Elections | Equality by lot

Citizens’ Assembly in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Posted on November 21, 2021 by paulnollen

The EU delegation to Bosnia and Herzegovina reports:

The EU in BiH [Bosnia and Herzegovina] has launched the Citizens’ Assembly, an innovative model of deliberative democracy, which offers a unique opportunity for citizens in BiH to directly express their views on constitutional and electoral reform, to recommend concrete solutions for elimination of the discriminatory provisions in the BiH Constitution as well as for improvement of the Election Law. This process is based on two rounds of sortition, practice of random selection of citizens as a representative sample of a country’s population. During the preparatory phase of the process a team of local and international experts and the independent company specialized in polling representative samples of the BiH population (IPSOS) jointly developed the methodology for random selection of citizens’ and completed the first round of sortition. The letter signed by the EU, the US and OSCE Ambassadors in BiH was sent to 4,000 randomly selected households in BiH, inviting citizens to express their interest in participating in the Citizens’ Assembly.
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Filed under: Applications, Elections, Sortition | 11 Comments »

Short refutations of common arguments for sortition (part 2)

Posted on November 17, 2021 by Yoram Gat

Part 1 is here.

The two arguments presented below pin the problem with elections on the voters.

4. The masses are rationally ignorant. Therefore any system that relies on their judgement would not function well. Sortition does not rely on mass judgement.

According to this argument elections present a variety of choices to the voters, with some of these choices being on the whole materially better than others as measured by the interests and values of the voters. The voters, however, each knowing that the impact of their vote is tiny, are too selfish (or more politely, too busy taking care of their private business) to spend the time and effort to determine which candidate or party are better than others. Instead they hope that others would do the work for them, and in this way they would save the effort of figuring out which alternatives are the better ones but at the same time they will enjoy the good outcomes of other people’s choices. But since everybody, or at least the large majority of voters, follow the same calculation, almost everybody is uninformed and as a result when they arrive at the voting booth, they often select poor alternatives.

All this sounds very sophisticated and has the stamp of approval of the economists and rational-choice theorists. The argument suffers, however, from at least two severe problems. First, the assumption that the electoral alternatives present to voters a meaningful choice is theoretically problematic. Since the electoral choice is between elite factions, the range of choice must be severely limited. The factions of the elite all share certain elite values and interests that any of them will promote if and when they are in power. The promotion of those values and interests is often made at the expense of the values and interests of the general population, making the policies pursued by government – regardless of the elite faction in power – detrimental to the general population.
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Filed under: Academia, Elections, Sortition, Theory | 17 Comments »

Waxman and McCulloch: The Democracy Manifesto

Posted on November 16, 2021 by Yoram Gat

Wayne Waxman, a retired professor of modern philosophy, and Alison McCulloch, a scholar of philosophy and retired journalist (as well as a contributor to this blog), have just published a book named The Democracy Manifesto: A Dialogue on Why Elections Need to be Replaced with Sortition.

The Democracy Manifesto is about how to recreate democracy by replacing elections with government that is truly of, by and for the people. Written in engaging and accessible dialogue form, the book argues that the only truly democratic system of government is one in which decision-makers are selected randomly (by sortition) from the population at large, operating much the way trial juries do today, but 100% online, enabling people to govern together even across great distances. Sortition has a storied history but what sets The Democracy Manifesto apart is its comprehensive account of how it can be implemented not only across all sectors and levels of government, but throughout society as well, including the democratization of mass media, corporations, banks, and other large institutions. The resulting Sortitive Representative Democracy (SRD) is the true heir to ancient Greek democracy, and the only means of ensuring ‘we the people’ are represented by our fellow citizens rather than by the revolving groups of elites that dominate electoral systems. In the process, the book grapples with myriad hot topics including economic issues, international relations, indigenous rights, environmentalism and more.

Filed under: Academia, Athens, Books, Elections, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 32 Comments »

Short refutations of common arguments for sortition (part 1)

Posted on November 6, 2021 by Yoram Gat

Some years ago I wrote a set of posts refuting several standard arguments against sortition (1, 2, 3, 4).

It seems useful, however, to refute some oft-offered arguments for sortition as well. These are arguments that provide a poor foundation for the idea of applying sortition in government. Such arguments are made, and repeated reflexively, by academics, by members of the sortition-milieu, by sortition activists, in the press, and by others who discuss sortition. Often, in addition to being factually or logically unsound, these arguments also lead to advocacy of the application of sortition in ways that are bound to lead to a failure to realize the full democratizing potential of sortition, and in some cases are bound to lead to complete discrediting of the entire notion.

The first three arguments presented (and refuted) here all deal with supposed superior competence of an allotted chamber over an elected one. All suffer from essentially the same flaw. In fact, the advantage of an allotted chamber over an elected one is not that it is more competent but that it is more representative.

1. Allotted bodies would carry out real deliberation whereas elected bodies are the setting for partisan performances and grandstanding.

This argument is a favorite of propounders of “deliberative democracy”. According to this argument, a major reason that public policy is poor is that it is not determined through meaningful deliberation. Supposedly, the elected are too busy electioneering, or are too stubborn ideologically to deliberate with each other and develop good, common sense, widely popular policy. But why would a government with a majority in the legislature avoid deliberating within itself – in public or behind closed doors – in order to produce policy that would make it popular? Are they too stupid? If what they seek is “good policy”, or even if they just seek reelection and if deliberation could produce policy options that would make them more popular and increase their chance for reelection, why would they be unable to engage in such deliberation?
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Filed under: Academia, Elections, Proposals, Sortition, Theory | 20 Comments »

Dominic Lawson: We hound today’s politicians but we take them for granted at our peril

Posted on October 24, 2021 by keithsutherland

This article in the Sunday Times is a valuable corrective to the prevailing view on this blog that elected politicians are only in it for themselves. Note the claim from the FT Whitehall editor “There’s almost no one I’ve met in a decade in [Westminster] who isn’t here because they want to help the country.”

Various trades are being depleted by an exodus of those willing to do what can be an unpleasant job: we are now seeing this in road haulage and social care. For many workers in these sectors the pain seems no longer worth the gain. For the rest of us — the consumers — there are unwelcome consequences, readily appreciated. But what if the same thing happens to the trade for which the public seems to have least respect? I mean our politicians.

Last week the Financial Times’s Whitehall editor, Sebastian Payne, said on Twitter he was “struck by the number of MPs who have told me they’re seriously considering leaving parliament, following the killing of Sir David Amess”. But it wasn’t just a matter of concern for the physical safety of themselves and their families: “That’s before considering the threats, abuse and hatred that spills in every day.” Defending the political trade as a whole, Payne observed: “There’s almost no one I’ve met in a decade in [Westminster] who isn’t here because they want to help the country.”

That is not a frequently expressed opinion in the traditional outlets of journalism, let alone the sewers of social media. This is the general atmosphere in which the North Devon MP, Selaine Saxby, was appalled to come across a cartoon in her local parish magazine showing a woman in a confessional saying: “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. Last night I killed a politician”, and the priest responding, “My daughter, I’m here to listen to your sins, not your community service work.” This was published before the slaughter of Amess; but he was not the first MP in recent years to have been murdered, or stabbed, while, actually, doing his community service work.

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Filed under: Elections, Press | 2 Comments »

Mueller on Landemore

Posted on September 30, 2021 by Yoram Gat

Jan-Werner Mueller, Professor of Politics at Princeton University and author of the recent book “Democracy Rules”, wrote an article in which he reviews Hélène Landemore’s book Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century (along with a couple of other books that he devotes less space to).

Luckily Mueller’s review focuses on the better points made by Landemore (e.g., that elitism is inherent to elections) rather than on the less convincing parts of the book. (For a detailed review of the strengths and weaknesses of Open Democracy see my series of posts devoted to this book.)

Mueller’s objections to allotted chambers are the following:

Alotted “bodies also can end up favoring the privileged, either because those who feel unqualified will abstain or because more educated and eloquent participants will dominate the debate.”
A sortition-based system “promises inclusion and openness, but it ultimately excludes all who have not been chosen in the process of random selection. In large countries, many people will never get a turn (indeed, serving would amount to winning the lottery).”
A “lottocracy might fail to fulfill one of the functions that elections reliably serve: the peaceful resolution of conflict through vote counting. If one accepts political realists’ argument that elections are always essentially conducted in the shadow of civil war, the counting process serves to demonstrate the relative strength of each conflicting party.”

Mueller concludes:

In any case, one need not go as far as abolishing elections to see that sortition chambers could play a useful role in situations where highly fraught moral issues need to be debated (as in Ireland’s abortion decision), or where conflicting parties need to set the terms of competition. That could apply to the shape of election districts, salaries for legislators, the overall size of parliaments, or any other issue where professional politicians have a conflict of interest.

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

Abizadeh: Representation, Bicameralism, Political Equality, and Sortition

Posted on September 30, 2021 by Yoram Gat

A paper by Arash Abizadeh.

Representation, Bicameralism, Political Equality, and Sortition: Reconstituting the Second Chamber as a Randomly Selected Assembly

Perspectives on Politics, 2020

Abstract

The two traditional justifications for bicameralism are that a second legislative chamber serves a legislative-review function (enhancing the quality of legislation) and a balancing function (checking concentrated power and protecting minorities). I furnish here a third justification for bicameralism, with one elected chamber and the second selected by lot, as an institutional compromise between contradictory imperatives facing representative democracy: elections are a mechanism of people’s political agency and of accountability, but run counter to political equality and impartiality, and are insufficient for satisfactory responsiveness; sortition is a mechanism for equality and impartiality, and of enhancing responsiveness, but not of people’s political agency or of holding representatives accountable. Whereas the two traditional justifications initially grew out of anti-egalitarian premises (about the need for elite wisdom and to protect the elite few against the many), the justification advanced here is grounded in egalitarian premises about the need to protect state institutions from capture by the powerful few and to treat all subjects as political equals. Reflecting the “political” turn in political theory, I embed this general argument within the institutional context of Canadian parliamentary federalism, arguing that Canada’s Senate ought to be reconstituted as a randomly selected citizen assembly.

Filed under: Academia, Elections, Participation, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 4 Comments »

It damages society if we keep on calling our politicians cheats and liars

Posted on September 12, 2021 by keithsutherland

Matthew Syed’s column in the current Sunday Times is a valuable corrective to the widespread cynicism over elected politicians expressed on this blog.

A story caught my eye last week about Priti Patel, the embattled home secretary. It involved Shirley Cochrane, a woman from Essex who had been diagnosed with breast cancer in 2016 but who felt abandoned by the NHS during the pandemic. She had been seeing cancer specialists every six months but was told last spring to “self-manage” at just the time she thought she felt another lump.

Unable to get through to specialists or generic phone numbers, Cochrane contacted her local MP — Patel — in a state of desperation. “She managed to secure for me a telephone appointment, and that was followed by the mammogram, and thankfully that was OK,” Cochrane told the Commons health select committee. She sounded more than a little grateful.

I mention this because I can’t help noticing how often Patel is demonised in our political culture. Every time I see her on TV, I brace myself for the vitriol, the ad hominem attacks, the questioning of her motives and intellect, a tsunami of nastiness that shames those who indulge in it. This isn’t just limited to social media. You see it in commentary, radio phone-ins and the “most liked” comments on newspaper websites.

This isn’t just about Patel, though. It seems to me that this is part of a more pervasive rush to see the worst in our political representatives. Sure, MPs sometimes bring criticism on themselves, but how often do we acknowledge the other side of the ledger: the dutiful constituency work, the civic-mindedness, the reports of select committees that few notice but that, through the slow accretion we call social evolution, improve countless lives?
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Filed under: Elections, Press | Tagged: democracy | 43 Comments »

Zaremberg and Welp: Beyond utopian and dystopian approaches to democratic innovation

Posted on August 18, 2021 by Common Lot Sortitionist

A 2018 paper by Gisela Zaremberg and Yanina Welp has the following abstract:

This paper discusses the myths regarding both the conceptualization and the expected effects that are implicitly or explicitly presented in analyses of the so-called ‘democratic innovations’, that is, the new institutions that aim to increase public participation beyond regular elections. It is argued that these myths, together with the (fictitious) confrontation between direct and indirect politics, have generated false oppositions and reductionisms that mask the debate and limit empirical approximations to democratic innovation. A research agenda based on the concept of ‘participatory ecologies’ is suggested as a way to gain an understanding of the mechanisms of participation in a systematic way.

I found these excerpts of particular interest to the Equality-by-Lot blog:

In a participatory ecology there is no single mechanism that is able to deliver all the virtuous democratic effects. Empirical evidence supports this proposition. For example, a positive balance of participatory mechanisms was observed in Ireland with the combination of a citizen’s assembly selected by sortition, which opened an informed debate about abortion, and a referendum, as a fair mechanism to make legitimate decisions. A negative balance is exemplified by the experience with recall referendums in Japan, where recall is activated more against policies than against authorities; however, as the first is binding and easier than the activation of initiative, it is used more frequently.

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