Applications | Equality by lot

Unthinkable: Should college places be awarded by lottery?

Posted on October 6, 2015 by Conall Boyle

An excellent article in the Irish Times:

Unthinkable: Should college places be awarded by lottery?

Using a lottery is preferable to distributing goods based on ‘bad reasons’, argues political scientist Peter Stone.

Dr Peter Stone of TCD’s political science department believes there’s scope for greater use of lotteries in society as a way of keeping “bad reasons” out of decision-making. Rather than seeing lotteries as a failure of imagination, he argues that those who dismiss lotteries can “have the failure of imagination because they think there must be a good reason for distinguishing [between options], even though we haven’t found it yet”.

School admissions are a “classic case” where lotteries are preferable, he says, and he extends the argument to third-level admission. Criticising the recent CAO reforms, which try to minimise random selection in the points race, he provides today’s idea: “Not only should we not be reducing the amount of random selection [in college admissions], we should be letting more in.”

Filed under: Academia, Applications, Distribution by lot | Leave a comment »

Coming Soon – Sortition in the UK

Posted on September 25, 2015 by Brett Hennig

This is a repost from the Sortition Foundation blog.

Sortition is coming soon to the UK!

Or at least three citizens’ assemblies and one forum presenting aspects of sortition are happening in the coming months:

A 200-member Citizens’ Assembly, as part of the NHS Citizen project, will occur on Wednesday 25 November in London.
Two 45-member Citizens’ Assembly Pilot Projects will each be held over two weekends, in Sheffield on 17-18 October and 7-8 November, and in Southampton on 24-25 October and 14-15 November.
The Policy Network, who recently published a report that included a call for the House of Lords to be replaced with a Citizens’ Assembly, are organising a forum on 15 October in London, “Contact Democracy in the modern world: An Australian perspective on democratic renewal.”
Jon Trickett MP, Shadow Communities and Local Government Secretary, has promised that “Labour will organise a series of citizens’ assemblies across the country.” It is unclear at this point if these will use sortition or not.

Continue reading →

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Nicholas Reece: The momentous success of radical democracy

Posted on June 28, 2015 by Yoram Gat

Nicholas Reece writes in The Age:

Experiment pays off: Melbourne People’s Panel produces quality policy

Citizen juries are one of the most promising innovations to emerge in the conversation about democratic renewal.

Melbourne’s radical experiment in democracy has reached a momentous conclusion, with the City Council announcing on Friday it will accept nearly all the recommendations of a 10-year financial plan developed by a citizens’ jury. That a group of 43 randomly selected Melburnians meeting over six weekends developed sound policy that is now being implemented is a profound result for anyone despairing at the state of our democracy. And it invites the exciting question, what’s next?

It turns out that having a plan “developed” over 6 weekends to guide the expenditure of billions of dollars over 10 years is considered a momentous success of radical democracy. What’s next, indeed.

Filed under: Applications, Elections, Press, Proposals, Sortition | Tagged: Australia, budget, citizens' jury | 44 Comments »

The Irish vote for marriage equality was set up by the sortition-selected Constitutional Convention

Posted on June 9, 2015 by Common Lot Sortitionist

Three Irish political scientists, David Farrell, Clodagh Harris and Jane Suiter, write in the Washington Post:

On May 22, Ireland became the first country in the world to introduce marriage equality through a national referendum to change the country’s constitution.

The vote was a world first in one other sense: Never before has a country changed its constitution as a result of deliberation involving a random selection of ordinary citizens. The government’s decision to call the referendum came because of a recommendation from the Irish Constitutional Convention, which had been asked to consider a range of possible constitutional reform questions.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Applications, Ballot measures, Press, Sortition | Tagged: Irish Constitutional Convention, Marriage equality | 4 Comments »

Sortition used in South Korea for blacklisting corrupt politicians

Posted on May 18, 2015 by Common Lot Sortitionist

A new book by Shaazke Beyerle, Curtailing Corruption: People Power for Accountability and Justice, describes grassroots efforts around the world to fight corruption.

In one of the cases described a randomly chosen group of regular citizens in Korea served as a ‘citizen jury’ that confirmed results of an investigation into political corruption. The outcome of this ‘people power’ campaign was that over 50% (58 out of 112) of the politicians identified as corrupt dropped out of the race, and of the blacklisted candidates who did run, 68% (59 out of 86) were defeated.

Filed under: Applications, Books, Juries, Sortition | Tagged: Korea | Leave a comment »

Citizens assembly: Neither fair nor effective

Posted on April 21, 2015 by Yoram Gat

Zool Suleman writes in the Vancouver Sun:

In her opinion article Creating a better community plan, Rachel Magnusson extols the virtues of a citizens assembly that is in the process of recruiting participation by residents of Vancouver’s East Vancouver neighbourhood known as Grandview-Woodland, anchored by Commercial Drive.

Authorized by Vancouver city council, this assembly is in response to a community urban plan process that raised howls of protest in 2013 when, after months of supposed listening, residents heard that multiple towers were to be raised in their neighbourhood, some as high as 32 stories.

With the citizens assembly, Vancouver city council is again embarked on a road heavy on process and light on listening. Magnusson and her fellow consultants, who are being paid $150,000 or more out of a total civic allotment of $275,000, are very enamoured by their credentials. Potent terms such as democracy, insight and community are rhetorically utilized to instil trust in the process. Trust is the main issue. Trust between the city’s planning department and the citizens of Grandview-Woodland is sorely lacking.

Our Community Our Plan, a citizens group based in the neighbourhood, has tried repeatedly to advise Magnusson, members of the planning department and city council of the pitfalls in this process, but to no avail, so in this space let us try again.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Applications, Juries, Participation, Press | 11 Comments »

Democratic experimentation meets democratic education in Cochabamba, Bolivia: a case study

Posted on April 4, 2015 by SimonPek

Founded in 2013, Democracy In Practice is a non-profit organization dedicated to democratic innovation, experimentation and capacity-building in an effort to contribute to government that is more inclusive, representative, and effective.

We present a case study which collectively examines the three pilot projects of Democracy In Practice’s student government program which ran February through November of 2014 in three schools in the Cochabamba area of Bolivia. This program involved replacing student elections with lotteries in which government members were randomly-selected to serve a given term before being replaced by a new group of randomly-selected students.

Program Overview

Implemented in three separate schools in the Cochabamba of Bolivia, the Democratic Student Government Program involved a dynamic and multi-faceted reinvention of student government. Most fundamentally, this reinvention involved replacing elected student governments with those that were randomly selected and rotated from within the student population. These governments of rotated, randomly selected students therefore operated continuously as standing decision-making bodies within the schools. Accordingly, the implementation of this program involved not only clear institutional change but also complex normative change, challenging conventional notions of governance as well as the regular practices and routines of both students and teachers. In this way, the projects explored here differ from other participatory governance initiatives that are typically temporary and limited to a particular issue.

Filed under: Applications, education, Elections, schools, Sortition | 2 Comments »

Citizens’ Juries: Taken for Fools?

Posted on March 3, 2015 by Conall Boyle

Following the rejection of the Icelandic citizens’ jury’s conclusions on constitutional reform, it is disappointing to report that much the same has happened in Ireland:

[T]he people who were involved really cared about this thing and did everything they could to make it a model for new ways of thinking about democracy in the 21st century. There was a glimmer of hope that some kind of dignity was being restored to the political process. Instead all it’s really done is to polish up the sign on the gates of institutional democracy: abandon hope all ye who enter here.

The process showed that, given half a chance, citizens are not cynical and want to engage positively with their State. It also showed that that State, given half a chance, will make them feel like fools for wasting their time.

You can read the full article here: Fintan O’Toole: How hopes raised by the Constitutional Convention were dashed.

Filed under: Applications, Ballot measures, Press, Sortition | Tagged: citizen deliberation, democracy | 7 Comments »

Morena allots its candidacies for the multi-member congressional districts

Posted on February 27, 2015 by Yoram Gat

am.com.mx reports:

The fortunes of 3000 Morena activists, previously elected in 300 district assemblies, was determined yesterday in a lottery.

In this way the party led by Andrés Manuel López Obrador selected two thirds of its multi-member congressional district candidates.

Afterwards the Morena national council appointed outsiders – academics, human rights defenders, writers and rural leaders, among others – to fill the remaining candidacies.

“We successfully incorporated sortition into the process of selection of candidates. It is unprecedented, never seen in the history of our country,” said López Obrador about the lottery method.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Applications, Elections, Press, Sortition | Tagged: Mexico, Morena | 3 Comments »

Morena has selected its pool for sortition of congressional candidates

Posted on February 3, 2015 by Yoram Gat

The Informador reports:

Morena chooses three thousand applicants to draw nominations
Party leader Marti Batres says district assemblies concluded without incident

MEXICO CITY (01/FEB/2015) The leader of the National Regeneration Movement party (Morena), Marti Batres, said that on Sunday 300 district assemblies concluded “without incident” the selection of three thousand applicants for the 200 slots of candidates for multi-member district deputies.

Among those elected, five men and five women from each of the 300 constituencies, there are housewives, students, professionals, retirees, workers, merchants, scholars, indigenous people and peasants, said Batres.

All those will participate in the February 23rd allotment process (sortition) for nominating candidates to multi-member electoral districts, Morena’s method to select its candidates.