Alexander Guerrero’s new book: Lottocracy

Posted on October 18, 2024 by Yoram Gat

Alex Guerrero, Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University and a longtime sortition advocate, has written to announce that his book Lottocracy: Democracy Without Elections (Oxford Press) is now out. It is available now in the UK from the publisher, and available for pre-order everywhere on Amazon.

The book, which has been more than a decade in the making, also has a website, https://www.lottocracy.org/, where highlights, excerpts and other information can be found.

I asked Alex what was new or different about his book compared to previous books advocating sortition. He called out 5 points:

I provide a more detailed and empirically informed set of concerns about electoral representative democracy and a more detailed and multidimensional diagnosis for why electoral democracy isn’t performing well. In doing this, I make the case that there are no straightforward “fixes” for what ails electoral democracy. Chapters 2-6 raise these empirically informed concerns; Chapter 7 considers possible solutions and suggests they will be inadequate.

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Filed under: Academia, Books, Proposals, Sortition | 32 Comments »

A Constitutional Imperative to Implement a Citizen’s Assembly Model within US Governance

Posted on October 10, 2024 by Yoram Gat

A post by Dylan Vargas. Dylan Vargas is a Master’s Student at American University studying International Affairs Policy and Analysis. In his studies he focuses on the interplay between good governance and human rights. He has worked extensively in the Democracy space, including work in four electoral campaigns and two years with the League of Women Voters of the United States advocating for Democracy Reform. This post was written as part of a Human Rights course Vargas is taking at AU.

A Constitutional Imperative to Implement a Citizen’s Assembly Model within US Governance

Outline: The core argument of the post is that the United States should implement a Citizen’s Assembly Model to achieve a more representative and responsive form of governance, as promised by the U.S. Constitution. Current democratic mechanisms are failing to adequately reflect the diverse population they serve, leading to widespread mistrust in government institutions. The implementation of a Citizen’s Assembly — a body made up of randomly selected citizens reflecting the demographic makeup of the country — would ensure that the voices and perspectives of ordinary Americans are better represented in policy-making. This argument addresses Equality by Lot’s debates surrounding political representation, democratic legitimacy, and the crisis of public trust in government. It focuses on the US Constitution, founding documents, US polling/stats, and conversations around democratic and repressive government political theory.

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Filed under: Academia, Sortition | 1 Comment »

INSA Online Summit – October 6th

Posted on October 4, 2024 by richwbrown

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INSA Online Summit 2024

JOIN US for a 1-hour informal and interactive roundtable on the status of sortition events and activities in countries around the world.

Sunday, 6 October 2024

– Monday, 7 October in Asia & Australia –

19:00 GMT, 20:00 Europe, 21:00 Israel, 14:00 EST (2:00 PM), 6:00 AEDT

Google Meet Joining Video Link: https://meet.google.com/eej-szev-hje

INSA is a volunteer organisation aimed at connecting pro-sortition academics, advocates, and activists around the world, to share resources and tactics and advance the theoretical understanding of sortition. www.INSA.site

You are also invited to join our Discord server at https://discord.gg/6sgnrphp6

Filed under: Academia, meeting, Sortition | Leave a comment »

Patrick Deneen on democracy, populism and sortition

Posted on October 2, 2024 by Yoram Gat

Patrick Deneen is a professor of political science at Notre Dame university. He is a fairly prominent public intellectual in US politics, popular especially among the Republican elite. His 2018 book, Why Liberalism Failed, drew quite a bit of attention.

A piece by Deneen has recently been published by the Notre Dame magazine. It is a surprisingly, even impressively, good. The heavy punches just keep coming. Here are some excerpts.

Democracy and Its Discontents

The claim that our democracy is imperiled should rightly strike fear in the souls of citizens, but it ought also to give pause to any student of politics. During most of the four decades I have studied and written about democracy, political scientists, and especially political theorists such as myself, would begin not with a claim about the relative health of democracy, but rather with a seemingly simple question: What is democracy?

Yet according to a dominant narrative among today’s academics, public intellectuals, media personalities and even many citizens, it is largely assumed that we know what democracy is. Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Athens, Books, education, Elections, History, Press, schools, Sortition | 17 Comments »

Sortition in New Zealand

Posted on September 28, 2024 by Yoram Gat

A 2022 talk by Prof. Matheson Russell from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, makes the standard case for sortition. Such presentations emphasize amiablity and “empirical findings” at the expense of political power and scientific rigor.

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This Saturday INSA Presents – Sortition and Socialism

Posted on August 28, 2024 by richwbrown

Sortition and Socialism

Online Conference

Saturday, 31 August

– Sunday, 1 September in Asia & Australia –

Free Admission

Google Meet joining info video call link: https://meet.google.com/ntz-xguv-bsb

For more information on times, presenters, topics see the

Conference Website

INSA is a volunteer organisation aimed at connecting pro-sortition academics, advocates, and activists around the world, to share resources and tactics and advance the theoretical understanding of sortition. http://www.INSA.site

You are invited to join our Discord server at https://discord.gg/6sgnrphp6w

Filed under: Academia, meeting, Sortition | Leave a comment »

Democracy Without Shortcuts, A Critique. #2: Deference to a lottocracy needn’t be “blind”

Posted on August 14, 2024 by Roger Knights

Christina Lafont, in her 2020 book, Democracy Without Shortcuts, routinely asserts that, because a minipublic excludes the mass public, the mass public must “blindly defer” to its decisions. Those words at face value imply that the mass public would be blindsided by its decisions. That is not her full meaning, but I’ll criticize that part of it first.

There are four mechanisms by which the public could descry and/or influence the machinations of a lottocracy.

1a. By pairing and “checking” any lottocratic legislative chamber with an elected House.

Any legislation considered in, or passed by, a lottocratic House would be subject to public scrutiny when it reached the elected House, and even before that, during election campaigns for that House. The public would not be taken unawares (for what it is worth). The majority of lottocratic reformers, as far as I know, are only asking for this single-House, or half-a-loaf, power, so Lafont is not justified in insinuating that any empowered lottocratic legislature would be scarily secretive and all-powerful. It would only be influential, and it would have to negotiate openly in compromise-seeking conference committees with its elected counterpart.

1b. By allowing the mass public to veto, by referendum, objectionable minipublic measures. Or by requiring their endorsement, by referendums, by the public.
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Filed under: Academia, Books, Participation, Proposals, Sortition | 24 Comments »

INSA Presents: Sortition and Socialism

Posted on August 13, 2024 by richwbrown

Sortition and Socialism

Saturday, August 31, 2024

– Sunday, September 1st in Asia & Australia –

15:00 – 19:00 UTC

Conference Website

Google Meet joining info video call link: https://meet.google.com/ntz-xguv-bsb

You are invited to join our Discord server at https://discord.gg/6sgnrphp6w

Filed under: Academia, meeting, Sortition | Leave a comment »

Mogens Herman Hansen – prominent classicist with an interest in sortition – dies

Posted on July 12, 2024 by Yoram Gat

The Guardian has an obituary of Mogens Herman Hansen.

Danish historian who transformed our understanding of the way Athenian democracy functioned

The term democracy emerged in the classical city-state of Athens to denote power exercised by common people, at that point men who were not slaves. From around the sixth century BC, officials were chosen by lot and were subordinate to a citizens’ assembly that made decisions. Writers on this process tended to describe it in theoretical terms. But the Danish historian Mogens Herman Hansen, who has died aged 83 after a short illness, transformed understanding of how Athenian democracy functioned by approaching it empirically, through a series of simple questions.

Hansen established the actual practices of the direct democratic assembly, the nature of the leadership exercised by the distinct classes of orators and generals in the absence of any form of partisan political structures, and the importance of mood and rhetoric on the opinions of the mass assembly.

His second insight was based on the fact that previous interpretations of Athenian democracy had ignored how it had changed as a result of Athens’ defeat in the Peloponnesian war with Sparta and the constitutional reforms that began in 403 BC.

The system had moved from the assembly being sovereign to one that was ruled by the distinction between laws (nomoi) that were permanent, and decisions (psephismata) that had to be made in conformity with the laws, and could be challenged in the courts if they were not.
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Filed under: Academia, Athens, Books, History, Sortition | 2 Comments »

Democracy Without Shortcuts, A Critique. #1: A false equivalency is drawn between electoral misanthropy and electoral misogyny

Posted on June 29, 2024 by Roger Knights

Among the major handicaps a reformer can encounter is the opposition of the indignant virtuous …. —E.S. Turner, Roads to Ruin: The shocking history of social reform, 1960.

Cristina Lafont’s 2020 book, Democracy Without Shortcuts, unfairly attacks lottocracy as invidiously exclusionary. A false equivalence is asserted between lottocrats’ current “existential” criticism of the political capability of mass publics and misogynists’ past “essentialist” criticism of the political capability of women (and sometimes of other marginalized groups). Lafont writes, for instance:

… The empirical evidence provided to supposedly ‘prove’ women’s ignorance, irrationality, apathy, and irresponsibility, and the arguments put forth to perpetuate their subjection to others in the not too distant past, are remarkably similar to the arguments and evidence currently provided by the ‘voter ignorance’ literature.
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Filed under: Academia, Books, Elections, Sortition | Tagged: citizen deliberation, citizen juries, Citizen Legislature, democracy, random selection, sortition | 11 Comments »