One of Bill McClellan’s readers writes in

Posted on July 29, 2011 by Yoram Gat

Google Alert netted another fine catch:

Democracy seeming like Greek to U.S.

Bill McClellan
stltoday.com, July 29, 2011

Not long ago, I wrote a column in which I suggested we select our leaders through a lottery [Stupid vs. immoral? Let’s leave governing up to chance, June 8, 2011]. We would avoid tiresome campaigns and the lies and misrepresentations therein, and we would rid ourselves of campaign contributions and the time-honored practice of buying influence and favors.

It was a whimsical idea. Or so I thought. But one of the joys of writing a newspaper column is hearing from people who know more than I do about the subjects I write about.

David C. sent me this note: “Today’s column made me think of ancient Athens, one of the most thoroughgoing democracies in western history (at least for those who weren’t slaves). They had a system of government very similar to your idea of government by lottery. As the Marxist historian C.L.R. James wrote in his essay, ‘Every Cook Can Govern’: ‘Perhaps the most striking thing about Greek democracy was that the administration (and there were immense administrative problems) was organized upon the basis of what is known as sortition, or, more easily, selection by lot. The vast majority of Greek officials were chosen by a method which amounted to putting names into a hat and appointing the ones whose names came out.'”

Filed under: Athens, Elections, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 3 Comments »

Karatani on sortition

Posted on June 30, 2011 by Yoram Gat

Kojin Karatani writes in his book, Transcritique (2001, translated by Sabu Kohso, p. 182ff):

There is one crucial thing we can learn from Athenian democracy in this respect. The ancient democracy was established by overthrowing tyranny and equipped itself with a meticulous device for preventing tyranny for reviving. The salient characteristic of Athenian democracy is not a direct participation of everyone in the assembly, as always claimed, but a systematic control of the administrative power. The crux was the system of lottery: to elect public servants by lottery and to surveil the deeds of public servants by means of a group of jurors who are also elected by lottery. […] My point is that the core of the system invented to stop the fixation of power in Athenian Democracy lay not in the election itself, but in the lottery. Lottery functions to introduce contingency into the magnetic power center. The point is to shake up the positions where power tends to be concentrated; entrenchment of power in administrative positions can be avoided by a sudden attack of contingency. It is only the lottery that actualizes the separation of the three powers. If universal suffrage by secret ballot, namely, parliamentary democracy, is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, the introduction of a lottery should be deemed the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Disappointingly, Karatani steps away from sortition, without providing a real reason – off-handedly blaming “the people” for not being ready for a radical solution:

Can we choose all representative by lottery in all elections? That is not realistic; the system itself would be too arbitrary to gain the trust of the people.

Instead, he offers a lottery among top vote getters, claiming it will reduce factionalism, and making a vague unexplained promise that such a mechanism will “free the power center from fixation in the long run”:

[W]hat is preferable to us would be to choose the most crucial post by lottery: namely choosing three candidates by secret vote (three in one choice) and then finally electing one by lottery. Because the last and most crucial stage is determined by contingency, factional disputes or conflicts over successors would not make sense.

Filed under: Athens, Books, Elections, Proposals, Theory | 1 Comment »

More on the going-ons in Syntagma Square

Posted on June 28, 2011 by Yoram Gat

I recently linked to a WSWS story about the Indignants in Syntagma Square. The Kathimerini newspaper has a story as well. As can be expected, the tone is much more equivocal.

In Syntagma Square, some see the dawn of a new politics

As Indignant protests enter second month, opinions divided about nature and future of the movement

[…]

Costas Douzinas, a law professor at Birkbeck, University of London, recently penned one of the most flattering profiles of the Indignants in Britain’s The Guardian newspaper, after being invited to speak in Syntagma. For him “this is the most political movement we have had in Greece, and perhaps in Europe for the past 20 years. It is totally political and in a way it changes our understanding of what politics means,” he says.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Athens, Sortition | 2 Comments »

Indignant, fumbling, drawing lots

Posted on June 25, 2011 by Yoram Gat

The WSWS has a critical report about the “indignants” movement in Greece:

Greece: The Syntagma Square movement—no real democracy

It is not easy to report on the “Indignants”, the protesters in Athens’ Syntagma Square. We spent almost an hour trying to find someone responsible who could tell us about the goals and character of the movement, without success.

[…]

There was no one willing to provide information about the objectives and purpose of the movement, and take responsibility for this. This game of hide and seek is not a coincidence. It is justified by reference to the principle of “genuine” or “direct” democracy, according to which the people take decisions directly, without the mediation of political representatives or parties. In fact, it serves to hide the real political objectives of the Indignants.
Continue reading →

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

Alan Ryan: “Do We Really Believe in Democracy?”

Posted on June 1, 2011 by Yoram Gat

YouTube has a talk by Prof. Alan Ryan discussing what he calls “real democracy, using lotteries in the way the ancient world used them”, and contrasting it with the existing system – which he describes as being similar to the Roman system – a system mixing elements of monarchy, aristocracy and monarchy. Ryan concludes by endorsing Fishkin’s “Deliberative Polling”.

Part one:

Part two:

This is a thoughtful, if brief, lecture and the points that are raised are worth discussing, I think, in comments and in future posts.

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

Democracy – Ancient and Modern

Posted on May 26, 2011 by keithsutherland

In The Principles of Representative Government (1997), Bernard Manin attempted to explain why Athenian (sortive) democracy was supplanted by election at the time of the birth of modern representative democracy. Many members of this forum have lamented this development and called for a return to classical democracy. In this post I would like to argue that sortition was only ever one element in Athenian democracy and that the other elements, if translated into a modern context, would of necessity be rather like the institutions that we currently bemoan. For analytic convenience I’ll deal with Athenian democratic practice under three categories:

  • One Man One Vote
  • Deliberative Scrutiny
  • Rule and Be Ruled In Turn

Continue reading →

Filed under: Athens, Distribution by lot, Elections, Sortition, Theory | 12 Comments »

Sortition for the House of Lords

Posted on May 17, 2011 by keithsutherland

Andrew Lilco of the influentual website Conservative Home is currently proposing sortition for the reformed House of Lords:

I propose that half the members (300) should be selected randomly.  It would be better if randomly-selected members knew their random selection from an early enough date to prepare for the role.  Thus I would prefer hereditary – probably with new hereditary families.  But I suspect that would be so controversial as to derail the whole scheme, and it is more important that there be random membership than whether people are prepared.  So I propose that half the members be selected by lot, as with jury service.  If you are selected for Second Chamber service, you must serve there for six months.  I suggest that there is overlapping turnover – so, each month one sixth of the membership leaves to be replace by a new set.  Hopefully, after a while people would see the benefits of expertise, responsibility and obligation being bred from an early stage, and so hereditary would once again be feasible.  But a jury-style (or Athenian-style) component to the chamber would be a good base.

Full article

Filed under: Athens, House of Lords, Proposals | 4 Comments »

New Book Review Mentions Kleroteria

Posted on February 24, 2011 by peterstone

From Walter Isaacson’s review of Bettany Hughes’ The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens and the Search for the Good Life (New York Times, February 11, 2011):

Hughes intersperses the story of Socrates’ trial in 399 B.C. with some wonderful details. We learn, for example, about the workings of the mechanical device that randomly selected, from 6,000 names, the jury of 500 Athenian citizens (yes, 500) that assembled at the law court to hear the case. This kleroterion, a replica of which can be viewed at the Agora Museum in Athens, was a proto-computer that used carved slots to send metal disks down a chute. “Every means possible has been thought of to prevent corruption,” Hughes writes. “Alphabetical blocks of seats, secret ballots, random-selection machines.” Her quest for authentic detail even leads her to grind up hemlock and sniff it. “It releases a nose-wrinkling sour smell,” she reports.

The review can be found here–

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/20/books/review/Isaacson-t.html?ref=books

Filed under: Athens, History | Leave a comment »

Paul Cockshott: Ideas of Leadership and Democracy

Posted on February 18, 2011 by Yoram Gat

Paul Cockshott is offering the Greek political structure as an alternative to the Roman model:

When the American revolutionaries were trying to establish their state – and that is the stable form of bourgeois state that has survived – they looked at historical models. And there were two models available for them, there was Rome and Athens. They had to choose between these, and it is actually no accident that they chose Rome, that the United States constitution is largely based on the Roman ideas of constitution – it’s a republic, it’s not a democracy. It was constructed as a state by slaveholders who saw what had been the most stable slaveholder state in the past: Rome. And they modeled their state on that.

But there’s another model, and that’s the Athenian model of direct democracy, and the Greeks, over a period of hundreds of years, developed mechanisms to prevent aristocratic domination of the state. Continue reading →

Filed under: Athens, Elections, History, Sortition, Theory | 60 Comments »

Gloating from fans of Fukuyama

Posted on February 2, 2011 by Conall Boyle

With the imminent arrival (?) of elective democracy in Egypt and other Arab countries, those who claim that

For better or for worse the immediate future, politically speaking, (by which I mean, the next 30 or 40 years) belongs to the parliamentary democracies

(which is more of less what Fukuyama predicted as ‘The End of History’). You can read more about this, and the extended and interesting range of comments it provoked at Crooked Timber (an excellent blog btw)

http://crookedtimber.org/2011/02/01/fukuyama-f-yeah/comment-page-2/#comment-346164

No mention of what might come after elections, only that elections were somehow the end point of history. So I added a comment as follows: Continue reading →

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

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