Deliberation | Equality by lot

Listen up, ruling elites: It’s not enough to be for the people, you must be with the people

Posted on May 16, 2025 by Yoram Gat

Clearly, “by the people” is a non-starter, so Nathan Gardels advises those readers of Noema magazine who are members of the benevolent, if a bit misguided, elites that if they wish to stem the rise of the authoritarian strongmen they better be “with” the people.

The rigid polarization that has gripped our societies and eroded trust in each other and in governing institutions feeds the appeal of authoritarian strongmen. Poised as tribunes of the people, they promise to lay down the law (rather than be constrained by it) […]

The embryonic forms of this next step in democratic innovation, such as citizens’ assemblies or virtual platforms for bringing the public together and listening at scale, have so far been mostly advisory to the powers-that-be, with no guarantee that citizen input will have a binding impact on legislation or policy formation. That is beginning to change.

[This takes us] a step closer to government “with” the people instead of just “for” the people […]

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Filed under: Deliberation, Elections, Participation, Press, Sortition | Tagged: Adressing the elites | Leave a comment »

Just sortition, communitarian deliberation

Posted on May 1, 2025 by Yoram Gat

A new paper by Nicole Curato, Amiltone Luís, Melisa Ross, and Lucas Veloso in Environmental Science & Policy includes field work eliciting comments from people in Zambezia, Mozambique regarding their views on sortition in the context of the allotted Climate Assembly on the Climate and Ecological Emergency.

Just sortition, communitarian deliberation: Two proposals for grounded climate assemblies

Abstract

Sortition or recruiting randomly selected everyday citizens is a core feature of climate assemblies. Sortition, the argument goes, enforces the principle of inclusiveness, as everyone has a fair shot at getting invited to the climate assembly. This form of recruitment, however, faces criticism. It challenges traditional structures of representation and decision-making where elders, religious leaders, elected representatives, and community organisers typically give voice to the ideas and grievances of everyday people. For some, sortition valorises the atomised individual who can speak their mind in a forum, without any mechanism for the individual to reconnect their deliberative experience to the wider community. In this article, we draw on the experience of the province of Zambezia in Mozambique as one randomly selected Assembly Member took part in the world’s first Climate Assembly on the Climate and Ecological Emergency. Based on in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, and feedback sessions with local organisations in Zambezia, we offer practical insight on how sortition can deepen community connection and maximise the impact of climate assemblies in delivering practical outcomes for climate change adaptation. Using grounded normative theory, our study demonstrates how sortition can promote justice by elevating the voices of those most impacted by climate change. We also demonstrate why a communitarian approach to citizen assemblies enhances accountability and shared learning and empowers members to translate global deliberations into local actions.

One useful contribution of this article is a summary of the arguments for and against sortition that the authors drew from the literature.
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Filed under: Academia, Applications, Deliberation, Sortition | 25 Comments »

Goldberg, Lindell and Bachtiger: Deliberative minipublics for democratic renewal

Posted on December 6, 2024 by Yoram Gat

A new paper in the American Political Science Review covers some very well explored ground.

Empowered Minipublics for Democratic Renewal? Evidence from Three Conjoint Experiments in the United States, Ireland, and Finland

Saskia Goldberg, Marina Lindell and André Bachtiger

Abstract

This article investigates the potential of deliberative minipublics to provide a new set of institutions for democratic renewal. Using three preregistered and identical conjoint experiments in the United States, Ireland, and Finland, it first shows that minipublics are moderately attractive institutional innovations, but that in all three country contexts, citizens in general are very reluctant to grant them empowerment and autonomy as well as ask for additional provisions (such as large size or large majorities for recommendations). Subgroup analyses, however, reveal that especially participation in minipublics as well as trust in other citizens as decision-makers in combination with low political trust produces more support for empowered and autonomous minipublics. But what stands out in the empirical analysis is that most citizens want minipublics as additions to the representative system, not as a replacement of the existing democratic infrastructure, as some minipublic advocates have suggested.

As is common in this genre, the conclusions are that citizens are conservative and suspicious about giving citizen bodies decision-making power. Thus, the authors say, it is up to political experts to design institutions that would “win” the support of those citizens. Such conclusions are convenient on two counts. First, they provide cover for the conservatism of the authors themselves, and second they entrust the authors, their colleagues in academia, and their benefactors in the halls of power, with the crucial role of designing any possible reforms to the system.
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Filed under: Academia, Deliberation, Sortition | 2 Comments »

Nobel prize winning AI technology creates the “Habermas machine”

Posted on October 21, 2024 by Yoram Gat

Google DeepMind, whose AI product AlphaFold2 won the 2024 chemistry Nobel prize for the company’s founder, Demis Hassabis, has now applied its technology to create a tool they call the “Habermas machine”. The tool is described as working as a “caucus mediator,” generating summaries that outline areas of agreement of people making up a discussion group. An excerpt from an article in the MIT Techology review:

AI could help people find common ground during deliberations

Groups using Google DeepMind’s LLMs made more progress in discussing contentious issues. But the technology won’t replace human mediators anytime soon.

Reaching a consensus in a democracy is difficult because people hold such different ideological, political, and social views.

Perhaps an AI tool could help. Researchers from Google DeepMind trained a system of large language models (LLMs) to operate as a “caucus mediator,” generating summaries that outline a group’s areas of agreement on complex but important social or political issues.

The researchers say the tool — named the Habermas machine (HM), after the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas — highlights the potential of AI to help groups of people find common ground when discussing such subjects.

“The large language model was trained to identify and present areas of overlap between the ideas held among group members,” says Michael Henry Tessler, a research scientist at Google DeepMind. “It was not trained to be persuasive but to act as a mediator.” The study is being published today in the journal Science.

Filed under: Academia, Deliberation | 2 Comments »

Citizens’ assemblies and sortition

Posted on October 19, 2024 by Owen Shaffer

Should the term sortition be used as a general term that encompasses citizens’ assemblies? Or is sortition simply one of several ingredients (deliberation, for example) used in citizens’ assemblies? Is this a regional question, North America vs. Europe vs. Australia vs. etc?

Filed under: Deliberation, Sortition | 6 Comments »

Harvard produces a pure specimen of the “deliberative democracy” narrative

Posted on June 3, 2024 by Yoram Gat

Gina Goldenberg, writing for the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation in the Harvard Kennedy School, has produced a highly purified specimen of the “deliberative democracy” narrative. The article is a useful condensed aggregation of the clichés of the “deliberative democracy” genre, notable for what it does not say more than for what it does. Other than the canned vocabulary, the tropes and the omissions, another noteworthy point is the intimate/inspirational style which focuses on the personalities of supposedly brilliant elite actors on whose insights and initiative our future depends (including professionally-staged pictures, of course).

In the excerpt below, I underline terms and phrases that are typical to the genre. I find it a useful exercise to consider what those terms and phrases mean and what alternative phrasings they were chosen over. Also, to reduce the mental burden on the readers, I elide some of the intimate/inspirational verbiage.

Could deliberative democracy ameliorate democratic backsliding? Two HKS students believe it might.

As concerns for the health of democracy mount, Medha Uniyal and Kartikeya Bhatotia consider one particular “experimental democratic practice” that could increase connectivity between citizens and decision-making processes.

In their PAE [Policy Analysis Exercise], [Medha Uniyal and Kartikeya Bhatotia, students at Harvard Kennedy School (HKS)] responded to the sentiment of global democratic decline by looking for untraditional and innovative mechanisms to increase civic engagement and collect deeper citizen input through deliberative democracies. By concentrating on the deliberative model, Uniyal and Bhatotia hope to address some of the challenges that aggregate democracies face today, like extreme polarization and decreased connectivity.
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Filed under: Academia, Deliberation, education, Participation, Sortition | 4 Comments »

Trends in Theorizing Sortition

Posted on April 17, 2024 by peterstone

Delighted to see my new review essay (co-authored with Audrey Plan, one of our department’s former Ph.D. students) appear in print. The essay deals with recent theoretical work on sortition. You can check it out here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00208345241247492.

I should add that Yanina Welp, a friend of mine, is publishing shortly a similar paper in the same journal focused more on the empirical literature on sortition. Not sure when that will appear.

Filed under: Academia, Deliberation, Elections, Proposals, Sortition, Theory | 2 Comments »

Deliberation and structure

Posted on March 25, 2024 by Yoram Gat

This post is a transcript of a discussion that has been going on in email over the last few days. I suggested that we continue this on Equality-by-Lot so more people can respond if interested, and so that a public record is produced which can later be referred to. All are invited to continue the discussion in the comments thread.

The discussion was part of a longer thread, but the transcript starts with the following message from Chris Forman:

I’m leaning to the premise that it’s the sum of the daily interactions between people that adds up to the behavior of society writ large. The purpose of lotteries and deliberation is to build connectivity and relationships from which good policy flows.

A simple plan to transform US society is to hold social events with a lottery element in them. I think simply connecting random people in local communities and supporting those connection meetups with well structured events and follow up activities could be a recipe that many many civic organizations could get behind.

Could be a really useful tool for organizations trying to reach broader demographics while training people in the value of lotteries, and building up support for lotteries through direct experiences.

Could transform society.

I replied:

Meeting with random people could be fun (although it could also be tedious). But the notion that mass participation is by itself a path to democracy is unconvincing. It ignores the fact that governance takes structure. Our current non-democratic government is based on structure, and democratic government would also require structure.

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Filed under: Deliberation, Participation, Sortition | 134 Comments »

Demiocracy, Chapter 4: The Nature and Dangers of DeMockery

Posted on January 22, 2024 by Roger Knights

The “classical” justification for democracy was that it is, or should be, rule by an informed public opinion acting, after deliberation, in the public interest.

Investigations, especially by post-war political science, discovered that the democracy we have actually got is not the classical model the Founders had in mind, but in fact mostly the rule of factions and partisans, which the Founders dreaded.

Factions include organized pressure groups and other “players.” They are only fitfully concerned—truly and wisely concerned—with the public interest.

Some political scientists have called this system “pluralism” or “polyarchy” (the rule of many); others have called it “interest group liberalism.” Both have concluded that elections are a mostly ceremonial affair and that it is unrealistic to expect (width-first) democracy to function in any very different way. They have also mostly concluded that polyarchy’s scramble isn’t so bad, especially compared to totalitarianism.

They hope that they may persuade you, that since it is impossible to do any good, you may as well have your share in the profits of doing ill. —Edmund Burke, The Philosophy of Edmund Burke, p. 148.

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Filed under: Books, Deliberation, Elections, History | 2 Comments »

Chris Forman Making the Case for Deliberate Democracy in America

Posted on November 28, 2023 by Yoram Gat

Chris Forman, PhD, an Author, and Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts was interviewed on the Unity Now podcast and discussed his advocacy for Deliberative Democracy and how it relates to his work in physics. Forman discusses how he inadvertently created a deliberation process, how this process can be adopted in the West, and how we can protect it from power-hungry individuals.