The launch issue of the Journal of Sortition is nearing completion. You can read the Foreword and Table of Contents at imprint-academic.com/sortition-hub and also register for a free printed and bound inspection copy, to be mailed to you on publication.
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Just out: an article proposing that Australia select its Head of State through a multi-stage process involving sortition at the beginning and the end. The author doesn’t really seem to endorse the idea; rather, he just offers it as an alternative that’s “a little bit whacky.” Here’s the link:
https://pelicanmagazine.com.au/2024/11/17/could-we-randomly-select-a-citizen-as-our-head-of-state/
Filed under: Academia, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 1 Comment »
We all know what lottocracy means: Sample Sovereignty. In other words, the elevation of a representative sample of the whole community to legislative seats, replacing elected legislators.
The case for this replacement seems strong:
Per Rousseau, there is less of a “representative” interference between the whole body and the legislators, meaning the General Will is more truly ensconced, and its actions more democratically legitimate.
Democracy means the rule of the considered common sense of the community. But a mass-electoral system gives each voter such a tiny influence on election results that most pay little consideration to political affairs. And an electoral system implies party government, which roils the waters and impairs considered consideration of the issues. And the influence of professional party politicians, pelf (money), propaganda, and the press (more generally, the media) further shapes and restricts the democratic dialogue. This is only a partial list of the demerits of what I call DeMockery (a mockery of democracy). Many others have noted them too.
The public, according to polling, seems disillusioned to an unprecedented level with DeMockery and ready for a change.
And yet there have been no powerful movements toward full lottocracy. Only randomly chosen advisory entities have been created. (And even they have shown flaws, as in Ireland recently.) The public and public intellectuals apparently need a strong inducement to move beyond today’s mass-electoral system.
Continue readingFiled under: Academia, Elections, Participation, Proposals, Sortition | 17 Comments »
Google DeepMind, whose AI product AlphaFold2 won the 2024 chemistry Nobel prize for the company’s founder, Demis Hassabis, has now applied its technology to create a tool they call the “Habermas machine”. The tool is described as working as a “caucus mediator,” generating summaries that outline areas of agreement of people making up a discussion group. An excerpt from an article in the MIT Techology review:
AI could help people find common ground during deliberations
Groups using Google DeepMind’s LLMs made more progress in discussing contentious issues. But the technology won’t replace human mediators anytime soon.
Reaching a consensus in a democracy is difficult because people hold such different ideological, political, and social views.
Perhaps an AI tool could help. Researchers from Google DeepMind trained a system of large language models (LLMs) to operate as a “caucus mediator,” generating summaries that outline a group’s areas of agreement on complex but important social or political issues.
The researchers say the tool — named the Habermas machine (HM), after the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas — highlights the potential of AI to help groups of people find common ground when discussing such subjects.
“The large language model was trained to identify and present areas of overlap between the ideas held among group members,” says Michael Henry Tessler, a research scientist at Google DeepMind. “It was not trained to be persuasive but to act as a mediator.” The study is being published today in the journal Science.
Filed under: Academia, Deliberation | 2 Comments »
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.
Filed under: Academia, Books, Proposals, Sortition | 32 Comments »
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.
Filed under: Academia, Sortition | 1 Comment »
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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 »
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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Google Meet joining info video call link: https://meet.google.com/ntz-xguv-bsb
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
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