotment pool was created, the dokimasia and retrospective accountability for political decisions.

Nevertheless, it is clear that, unlike most academics dealing with sortition, including those that are considered as being advocates for sortition, David recognizes that reform of the existing system is an urgent need, due to the severe dysfunction of the electoral system as a means for representing public values and interests:

The adoption of sortition among volunteers (in one way or another) for the legislative, in addition to elections, is liable to galvanize participatory democracy and significantly reduce (or, at least, balance) the extent of the ills involved in an exclusively elective system, particularly the manipulation of party elites, the extensive cheating of voters by deceptive electoral propaganda, the manipulation of populist politicians and the over-influence of wealthy oligarchs and tycoons in politics—the blatantly plutocratic aspect of most modern democracies. The optimal ways of reaching
those aims remain to be further explored not only for macro-politics but also with respect to other forms of administration.

Filed under: Academia, Athens, Elections, History, Press, Sortition | Leave a comment »

Doing Democracy Differently: Teaching Deliberative Democracy in the Secondary Classroom – March 11-12, 2023

Posted on January 20, 2023 by richwbrown

On March 11 & 12, 2023, the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College (New York) and Democracy Without Elections (DWE), a member-run nonprofit organization in the US that promotes the use of randomly selected deliberative bodies, are offering a course to teachers for recertification credit called Doing Democracy Differently: Teaching Deliberative Democracy in the Secondary Classroom.

This college level training course for high school educators to be held in New York City will encourage teachers to include the study of randomly selected bodies and other democratic reform initiatives in their secondary school civics curriculum. The hope is that the course will both raise awareness in high schoolers of new democratic tools and fuel their active participation in future democratic reform.

The DWE Education Group has for the last year been exploring ways to initiate young people into the movement advocating for deliberative democracy, citizens’ assemblies, democratic lotteries, and other randomly selected deliberative bodies. Recently, the committee received a $10,000 grant earmarked for tuition support for teachers enrolling in this training course. They also have been searching for partners and reached out to Stanford University, Bard College, and Colorado State University, who all have strong connections to the democratic reform movement. The goal was to find an academic host for the training course who could offer college credit to interested teachers as well as connections to large numbers of potential participants.
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Filed under: Academia, education, Sortition | Leave a comment »

Khoban: A Feminist Defense of Randomly Selected Political Representatives

Posted on January 13, 2023 by Yoram Gat

In a recent paper in Critical Policy Studies, Swedish researcher Zohreh Khoban argues that feminism and sortition are naturally allied.

Politics of Emancipation: A Feminist Defense of Randomly Selected Political Representatives
Zohreh Khoban

Abstract

The presence of women in elected assemblies has been argued to transform the political agenda so that it better addresses the needs and interests of women. In this article, I reflect on women’s political representation by starting from democratic theories that point to the inadequacy of electoral democracy. I argue that, compared to including women in the political elite, dissolving the division of political labor between professional politicians and ‘ordinary’ citizens has a greater potential to challenge status quo gender relations. I suggest that political assemblies consisting of randomly selected citizens would better serve women’s self-determination and emancipation for three reasons: 1) allotted representatives would be more willing and able than elected representatives to critique social norms and practices, 2) the idea of allotted representatives better supports the idea that knowledge is situated, and 3) it better accommodates the notion that political merit is a gendered, racialized and class-based concept.

Filed under: Academia, Elections, Press, Sortition, Theory | Leave a comment »

Promoting Citizens’ Assemblies

Posted on January 8, 2023 by Owen Shaffer

Democracy Without Elections and Healthy Democracy have teamed up to provide a new seminar titled “Building Political Will for Lottery-Selected Panels in Your Community – A How-To Guide.”

The seminar will be led by Linn Davis on Zoom over two Saturdays: 11 and 25 February. Click here to reserve your spot.

Filed under: Academia, meeting, Sortition | 3 Comments »

A sortition proposal in Sri Lanka

Posted on January 7, 2023 by Yoram Gat

Over the last few years, Sri Lanka has been experiencing a prolonged economic crisis which has come to a head in 2022 leading to a political crisis. The following recent piece by Chandre Dharmawardana, a prominent Sri Lankan retired physicist, published in several Sri Lankan websites, offers sortition as a way to resolve the political crisis.

Using sortition to prevent electing of same crooks to parliament

The terrorism of the LTTE ended in May 2009, and most Sri Lankans looked forward to a dawn of peace, reconciliation and progress. Even Poongkothai Chandrahasan, the granddaughter of SJV Chelvanayagam could state that ‘what touched me the most that day was that these were poor people with no agenda wearing their feelings on their sleeves. Every single person I spoke to said to me, “The war is over, we are so happy”. They were not celebrating the defeat of the Tamils. They were celebrating the fact that now there would be peace in Sri Lanka’ (The Island, 23rd August 2009).

The dilemma faced by SL

Unfortunately, instead of peace, prosperity and reconciliation, a corrupt oligarchy made up of politicians from the two main parties of the period, namely the UNP, the SLFP, the JVP, their associated business tycoons and NGO bosses have evolved into a cabal of the rich who have hogged the power of parliament among themselves. The party names “UNP, SLFP, JVP” etc., have morphed into other forms, while the leaders concerned have changed adherence to the parties or made alliances with the ease of changing cutlery at a sumptuous banquet.

Periods of civil strife are also periods when corrupt cutthroats thrive, with illegal arms and money in the hands of those on both sides of the conflict who made a career out of the war.
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Filed under: Academia, Elections, History, Press, Proposals, Sortition | Leave a comment »

Sortition in 2022

Posted on December 21, 2022 by Yoram Gat

Equality-by-Lot’s traditional yearly review post.

The most significant piece of sortition-related news for 2021 had been, in my view, the finding that over a quarter of public in four Western European countries – the UK, France, Italy and Germany – supports using allotted bodies to systematically complement the work of parliament. This year, the most significant piece of sortition-related news was the findings of a wider-coverage poll, this time conducted in 15 Western European countries. According to this poll, in all those countries there is fairly strong popular support (~4 in a scale of 0 to 10 on average) for having “a group of randomly-selected citizens make decisions instead of politicians”.

But while popular support for sortition is strong, and while (well justified) concern in elite circles about the declining popularity of the elections-based system persists, it seems to me that 2022 has continued a down-trend in interest in sortition in elite circles, a down-trend that indicates a recovery from the heights of establishment hysteria about the “Crisis of Democracy” following Brexit, the election of Donald Trump and the Gilets Jaunes protest in France. Academics have continued publishing papers and opinions on the pros and cons of sortition (unfortunately often rehashing very well hashed material) but applications of sortition have been fading in prominence since the zenith of the French Citizen Convention for the Climate, and discussion of the idea in mass media has receded as well.

That said, there were certainly many notable pieces of news and opinion written about sortition over the last year. Pieces advocating for sortition and discussions of the subject that were mentioned this year on Equality-by-Lot included items from South Africa, the UK: 1, 2, the US: 1, 2 3, 4, 5, 6, Australia, Malaysia, Texas, US, France, Ireland, Utah, US, California, US, Pakistan, Pennsylvania, US, and Massachusetts, US.

Also this year, an allotted council on climate change in Herefordshire, UK generated a discussion about its cost as well as other aspects. A fairly prominent Australia politician,
Vicotr Kline, wrote a strident article advocating replacing elections with sortition, and an independent candidate for governor of Minnesota, US ran on a sortition-based platform. In the city of Petaluma, California, an allotted Citizens’ Assembly was convened to determine how to use a piece of public property, an assembly to discuss food policy was set up in Switzerland, and in the province of Trento, Italy, a bill was discussed for constituting a citizen assembly for reviewing municipal regulations.

Finally, this year saw the passing of citizen assembly pioneer, Ned Crosby.

Filed under: Academia, Applications, Books, Elections, Opinion polling, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 1 Comment »

The experts making sure that the disadvantaged get heard

Posted on December 9, 2022 by Yoram Gat

Annabelle Lever, researcher at Cevipof and professor of political philosophy at Sciences Po, writes in The Conversation about the lengths into which the organizers of allotted bodies have to go in order to overcome “cultural imperialism” and give the disadvantaged a voice.

Creating a citizens’ assembly that truly reflects society as a whole isn’t so simple, however. In particular, only a very small percentage of those invited to participate actually agree to do so.

To create an assembly that is more descriptively representative of the population – or one that looks more like us – several approaches are used. One is to have an initial phase of unweighted selection followed by a second phase that uses weighted lotteries. Another is to use stratified sampling or forms of stratification from the beginning.

Because citizen assemblies are very small compared to the population as a whole – France’s Convention for the Climate was made up of just 150 people – the descriptively representative character of the assembly can occur on only a few dimensions. Organisers must therefore decide what population characteristics the assembly should embody and in what proportion. Randomisation thus does not preclude difficult moral, political and scientific choices about the assembly to be constructed, any more than it precludes voluntariness or self-selection.

The use of weighted lotteries means that individuals will not have a formally equal chance to be selected to it – nor, of course, a substantively equal one. Assemblies created by stratified random selection offer a much wider set of opportunities to serve than is typical of other deliberative bodies. It is thus important to remember that even when a randomly selected assembly “looks like us”, everyone will not have had the same chance to be selected to it, nor to take up the invitation if they want to.

[D]emocratic equality does not require that deliberative bodies be composed of social groups in proportion to their share of the population.
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Filed under: Academia, Press, Sortition | 17 Comments »

Authoritarians do sortition just like we do but very differently

Posted on December 3, 2022 by Yoram Gat

SWI swissinfo.ch interviews Su Yun Woo, who is studying processes for citizen participation in decision making in China. Somewhat confusingly, the interview seems to be asserting two conflicting claims. On the one hand it is pointed out that the “citizen participation” processes in China are essentially the same as those in the West and have the same objectives. At the same time it is explaining that, obviously, things in “democracies” are very different as the authoritarian regimes lack “any overarching democratic conviction”.

SWI: How do these participatory budgeting processes [in China] work?

S.Y.W.: The authorities invite the local population to get involved in decision-making on a part of the budget. A group of citizens will come together to form a panel to discuss how to spend money on a project that serves the community – for instance, a library or a communal garden. Wenling’s participatory budget is well known, whereas the example of Chengdu has been less well studied.

In Wenling, citizens are selected through a lottery system. In Chengdu, the participants are volunteers. This explains why mainly older people took part there, since they have more time. In Wenling, random selection works as the participants get paid – just as they do in Switzerland for projects of this kind. They receive the equivalent of CHF7 ($7) and a free lunch for taking part. In Wenling, participatory processes are now an integral part of local budget policy-making.

SWI: So the participants do not have to be Communist Party members?

S.Y.W.: No, they are ordinary citizens. There is no denying, however, that there can be official interference in participatory projects. I was told about some party officials who were supposed to go door to door and ask people their opinions, but instead they just filled out the forms themselves.

SWI: How would you describe the discussion culture during participatory budget debates?

S.Y.W.: Some participants are very vocal in expressing their opinions, while others stay quiet and prefer to take a back seat.

SWI: This sounds rather like participatory budgeting elsewhere.
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Filed under: Academia, Applications, Press, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Altaf: Getting out of the mess

Posted on November 25, 2022 by Yoram Gat

Dr. Anjum Altaf is an economist and Dean of Social Sciences at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. The following are excerpts from an article Altaf recently published in the Pakistani newspaper Dawn.

THE big question Pakistanis must ask is how to get out of this disarray. By now, no one can deny that the country is in a huge mess, which is getting worse by the day. And it is getting worse because of the quality of its rulers. They are interested in nothing beyond their own interests; their only concern, while the country drowns and burns, is who will get to appoint the most important man who, they will then complain, does not allow them to do what needs to be done.

At this stage of terminal decline, there is no possibility of a normal recovery because of the state of the rot and the capability deficit to address it. Only radical solutions offer hope. Ideally, one would hope that the quarrelling rulers would realise the gravity of the catastrophe that threatens everyone and arrive at a consensual response, but that is extremely unlikely. In its absence, only popular demand can force their hand and save the country.

It is no longer possible to revert back to monarchy (though note how intelligently that has been employed in Malaysia) and dictatorship has time and again made things much worse. There is no alternative to popular rule, but we can certainly have a system where governance is truly by the people. There is a model for such an alternative called ‘sortition’, in which legislators are selected by lottery from the larger pool of adult citizens.

In ancient Athens, sortition was the method for appointing political officials and was deemed the principal characteristic of democracy by ensuring that all eligible citizens had an equal chance of holding public office. Unhealthy factionalism, the buying and selling of electables, and populist posturing is eliminated when assemblies are chosen by lottery. These representatives can then engage the experts they need for formulating policies.

This proposal is bound to be met with incredulity and scepticism. I can only point out that even today, in common-law systems, sortition is used to select prospective jurors who have a say over life-and-death decisions. Today, it is a life and death instance for Pakistan, and citizens need to take their governance in their own hands. There is no way they can do a worse job than the motley bunch of uncaring electables and strongmen to whom they have handed over their destiny.

Any extension of the status quo will reduce Pakistan to rubble. By the time the music stops, the lights will be out and there will be nothing to eat next year.

Filed under: Academia, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 4 Comments »

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