How did Van Reybrouck know about lottocracy?

Posted on November 1, 2014 by avanderven

On Sunday, September 29th 2013 in a Dutch TV series named Buitenhof the word Lottocracy (Dutch: lottocracy), although casually, for the first time was used in public in Holland. There was an interview with David Van Reybrouck about his new book ‘Against elections’. Great, that the idea of ​​Lottocracy was mentioned for the first time in the Dutch media. The broadcast can be viewed by clicking below:

http://www.uitzendinggemist.nl/afleveringen/1368517

However, van Reybrouck did not mention in the program nor in his book, that the idea of ​​lottocracy has already been discussed extensively in the book ‘The World Solution for World Problems’, especially in the chapter ‘A Concept for Government’. The book was already published in 1988. The book is available as an electronic book at:

http://www.picarta.nl/

The book can also be read directly on Internet at the address:

http://www.socsci.kun.nl/~advdv/leonbook/leonbook.html
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Filed under: Books, Elections, Sortition | Leave a comment »

English translation of part of David Van Reybrouck’s book Against Elections

Posted on October 24, 2014 by tbouricius

A section of Belgian author David Van Reybrouck’s sortition book, Against Elections has been translated into English and posted online:

Representative democracy is in crisis. Low voter turnout, abstention, falling party membership, and the phenomenal rise of populist parties – these are the symptoms of Democratic Fatigue Syndrome. Considering democratic innovation from classical Athens to present day, it becomes apparent that our democratic institutions haven’t been updated since the late 18th century. How to renew the centralised, hierarchical party system to reflect the horizontal power relationships of the hyper-connected, interactive society of the 21st century? A bi-representative system, combining elections with the democratic principle of sortition, or drawing of lots, could steer democracy into smoother waters.
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Filed under: Books, Elections, Press, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Stokes, Dromi and democracy

Posted on October 8, 2014 by Yoram Gat

Susan C. Stokes, a professor of political science at Yale university, is the author of a book called Mandates and Democracy: Neoliberalism by Surprise in Latin America.

I find the following excerpts from a chapter called “Explaining policy switches” generally amusing and rather illuminating about the practice of political science (I introduced some light editing to improve readability of the excerpts):

[B]oth qualitative evidence from campaigns and statistical analysis of cross-sectional data offer evidence that fear of losing elections induced politicians to hide their policy intentions.

Yet evidence of this belief structure does not adjudicate between the representative and the rent-seeking model of policy switches. Both kinds of politicians are expected to hide their true intetions to win office. The critical question is, Did they dissimulate and switch because they thought efficiency policies were in the best interest of voters or because they found efficiency policies advantageous for themselves, whether or not they would be good for voters?
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Filed under: Academia, Books, Elections, History | 5 Comments »

The Vergne lotteries literature database

Posted on July 1, 2014 by Yoram Gat

Antoine Vergne has shared his database of lotteries related literature. The database currently contain 365 items touching on a variety of topics related to distribution-by-lot and sortition, covering theory, practice, history and advocacy, and ranging in time from antiquity to the present.

For those who are interested to access the list, it is available in bibliographical format and as a report.

The database is managed as a Zotero library. Readers who wish to help manage and extend the database are invited to leave contact information below or to email me (the address is here).

Filed under: Academia, Books, Distribution by lot, History, Juries, meta, Press, Proposals, Sortition | Tagged: | 5 Comments »

Dahl: Is Minority Domination Inevitable?

Posted on June 10, 2014 by keithsutherland

In most of the sciences – whether human, social or natural – there is a symbiotic relationship between theoretical and quantitative approaches. Einstein would not have formulated the theory of special relativity had the Michelson-Morley experiment confirmed the existence of the aether wind. The academic study of politics, however, bucks this trend as theorists and political scientists rarely talk to each other. This is primarily because the term ‘political theory’ is generally preceded by the adjective ‘normative’, so a conversation between theorists and polsci professors might well be seen as a contravention of the naturalistic fallacy.

This is self-evidently the case in the field of social theory, dominated by the long shadow of Rawls and still dedicated to the study of ‘57 varieties of luck egalitarianism’ (Waldron, 2013, p. 21). But why should it apply to democratic theory? – common-sense would dictate this should be a combination of normative and descriptive work, as most modern poleis claim to be democracies. Yet the upgrade panel for my own PhD (on representation and sortition) advised me to choose between the theoretical and empirical literature and not to seek to reconcile the two. The recent thread on this blog discussing Gilens and Page’s claim to have disproved the median voter theorem is a good indication of the sharp divide between the two literatures.
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Filed under: Academia, Books, Elections, Theory | 26 Comments »

Philo Judaeus advises against sortition

Posted on June 7, 2014 by Yoram Gat

Philo Judaeus was a Hellenistic Jewish philosopher who lived in Alexandria, in the Roman province of Egypt, in the first century BC and first century AD. The following passages are taken from Philo’s A Treatise on Those Special Laws Which Are Contained Under and Have Reference to the Eighth and Ninth, and Tenth Commandments.. In them he repeats the competence argument against sortition which Xenophon attributes to Socrates. Philo adds an argument against sortition and in favor of elections from Biblical authority.

XXIX. (151) Some persons have contended that all magistracies ought to have the officers appointed to them by lot; which however is a mode of proceeding not advantageous for the multitude, for the casting of lots shows good fortune, but not virtue; at all events many unworthy persons have often obtained office by such means, men whom, if a good man had the supreme authority, he would not permit to be reckoned even among his subjects: Continue reading →

Filed under: Athens, Books, History, Religion, Sortition | Tagged: | 20 Comments »

Manuel Arriaga: Rebooting Democracy

Posted on May 15, 2014 by Yoram Gat

A review of Manuel Arriaga’s Rebooting Democracy: a citizen’s guide to reinventing politics

Rebooting Democracy is a short and enjoyable book (available at Amazon; the first 50 pages are available online). Its introduction explicitly positions it as being motivated by the sentiments of the Occupy protests and the author’s proposals as responding to those sentiments. Like the Occupy protests Arriaga’s message is to a considerable extent anti-electoral:

[V]oting out one politician or party to bring in a different one will not solve our problems. Time has made it clear that this is not merely an issue of casting. If the play stinks, replacing the actors will not make it any better.

The first two chapters present an explanation of why the Western electoral system does not serve “us”. Arriaga summarizes his explanation with the following two points:

1) We have delegated power to the political class and hardly supervise it.

2) As voters, we are condemned to unreflective and easy-to-influence decision-making. Even if we were inclined to effectively supervise politicians, this would severely limit our ability to do so.

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Filed under: Books, Elections, Initiatives, Proposals, Sortition | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | 27 Comments »

The Warm, Fuzzy Side of Sortition: When Deliberation Goes Right

Posted on April 21, 2014 by Ahmed R. Teleb

Has anyone read Tom Atlee’s Empowering Public Wisdom: A Practical Vision of Citizen-Led Politics? Chapter 5 is called “Citizenship and Randomly Selected Ad Hoc Mini-Publics.”

Tom’s been an advocate of sortition for decades and it seems there hasn’t yet been a discussion of his thought on Equality by Lot. Beyond being a long-time advocate of “Citizen Deliberative Councils” and other sorts of minipublics, he has deep insights into group dynamics—the conditions under which groups go beyond simple bargaining and reach something closer to creative wisdom.

In my humble opinion, there’s an inadvertent academic bias on this blog that leaves out significant work from activists and non-academic writers like Tom. I think it would serve us well to do otherwise.

To that end I will list some brilliant ideas I’ve gleaned from his latest book, Empowering Public Wisdom (2012), and from reading some of his blog.
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Filed under: Applications, Books, Experiments, meta, Sortition | Tagged: , , , | 18 Comments »

Sortition Here?

Posted on April 17, 2014 by peterstone

Is anyone familiar with John Rachel’s An Unlikely Truth? I haven’t read it, but I’m told the author is some sort of sortition fan.

Filed under: Books, Elections, Proposals, Sortition | Leave a comment »

Gilens and Page: Average citizens have no political influence

Posted on April 16, 2014 by Yoram Gat

Keith McDonnell and Terry Bouricius wrote to point out the following.

Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page have a new paper titled “Testing theories of American politics: elites, interest Groups, and average citizens”. The paper continues the work of Gilens analyzing the correlation between public opinion and policy (see his 2005 paper “Inequality and democratic responsiveness” and a book on the same theme, Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America).

The previous work found that any correlation between public sentiments and policy is completely mediated by elite opinion (where “elite” is defined as top decile of income). The new paper adds to the analysis the position of interest groups and again finds that elites dominate policy making. The abstract is as follows:

Abstract

Each of four theoretical traditions in the study of American politics – which can be characterized as theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy, Economic Elite Domination, and two types of interest group pluralism, Majoritarian Pluralism and Biased Pluralism – offers different predictions about which sets of actors have how much influence over public policy: average citizens; economic elites; and organized interest groups, mass-based or business-oriented.

A great deal of empirical research speaks to the policy influence of one or another set of actors, but until recently it has not been possible to test these contrasting theoretical predictions against each other within a single statistical model. This paper reports on an effort to do so, using a unique data set that includes measures of the key variables for 1,779 policy issues.

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.

Filed under: Academia, Books, Elections, Opinion polling, Participation | 5 Comments »

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