Thomas Fleming: Down With Democracy!

Posted on September 5, 2012 by Yoram Gat

Thomas Fleming, editor of the American monthly Chronicles: a Magazine of American Culture, author of several books on ethics (The Morality of Everyday Life) and politics (Socialism, The Politics of Human Nature), contributor to newspapers, magazines, and academic journals on both sides of the Atlantic, and formerly a professor of Greek and Latin at several universities, is again proposing following the Athenian example.

It turns out that the American political system had been in reasonably good shape until Martin Van Buren copied the party system from the UK, and in doing so put the US government on the path of corruption. The final nail in the coffin, Fleming asserts, was the institution of primaries, replacing the corrupt but still useful party leaders as the determinants of party candidates.

Taking a break in dispensing dubious historical synopses, Fleming moves to the present:

If this is democracy, I am ready to try an alternative.  Whenever anyone dares to criticize democracy, he is inevitably slapped down with Churchill’s witticism that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried.  What neither Churchill nor his millions of quoting admirers have ever explained is what they mean by democracy. Indeed, after decades of studying political theory–and discussing such matters with the learned and the wise–I still have no clue as to what people mean when they use the word, other than their opinion that democracy is decidedly a good thing.

Cheerleaders for democracy, the American way of life, and my sweet old etcetera tell us that the principles of one man/one vote and representative government are the essence of our democratic liberty. Interestingly, the people who are credited with inventing the institution and certainly gave us the word–I mean of course the Greeks–did not regard elections as particularly democratic.

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Filed under: Academia, Athens, Elections, History, Participation, Proposals, Sortition | Leave a comment »

Lanni and Vermeule: Precautionary Constitutionalism in Ancient Athens

Posted on August 25, 2012 by Yoram Gat

Harvard Law school professors Adriaan Lanni and Adrian Vermeule discuss sortition among other Athenian political mechanisms. They write:

In the ancient Greek world, selection of magistrates by lot was nearly synonymous with democracy. One of the most important functions of the lot in the Athenian democratic structure was to prevent any individual magistrate from amassing too much power and thereby threatening the sovereignty of the popular Assembly. We argue that the lot, taken together with the principles of rotation and collegiality, operated as precautionary measures against individuals gaining too much influence. Continue reading →

Filed under: Athens, Elections, History, Sortition, Theory | 2 Comments »

Gary Gutting: Should We Cancel the Election?

Posted on August 24, 2012 by Yoram Gat

Gary Gutting is a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and an editor of Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Mark Fredrickson found a post of his on the New York Times online opinion pages. The post is set up as a dialog between the author and Socrates. It is a typical mix of valid points and elitist dogma.

SOCRATES: I’m against it.

GUTTING: I see what you mean. It’s going to be nasty, brutish, and long — not to say immensely expensive — but of course if we want a democracy, there’s no alternative.

S: I disagree. You shouldn’t hold the election at all. You should flip a coin instead.

G: You don’t see any difference between Obama and Romney?

S: Oh, I do. I’m very impressed with Obama, no question. He’s intelligent, courageous, self-controlled and has a good sense of justice. Just the sort of person I had in mind for my philosopher-rulers. But none of that’s going to make a difference to the American voters. The election’s likely to be close, and in any case the outcome will turn on the October unemployment report, the price of gas, an Israeli attack on Iran, who has the most money for attack ads in the last two weeks or some other rationally irrelevant factor that you don’t yet have any hint about.

G: But surely you’d prefer to let Obama make his case to the American people rather than let blind chance decide the outcome?

S: I think letting the American people decide is no different from leaving it to chance. The vast majority of you don’t know enough about the issues or the candidates to make anything like a reliable decision. (It was the same in Athens in my day.)
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Filed under: Athens, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 5 Comments »

Scialabba: Plutocratic vistas: America’s crisis of democracy

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Yoram Gat

George Scialabba writes in the LA Review of Books and in Salon about the history of plutocratic control of elections in the U.S. and offers sortition as an alternative.

Scialabba has the following excerpt from the 1897 book Equality by Edward Bellamy:

“But why did not the people elect officials and representatives of their own class, who would look out for the interests of the masses?” […]
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Filed under: Athens, Elections, Fiction, History, Juries, Press, Proposals, Sortition | Leave a comment »

Japan’s energy future too important to be left to experimental polling method

Posted on July 12, 2012 by Yoram Gat

An opinion piece in The Mainichi:

Yoroku: Japan’s energy future too important to be left to experimental polling method

Once upon a time, in ancient Athens, state policy was decided not by elected representatives, but by a great assembly of all eligible citizens. Five hundred of these citizens were also chosen by lot for the Bouletai, or council, which spent time deliberating the issues facing Athens and drawing up bills for the assembly’s consideration.

In the modern world, a small-scale version of this selection by lot and the group deliberation that was such an important part of Athenian democracy is being resurrected by U.S. academics in the form of deliberative polls.
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Filed under: Athens, Press, Sortition | 2 Comments »

Popular Sovereignty Network

Posted on July 8, 2012 by keithsutherland

I attended the first meeting of the Popular Sovereignty Network yesterday at Queen Mary, University of London. The first talk, by Melissa Lane (politics, Princeton) was on Athenian democracy. Professor Lane took issue with the assumption that the Athenian franchise for office-holding was open to all male citizens over 30, drawing attention to the Solonic prohibition on the thetes holding office (as opposed to participating in the assembly and courts). The source for the Solonic prohibition is Aristotle’s Politics, VII 3. Scholars like Hansen and Sinclair claim that by the 4th Century the prohibition had become a ‘dead letter’, but there is no real evidence for this.

Her talk then took an unusual turn when she shifted the focus to the election of (some) officeholders, on the basis of universal (by Athenian standards) suffrage. I questioned her on the number of elected offices and she claimed it was 100 (out of around 700); nevertheless she used this to argue that Athenian democracy was not so different from its modern Schumpeterian form, in which all citizens elect officeholders and then hold them to account.

This was all a little odd (why focus on the minority of elected officials?), and not particularly convincing, so perhaps she was just trying to stir things up. But I did find her contrast between office-holding and assembly/courts to be illuminating. She disputed Hansen’s claim that ‘ruling and being ruled in turn’ referred to rotation in office, claiming that it referred more to the assembly and the courts. Jury service did involve very significant rotation and, with the 4th century innovation of the nomothetai, serious legislative power was involved. Membership of the council was a collegial office, so Aristotle’s remark could have referred to this (Hansen claims that most eligible citizens would have served on the council at least once), but note her earlier comments on the Solonic prohibition.
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Filed under: Athens, Elections, History, Juries, Participation, Sortition | 2 Comments »

Nissani: Cheers for Direct Democracy

Posted on July 6, 2012 by Yoram Gat

Dr. Moti Nissani writes in The Dissident Voice:

Revolutionary strategists must ask themselves: How can we best structure our own movement? And: What kind of political framework should we aim for, once we relegate the Banking-Militarist Complex to the dustbin of history? The answer to both questions is the same: genuine (or direct) democracy.

Democracy, for the Greeks who coined the word, meant “power of the people” or “rule of the people.” Perhaps the best-known example of a genuine democracy in a highly-advanced, highly-literate, polity, is Athens and its sister democracies of Ancient Greece. There, all significant political, legal, and judicial decisions were made directly by the people. Democratic Athens went to war if, and only if, the majority so voted; a man was exiled, or condemned to death, if, and only if, his fellow citizens so decreed.

It is a typical reformist treatment of the Athenian system. Sortition is discussed in the context of juries, but its application to political offices is given barely a mention:

The Athenians knew that power-seekers could not be trusted, so they filled many important public offices by lot. Moreover, most office holders maintained their positions for extremely short durations. Athens thereby bypassed, to a certain extent, a key problem in all other extant political systems: The ascendancy of the psychopaths.

Filed under: Athens, History, Participation, Sortition | 3 Comments »

Sintomer: Tirage au sort et démocratie délibérative

Posted on June 8, 2012 by Yoram Gat

An article by Yves Sintomer discusses, among other things, reasons for the avoidance of sortition by 18th century revolutionaries. English translation by John Zvesper.

Bernard Manin first raised the question of why with modern revolutions sortition disappeared from the political scene. His answer was based on two observations: first, the founding fathers of modern republics wanted elective aristocracies, and for this reason they rejected random selection, which Plato and Aristotle had connected with democracy. Second, the theory of consent, deeply rooted in theories of natural law, was so widespread that it seemed difficult to legitimize any political authority that was not formally approved by the citizenry.

Both of these arguments are important, but they do not explain everything. […]

The unavailability of the statistical concept of the representative sample (even though probability calculus was already well developed by the time of the American and French Revolutions) is the key to understanding why political sortition seemed useless in modern democracies, whose size – as almost no political writer in this period failed to point out – made it impossible to have self government similar to that of the ancient democracies. In this conceptual world, drawing lots meant arbitrarily giving power to someone. Lacking the idea of the representative sample, the proponents of descriptive representation were forced to choose other tools to advance their ideals.

Filed under: Athens, History, Sortition | 11 Comments »

Etienne Chouard

Posted on May 24, 2012 by peterstone

I spoke to Etienne Chouard for the first time last night. He recommended the following TED talk he did:

It is close-captioned with English subtitles.

He also pointed me to the following talk (again in French) which unfortunately does not yet have subtitles:

I’ve only watched the first talk, and I must say I think he overstates a bit the worthlessness of elections. There is a reason why people like Mugabe resist elections so vehemently–it does offer some checks on arbitrary power. At the very least, they prevent one faction of the powerful from running roughshod over everyone, including other powerful people, and that can provide a measure of protection to everyone else.

Chouard expressed great appreciation for the work of Bernard Manin. I wonder what he thinks of the claim that representative government has both a democratic and an aristocratic side? I hope we will discuss this further with him.

Filed under: Athens, Elections, Sortition | 12 Comments »

David Chaum: Random-sample elections

Posted on May 18, 2012 by Yoram Gat

Joshua Davis writes in Wired:

Roughly 2,500 years ago, the citizens of Athens developed a concept of democracy that’s still hailed by the modern world. It was not, however, a democracy in which every citizen had a vote. Aristotle argued that such a practice would lead to an oligarchy, where powerful individuals would unduly influence the masses. Instead the Athenians relied on a simple machine to randomly select citizens for office. It’s an idea whose time has come again.

Two separate research initiatives—one from a pioneering cryptographer and a second from a team based at Stanford University—have proposed a return to this purer, Athenian-style democracy. Rather than expect everyone to vote, both proposals argue, we should randomly select an anonymous subset of electors from among registered voters. Their votes would then be extrapolated to the wider population. Think of it as voting via statistically valid sample. With a population of 313 million, the US would need about 100,000 voters to deliver a reliable margin of error.

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Filed under: Academia, Athens, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 14 Comments »

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