How Athenians Managed the Political Unaccountability of Citizens

Posted on June 29, 2014 by keithsutherland

Recent discussions on this blog have focused on the need for ongoing political accountability in any sortition-based political system, so I thought this article by Farid Abdel-Nour and Brad L. Cook in the current issue of History of Political Thought would be of interest:

Abstract: The political unaccountability of ordinary citizens in classical Athens was originally raised as a challenge by ancient critics of democracy. In tension with that criticism, the authors argue that attention to the above challenge is consistent with a defence of Athenian democratic politics. In fact, ordinary citizens’ function in the Assembly and courts implicitly included the burden of justifying their own political decisions to an imagined authority, as if they could be brought to account. By means of practices that encouraged this self-scrutiny, Athenians marked the challenge of citizens’ political unaccountability as an unavoidable but manageable aspect of their democracy.

The authors argue that ‘one type of practice placed citizens’s political decisions under the external gaze of other citizens, another placed them under the gaze of the gods, and yet another placed them under the gaze of an internal imagined audience’ (p. 445).
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Filed under: Academia, Athens, History, Sortition | 37 Comments »

Alex Guerrero: Against Elections

Posted on June 13, 2014 by Yoram Gat

Alex Guerrero has a new paper forthcoming: “Against Elections: The lottocratic alternative”.

The paper begins as follows:

It is widely accepted that electoral representative democracy is better — along a number of different normative dimensions — than any other alternative lawmaking political arrangement. It is not typically seen as much of a competition: it is also widely accepted that the only legitimate alternative to electoral representative democracy is some form of direct democracy, but direct democracy — we are told — would lead to bad policy. This article makes the case that there is a legitimate alternative system — one that uses lotteries, not elections, to select political officials — that would be better than electoral representative democracy.

Filed under: Academia, Elections, Sortition | 17 Comments »

Dahl: Is Minority Domination Inevitable?

Posted on June 10, 2014 by keithsutherland

In most of the sciences – whether human, social or natural – there is a symbiotic relationship between theoretical and quantitative approaches. Einstein would not have formulated the theory of special relativity had the Michelson-Morley experiment confirmed the existence of the aether wind. The academic study of politics, however, bucks this trend as theorists and political scientists rarely talk to each other. This is primarily because the term ‘political theory’ is generally preceded by the adjective ‘normative’, so a conversation between theorists and polsci professors might well be seen as a contravention of the naturalistic fallacy.

This is self-evidently the case in the field of social theory, dominated by the long shadow of Rawls and still dedicated to the study of ‘57 varieties of luck egalitarianism’ (Waldron, 2013, p. 21). But why should it apply to democratic theory? – common-sense would dictate this should be a combination of normative and descriptive work, as most modern poleis claim to be democracies. Yet the upgrade panel for my own PhD (on representation and sortition) advised me to choose between the theoretical and empirical literature and not to seek to reconcile the two. The recent thread on this blog discussing Gilens and Page’s claim to have disproved the median voter theorem is a good indication of the sharp divide between the two literatures.
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Filed under: Academia, Books, Elections, Theory | 26 Comments »

Looking for co-presenter on sortition in Washington

Posted on May 28, 2014 by Common Lot Sortitionist

The National Coalition on Deliberation & Dialogue is holding its annual meeting in Washington, 17-19 October.

They ‘highly encourage’ two presenters.

I’d be interested in focusing on the cultural aspect of switching from electoral campaigns to sortitional selection. Especially how media might be used. Encouraged by NCDD’s suggestions, I might devise an on-the-spot exercise for participants.

I would assume that a co-presenter would concern her- or himself with the more conceptual aspects.  But maybe not. Maybe doubling up on the “How?” would be best.

Please contact me directly if interested: dgrant (at) thecommonlot (dot) com

Filed under: Academia, Action, education, Participation, Proposals, Sortition, Theory | Tagged: , , , , | 1 Comment »

Democratic accountability, part 2

Posted on May 2, 2014 by Yoram Gat

Part 1 describes what “democratic accountability theory” is.

“Accountability” has a generalized positive connotation. Surely it is better when power is held accountable than when it is unaccountable or arbitrary. Scratching the surface, however, various considerations make it evident that the appeal of “electoral accountability” is illusory.

  • First, an “accountable government” is presumably self-evidently superior to an “unaccountable government” whose mandate is permanent and therefore cannot be replaced. But the charm of accountability seems less clear when the alternative is a different “unaccountable” government – a government whose mandate is temporary and cannot be renewed. If elections are the only method of accountability then such a limited mandate government is not accountable either. Accountability, it turns out, is not about replacing government any more than it is about permanent government. For some reason, a government must be re-electable to be “accountable”. It is the ability to award the prize of re-election that makes a government electorally accountable. If a prize cannot be awarded, or cannot be withdrawn, the spell of accountability is nullified.

    • Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Elections, Sortition | Tagged: , , , | 210 Comments »

Democratic accountability, part 1

Posted on April 20, 2014 by Yoram Gat

“Democratic accountability” seems to be an invention of the last 50 years.

accountability-ngram

It is one more ideological maneuver in the centuries old intellectual effort of aligning an ideology propounding political equality with support for the oligarchical practice of elections.
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Filed under: Academia, Elections, Participation, Theory | 14 Comments »

Commentary on Gilens and Page, “Average citizens have no political influence”

Posted on April 17, 2014 by keithsutherland

This is an interesting paper, that brings admiral clarity to the competing theoretical models that address the problem, ‘Who governs? Who really rules?’ (Gilens and Page. 2014, p.3). However I’m skeptical as to whether the authors’ dataset provides unequivocal support for the general equation between ‘electoralism’ and oligarchical rule claimed by Yoram Gat in his open letter to Professor Gilens, for the following reasons:

1. Dataset
It’s surprising that a total of 1,932 cases yielded as many as 1,779 instances demonstrating a clear relationship between public preferences and policy change (p.10). Most legislative outcomes involve messy compromises involving trade-offs between the preferences and interests of the various parties involved. What criteria were employed by Gilens’s ‘small army of research assistants’ in order to decide that these 1,779 instances involved a ‘clear, as opposed to partial or ambiguous, actual presence or absence of policy change’ (ibid.)? Are public preferences really as unambiguous as the authors claim? An influential work by Benjamin Page’s frequent collaborator Robert Shapiro used the examples of Bill Clinton’s (failed) healthcare reforms and Newt Gingrich’s ‘Contract with America’ as examples of elite- and partisan-driven policy initiatives (Jacobs and Shapiro, 2000). However in the former case survey evidence was ambiguous: a Gallup Poll conducted in early August 1991 indicated that 91 percent of the public felt there was a ‘crisis in healthcare’ (Gallup, 1991, p. 4) and a large majority (75% of adults polled) wanted the government to provide healthcare (Times, 1992). But it was not clear what the public wanted done about health care, being torn between the desire for comprehensive provision and the deep-seated American aversion to big government: ‘different polls and even successive questions in the same polls turn up seemingly contradictory responses’ (Kosterlitz, 1991, p. 2806). In any event, Clinton’s healthcare reforms were defeated: ‘the policy outcome turned, in the end, on the response of the relatively few centrist legislators to – exactly – the median national opinion as measured by polls’ (Quirk, 2009, p. 6, my emphasis). Similarly the GoP ‘Contract with America’ was entirely driven by the median-voter strategy:

The issues that garnered very favourable ratings with the public were included in the contract and those that did not were left off. There was little discussion about how these policies fit together, rather the concern was maximizing popularity. (Geer, 1996, pp. 34-5, my emphasis).

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Filed under: Academia, Opinion polling, Theory | 188 Comments »

A letter to Prof. Martin Gilens

Posted on April 16, 2014 by Yoram Gat

Dear Prof. Gilens,

My name is Yoram Gat.

I recently became aware of your new paper “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens ” expanding on your previous work (“Inequality and democratic responsiveness”, 2005).

I see the findings of this work, as I presume you do, as confirming the widespread public sentiment, consistently measured in many opinion polls and expressed for example in the 2011 “Occupy” protests, that the American system does not represent the majority of Americans (“the 99%”). I also presume that the American system is not unique in this respect: 2011 has seen protest around the world reflecting similar sentiments in other societies governed by similar systems.
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Filed under: Academia, Action, Elections, Opinion polling, Proposals, Sortition | 8 Comments »

Gilens and Page: Average citizens have no political influence

Posted on April 16, 2014 by Yoram Gat

Keith McDonnell and Terry Bouricius wrote to point out the following.

Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page have a new paper titled “Testing theories of American politics: elites, interest Groups, and average citizens”. The paper continues the work of Gilens analyzing the correlation between public opinion and policy (see his 2005 paper “Inequality and democratic responsiveness” and a book on the same theme, Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America).

The previous work found that any correlation between public sentiments and policy is completely mediated by elite opinion (where “elite” is defined as top decile of income). The new paper adds to the analysis the position of interest groups and again finds that elites dominate policy making. The abstract is as follows:

Abstract

Each of four theoretical traditions in the study of American politics – which can be characterized as theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy, Economic Elite Domination, and two types of interest group pluralism, Majoritarian Pluralism and Biased Pluralism – offers different predictions about which sets of actors have how much influence over public policy: average citizens; economic elites; and organized interest groups, mass-based or business-oriented.

A great deal of empirical research speaks to the policy influence of one or another set of actors, but until recently it has not been possible to test these contrasting theoretical predictions against each other within a single statistical model. This paper reports on an effort to do so, using a unique data set that includes measures of the key variables for 1,779 policy issues.

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.

Filed under: Academia, Books, Elections, Opinion polling, Participation | 5 Comments »

Top-down or bottom-up? Sinister interests – vs – the median voter strategy

Posted on April 2, 2014 by keithsutherland

For some time I’ve been puzzled as to why empirical political scientists and normative political theorists have taken up antithetical positions on what has to be the central issue of democratic politics – who rules?. In the former community there is widespread agreement that the demos has kratos – elected politicians are obliged to formulate policies that are designed to attract the support of the ‘median’ voter. Political theorists, however (along with their colleagues in media studies), in so far as they are interested in the topic at all, view this as little more than a confidence trick, designed to conceal the identity of the shadowy ‘sinister interests’ who are really pulling the strings of power. Given that political scientists and political theorists are both housed in the same faculties, and drink their cappuccinos in the same common rooms, why should they come to such diametrically opposed conclusions?
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Filed under: Academia, Opinion polling, Theory | 17 Comments »

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