The Paradox of Democratic Selection: Is Sortition Better than Voting?

Posted on January 6, 2016 by keithsutherland

A draft book chapter by Anthoula Malkopoulou:

Sortition, or the selection of political officers by lot, has its antecedent in the direct democratic tradition of ancient Athens. Its transfer into a modern context of representative democracy poses rightful scepticism not only about the practical difficulties, but more so about the theoretical inconsistencies that arise. Modern systems of political representation are based on the aristocratic idea of ‘government by the best’, who are to be selected through a competitive call for candidates (Manin 1997). Sortition, on the other hand, replaces this aristocratic criterion of competition and evaluative election with the democratic mechanics of direct and equal distribution of political office by chance. Hence, the very expression ‘democratic (s)election’ includes a paradoxical contradiction in terms, between the democratic concept of equal access to public office and the aristocratic idea of government by the (s)elected best.

My aim in this chapter is to shed some light into this contradiction by critically discussing the benefits and pitfalls of using sortition today, comparing it throughout the chapter with voting and the general effects of electoral representation. More specifically, my arguments are divided in four sections. I begin by addressing the reasons that drive klerotarians away from electoral representation (1). Next, I consider alternative modes of political ‘outsourcing’, such as the inclusion of civil society actors or the use of quotas (2). I continue by discussing the democratic legitimacy of sortition by dividing the subject in two questions: (a) political equality and (b) political participation (3). Last, I focus on the type of political representation that the lot produces, viewed from the perspectives of descriptiveness, authorization and accountability (4). In conclusion, I suggest that lotteries may offer valuable improvement to current practices of democratic selection, but only if special measures are taken to compensate for the limitations they entail.

Full text (uncorrected draft: not for citation).

Filed under: Academia, Athens, Ballot measures, Books, Elections, Participation, Sortition, Theory | 26 Comments »

Sortition Introduction for 21st Century Democracy Conference in Alexandria, Egypt

Posted on January 1, 2016 by tbouricius

The Way Forward – by Terry Bouricius

This is the original full draft of an introductory presentation intended to prepare participants of the 21st Century Democracy conference hosted by the Library of Alexandria for the subsequent day’s sessions largely focused on sortition. Due to earlier panels running overtime, this full speech was never presented, and only a few key points were made in an introduction the next day. Note that some underlining and ALL CAPS appear as emphasis aids for reading the speech aloud.

Discussions about the problems of democracy tend to focus on the problems of the elections.

A fundamental point that needs to be understood is that elections are not the same thing as democracy, and are at best one tool for approaching the democratic ideal. Clearly, a system of free and fair elections is a vast improvement over a dictatorship or one-party state. But the ideal of democracy goes far deeper.

The democratic ideal can be summed up as government of, by and for the people. But modern democracies all have government BY a political class that is distinctly different than the people (mostly male, older, wealthier, better educated, etc.)… and whether that government is truly FOR the people is always a matter of debate.

John Adams, one of the founders of the United States wrote in 1776 that a legislature “should be in miniature an exact portrait of the people at large. It should think, feel, reason and act like them.”

The ideal of democracy is that the government should make the same decisions that the people as a whole would make IF they could all have the time, motivation, information, attention, expert advice, access to conflicting points of view, fact-checking of faulty assumptions, and good facilitation. Obviously it is impossible to have all of the people do this on even one issue, let alone the vast number of public policy decisions made every year. But we know exactly how to achieve this ideal by combining the principles of scientific sampling to select a statistically accurate representative mini-public, with good decision-making procedures. The random selection of public officials like this is known as “sortition.”

This would be government BY the ordinary people, rather than by a political class with only the CONSENT of the people.
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Filed under: Academia, Sortition | Tagged: | 14 Comments »

Sortition and 21st Century Democracy

Posted on December 30, 2015 by davidschecter

Sortition and 21st Century Democracy

David Schecter’s presentation at the “Democracy for the 21st Century” conference, Library of Alexandria, Egypt, December 11, 2015

This conference began with a quote from John Kennedy – “the great enemy of truth is not the lie, but the myth.” I believe that the great enemy of truth about democracy is the myth that there is only one democratic way to choose representatives — through elections.

As Dr. Ismail Serageldin suggested, we have been confusing one means of choosing — elections — with democracy itself. And as Dr. George Ishak said, “In the 21st century, we should find new ways to select representatives.” Sortition is one of those ways. Actually, it is not a new way, it’s a very old way. It was used more than elections in ancient Athens, and people wrote about it here in Alexandria 2,000 years ago.

My colleagues, Terrill Bouricius and Oliver Dowlen, have described specific proposals for incorporating sortition into political system design. I would to talk about a whole set of proposals, and a menu of options.

I have been researching proposals like these, and I have also co-authored one. I have found 18 such proposals so far, and I have had the pleasure of corresponding with the authors. They come from Australia, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, South Africa, the U.K., and the U.S. Together, they represent many new possibilities for democracy.

My talk will have three parts. First, I am going to review the rationale for the use of sortition and “mini-publics” – that is, representative samples of the public. I am also going to respond to some common objections to this idea. Second, I am going to describe a menu of options for incorporating mini-publics into political systems. Third, I am going to pose some important questions that have not yet been addressed within these proposals.
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Filed under: Academia, Sortition | Tagged: | 7 Comments »

2015 review – sortition-related events

Posted on December 24, 2015 by Yoram Gat

This is a review of notable sortition-related events of the year 2015.

Brett Hennig wrote to mention citizens’ assembly pilots and the Irish constitutional assembly which led to the marriage equality vote.

In my mind the two most notable sortition-related events of 2015 were:

  • In Mexico, the Morena party allotted of some of its congressional candidates among the party rank-and-file. This was covered on Equality-by-Lot here (English version), here and here.
  • Leading Belgian politicians from various parties proposed changing the selection method of the Belgian upper house to sortition. This is the most high-profile proposal of its kind of the modern age.

Continuing the trend of previous years, those developments happened in the non-English speaking world. However, they are a reflection of a wide-spread disillusionment with elections – a sentiment that is as common in the English-speaking world as it is outside of it.

In the US this sentiment found an electoral outlet in the surprise strength of the campaigns of two presidential candidates which are perceived as being outside of the electoral establishment – Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. This fact was observed in a relatively well-noticed academic paper in Science journal by Fisman and Markovits about the way class affects policy choices. The authors drew from their work some conclusions that come close to an indictment of the electoral method.

Filed under: Academia, Elections, Experiments, House of Lords, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 15 Comments »

Prinz and Garry: Democracy is due for an overhaul – could lawmaking-by-jury be the answer?

Posted on December 18, 2015 by Yoram Gat

In an article in The Conversation, Janosch Prinz and John Garry, both from Queen’s University Belfast, advocate for legislation by ad-hoc allotted bodies.

They start off by recounting a standard list of instances of electoral disfunction:

Many will agree that, in practice, democracy leaves a lot to be desired. The system often falls short of its ideals: whether it’s the US congress causing a total government shutdown; Australian prime ministers being ousted by internal party politics; or the UK’s disproportionate electoral system allocating only one seat to a party which received close to 4m votes.

This misses the point. None of these examples is an indication of a problem inherent in elections. The problem with electoralist systems is not that they don’t function but that they function in favor of electoral elites and their allies rather than for the average person.
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Filed under: Academia, Ballot measures, Elections, Juries, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 2 Comments »

Dahl: After the Revolution

Posted on December 15, 2015 by keithsutherland

I’ve been re-reading Robert Dahl’s 1990 book and a section struck me as particularly relevant to some of the debate on this forum:

Perhaps the greatest error in thinking about democratic authority is to believe that ideas about democracy and authority are simple and must lead to simple prescriptions. . . . if you think there are simple prescriptions, then we cannot hope to understand one another. (p.73)

Dahl’s approach, as always, offers a rich combination of historically-informed theoretical analysis, comparative political science and pragmatic policy proposals. From the political theory perspective, he argues that democracy involves a trade-off between personal choice, competence, economy, and the principle of affected interests. Although ‘primary’ (assembly) democracy is generally viewed as the gold standard, considerations of scale mean that other ostensibly non-democratic mechanisms will often lead to a form of democracy that better manages the trade-off than an attempt to approximate the ideal. Polyarchy may well be a poor approximation of ideal democracy but it’s descriptively accurate and a lot better than actual historical alternatives (various forms of oligarchy and dictatorship).

The error of thinking about democracy as a a single form has led to catastrophe in the past; I fear it will lead to disaster in the future.

Dahl’s historical examples include the excesses of the Athenian demokratia, Jacobinism and the attempts to introduce ‘real’ democracy in the former Soviet Union — where the supposed rule of the people’s soviets in effect meant the dictatorship of the leaders of the vanguard party. From the perspective of the future, Dahl spends longer considering sortition (pp. 122-5) than the mere half page in Democracy and Its Critics, but his treatment is cautious — participation by lot should be restricted to selecting advisory councils for elected officials. This is because sovereignty by sortition would contravene principles of personal choice, competence and economy. In coming to this conclusion he ignores the Greek distinction between magistrates and juries and also fails to capitalise on the dual role of polyarchic officials (policy advocacy and judgment), thereby ignoring the potential of sortition in the latter function without undermining his three principles.

P.S. Andre [or any other Rousseau scholar]: Dahl claims (p.139, footnote 10) that Rousseau ‘strongly objects to the selection of representatives by lot’. Is this true? One might well deduce that this was the case, in that he insisted that all citizens should participate in the sovereign assembly, but did he anywhere actually consider sortition for the legislature? Dahl argues that Rousseau’s throwaway suggestion for spatial rotation in Social Contract Ch.XIII (moving the capital alternately from one village to another) was incompatible with his hostility to sortition in the legislative assembly, but to my mind the possibility of spatial rotation would mean that a statistically-representative assembly would not be ruled out as a matter of principle. After all the Greeks did not see any incompatibility between law-making by assembly vote (5th century) and law-making by the vote of an allotted subset (4th century) — the latter was no less democratic than the former.

Reference
Robert A. Dahl, After the Revolution? Authority In a Good Society. Revised edition (1990), Yale University Press.

Filed under: Academia, Juries, Sortition, Theory | 6 Comments »

The Dunning–Kruger effect and its implications for voting

Posted on November 28, 2015 by Yoram Gat

The Dunning–Kruger effect

is a cognitive bias wherein relatively unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than is accurate.

The effect is named after David Dunning and Justin Kruger of the department of psychology at Cornell University who published a paper in 1999 which described a series of experiments which they conducted which demonstrated the effect.

In an interview, Dunning described his understanding of the effect as follows:

Dunning: [I]f you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent.

[Interviewer:] Why not?

Dunning: If you knew it, you’d say, “Wait a minute. The decision I just made does not make much sense. I had better go and get some independent advice.” But when you’re incompetent, the skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is. In logical reasoning, in parenting, in management, problem solving, the skills you use to produce the right answer are exactly the same skills you use to evaluate the answer. And so we went on to see if this could possibly be true in many other areas. And to our astonishment, it was very, very true.

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Filed under: Academia, Elections, Experiments | 38 Comments »

Koop: Allotted assemblies allow the elected to renege on campaign promises

Posted on November 14, 2015 by Yoram Gat

Kevin Mooney wrote to point out an article in the Ottawa Citizen. In the article Royce Koop, an associate professor in the Department of Political Studies at the University of Manitoba, argues against repeating the electoral reform process carried out in British Columbia and Ontario provinces.

Koop makes two arguments. The first is the somewhat tautological point that “tak[ing power] from elected representatives and giv[ing it] to the people […] threatens representative democracy by taking decision-making power from MPs and handing it to citizens, [while] representative democracy is best served by allowing MPs to represent the interests of their constituents through their votes, rather than by seizing MPs’ power and handing it to citizens”.

The more interesting argument (which to a large extent is in fact contradictory to the first one) is a much more practical one:

[T]he use of citizens assemblies and referendums would have the effect of allowing politicians to escape from being accountable to the public for their actions.
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Filed under: Academia, Elections, Press, Sortition | 8 Comments »

Talking about Sortition in Istanbul

Posted on November 12, 2015 by peterstone

2 weeks ago, I gave a talk in Istanbul on sortition. The talk was part of a small conference entitled “A Pilot Meeting for the Democracies of the Future,” held in conjunction with the Istanbul Biennial. the talks from the conference are now available on Youtube. My talk can be found here:

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

Participatory & Deliberative Democracy in Ireland

Posted on October 25, 2015 by peterstone

Last week, I went to the Annual Meeting of the Political Studies Association of Ireland (PSAI), in Cork. While I was there, I attended the business meeting for the PSAI’s Participatory and Deliberative Democracy Specialist Group. The group has created a new website, which offers forums for discussions, a news page, and list of relevant publications. Everyone interested in participatory and deliberative democracy (which I would think most sortition advocates would be), especially in an Irish context, should consider checking it out. (Getting active on the page does require joining the PSAI, I believe.)

The specialist group page is at http://psai-pdd.org/.

Filed under: Academia, Sortition | 3 Comments »

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