Psychologizing the electoralist phenomenon

Posted on June 24, 2023 by Yoram Gat

Steve Taylor, a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Leeds Beckett University wrote a piece in The Conversation offering his explanation for trouble with the electorlist system. Taylor writes:

The ancient Greeks practised direct democracy. It literally was “people power”. And they took measures specifically to ensure that ruthless, narcissistic people were unable to dominate politics.

Recent political events show that we have a great deal to learn from the Athenians. Arguably, a key problem in modern times is that we aren’t stringent enough about the people we allow to become politicians.

There’s a great deal of research showing that people with negative personality traits, such as narcissism, ruthlessness, amorality or a lack of empathy and conscience, are attracted to high-status roles, including politics.

In a representative democracy, therefore, the people who put themselves forward as representatives include a sizeable proportion of people with disordered personalities – people who crave power because of their malevolent traits.
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Filed under: Academia, Athens, Elections, History, Press, Sortition, Theory | 25 Comments »

Wallonia: A first citizen commission to discuss democracy

Posted on June 16, 2023 by Yoram Gat

An article by Eric Deffet published in Belgian Le Soir on June 14th, 2023.

The Walloon parliament has approved the creation of a first deliberative commission with a mix of allotted citizens and elected officials. Creating a mirror-in-mirror situation, this commission will discuss… the creation of a permanent commission to serve alongside the legislature.

Several years after Brussels, Wallonia is getting ready to launch its own experimentation with a first deliberative commission mixing elected officials and allotted citizens. The legal framework has long existed and the green light for a real life test has been given on Wednesday in the assembly. It responds to demands for citizen participation and transparency following the revelations on the dysfunction of the regional parliament. The participants will be drawn from the National Register: 30 citizens and as many additional fill-ins, who will have to represent the Walloon population.
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Filed under: Applications, Elections, Press, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Peter Jones: The lost art of persuasion

Posted on June 9, 2023 by Yoram Gat

In his column “Ancient and Modern” published in the Spectator Australia, Peter Jones warns his readers against the “Maoist re-education” of the young, generated by the “cancellation” tactics wielded by those “urging gender changes on children who rather feel like it”. In the process, Jones gives his readers a sketch of the Athenian system, including its reliance on sortition, presenting it as a model of good government, where policy was decided based on debate, persuasion and “peaceful agreement”, rather than the outrageous tactics he decries.

Despite mentioning selection by lot, Jones ignores the role of the allotted Council in Athenian politics. When talking about “the all-powerful Assembly” Jones does not consider the question of whether this Assembly in reality provided an arena where isegoria was more than a formality. It also remains unclear whether Jones advocates for the radical change that would be required in order to turn the Western political system into something that is more akin to the Athenian system and providing “more political control over tyrants and oligarchs”. His focus on activists causing an “uproar and silently glueing [themselves] to tarmac” may indicate that leaving those aside we are already living in a system which embodies the ideals of democracy. An off-handed comment about the “rights” of free speech being “rescindable” may also provide a hint regarding Jones’s mindset.

What would ancient Greeks have made of the current protests relating to the oil industry and identity reassignment? Very little indeed.

The Greek invention of democracy (‘people power’) emerged in the late 6th century bc after strong popular demand for more political control over tyrants and oligarchs. The result was a system in which all male citizens over 18 debated and determined all political questions in the regular Assemblies. Most official posts were held, usually for one year, by citizens who presented themselves for selection by lot (voting was considered meritocratic, not democratic), with serious consequences for failure.
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Filed under: Athens, Elections, History, Press, Sortition | 10 Comments »

Fung and Lessig: How AI Could Take Over Elections

Posted on June 8, 2023 by Owen Shaffer

An article in Scientific American by Archon Fung and Lawrence Lessig presents a parallel approach to my research on democracy and artificial intelligence. Citizens’ assemblies are a good way to fix this, by solving emotionally charged issues prior to an election. Even better, nested assemblies could replace much of the election process.

Sen. Josh Hawley asked OpenAI CEO Sam Altman this question in a May 16, 2023, U.S. Senate hearing on artificial intelligence. Altman replied that he was indeed concerned that some people might use language models to manipulate, persuade and engage in one-on-one interactions with voters.

Here’s the scenario Altman might have envisioned/had in mind: Imagine that soon, political technologists develop a machine called Clogger – a political campaign in a black box. Clogger relentlessly pursues just one objective: to maximize the chances that its candidate – the campaign that buys the services of Clogger Inc. – prevails in an election.

As a political scientist and a legal scholar who study the intersection of technology and democracy, we believe that something like Clogger could use automation to dramatically increase the scale and potentially the effectiveness of behavior manipulation and microtargeting techniques that political campaigns have used since the early 2000s. Just as advertisers use your browsing and social media history to individually target commercial and political ads now, Clogger would pay attention to you – and hundreds of millions of other voters – individually.

Filed under: Academia, Elections, Press, Sortition | 9 Comments »

Random citizens’ panel to advise on German food policy

Posted on May 13, 2023 by Yoram Gat

Julia Dahm writes in EURACTIV Germany about the decision by the German parliament to convene an allotted body to “bring the citizens’ perspective into the political debate” about food policy. Even at this early stage (the proposal was only adopted a few days ago), it seems all the expected elements of such a situation – familiar from the going-ons around the French Citizen Climate Convention, for example – are there: a government elected promising to act on a certain set of do-good principles, established powers pushing against any change, conservatives claiming that citizen assemblies are a sign of weakness and a shirking of authority, and the inevitable suspicions and accusation of manipulation by the organizers.

The German parliament has decided to launch a panel of randomly selected citizens set to advise lawmakers on food and nutrition policies, in an effort to help navigate the thorny issue of the state interfering in dietary choices.

The motion to set up a citizens’ panel on diets and nutrition had been tabled by the three government parties – the Social Democrats (SPD), the Greens, and the Liberals (FDP) – and was adopted by the Bundestag on Wednesday evening (10 May).

The first-ever citizens’ council put in place by the German parliament s set to “focus on the radical dietary changes that are already taking place in our day-to-day” and should “bring the citizens’ perspective into the political debate”.
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Filed under: Applications, Elections, Press, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Timo Rieg is skeptical about citizens’ councils

Posted on April 29, 2023 by Yoram Gat

Below is an extended excerpt from a translation of a piece by Timo Rieg (originally in German).

Everything speaks for the drawing of lots – called “aleatoric democracy” as a method of social control, after the Latin word for dice “alea” and known, among other things, from Asterix: “Alea iacta est,” “the die is cast,” or in the classic German phrase “die Würfel sind gefallen.”

But precisely because everything speaks for the democratic drawing of lots, the current hype about citizens’ councils must make one skeptical. For the strengths of aleatory democracy are a frontal assault on the real ruling aristocracy.

In its egalitarianism, the drawing of lots takes no account whatsoever of party careers; it knows no hierarchy, no compulsory factions, no empty election promises. Parties and lobbyists may exist even in an aleatory democracy, but they would forfeit most of their current influence on public life as a whole.

Of course, it is not impossible that professional politicians in particular, some of whom have known for many decades about the insane autonomy of parties, might long for a change of system and therefore be open to experimentation (some politicians and ex-politicians have written entire books about this).

Good lobbyists could be trusted to convince drawn citizens of their positions; good lobbyists do not rely on political backrooms, on covert influence, on strong-arming. But there will be only a very small minority willing to give up their special role for the sake of a fair democracy.

It is therefore to be feared that some advocates of aleatory democratic citizen participation are wolves in sheep’s clothing. After all, hardly any of the protagonists of this new civil rights movement would like to make their own influence or their own (economic) advantages dependent on a lottery, which means: giving up special rights in favor of the general public.
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Filed under: Elections, Sortition | 3 Comments »

Understanding the present by listening to the past: Walter Lippmann’s “The Public Philosophy”

Posted on April 27, 2023 by Nicholas Gruen

I thought readers of this blog might be interested in a post I’ve just put on my own blog on Walter Lippmann’s The Public Philosophy. It does not directly reference sortition, but I think it’s an excellent illustration of the value that sortition can bring — and it provides a corroborative context for the ideas I sketched out here.

oooOOOooo

One way to get beneath the surface of what’s going on is to read people who were writing about issues as they emerged rather than in more modern times when they’d become the norm and become infused in our commonsense.

I was browsing in one of the few remaining second-hand bookshops around (as is my wont) when I came upon Walter Lippmann’s 1955 book, The public philosophy. Walter Lippmann was one of the great journalists and thinkers of the 20th century. He wrote a series of books that were landmarks in their day, despite uniformly bland titles. Public opinion. The good life. And this one — The public philosophy. 

Reading part 1. I was shocked to discover a critique of democracy that I had not really crystallised for myself. It comprehends two tendencies both of which are at their most disastrous in the avoidance of war on the one hand and the fighting of wars on the other.

In the first place there’s what I’ll call temporal mismatch. It can take an electorate years to catch up with emerging developments and so public opinion can be a disastrous guide to the exigencies of a particular situation. A further aspect of public opinion is its capacity for wild swings in sentiment which I’ll call temperamental amplification.

Lippmann explains how democracies wildly overshoot. They’re not good at avoiding war by preparing properly for it. It is easy to understand why that is. Wars are very expensive. So preparing for them is expensive too. That means that politicians get the choice between warning the electorate and preparing for war and winning elections. If they call for more military spending their democratic opponent will say that it can be handled without serious financial pain — either because the threat is overblown or because it can be managed via borrowing or some other evasively defined expedient.

Then as war looms larger, far greater sacrifice than would otherwise have been necessary is called for, alongside industrial scale demonisation of the enemy. We’re somewhat familiar with this narrative from WWII, but Lippmann extends it back to the insouciance of war before WWI, the imposition of the Carthaginian Peace of 1919 which in humiliating Germany made Round Two of the Great War all the more likely. (Lippmann became fast friends with Keynes when they were both in Versailles. Coming to terms with the cataclysm of that war and its peace burned itself deeply into both men’s thought.)

Of course, this is directly relevant to today’s circumstances where the economic hangover from both COVID and Europe’s first major war in eighty years is intensifying the scarcity of energy and food, and in so doing undermining living standards. A further demand is to get Ukraine the arms it needs to fight off the Russians — but that’s expensive too.

But how much are our political leaders leveling with their populations? They’re not of course. Because to do so they’d have to say something like “Here’s the plan. We need to reduce living standards compared to what they would otherwise be by 2-3%. Then their opponents will denounce this as the counsel of despair and incompetence and come out and say they can do all they need to do without such hardship.

An extract from Lippmann is over the fold.

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

Another Herefordshire citizen council letter to the editor

Posted on April 24, 2023 by Yoram Gat

The Herefordshire citizen council for the climate has been the subject of a couple of critical letters to the editor of the Hereford Times last year. In a new letter, Frank Myers MBE from Ross-on-Wye is critical of the process as well, and in particular is unhappy about the fact that the identities of the members of the council are not made public.

Why won’t Herefordshire Council name Climate Assembly members?

LAST year a Citizen’s Climate Assembly was formed. Some 50 or so members were recruited and each were paid £300 for their participation.

The group was chosen, with the help of the infamous Sortition Foundation, in such a way that almost 90 per cent had preconceived concerns about climate change.

As we approach the local elections I think it is important to know how many of these people have put themselves forward for election for posts where they are paid nothing.

So I asked Herefordshire Council for their names and the council refused to disclose them.

So we are not allowed to know but Councillor Ellie Chowns, the leader of the Greens, who chaired the foundation proceedings, obviously knows their identity and has had the opportunity to share the Green message with them.

Is this democracy?

Filed under: Applications, Elections, Press, Sortition | 7 Comments »

Varoufakis explains how citizen councils can revolutionize democracy

Posted on April 21, 2023 by Yoram Gat

It was recently noted here that Yanis Varoufakis, former finance minister of Greece and leader of the Greek MeRA25 party, proposed a “monetary supervision jury” for controlling the central bank. It turns out that for Varoufakis citizen councils should serve in similar roles controlling public sector entities across the state bureaucracy.

A short clip on the YouTube channel of the DiEM25 movement shows a segment from a speech by Varoufakis in the Greek Parliament advocating for wide use of citizen councils, “mostly allotted but with elected members as well”. Varoufakis proposes that such bodies should select the managers of public sector organizations and monitor their performance. According to Varoufakis deliberative citizen councils would provide an alternative to both the corruption and inefficiency of capitalism and the corruption and inefficiency of statism by combining “the best of the state with civil society”.

Filed under: Elections, Proposals, Sortition | 3 Comments »

Bertrand Russell on Athenian democracy

Posted on March 31, 2023 by Yoram Gat

In his 1945 book History of Western Philosophy Betrand Russell writes the following (p. 74):

Athenian democracy, though it had the grave limitation of not including slaves or women, was in some respects more democratic than any modern system. Judges and most executive officers were chosen by lot, and served for short periods; they were thus average citizens like our jurymen, with the prejudices and lack of professionalism characteristic of average citizens.

It is remarkable that the reason given for the Athenian system being more democratic than modern systems is not the standard superficial argument about the Assembly voting directly on laws. Russell’s appeal to the fact that Athenian judges and officers had, as a result of being chosen by lot, the same outlook as the average citizen is an adumbration of Manin’s pure theory of elections (“the principle of distinction”).

Filed under: Academia, Athens, Books, Elections, History, Sortition, Theory | 1 Comment »

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