Books | Equality by lot

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 »

Through Sortition to democracy

Posted on September 11, 2023 by theodorestathis

Sortition is a tool and not an end in itself. For that matter democracy, a super tool, is not an end in itself either. What is an end in itself is the welfare of all, not of the few, nor of the many, but for all people in a community, in a region, in a nation, in the planet. This can only be achieved if the well-known axiomatic principles of democracy can be satisfied. Having this always in our mind we will avoid into falling into a dogmatic trap, into which Adam Smith and his followers or Marx and his followers fell.

The introduction of sortition with constraints to politics was done by the ancient Greeks in Athens, around 509 B.C., for the purpose of serving the first democratic system of government instituted by Klisthenis. That first experiment of democracy was partially successful, mainly because sortition was used to select political officers. What prevented it from succeeding in all of its objectives were the workings of the citizens’ assembly.

The objective of using sortition in politics is to obtain assemblies of political officers that will be free from any dependence, especially the type of dependence that is a result of collusion or corruption. On the basis that the tool of election, always, produces collusion and corruption, if we really are for democracy, the option is one that of sortition with appropriate constraints. The use of constraints is necessary in order for the process to be completed successfully and thus for those noble objectives of democracy to become a reality. The constraints come in the form of prerequisites which have to be satisfied by those who will be allotted for the assembly.

Today in most of the countries of the planet political parties is the basis of all political activities. So, if we want to make a peaceful transition from today’s so called democracies to real democracies, we have to start with what we have. The first job we all have to do is obtain, eventually, political parties that will be freed from all the types of cliques that dance with collusion and corruption, so as to operate democratically. This can be achieved by using an appropriate sortition process, instead of elections, for selecting the members of all the party organs. This constitutes a major step towards democracy, which will bring more people to party activities which now stay out of them because of the operations of the cliques. A development of this type will further enhance the quality of representation, which will be also reflected in assemblies like parliaments and city hall councils. Changes of this sort in party operations need no constitutional changes for them to proceed. Political parties may not like this idea, but they may be forced to follow once new parties start appearing with these new democratic face. More details on this can be found in my book A Therapy for Dying Democracies, published by Dorrance Publishing Co., USA.

Filed under: Books, Sortition | 7 Comments »

Irish higher education minister laments the cruelty of random selection

Posted on September 1, 2023 by Yoram Gat

It turns out that entry to higher education programs (“courses”) in Ireland is determined by attaining some cutoff grade. Due to “grade inflation” many programs find themselves over-subscribed and select candidates via a lottery. The Irish higher education Minister Simon Harris expressed his misgivings about the use of random selection:

Random selection can be a particularly cruel and difficult way that you get the max points perhaps required, but you still find yourself not guaranteed a place in the course.

Mr. Harris’s empathy toward the anguish of those with good grades not having a guaranteed place is rather moving. Such students must be more anguished, it seems, than those who are denied a place in a program because they do not meet the cutoff grade.

For more on the convoluted elitist logic behind such statements, see my three part review of Connal Boyle’s book Lotteries for Education.

Filed under: Academia, Applications, Books, Distribution by lot, education, Press, schools | Leave a comment »

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 »

Larry Bartels wants democratic theory to focus on elites

Posted on July 23, 2023 by Yoram Gat

Larry Bartels is an American political scientist. In 2016 he published, together with Christopher Achen, the book Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government, in which the authors argued that voters can’t really tell what’s good for themselves. One possible takeaway from this argument could have been that elections are not a democratic mechanism. A recent interview with Bartels, on the occasion of the publication of a new book of his, indicates that he draws a very different conclusion. Bartels gives up on the people altogether (“they are what they are”) and wants to focus democratic theory on the behavior of elites.

I think what we need is a theory of democracy that has some real understanding of, on one hand, the inevitable power and leeway of political elites and, on the other hand, the goals they should strive to achieve when they exercise that power. Much of our thinking about democracy is very focused on ordinary citizens and what they should or shouldn’t be doing in their role in the process.

I’ve come increasingly to think that that’s a futile exercise. Ordinary people are pretty much what they are. We have a pretty good sense of how they behave. There are a lot of commonalities in their behavior across political systems with different cultures and different institutions. In all those places, regardless of the role of citizens, it’s the political leaders who really call the shots. So what we need is a better understanding of what democratic leadership entails, and how institutions can be made not to ensure, but at least to increase the probability that leaders will govern in enlightened ways, and on behalf of the interests of ordinary citizens.

Bartels ends on an overtly aristocratic note, where, perhaps taking a page from the Chinese, he wants to cultivate better elites. But at the same time he is overtly pessimistic and warns his audience that we should not expect too much from democracy.

[W]hat would a better system of democracy look like? I don’t have the answer to that. I do have the sense that we tend to focus too much on trying to avoid every conceivable threat to democracy and to imagine that if only we got the system and the rules right, that the system would operate happily in perpetuity. I think in reality there’s a huge gray area between democracy and autocracy, and lots of different dimensions in which democracies perform better or worse. Maybe the sense that a lot of people in the U.S. and elsewhere have now that we’re in a period of crisis is a belated recognition that democracy in all times and places is partial and risky and chancy.

[W]hat we really have to focus on is how we can socialize leaders to want the right things, and constrain them to avoid the worst excesses of misuse of power in political systems.

Filed under: Academia, Books, Elections, Press, Theory | 1 Comment »

Malkin on Greek allotment

Posted on June 3, 2023 by Yoram Gat

Irad Malkin is a prominent Israeli classicist. He has already been mentioned twice on Equality by Lot, when in 2013 and 2014 he penned op-ed pieces advocating for the use of sortition as a tool of democracy. It seems that lottery and its role in Ancient Greek society has become Malkin’s main focus of research over the last few years. The product of this research is a forthcoming book called “Greeks Drawing Lots: from Egalitarianism to Democracy”.

A first taste of Malkin’s research is already available in the form of a chapter in a book published last year edited by Sofia Greaves and Andrew Wallace-Hadrill and titled “Rome and the Colonial City: Rethinking the Grid”. The chapter written by Malkin is called “Reflections on egalitarianism and the foundation of Greek poleis“. It opens as follows:

When Greeks founded new settlements, they were facing the question of how to distribute plots of land to individual settlers. The main reason individuals joined a new foundation was to get such a plot of land (klêros), regardless of other reasons for colonisation. Back home, two brothers would need to share a klêros through partible inheritance by lot. However, if one brother stayed and another left for a new settlement abroad, both would have ended up, each, with a viable klêros. In and of itself, a klêros provides a basis for livelihood and a mutually recognised share of political and military power within the community. Practices of Greek colonisation are parallel to the Greek practice of ‘partible inheritance by lot’, since the same general principles and structures apply to both when it comes to land distribution: equality before the chance of the lottery, and, when possible, equality (sometimes equitability) of the size of the klêros.

From this we learn, if I understand correctly, that (like the English word “lot”?!) the word “klêros”, as in the randomizing machine “klêroterion”, meant in the first place a piece of fertile land, and the use of this word for randomization is derived from the custom of using the lottery for the distribution of such lands.

Malkin’s main thesis appears to be that the lottery was an embodiment of an egalitarian ideology. This ideology was especially influential in newly established colonies was in competition with oligarchization trends in more established settlements. It is this ideology that eventually, over the course of hundreds of years, developed into the Greek democracy.
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Filed under: Academia, Books, Distribution by lot, History, Press, Sortition | 3 Comments »

Martin Wolf: Citizens’ juries can help fix democracy

Posted on May 29, 2023 by Yoram Gat

Sortition has found a fairly prominent advocate in the Financial Times‘s Martin Wolf. Wolf was introduced to the idea by Nicholas Gruen and is highly influenced by him. Wolf has written a book offering sortition as a solution to “ailing Western polities”. His prominent position and impeccable institutional credentials make him possibly the most prominent promoter of sortition in the Anglophone world.

Wolf is now repeating his argument in an article in the Financial Times. In particular he is implying that the “failure” of Brexit would not have happened if the decision whether to leave or remain were made by an allotted body. But Wolf goes farther and proposes a permanent allotted chamber with not insignificant powers.

“Brexit has failed.” This is now the view of Nigel Farage, the man who arguably bears more responsibility for the UK’s decision to leave the EU than anybody else. He is right, not because the Tories messed it up, as he thinks, but because it was bound to go wrong. The question is why the country made this mistake. The answer is that our democratic processes do not work very well. Adding referendums to elections does not solve the problem. But adding citizens’ assemblies might.

In my book, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, I follow the Australian economist Nicholas Gruen in arguing for the addition of citizens’ assemblies or citizens’ juries. These would insert an important element of ancient Greek democracy into the parliamentary tradition.
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Filed under: Books, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 12 Comments »

Engines of oligarchy: me and Hugh Pope on the Keys to Democracy

Posted on May 28, 2023 by Nicholas Gruen

One of my favourite discussions so far with journalist, scholar and gentleman Hugh Pope. As readers of this site will know, Hugh has just brought to publication The Keys to Democracy: Sortition as a Model for Citizen Power, a book written by his father in 1990. But being well ahead of its time, the book was unpublishable. It pursued Aristotle’s point that elections installed a governing class and were therefore oligarchic. The institution that democracy represented the people was selection by lot as embodied today in legal juries. And it has a delicious fondness for G. K. Chesterton’s idea that, like a hostess, “democracy is bringing the shy people out”. You’ll also see me learning profound new things — like the fact that one of the things democracy is about is how you change your mind.

If you’d rather just listen to the audio file, it’s here.

Filed under: Books, Sortition | 13 Comments »

Bouricius: The Trouble With Elections

Posted on May 18, 2023 by Yoram Gat

In former lives, Terry Bouricius was an elected politician in the US state of Vermont and an electoral reformer. In the present, Terry is a sortition advocate and a regular commenter on this blog. Among other activities, he has published an influential paper offering a multi-body sortition-based government system. In addition, it turns out, Terry has also been writing a book which he is now about to start publishing in installments on democracycreative.substack.com. You can sign up to get notified as new chapters are published.

Filed under: Books, Press, Sortition | Leave a comment »

Interview with the Classical Republican

Posted on May 12, 2023 by peterstone

I was interviewed some time ago about sortition for the Classical Republican. It was a wide-ranging conversation that included discussion of this blog. The interview is now on Youtube, and can be viewed here. Note that the Classical Republican has an entire Youtube playlist devoted to sortition which features, in addition to my interview, an extended conversation with longtime sortition advocate Oliver Dowlen and other interesting videos. The playlist can be found here.