Distribution by lot | Equality by lot

The Triumph of Election

Posted on April 11, 2011 by keithsutherland

Why did the American founders ignore the case for sortition? It was well known at the time that sortition was one of the primary mechanisms of Athenian democracy and this explains why Madison and his Federalist chums (who were no democrats) ignored it. But even Antifederalists (who argued the democratic case for descriptive representation) failed to propose sortition as a means to establish a legislature that was a ‘portrait in miniature’ of the whole community. According to Bernard Manin it was philosophy – in the form of the Natural Right theory of consent – that was the principle cause of the ‘triumph of election’ (Manin, 1997, Ch.2). But is this true?

James Fishkin points out that the etymological root of ‘deliberation’ (deliberationem) is ‘weighing’ (2009, p.35), so when a randomly-selected assembly member of an allotted chamber (AC) ‘like me’ weighs up the arguments and judges accordingly then I am descriptively represented. But is it possible to take this further and argue that I thereby consent to the judgment of a randomly-selected assembly? The argument for this further claim would need to take the following lines (paraphrasing Fishkin, 2009):

Someone ‘like’ me would, ex hypothesi, exercise judgment in the same way that I would myself. The argument does not require a definition of the ‘likeness’ criteria (age, gender, occupation, political preferences etc.), as the randomization process in principle reflects the incidence of any quality in the general population.
The number of representatives ‘like me’ in an allotted assembly would be proportionate to the number in the general population. If the sample is not sufficiently fine-grained to accurately reflect the distribution of any quality deemed to be salient to the exercise of political judgment then the sample numbers would need to be increased accordingly: only a relatively small sample would be needed to provide an accurate gender balance, whereas the proportional representation of, say, albinos or molecular microbiologists would require a larger sample. The rapid growth of the polling industry is a testimonial to the accuracy and validity of the probability sampling principle.
Therefore the aggregate judgment of the allotted assembly would represent the considered judgment of the whole population. This was the principle behind the nomothetai (legislative assemblies) introduced in fourth-century Athens.
All electors are currently deemed to consent to the results of a general election, whether or not ‘their’ candidate was victorious; so the same principle should apply to the result of a vote in an allotted assembly (the only difference being the employment of one or other of the two mechanisms – election or sortition – that constitute a ‘ballot’.) Although one might argue that the ‘consent’ involved is at best tacit, hypothetical (or some other form of ‘useful fiction’), the same is true in both instances of the ‘ballot’.

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Filed under: Distribution by lot, Elections, History, Sortition | 36 Comments »

Conall Boyle on university admittance: (2) what merit?

Posted on April 7, 2011 by Yoram Gat

Selecting school entrants by IQ and no other criterion is a good example of a meritocratic system.

Conall Boyle, Lotteries for Education

Conall Boyle sees admitting students to universities based on standardized test scores as being a meritocratic policy. This is so, according to Boyle, since standardized test scores are a good (indeed, the only) predictor of probability of graduation. There seems to be an obvious gap here: it is far from clear why high probability of graduation can be considered “merit”. Boyle rejects “good works” (such as doing volunteer work for good causes), for example, as being “false merit”, because it is not a predictor of probability of graduation. This seems like an unusual use of the term “merit” – a more suitable term perhaps is “potential” or “promise”.

Even then, we are obviously dealing with “promise” of a rather peculiar nature: “promise to graduate”. Boyle sees such promise-based policy as being justified by considerations of efficiency: there is a limited number of slots at the university, the public has an interest to have as many as possible of those slots turn into graduates rather than turn into dropouts. But, again, there is an obvious gap: producing graduates cannot be a good by itself since the university could easily produce more graduates (or fewer graduates) by changing the graduation requirements. The real objective of a university education is something different. Admittedly, an examination of what exactly is that objective would be a rather complicated and potentially controversial task. However, without undertaking this task it would be rather difficult to support the claim that the promise of good grades provides utility for society.

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Filed under: Books, Distribution by lot, schools | 11 Comments »

Conall Boyle on university admittance: (1) why lotteries?

Posted on March 26, 2011 by Yoram Gat

I do not for one moment disagree with the principle that Merit alone should determine university entrance. Rather it is the form of merit used that I would disagree with.

Conall Boyle, Lotteries for Education

In Lotteries for Education Conall Boyle presents a case for using lotteries to supplement standardized test scores as the criterion for admission to universities. He first informs us that it is an empirical fact that such test scores (somewhat inconsistently, I think, covering both IQ tests and subject area exams) are not only the best predictor of university academic performance and graduation rates (explaining about 50% of the variance), but the only predictor of any validity (interviews and extra-curricular activities, for example, having no predictive power at all). Having made this point, Boyle sees it as his main task to convince his readers that having standardized test scores as the only entrance criterion should be avoided.

This task Boyle approaches in various ways throughout the book. In the ultimate chapter three arguments are presented:

A lottery is a “practical and efficient” way to handle borderline cases. That is, it is an easy way to differentiate between applicants whose scores are identical, or are so close that differences in their expected academic performance are negligible.
Accepting the top-scoring quota every year creates “inter-temporal unfairness” in the sense that the cutoff point will fluctuate from year to year. That is, a student with score x would be admitted one year, but another student with an identical score would not be admitted the next year.
“Balancing risk”: Boyle argues the risk of accepting students who fail to graduate should be balanced against the risk of the students who are not accepted but who would have graduated had they been accepted.

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Filed under: Books, Distribution by lot, schools | 6 Comments »

The imperceptible selection

Posted on March 24, 2011 by Yoram Gat

Sani Caleb, a lawyer and the head of the Clinic for Educational Rights at the Academic Center for Law and Business in Israel, writes in haoketz.org, a blog dealing with social issues, advocating for the use of lotteries to allocate seats in Israeli public charter schools:

The imperceptible selection

Despite the guidelines of the Ministry of Education and the judicial rulings, many schools continue to decide in effect who will win a place and who will be left outside

It was recently made public that the Ministry of Education instructed the public charter schools (the School for Nature and Environment and the School for the Arts, etc.) to avoid administering entrance exams to students entering first grade. […]

The prohibition of selection exams upon entrance to schools follows, inter alia, from the proven direct association between the social-economic status of a family and its cultural background and the educational achievements of its children. Therefore grouping students based on their educational achievements into “better” and “not as good” schools deepens the gaps and the inequalities. In order to bypass the prohibition, many schools employ inventive ways to select students, such as acquaintance interviews with the students and their parents, observations and diagnoses. The procedure is different, but in most cases the goal is unchanged – to allow the schools to decide, each school according to its own criteria, the identity of the students that are admitted. Continue reading →

Filed under: Distribution by lot, schools | 4 Comments »

What Sortition Can and Cannot Do

Posted on March 3, 2011 by keithsutherland

There is considerable disagreement regarding the political potential of sortition. Dowlen (2008) argues that sortition is not primarily a system of representation as its invention in classical time predates the discovery of probability. Fishkin (2009) has long advocated sortition as a method of deliberative polling but has not (to date) suggested that it should be incorporated permanently into the system of governance. A host of writers (including the present author) have argued that sortition should either replace or supplement the institutions of electoral democracy as part of a mixed constitutional settlement. At the opposite end of the spectrum to Fishkin a small number of brave souls (mostly active on this blog) have argued for the wholesale replacement of electoral democracy by sortition. In this post I argue that, for purely conceptual reasons, the role of sortition can only be one, albeit an essential, part of a mixed constitution and that the attempt to extend its usage beyond this role undermines any claims that it may have to be a democratic mechanism. My case is based on some partially developed arguments in Pitkin (1967).

In her book The Concept of Representation, Hannah Pitkin argues that there are a variety of aspects to representation – aesthetic, symbolic, formalistic, descriptive and active – the latter two being the most relevant to political representation. Descriptive representation involves “standing for” and requires a degree of identity between the representative and her constituency, as evidenced by contemporary demands for all-women candidate shortlists and positive discrimination on account of ethnic minorities. Random selection is the best way of achieving descriptive representation, hence James Fishkin’s choice of this method for his Deliberative Polling programme. On the other hand, Active representation requires the representative (in a similar manner to a trustee or advocate) to act in the interests of her constituents; there is no intrinsic need for the representative to in any way mirror their identity, thereby justifying electoral representation in single-member constituencies. According to Pitkin, descriptive representation does not cover what the representatives do, while active representation is indifferent to who does it.
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Filed under: Distribution by lot, Elections, History, Initiatives | 55 Comments »

Do people like lotteries for allocation?

Posted on February 18, 2011 by Conall Boyle

David Teira of Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (Madrid) asks

Sorry if my question is too simple, but I’d be grateful if anyone pointed out the references of empirical studies on our taste for lotteries in the allocation of scarce goods. Are there people who do not like lotteries as allocation mechanisms, independently of whether they are fair or not?

Filed under: Distribution by lot, Experiments, Opinion polling | 3 Comments »

Inshallah

Posted on February 15, 2011 by keithsutherland

Our ongoing debate on Egypt got me thinking about the connection (or lack of it) between sortition and religion. Fustel de Coulanges’ 1864 account, that lot was the revelation of divine will, was discredited by Headlam in 1891 and nobody has sought to revive it. Similarly, as Conall Boyle points out in his edition of Gataker, lotteries were only acceptable in the Judaeo-Christian tradition in so far as they didn’t involve claims about divine revelation.

On the other hand Oliver Dowlen argues that the disappearance of lot may well be connected with religious factors, as sortition appears to have been a victim of the Reformation:

There are many reasons why the process of selecting nominators by lot might have been lost in the transition from Venice to the New World. . . The drawing of the lottery was very much a public process, witnessed by the whole community or reggimento. To the puritan settlers this could have seemed a very foreign, bizarre public ritual which smacked of superstition – even Catholicism. The secret ballot, on the other hand, conformed to the Protestant ideal that the private individual should be alone in his judgement and answerable only to God. (Dowlen, Political Potential of Sortition, p.163)

The question that I’m leading up to – and it’s no more than that – is would sortition-based politics be more acceptable to Muslim sensibilities than (Western) electoral politics, and might this possibly account for the failure of electoral democracy in the Arab world?

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Filed under: Distribution by lot, History, Proposals, Sortition | 21 Comments »

The Party’s Over: Blueprint for a Very English Revolution

Posted on February 3, 2011 by keithsutherland

Greg requested an outline of my structural proposals for the introduction of sortition, so here goes. It’s a talk I gave recently to the University of Brighton Philosophy Society. The focus is the UK parliament, but the principles are more general.

It’s become a commonplace that our political arrangements are in bad shape. Party leaders know we’ve twigged that there is no connection between manifesto commitments and actual policies, yet for some reason we don’t call their bluff – those of us who still turn out to vote give politicians the benefit of the doubt by maintaining that polite fiction called democracy. Party membership has declined catastrophically since the middle of the last century – parties now do little more than reflect what focus groups say we want, rather than continuing to stand for a particular manner of thinking, or specific socio-economic interests. So what is the point of the party?

The argument that I want to put forward this evening is that tinkering around with the electoral system by introducing AV or proportional representation is just re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. What is needed is clear thinking, we need to bring to bear the tools of the philosopher via:

A clear analysis of the relevant concepts and categories
A thorough understanding of the history of political thought

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Filed under: Distribution by lot, Elections, Initiatives, Proposals | 51 Comments »

The Enfranchisement Lottery – a commentary

Posted on December 18, 2010 by keithsutherland

I assume that everyone has by now read Claudio López-Guerra’s excellent paper. It was circulated on Conall Boyle’s email list and is available from the author: claudio.lopezguerra@cide.edu. The paper compares the enfranchisement lottery with universal suffrage and concludes that, although the former is clearly an improvement from an epistemic point of view (ensuring that voters are properly informed), universal suffrage wins on account of being more conducive to political stability. I would like to make the alternative case – the epistemic benefits come out on top because political stability is ensured by factors other than the ‘perceived fairness’ of universal suffrage.

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Filed under: Distribution by lot, Elections, Proposals, Sortition | 9 Comments »