Alexander Guerrero: The lottocracy

Posted on February 4, 2014 by Yoram Gat

As was mentioned here before, some time ago Prof. Alexander Guerrero and his ideas about the use of sortition in government were the subject of an article in The Boston Globe.

I thank Prof. Guerrero for alerting me to a recently published essay of his about sortition in the online magazine Aeon. The essay presents Guerrero’s proposal, but starts with an interesting analysis of the failure of elections and follows the proposal with an analysis of the promise of sortition.

The lottocracy
Elections are flawed and can’t be redeemed – it’s time to start choosing our representatives by lottery

[…]

The celebrity comic Russell Brand is gesticulating wildly, urgently, in a hotel room, under the bright lights of a television interview. ‘Stop voting, stop pretending, wake up. Be in reality now. Why vote? We know it’s not going to make any difference. We know that already.’ He is responding to his interviewer, Jeremy Paxman, who is taking him to task for never having voted.

We are brought up to think that voting is important, that it is a necessary condition of being a politically serious person, that we can’t complain about politics if we don’t vote. This last principle has echoes of the more reasonable parental admonition, said of lima beans or cauliflower: don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. But that principle is based on sound epistemological grounds: you might, for all you know, like cauliflower or lima beans. The voting thing is, as Brand argues, stupid. There are ways of participating in public affairs other than voting. For example, one can become a celebrity and call for revolution in a television interview.

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Filed under: Academia, Athens, History, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 47 Comments »

Skin-in-the-game Argument: Citizen Warriors and Origins of Democracy

Posted on January 16, 2014 by Ahmed R. Teleb

In First Democracy: The Challenge of an Ancient Idea, Paul Woodruff argues that democracy became and remained the Athenian form of government for mainly two reasons:

1) It ended class warfare and created a harmonious community.

but perhaps more importantly,

2) It provided free citizen warriors (in the form of naval rowers) who identified with the state and were therefore willing to make sacrifices for it.

Woodruff says that if so many rowers were not needed for Athenian navies’ ships, elites may not have allowed the people (the many) to wield as much power as they did.

Being not at all a historian, I ask those who know more about ancient history to agree or disagree with the above assessment.

Did military need provide the conditions for democracy in Athens?

Does the state (or elites) today need something in exchange for genuine democracy?

What would today’s state (or elites) want from the people in return? Citizen consumers?

[I hope there is something less cynical than my last suggestion.]

Filed under: Athens, Books, History | 46 Comments »

Info Tech of Ancient Democracy

Posted on January 13, 2014 by Common Lot Sortitionist

This is from a site that contains, among other things: idiosyncratic, vernacular reviews of “Dead Media”. In this case, the technology surrounding Athenian use of sortition. The author does so via a tour of the Agora Museum in Athens.

http://www.alamut.com/subj/artiface/deadMedia/agoraMuseum.html

Typical of the 17-pages’ tone, early on:

(… this seems the proper place for a DISCLAIMER. To wit: I am neither a classicist nor an archaeologist, nor do I play one on television. Any speculations or flights of theorizing contained herein are worth approximately the scrap value of the electrons that convey them, and should not be cited in support of any statements more authoritative than dinner-party chatter. Assertions of fact, however, have to the best of my ability been checked against the documentary sources listed above, and may be taken as gospel.)

Filed under: Athens, History, Sortition | 14 Comments »

Making A Case for Democracy By Sortition

Posted on December 8, 2013 by Yoram Gat

Google Alerts found the following proposal and discussion, going much along the standard lines.

The Athenian magistrate system had many problems during it’s long life, and one of them was the issue of rule via oligarchy: in a democratic system driven by voter elections (as championed by Socrates), magistrates could effectively buy their seats. In turn, the Greek administration created by popular vote came represent only the interests of the wealthy.

This problem was solved by discarding elections in favor of sortition – simply drawing from the public at random whom would hold what seat for a given term.

I think this is a system that ought to be seriously considered for use today (of course it will never be, but whatever, I can pretend that this is totes up for debate somehow & somewhere).

…So you just pick people at random, and boom, there’s your government?

In essence, yes. There’s an annual lottery (or bi-annual, or however many times over ‘X’ time period you want to rotate people out), and everyone that meets eligibility criteria (so, presumably, no children) are included in said lottery. If your name / SSN / whatever is drawn, you fill a seat. It’s a paid position, just like today, and you otherwise do exactly what government officials do (or are supposed to do) right now.

Filed under: Athens, Sortition | 3 Comments »

Sortition on BBC4 Radio PM programme

Posted on November 27, 2013 by Conall Boyle

Today (27 Nov 2013) in a series about reforming democracy, a listener proposes picking MPs by lot. A panel of Bogdanor, Runciman and Clare Fox sympathise but don’t think it would solve anything.

It starts at 25 mins in, and runs for about 5 mins at:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03jdw6p

[BBC sometimes does not allow access outside UK]

Filed under: Applications, Athens, Sortition | 9 Comments »

A Protocol for Mondial Lottocracy

Posted on October 14, 2013 by avanderven

In chapter 16 of his 1988 book The World Solution for World Problems, A Concept for Government, L. Leòn presented a protocol for mondial lottocracy.

At the moment, this blog, Equality by Lot, is all about an endless stream of opinions, opinions, …, and discussions, discussions… Would it not be an idea to start with a rules based protocol, such as L. Leòn’s protocol, and to ask people to add rules or to eliminate rules (with a short explanation of why)? It would make things much more down-to-earth and much more exciting.

Filed under: Academia, Action, Applications, Athens, education | Tagged: , , | 18 Comments »

To avoid pathological outcomes

Posted on October 14, 2013 by constitutionalism

Sortition is proposed as a remedy to some pathologies in our present constitutional systems, but if not done well, it could introduce some pathologies of its own. Some of these have been discussed, but we need to focus for a moment on how it could go wrong, and what we could do to avoid that.

Sortition and pillage

Sortition is often offered as a way to avoid having those elected pillage the public fisc for their own benefit or that of their constituents, sometimes called patronage. Public choice theory examines how special interests invest more than most others to influence public decisions for their benefit, by both the selection of decisionmakers and pressure on them to favor those interests to retain office or advance in office. Once elected, officials become a special interest unto themselves, and public choice processes operate within government institutions as well as on elections.
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Filed under: Athens, Elections, History, Sortition, Theory | Tagged: , , | 15 Comments »

David Van Reybrouck: Against elections

Posted on October 6, 2013 by Yoram Gat

Ad van der Ven wrote to draw attention to David Van Reybrouck’s argument in favor of sortition. Van Reybrouck is a prize winning Flemish Belgian author writing historical fiction, literary non-fiction, novels, poetry, plays and academic texts.

His latest book is Tegen verkiezingen (Against elections) (machine translation with my touch-ups):

Our representative democracy is increasingly in the doldrums. Its legitimacy is affected: fewer and fewer people vote, voters are less predictable in their choice, and the membership of political parties is decreasing dramatically. It is the efficiency of less democracy: since long term government is problematic, politicians increasingly align their policies to the next election. It all leads to what is called by David Van Reybrouck democratic fatigue. But how do tackle it? Papering over the cracks – that is what is happening now mainly. There are some renovation trends here and there. Reybrouck fears that this kind of marginal solutions is no longer sufficient and that the existing system will result in more and more crises.
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Filed under: Athens, Books, Elections, History, Participation, Press, Proposals, Sortition | Tagged: | 71 Comments »

Sortition (or: after overthrowing the system, then what?)

Posted on July 26, 2013 by Yoram Gat

A message I sent to Paul Jay and Chris Hedges:

Dear Paul and Chris,

I am writing to you after watching the Reality Asserts Itself interview. I share the abhorrence you express toward the ruling elites and their oppressive policies. I share the rejection of the electoral system as a means for achieving the political ends of the 99%, and I support the call for creating a mass movement to effect change – to overthrow the system.

I would like, however, to point out that an important piece is missing from this agenda. Overthrowing the system would just be the beginning. Something needs to replace the system once it is overthrown. Until the Left articulates a credible alternative to the existing system it would be difficult to mobilize support for the revolutionary movement. Why would the people risk overthrowing the system (with all of its oppression and criminality) if there is no expectation that the outcome would be different.

“Occupy”, with its vaguely anarchist ideology, tended to avoid the matter of proposing such an alternative system. It hardly ever went beyond the standard anarchist slogans about consensus-building mechanisms, popular assemblies and horizontal power structures. This, I believe, was the main reason “occupy” failed to galvanize the bulk of the public, leading to its fizzling.
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Filed under: Action, Athens, Elections, History, Sortition | 56 Comments »

Adam Cronkright and Simon Pek: Reconstructing Democracy

Posted on July 8, 2013 by Yoram Gat

recondemo
Adam Cronkright sent the attached document and writes:

Here is a draft that I’ve put together to help explain the work we are doing here in Bolivia, and hopefully in other places in Latin America with time. Would love to get input/feedback from readers of the EqualityByLot blog.

In particular, I would love help with the citations in the section on ancient Athens. I’ve been a long ways from home for the last half a year, so I have no access to my personal computer, my personal library, nor any English public/academic library. So in putting this Overview together, I regularly cited a second/third-hand source (Arthur Robbins Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained: The True Meaning of Democracy), since it was one of the few .pdf’s I could access. But Robbins did not rigorously cite his Athenian history, and I would much prefer to cite primary sources when possible. So any help making that section more academically rigorous would be appreciated.
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Filed under: Applications, Athens, Books, Participation, Sortition | 23 Comments »

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