The Keys to Democracy by Maurice Pope

Posted on October 7, 2023 by Yoram Gat

Maurice Pope’s book The Keys to Democracy is the third book ever written advocating the use of sortition as a major component of a modern government. (The two earlier ones being Ernest Callenbach and Michael Phillips’s A Citizen Legislature and John Burnheim’s Is Democracy Possible?, both first published in 1985. Pope, who seems to have started writing at about the same time, was apparently unaware of either.) The great strengths of Pope’s writing are his independence of thought and his evident sincerity. Coming early into the field, and being a classicist rather than a political scientist, Pope was clearly breaking new ground, following his own logical train of thought. He was thus free from the burden of formulaically making connections to prior writings and from the petty-political considerations of self-promotion. This unique situation made a thoroughgoing impact on the book as a whole.

Authors of works about sortition (including Pope) generally share the ostensible aim of achieving some measure of democratization of society. But while this general aim is broadly shared, the consensus ends there because the detailed aims and the proposed mechanisms for achieving them vary widely. At the conservative end, the problem with the existing system is conceived as some sort of sclerosis. The main symptom of the problem is fatigue, or a lack of confidence. Sortition-based institutions are then seen as a way to infuse the system with new blood or new vigor, rejuvenating a system that is essentially sound but has for various reasons, that generally remain vague, fallen into a bad state. Associated with this view of things are generally quite modest proposals – advisory bodies that “help” current decision makers make more informed decisions. Even those more informed decisions are perhaps less important than the mere fact that allotted citizens are widely recognized as having had a part in the process. Indeed, what exactly the problems are with the current outcomes of the process and what are the expected improvements in terms of policy is usually not specified. In fact, sometimes the entire point is to have the allotted citizens themselves become more informed rather than making any changes in decision making. Writings in this vein tend to be heavy with references to the canon of “deliberative democracy” and light on the idea that democracy is a regime of political equality.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Athens, Books, Elections, Fiction, History, Juries, Participation, Press, Sortition | 10 Comments »

A New Zealand farmer proposes sortition, but “strictly tongue-in-cheek”

Posted on October 5, 2023 by Yoram Gat

From the NZ Herlad‘s “The Country” section:

Election 2023: Jane Smith thinks about ancient Greek voting options we might prefer

No-nonsense North Otago farmer Jane Smith is the last person you’d expect to get swept up in a TikTok trend but she may have inadvertently created an alternative version of “How often do you think about the Roman Empire?”

In Smith’s case, the question is “How often do you think about ancient Greece?”

The sheep farmer told The Country’s Jamie Mackay that she’s so tired of Kiwi politicians and election campaigning that she had gone back in time, in an attempt to find a more palatable way of choosing leaders.

Admitting that this was all strictly tongue-in-cheek and “off the top of my head” Smith listed her favoured election processes from Ancient Greece.

Sortition – lottery system

Sortition is when officials were in large part chosen by lottery.

“So, a wee bit like jury duty,” Smith said.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Athens, Elections, Press, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Josine Blok reviews Pope’s The Keys to Democracy

Posted on September 23, 2023 by Yoram Gat

Josine Blok, a historian from Utrecht University, has a review of Maurice Pope’s The Keys to Democracy in H-Soz-Kult. In the last two paragraphs of the review, Blok gives her opinion about the substance of the book:

The quality of the argument is in my view quite uneven. Some of the political analyses and in particular the historical sections suffer from oversimplification, generalisation, and special pleading. For instance: “The political ideals and most of the political practices of Western civilisation go back through Venice and ancient Rome to classical Greece.” (p. 115). No, they don’t, this is simply not true, nor is Pope’s account of how sortition got “lost” in the course of history. On p. 123, Pope contends: “It would be possible […] to define history itself as the story of how experts have been proved wrong. For otherwise […] it would not be history at all, but current practice. […examples in] the history of science. Being history, it is possible to tell which side was wrong.” This view of history is simply bizarre. If Pope resorted to such sweeping statements to help easy reading, I don’t think they are the proper means to that end.

But, making up for such drawbacks, Pope offers excellent observations on deliberation as a crucial ingredient of democracy and on the potential of sortition to prevent oligarchisation (the “law of Michels”), meritocracy and other problematic forms of hierarchy. Sortition enables implementing the equality of citizens and bringing their engagement in policy making about. Importantly, Pope points out that sortition, whenever it is employed, must be rigorous and compulsory to be effective, and allotted bodies must be selected from the whole population (p. 167; complemented by the outstanding comment by Potter in the appendix). He underlines that allotted panels of citizens must have moral authority and real responsibility (to which should be added a transparent system of accountability). Written with an open, engaging style, The Keys to Democracy is set to win a wider audience for its important and pressing message.

Filed under: Academia, Athens, Books, Deliberation, Elections, History, Opinion polling, Press, Sortition | 2 Comments »

Quality of representation through sortition is assured using appropriate prerequisites

Posted on September 14, 2023 by theodorestathis

In my article Democracy through sortition I mentioned that sortition is a tool and not an end in itself. That means for sortition to work it needs to be subject to certain constrains. This condition is neglected by many followers of sortition and that creates a problem, at least in when trying to make a political system to operate democratically. One such problem is created, concerning quality of representation in a legislative body, like a parliament, when sortition neglects to take into consideration the use of prerequisites.

Sortition was used in the first democracy in ancient Athens, in order to select, from teams of volunteers, 500 parliamentarians for a term of one year, 50 from each of the 10 districts with equal population. The prerequisites for one to be selected through sortition as a member of parliament in a district were: He had to be a Greek, a member of a district, 30 years of age and older among others. The question may arise as to whether these prerequisites were sufficient in order for the representation to be, concerning its quality, sufficiently appropriate. The operation of that parliament started around 509 B.C. and for more than half a century the parliamentarians, while working all year around, were not paid for their services. So the members of a district that were working for a living, even if they wanted to be among those in the teams of volunteers, it was, objectively, not possible and there were many of them. Another difficulty for the citizens to participate was the distance to Athens from the place they lived, which to many of them was a major obstacle. In any case the fact is that, even in the first democracy, prerequisites were used!

Continue reading →

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

Under sortition, no matter what your cause is, you have no lever to force the government to act

Posted on August 4, 2023 by Yoram Gat

Adam Lee writes a polemic for sortition in OnlySky, a website billing itself as being “dedicated to protecting America’s secular democracy through reality-based journalism, storytelling, and commentary”. Lee covers standard ground – Athens using sortition and rejecting elections, the statistical representativity of allotted bodies, the unrepresentativity of elected bodies, Ireland’s use of sortition. (One thing that I have not heard before is that Ireland will soon have another constitutional referendum for adopting or rejecting a proposal by the allotted constitutional convention, this time for deleting Article 41.2 of the Irish constitution which is concerned with making sure mothers do not neglect “their duties at the home”.)

Lee offers two potential problems with a sortition-based system. The first is the statistical possibility of unrepresentative samples:

What if we choose 100 representatives by lot and get 75 QAnon-believing evangelicals? A legislature that’s far out of the mainstream could wreak tremendous harm or radically reshape society in disastrous ways.

The other is problem is that

even if [the system is] representative, it wouldn’t necessarily be responsive. People mounting a campaign on issues that matter to them is one of the safety valves of democracy. If there’s a problem that the government is ignoring—anything from potholed streets to rampant gun violence to unpopular wars—someone can, and probably will, run for office on a platform of fixing it.

Under sortition, that’s impossible. No matter what your cause is, you have no lever to force the government to act. You have to sit back and hope that someone who shares your views gets chosen on the next go-round.

Lee concludes:

Despite these problems, I can see real potential for sortition—if not as the sole basis for government, then maybe as a component of it. What if, instead of a House and a Senate, we had one democratically elected chamber and one made up of citizens chosen by lot?

Filed under: Athens, Elections, History, Press, Sortition | 29 Comments »

Rancière: The scandal of sortition

Posted on July 29, 2023 by Yoram Gat

The second chapter of Jacques Rancière’s Hatred of Democracy (2005), “Politics, or the Lost Shepherd”, contains a fairly long discussion of sortition and its relation to democracy. The following paragraph is from page 41 of the English translation:

The scandal [of sortition] is simply the following: among the titles for governing there is one that breaks the chain, a title that refutes itself: the [Plato’s] seventh title is the absence of title. Such is the most profound trouble signified by the word democracy. It’s not a question here of a great howling animal, a proud ass, or an individual pursuing pleasure for his or her own sake. Rather is it clearly apparent that these images are ways of concealing the heart of the problem. Democracy is not the whim of children, slaves, or animals. It is the whim of a god, that of chance, which is of such a nature that it is ruined as a principle of legitimacy. Democratic excess does not have anything to do with a supposed consumptive madness. It is simply the dissolving of any standard by which nature could give its law to communitarian artifice via the relations of authority that structure the social body. The scandal lies in the disjoining of entitlements to govern from any analogy to those that order social relations, from any analogy between human convention and the order of nature. It is the scandal of a superiority based on no other title than the very absence of superiority.

This is somewhat reminiscent of the “blind break” argument for sortition (by eliminating all reasons for selection, bad reasons are eliminated as well). Later on, for example, Rancière emphasizes the fact that when using sortition seeking power is not a prerequisite to attaining it. But the tone here is quite different. The emphasis is on rejecting traditional or “natural” reasons, reasons that dominate social relations throughout, reasons that justify the elevated status of established elites. It is the rejection of those traditional reasons that scandalizes those elites, as well as many among the masses who have internalized the justness or naturalness of those “distinctions”.

Filed under: Academia, Athens, Books, Sortition, Theory | 9 Comments »

The puppet show of modern accountability: How allotment could help

Posted on July 11, 2023 by Nicholas Gruen

The more I’ve thought about sortition or as I call it “representation by sampling” the more profound I find the ways it differs from representation by election. The latter is inherently competitive and performative and both these things tend to undermine the bona fides of people’s contribution to discussion. They minimise rewards for listening and maximise the rewards for assertive speech.

Performance, especially performance before those with greater power saturates our daily lives. Hence the following passage from an anonymous local government bureaucrat.

I spent 10 years of my life writing. I wrote neighbourhood plans, partnership strategies, the Local Area Agreement, stretch targets, the Sustainable Community Strategy, sub-regional infrastructure plans, funding bids, monitoring documents, the Council Plan and service plans.

I have a confession to make. Much of it was made up. It was fudged, spun, copied and pasted, cobbled together and attractively formatted. I told lies in themes, lies in groups, lies in pairs, strategic lies, operational lies, cross-cutting lies. I wrote hundreds of pages of nonsense. Some of it was my own, but most of it was collated from my colleagues across the organisation and brought together into a single document.

Why did I do it? …[B]ecause it was my job.

The Greek political principle of parrhēsia is directed specifically against this kind of tendency — in our language it is the taking of risk to speak truth to power. But it is a distinctly modern form of speech — in which the warrant for its truthfulness (whether scientific or political) is not its persuasiveness to others, but it’s truthfulness to the speaker — it is the speaking of one’s own truth, and that truth is demonstrated by the speaker’s heedlessness of the consequences of his truth-telling.

In any event, in the discussion recorded above I argue the scope for sortition to help us escape from this trap. The audio file is also available here.

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

Psychologizing the electoralist phenomenon

Posted on June 24, 2023 by Yoram Gat

Steve Taylor, a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Leeds Beckett University wrote a piece in The Conversation offering his explanation for trouble with the electorlist system. Taylor writes:

The ancient Greeks practised direct democracy. It literally was “people power”. And they took measures specifically to ensure that ruthless, narcissistic people were unable to dominate politics.

Recent political events show that we have a great deal to learn from the Athenians. Arguably, a key problem in modern times is that we aren’t stringent enough about the people we allow to become politicians.

There’s a great deal of research showing that people with negative personality traits, such as narcissism, ruthlessness, amorality or a lack of empathy and conscience, are attracted to high-status roles, including politics.

In a representative democracy, therefore, the people who put themselves forward as representatives include a sizeable proportion of people with disordered personalities – people who crave power because of their malevolent traits.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Athens, Elections, History, Press, Sortition, Theory | 25 Comments »

Peter Jones: The lost art of persuasion

Posted on June 9, 2023 by Yoram Gat

In his column “Ancient and Modern” published in the Spectator Australia, Peter Jones warns his readers against the “Maoist re-education” of the young, generated by the “cancellation” tactics wielded by those “urging gender changes on children who rather feel like it”. In the process, Jones gives his readers a sketch of the Athenian system, including its reliance on sortition, presenting it as a model of good government, where policy was decided based on debate, persuasion and “peaceful agreement”, rather than the outrageous tactics he decries.

Despite mentioning selection by lot, Jones ignores the role of the allotted Council in Athenian politics. When talking about “the all-powerful Assembly” Jones does not consider the question of whether this Assembly in reality provided an arena where isegoria was more than a formality. It also remains unclear whether Jones advocates for the radical change that would be required in order to turn the Western political system into something that is more akin to the Athenian system and providing “more political control over tyrants and oligarchs”. His focus on activists causing an “uproar and silently glueing [themselves] to tarmac” may indicate that leaving those aside we are already living in a system which embodies the ideals of democracy. An off-handed comment about the “rights” of free speech being “rescindable” may also provide a hint regarding Jones’s mindset.

What would ancient Greeks have made of the current protests relating to the oil industry and identity reassignment? Very little indeed.

The Greek invention of democracy (‘people power’) emerged in the late 6th century bc after strong popular demand for more political control over tyrants and oligarchs. The result was a system in which all male citizens over 18 debated and determined all political questions in the regular Assemblies. Most official posts were held, usually for one year, by citizens who presented themselves for selection by lot (voting was considered meritocratic, not democratic), with serious consequences for failure.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Athens, Elections, History, Press, Sortition | 10 Comments »

Bertrand Russell on Athenian democracy

Posted on March 31, 2023 by Yoram Gat

In his 1945 book History of Western Philosophy Betrand Russell writes the following (p. 74):

Athenian democracy, though it had the grave limitation of not including slaves or women, was in some respects more democratic than any modern system. Judges and most executive officers were chosen by lot, and served for short periods; they were thus average citizens like our jurymen, with the prejudices and lack of professionalism characteristic of average citizens.

It is remarkable that the reason given for the Athenian system being more democratic than modern systems is not the standard superficial argument about the Assembly voting directly on laws. Russell’s appeal to the fact that Athenian judges and officers had, as a result of being chosen by lot, the same outlook as the average citizen is an adumbration of Manin’s pure theory of elections (“the principle of distinction”).

Filed under: Academia, Athens, Books, Elections, History, Sortition, Theory | 1 Comment »

« Previous Page — Next Page »