Demiocracy, Chapter 3: What’s the Solution? Why

Posted on January 15, 2024 by Roger Knights

By narrowing each electorate’s topical and electoral scope, and by simultaneously and necessarily multiplying the number of electorates, we enable every issue and every candidate to be thoroughly and continuously evaluated by everyday citizens. In other words, we replace P-dominated DeMockery with demos-dominated democracy.

In addition, by restricting each legislator’s topical domain, we enable ordinary citizens, who are not typically fluent in multiple political domains (unlike members of the current “political class”), to become viable political candidates, also vastly expanding the role of the demos.

Democracy should be rule by an informed public opinion acting, after deliberation, in the public interest. But, in a mass-electorate DeMockery, the average voter will NOT be adequately informed, and will engage in little deliberation—resulting in misgovernment.

The problem with letting everybody vote too is that people are really easily manipulated and they’re really undereducated. They don’t have any incentive to pay attention to the real issues, what’s at stake and what are the consequences of each vote. They just vote with whatever feels good. And they’re busy, and they’re tired … and they don’t have the time, and they don’t have the incentive to be enlightened. They don’t have the incentive to have an objective, enlightened approach to how you handle the future of our society. —“Joe Rogan’s harsh truth about American voters” —Podcast, viewed November 6, 2023.

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Filed under: Books, Elections, Proposals, Sortition | 9 Comments »

Gallup poll: Record Low in U.S. Satisfied With Way Democracy Is Working

Posted on January 13, 2024 by Yoram Gat

Gallup finds that “satisfaction with the way democracy is working” in the U.S. has eroded dramatically over the last 4 decades.

Satisfaction has been declining among both Republicans and Democrats as well as among independents. Satisfaction is highly positively correlated with education in the latest poll, but was less so in the previous poll in 2021.

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Demiocracy, Chapter 2: What’s the Solution? How

Posted on January 13, 2024 by Roger Knights

My prescription is to “de-mass-ify” democracy by downsizing and dividing the electorate into multiple, issue-specific “Demi” (small) electorates, each responsible for a single electee. At a stroke the power of the Pernicious P’s would be cut by some 80%.

The representatives must be raised to a certain number in order to guard against the cabals of a few; and … must be limited to a certain number in order to guard against the confusion of a multitude. —The Federalist #10.

Such Demi-electorates would continuously oversee and supervise their single officeholder throughout his/her term, not just during an election campaign.

These Proxy Electorates (PEs) would meet for hours every few months, primarily over a private intranet. Each PE would hear a report from its officeholder (who would have a correspondingly limited, issue-specific scope), pose questions, hear criticisms, discuss matters among themselves, and optionally make recommendations, authorize research, and launch investigations. During intervals individual electors could add comments, do research, chat, message, query the webmaster, etc.

In other words, these PEs would not be solely electors—they would be, at the least, actively involved overseers, and at most semi-legislatures, with their electee being only a functionary, depending on their charter and their mood.

Proxy Electors would be chosen as follows. Each member of the “full” (or “base,” or “mass”) electorate would be given 10 (say) “ballots” with which he/she could nominate similar everyday citizens to be his/her Proxies; no more than three ballots could be cast for any one person, including for him/herself.

All nominations would go into a virtual “bal-lottery box,” along, optionally, with some percentage of randomly selected names—say from 20% to 50%. From the box the names of pending Proxy Electors would be drawn and put into a reserve pool.

This technique is a combination, respectively, of selection (by nomination) and sortition (the technical term for random selection in politics).

There would be four (say) tiers, or levels, of Proxy Electorates: Local, County, State, and National. Bal-lotteries would be used to promote Electors from one tier to the next-higher tier, while remaining as much as possible within a similar issue-specialty (or “topical domain”) —e.g., education, law enforcement, transportation, commerce, etc. These successive bal-lotteries would tend to sift out the invincibly ignorant, improving the quality of the remaining Proxy Electors, especially at the upper levels, where noxious numbskulls would be the most damaging.

A dozen or so single-topic legislators would make up a “Demi” (i.e., small), single-topic legislature. Twelve to thirty Demi legislatures would in turn make up a full, Omni-topic legislature, whose approval would be needed before bills passed by its Demi components became law. Its members would be elected by either Demi-legislators, or Proxy Electorates, or some combination of both.

Proxy Electors would in addition freely nominate their favorite fellow electors for promotion to the electorate at the next level up (town, county, state, nation), using the random selection method already described, which I’ve dubbed a “bal-lottery.”

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Demiocracy, Chapter 1b: The (Mass-Electoral) System Is the Problem

Posted on January 12, 2024 by Roger Knights

It’s been famously said that the general will cannot be represented—only a factionalizing “will of all.” And it’s been found, after man tore free, that Rousseau’s warning was correct.

Rousseau’s fears about representative institutions are everywhere confirmed within the politics of power: Leaders, players or actors become isolated from an audience. —Robert J. Pranger, The Eclipse of Citizenship, 1968, p. 27.

However, the general will can be incarnated in the State—“virtually” incarnated—by inserting a small, or “demitasse,” sample from the whole population. “Demiocracy” is the name I’ve adopted for this Demi-incarnated democracy.

It is rational to use a sample when using the whole would be impossible, awkward, or undesirable. We use a sample as juries for those reasons. Likewise, we use samples in focus groups, in surveys of TV viewership, and in opinion polling.

Demiocracy’s behavior will be revolutionary, though probably not (fortunately) as revolutionary as Rousseau hoped.

To make a revolution is a measure which, prima fronte, requires an apology. —Edmund Burke.

Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas. —Alfred North Whitehead.

The state begins by being absolutely a work of the imagination. Imagination is the liberating power possessed by man. —Ortega y Gasset.

All great truths begin as blasphemies. —George Bernard Shaw.

A man with a new idea is a Crank, until the idea succeeds. —Mark Twain.

A really new idea affronts current agreement. —White’s Observation.

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Filed under: Ballot measures, Elections, Proposals, Sortition, Theory | 8 Comments »

Demiocracy: A Demos-Dominant Democracy, Chapter 1a: The Founders’ Foundation—Neighborly Nomination

Posted on January 8, 2024 by Roger Knights

If a parliament … is the method, then certainly let us set about discerning the kind of suffrages, and rest no moment till we have got them. —Carlyle, A Carlyle Reader, p. 432.

The fact is, however, that no practical substitute for the present type of representative government, with its dependence on the system of permanent party organizations, has yet been devised…. —James Hogan, Election and Representation, 1945, p. 55.

The recruitment of the deserving by their “familiars” was the basis of the Founders’ political system. Therefore, LET US VOTE the way they intended: not for party politicians, but FOR FELLOW CITIZENS IN OUR “NEIGHBORHOODS”—physical, social, collegial, and familial—who deserve it—hopefully because they exhibit “the requisite wisdom and virtue.”

Let us no longer vote for a slate of presidential electors, whom we don’t know, but rather for people whom we DO. Some of these nominees would become, by random selection, our presidential electors—in other words, our designated political Proxies.

We would thereby select our choices, not settle for a pre-selected name on a menu—hopefully (because we don’t really know his character) the “Least Evil” one of the bunch. Our free selections, on the other hand, would be of better-known quantities, constituting our personal “Best Men” (and Women).

Our Proxy Electors (PEs) would constitute a new and very different Electoral College — a “Popular” one.

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America Should Be Ripe for Sortition

Posted on January 5, 2024 by Roger Knights

Here are a few instances where DeMockery has badly failed us, and where Demiocracy [to be explained later] would have done a better job—and had greater legitimacy with the public, because of its Everyman composition. The priorities of common folk are not as much warped by the Pernicious P’s. (Their relative resistance to Propaganda, for instance, was portrayed by the cynicism of the “proles” in the saloon-set scenes in 1984.)

To me, as to the alienated Greeks I posted about yesterday, these outrages are not just incidental accidents, but revelations of the essential objectionable character of the political class that is nurtured and sustained by DeMockery.

There’s no such thing as a cheap politician. — Ferdinand Lundberg, Scoundrels All, 1968.

  1. The Great Depression, Part 1. I’ve read that some officials wanted the Federal Reserve to be more hawkish in 1927, because a house of cards was a-building due to its loose credit policy. But moderating the roaring Twenties then would have impinged on the wealth of Wall Streeters and dimmed the GOP’s presidential prospects in 1928, so pressure was applied to keep the party going. Even if this speculation isn’t 100% correct, it is the SORT of thing that is likely occur under DeMockery. For instance:

    Also to blame is former President Donald Trump, who repeatedly pressured and even threatened to fire Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell to continue to keep the interest rates low to aid his re-election campaign. When Mr. Trump was first elected, the 2007-09 recession and its aftereffects had more or less ended. But he wanted low interest rates to artificially boost the economy at great expense. He met with the Fed chairman to remind him of his expectations. —Letter to the WSJ, April 10, 2023, by A. Salinity.

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

Is Greece Ripe for Sortition?

Posted on January 2, 2024 by Roger Knights

In the First World, Greece seems like the ripest country for sortition, mainly because of widespread exasperation with the entire political system in the wake of its March 2023 railway disaster.

The BBC reported on March 12, 2023:

This tragedy has shaken Greece. So many of the lives lost were young and it has unleashed a national outpouring of grief and outrage mostly directed against the country’s ruling classes. Not for the first time, Greeks feel betrayed by their politicians.

According to early polling, 87% say there are other causes beyond human error, and guilt needs to be assigned. Every day new revelations about the sordid state of Greece’s train network cause more horror, anger and distrust of the political class.

A class that neglected the rail system, privatised operations, spent millions on security systems only to let them rot and wasted vital EU funding.

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Filed under: Elections, Press, Sortition | 6 Comments »

Tom Paine’s “Common Sense” Says: “Saul Was by Lot”

Posted on January 2, 2024 by Roger Knights

Common Sense is a pamphlet written by Thomas Paine in 1775–1776 advocating independence from Great Britain to people in the Thirteen Colonies. In it he writes:

Yet I should be glad to ask how they [monarchists] suppose kings came at first? The question admits but of three answers, viz. either by lot, by election, or by usurpation. If the first king was taken by lot, it establishes a precedent for the next, which excludes hereditary succession. Saul was by lot, yet the succession was not hereditary, neither does it appear from that transaction there was any intention it ever should be. If the first king of any country was by election, that likewise establishes a precedent for the next; for to say, that the RIGHT of all future generations is taken away, by the act of the first electors, in their choice not only of a king, but of a family of kings for ever, hath no parallel in or out of scripture but the doctrine of original sin.

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Sortition in 2023

Posted on December 22, 2023 by Yoram Gat

Equality-by-Lot’s traditional yearly review post.

In terms of interest in sortition, 2023 saw a continuation of the trend of previous years. Throughout 2023, there was a steady beat of activity around the world proposing or reporting the application of sortition in various ways for various purposes, along with a stream of condemnations and warnings against the idea.

This included some fairly high profile pieces, with the most notable one being an op-ed in the New York Times. Among the most high profile applications was the French End-of-Life panel. The head of the CESE, the institution that organized this body, proposed expanding the use of allotted bodies.

While the The academics continued their back-and-forth, sortition found a new fairly high-profile advocate in Martin Wolf, the chief economics commentator at the Financial Times, who was introduced to the idea by Nicholas Gruen.

An even more influential sortition advocate this year was Yanis Varoufakis, who put allotted citizen councils as a main component of his democratization agenda. His organization, DiEM25, created a deliberative democracy collective devoted to discussing this idea.

Two notable books dealing with sortition published this year were the late Maurice Pope’s The Keys to Democracy that was originally written in the 1980’s and Yves Sintomer’s The Government of Chance.

This activity indicates a level of interest that is generally comparable to that of the last couple of years. There is a persisting sense of recovery of the prevailing elections-based system from the crisis of 2016 which diminishes any immediate interest in sortition as a tool for contending with popular discontent. As long as there is no widespread unrest, it is likely that interest in sortition will continue to simmer. However, it is important that sortition activists continue to look for ways to spread awareness of the idea in the population so that when a new crisis does occur, sortition is a present viable alternative to the status quo. If it is not, then in all likelihood anti-democratic sentiments would gain ground as a result of popular frustration. Examples of such outcomes already appeared in 2023 in Argentina and the Netherlands.

Filed under: Academia, Applications, Books, Elections, Press, Sortition | 2 Comments »

Upcoming drawing of a Michigan redistricting commission member

Posted on December 21, 2023 by Yoram Gat

The U.S. state of Michigan has an allotted redistricting commission. Following the resignation of Dustin Witjes, one of the commission’s four Democratic members, a replacement member is going to be allotted on January 3rd. The allotment is going to be live-streamed on the internet.

Following Witjes’ resignation on Wednesday, [state Rep. Ann] Bollin said it was long overdue.

“His prolonged absence from Michigan while collecting pay as a member of the redistricting commission is unacceptable. This situation has exemplified a lack of accountability and a disregard for the responsibilities tied to this crucial role,” she said.

With Witjes’ resignation, the Michigan Department of State will host a random selection at 3:30 p.m. Jan. 3 to choose a replacement.

The Michigan constitution requires new commissioners to be randomly selected from the remaining pool of semi-finalist applicants who affiliate with the same party as the departing commissioner.

“Of the 200 semi-finalists randomly selected in June 2020, there are 52 remaining who affiliate with the Democratic Party,” stated a release.

The drawing will be livestreamed on the MICRC’s social media accounts.

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