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 »

Upcoming Presentation by Oliver Milne: The Jury Trust Model

Posted on June 21, 2024 by richwbrown

The Jury Trust Model: Nationalised Industries Without the Corruption

Presented by Oliver Milne, PhD. – Independent scholar and game designer based in Galway, Ireland. PhD in Philosophy from the University of Galway in 2024.

The control of capital is among the most potent of powers: the power to make or break people’s livelihoods, landscapes, and governments. There are limitless ways this power can be abused, and vast amounts of it can be amassed by its abuser. In this talk, Oliver will propose a novel model of capital ownership, the jury trust, in which allotted juries are entrusted with the stewardship of large firms, and make the case that this model can address the problems inherent to state and private ownership.

Date: Thursday, 27 June · (Friday, 28 June in Asia & Australia)

Time: 20:00 – 21:00 Time zone: Europe/Copenhagen

Google Meet link: https://meet.google.com/kfs-vatf-jnu

Or dial: ‪(DK) +45 70 71 45 70 PIN: ‪247 732 930# More phone numbers: https://tel.meet/kfs-vatf-jnu?pin=6887037700703

Discord invitation https://discord.gg/6sgnrphp6w

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

INSA Presents the Online Conference: Sortition and Socialism

Posted on June 21, 2024 by richwbrown

Sortition and Socialism

Saturday, August 31, 2024

– Sunday, September 1st in Asia & Australia –

15:00 – 19:00 UTC

17:00 CEST • 11AM US Eastern • 12:00 Buenos Aires • 8AM US Pacific

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

Or dial: ‪(DK) +45 70 71 41 10 PIN: ‪115 473 082# More phone numbers: https://tel.meet/ntz-xguv-bsb?pin=5619945386152

Featured Presenter

Dr. Camila Vergara

Dr. Camila Vergara is a critical legal theorist, historian, and journalist from Chile writing on the relation between inequality and the law, and on alternative institutional solutions to systemic corruption. She is Senior Lecturer at University of Essex Business School, Editor of Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory, Associate Editor of Critical Sociology, and author of Systemic Corruption: Constitutional Ideas for an Anti-Oligarchic Republic (Princeton University Press 2020). In her work on constitutional theory, republicanism, and corruption, she advocates for council democracy and sortition-based plebeian institutions as part of a counterpower structure against oligarchy. In addition to her scholarly work, Dr. Vergara is a global public intellectual and an activist advising and collaborating with grassroots organisations on rights, deliberative democracy, and community-based forms of governance.

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

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Harvard produces a pure specimen of the “deliberative democracy” narrative

Posted on June 3, 2024 by Yoram Gat

Gina Goldenberg, writing for the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation in the Harvard Kennedy School, has produced a highly purified specimen of the “deliberative democracy” narrative. The article is a useful condensed aggregation of the clichés of the “deliberative democracy” genre, notable for what it does not say more than for what it does. Other than the canned vocabulary, the tropes and the omissions, another noteworthy point is the intimate/inspirational style which focuses on the personalities of supposedly brilliant elite actors on whose insights and initiative our future depends (including professionally-staged pictures, of course).

In the excerpt below, I underline terms and phrases that are typical to the genre. I find it a useful exercise to consider what those terms and phrases mean and what alternative phrasings they were chosen over. Also, to reduce the mental burden on the readers, I elide some of the intimate/inspirational verbiage.

Could deliberative democracy ameliorate democratic backsliding? Two HKS students believe it might.

As concerns for the health of democracy mount, Medha Uniyal and Kartikeya Bhatotia consider one particular “experimental democratic practice” that could increase connectivity between citizens and decision-making processes.

In their PAE [Policy Analysis Exercise], [Medha Uniyal and Kartikeya Bhatotia, students at Harvard Kennedy School (HKS)] responded to the sentiment of global democratic decline by looking for untraditional and innovative mechanisms to increase civic engagement and collect deeper citizen input through deliberative democracies. By concentrating on the deliberative model, Uniyal and Bhatotia hope to address some of the challenges that aggregate democracies face today, like extreme polarization and decreased connectivity.
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Filed under: Academia, Deliberation, education, Participation, Sortition | 4 Comments »

Quality by lot

Posted on May 31, 2024 by Nicholas Gruen

Readers of Equality by lot might be interested in this use of sampling to improve not equality but quality.

The “Quality Control” Interview for Big Classes

I teach a lot of big classes – the undergraduate advanced data analysis class passed 100 students many years ago, and this fall is over 230 – which has some predictable consequences. I don’t get to talk much to many of the students. They’re mostly evaluated by how they do on weekly problem sets (a few of which, in some classes, I call “take-home exams”), and I don’t even grade most of their homework, my teaching assistants do. While I try to craft problem sets which make sure the students practice the skills and material I want them to learn, and lead them to understand the ideas I want them to grasp, just looking at their scores doesn’t give me a lot of information about how well the homework is actually working for those purposes. Even looking at a sample of what they turn in doesn’t get me very far. If I talk to students, though, I can get a much better sense of what they do and do not understand fairly quickly. But there really isn’t time to talk to 100 students, or 200.

About ten years ago, now, I decided to apply some of the tools of my discipline to get out of this dilemma, by means of random sampling. Every week, I would randomly select a fixed number of students for interviews. These interviews took no more than 30 minutes each, usually more like 20, and were one-on-one meetings, distinct from regular open office hours. They always opened by me asking them to explain what they did in such-and-such a problem on last week’s homework, and went on from there, either through the problem set, or on to other topics as those suggested themselves.
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Filed under: Academia, Applications, education | Leave a comment »

Lafont Proposes Institutionalized, Advisory Mini-publics

Posted on May 29, 2024 by Roger Knights

Yoram published some anti-lottocracy paragraphs from Christina Lafont recently. It spurred me to read her book and compose a rebuttal, which I’m in the midst of. In the meantime, here are paragraphs from the book in which she urges the integration of advisory mini-publics in current mass democracies, from pages 148-159.

5.2. Deliberative Activism: Some Participatory Uses of Minipublics

Contestatory Uses of Minipublics

[The] considered majority opinion [of a mini-public] differs from current [mass] majority opinion [and] could give minorities a powerful tool to challenge consolidated majorities […].

[A] distinctive and very valuable feature of minipublics is their superior ability to secure effective inclusion of marginalized voices. […] This could lead to more nuanced positions on polarizing issues or it could prompt a general reconsideration of popular but unjust views […].

[I]n order to maintain their legitimacy, all such uses of minipublics would need to ensure the independence of the institutions in charge of organizing them.
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Filed under: Academia, Sortition, Theory | Leave a comment »

Sortition and Socialism Online Conference: 2nd Call for Presenters

Posted on May 28, 2024 by richwbrown

Sortition and Socialism Online Conference

2nd Call for Presenters

The International Network of Sortition Advocates (INSA) is proud to announce our first conference, ‘Sortition and Socialism’, on Saturday the 31st of August. The aim of the conference is to help develop the theory of sortitional-democratic models of plebeian power and socialism, and build closer connections between theorists of sortition and deliberative democracy and leftwing theoreticians and activists. We invite speakers from both scholarly and activist backgrounds to explore the role of appointment by random selection within struggles for liberation and proposed alternatives to capitalism.

Invited speaker: Camila Vergara (University of Essex)

Presenter Information

Conference Date & Time: Saturday 31st August 2024, 15:00-19:00 UTC

The deadline for applications is the 7th of July. Talks should be no longer than 25 minutes; there will be a 20-minute Q&A after each talk, and a panel discussion at the end of the day in which all speakers are invited to participate. Applicants should email an abstract of their proposed presentation, along with a short bio, to <facilitator@insa.site>.

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. As a functionally-defined network, we are multi-partisan, acting as a clearing house for sortition advocates of many different political stripes, conditionally brought together by our common interest in advancing sortition in theory and practice.

If you are a supporter of the use of sortition in politics or other realms, or interested in learning more about what sortition has to offer, you are invited to join our Discord server at <https://discord.gg/6sgnrphp6w>.

Filed under: Academia, Action, meeting, Sortition | 2 Comments »

Malkin and Blok: Drawing Lots

Posted on May 24, 2024 by Yoram Gat

Drawing Lots: From Egalitarianism to Democracy in Ancient Greece, a new book by Irad Malkin and Josine Blok, has just been published by Oxford University Press. The book is a major landmark in the study of sortition and its association with democracy. The book aims to show, via a review of the history of the application of allotment in the ancient Greek world, that Greek democracy grew out of an egalitarian mindset, a mindset that was expressed, as well as presumably reinforced, by the widespread application of allotment in different contexts over a centuries-long period.¹

Before the lot became political, drawing lots and establishing a mindset of equal chances and portions were already ubiquitous during the centuries before Cleisthenes laid the foundations for democracy in 508. They touched upon a whole spectrum of life and death, both private and public. They expressed values of individuality, fairness, and equality.

Malkin considers his new book as the first comprehensive treatment of classical allotment. He points out a rather astounding fact – allotment, “a significant institution that permeated the lives of Greeks during the archaic period and impacted how they saw human society and structured their expectations and behaviors”, has received very little attention by classicists.
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Filed under: Academia, Athens, Books, Elections, History, Sortition | Tagged: democracy, greece, History, politics | 2 Comments »

Rorty on democratic government

Posted on May 18, 2024 by Yoram Gat

Richard Rorty, 1931–2007, was a fairly prominent Left-Liberal American philosopher. He saw himself as a pragmatist and a disciple of John Dewey and is known for promoting wide-ranging relativist views. In particular, Rorty rejected the existence of transcendent truths that can serve as the goals of scientific inquiry, philosophy or politics.

Such radical philosophical notions somehow seem to co-exist with an old-fashioned electoralist political theory, which harks back to the post WWII era – a period which embodied Rorty’s political ideal.

I think democratic governments are run by experts. The only question is which experts are going to be in power at any given moment. Dewey’s dreams of participatory democracy will never come true. I think American universities and Western universities generally have served democratic societies very well indeed. They have supplied experts who could then be associated with politicians who were voted in or were voted out by the masses. That’s the best we can expect.

Filed under: Academia, Elections | 6 Comments »

Foley and Yoon: Sortition for the Student Assembly at the College of William and Mary

Posted on May 11, 2024 by Yoram Gat

Just two months ago, Evan Tao proposed applying sortition to selecting the student body of a Brown University. A similar proposal is now made by Michael Foley and Grant Yoon from the College of William and Mary.

Student Assembly officials shouldn’t be elected, they should be randomly selected. This somewhat radical idea has roots in ancient Athens where, for centuries, public officials were chosen via sortition. Sortition is the selection of public officials by lottery rather than election. We know, it sounds like an insane idea, but bear with us. Our goal with this article is not to convince you that sortition is a perfect system that should be implemented everywhere, we haven’t even convinced ourselves of that, but rather that it is a system with enough merit to be worth trying, and that the College of William and Mary’s Student Assembly offers the perfect laboratory within which we can test out the concept.

Our argument for sortition at the College boils down to this: randomly selected legislators would govern more effectively and promote a more inclusive culture surrounding student government on this campus.