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: | Leave a comment »

UK citizens trust citizen assemblies 4 times more than MPs

Posted on May 13, 2025 by Yoram Gat

Findings from a 2024 poll appearing in a paper by Sortition Foundation.

Filed under: Elections, Opinion polling, Proposals, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Choosing by lot and the politics without titles

Posted on May 4, 2025 by towardsautonomyblog

Yavor Tarinski

The man who wears the shoe knows best that it pinches and where it pinches. ~John Dewey [1]

One of the main pillars of contemporary oligarchies worldwide is the institution of elections. Every leader and government, regardless of how liberal or authoritarian, claims its ascendance to power through some kind of electoral process. Elections are considered as “the democratic means” per se – if a system is based on elections, then it supposedly is a “democracy”.

The supporters of this view see in electoral processes a means of sustaining popular sovereignty, while avoiding what they see as a danger of popular self-rule – i.e., rule by the incompetent. But as philosopher Jacques Rancière underlines, there is an “evil at once much more serious and much more probable than a government full of incompetents: government comprised of a certain competence, that of individuals skilled at taking power through cunning.”[2]

Electoral processes tend to nurture antagonism and competitiveness, rather than cooperation and dialogue. They give way to a certain anthropological type – the power-hungry political demagogue. Rather than concerned with resolving public issues and problems, it focuses on “winning” elections. The very essence of politics is radically altered in elections-based systems – with their content being emptied of any substantial deliberatory essence and replaced with a lifestylish approach that focuses on candidates – their ways of life, the tricks they pull on each other, etc.

Ultimately, the main agenda that drives the action of the electoral anthropological type is that of opinion polls. Candidates must learn what and when to say things that will be liked by the largest amount of people, so that they can get ahead in the race. The result is a type of craft where electoral competitors outbid each other, play dirty, and resort to all sort of tricks in order to win. This becomes the main occupation of people involved in electoral competitions for office. Because of this political scientist James S. Fishkin suggests:

Candidates do not wish to win the argument on the merits as much as they wish to win the election. If they can do so by distorting or manipulating the argument successfully, many of them are likely to do so. Representatives elected through such processes are looking ahead to the next election while in office.[3]

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Filed under: Books, Elections, Sortition, Theory | Tagged: , , | 4 Comments »

Dowding, Bosworth and Giuliani: Sortition, Parties and Political Careerism

Posted on April 22, 2025 by Yoram Gat

A new paper in The Political Quarterly:

Sortition, Parties and Political Careerism

Keith Dowding, William Bosworth and Adriano Giuliani

Abstract: One reason for growing distrust of politicians, parties, and governments is the increase in ‘careerism’: politicians who have never worked outside politics and seem to work inside politics for themselves as much as for the common good. Sortition—choosing representatives by lottery—is one solution. However, random selection of representatives breaks the accountability link provided by elections and leaves amateur politicians at the mercy of their civil servants. It would, critics argue, destroy competitive party politics, the foundation of modern democracy.

We suggest that parties select their candidates through sortition of party members, with successful incumbent MPs standing again. This would mitigate the ills of patronage and adverse selection without losing professionalism and political experience. It would encourage deliberation and the proper persuasive and representation function of parties, alongside the accountability that elections provide. It would also, we suggest, lead to better advice to politicians from policy units within and outside the public service.

Keywords: careerism, democracy, political careers, political parties, professional politicians, sortition

Filed under: Academia, Elections, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 8 Comments »

Handpicking the candidates – a possibility that remains unaddressed

Posted on April 12, 2025 by Yoram Gat

The Kleroterion is a sculpture by Taryn Simon. It was originally presented at the Storm King art center in New York in 2024. It is now on display at Gagosian Gallery in New York. Alfred Mac Adam, Professor of Latin American literature at Barnard College-Columbia University, reviews the work at The Brooklyn Rail, a website billing itself as “Critical perspectives on art, politics and Culture. Independent and Free”.

Adam explains the workings of the sculpture:

The machine randomly picked one from a group thus avoiding any possibility for corruption. Simon’s recreation, which looks something like a classic PEZ dispenser as Donald Judd might have reconfigured it, stands alone in one room of the gallery. The space is curtained in red drapery, with red carpet on the flooring forming a pathway to the kleroterion. To run the device, each of five viable candidates for office would be assigned a colored lozenge. The lozenges would be inserted into a slot and a crank turned until all but one lozenge were ejected from the machine, declaring the winner.

As Adam describes things, and indeed, looking at the device itself which has very few slots, Simon’s device is quite different from the Athenian kleroterion. Continue reading →

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Mr. Smarty Pants introduces his readers to sortition

Posted on April 12, 2025 by Yoram Gat

It appears that Mr. Smarty Pants Knows is a brief section in The Austin Chronicle which introduces readers to the lesser known words and expressions of the English language. The April 11th, 2025 of edition of this section introduces its readers to the word sortition (among a few other words). The author provides a short rationalization for the mechanism.

Have you ever been selected for jury duty? Sortition is the selection of public officials or jurors at random to get a representative sample. In ancient Athens, they believed sortition was more democratic than holding elections because oligarchs couldn’t buy their way into office.

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Representation as Embodiment

Posted on April 11, 2025 by keithsutherland

‘May you live in interesting times’ is both an ancient Chinese curse and an accurate description of current politics. Despite often being at opposite ends of the policy scale, lottocrats and charismatic populists share the same perspective on ‘representation as embodiment’, as illustrated in this crude mash-up of the frontispiece to Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651 m/s drawing). Both camps (while often disagreeing on policy matters) claim that the Mortall God is an emergent property of popular sovereignty. Lafont and Urbinati (2024) equate lottocracy with populism: populism has an unaccountable leader who is supposed to ‘embody’ the nation; lottocracy has an unaccountable assembly that is supposed to ‘embody’ the nation.
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Filed under: Academia, Books, Elections, Sortition | 35 Comments »

Politician criminality, an insoluble electoralist dilemma

Posted on April 3, 2025 by Yoram Gat

The recent judgment against Marine Le Pen in France has been compared to the decision against Georgescu in Romania. In each case a prominent “extreme right wing” candidate in a European country has been barred from participating in an election campaign in which they had a fair chance of winning. In fact, however, Le Pen’s case is much more similar to that of Turkey’s Imamoglu than to Georgescu’s.

First, unlike Georgescu, whose electoral win was retroactively annulled and who was barred from an election that is merely weeks away, Le Pen’s and Imamoglu’s electoral potential in elections that are years away is speculative. Second, and more importantly, while Georgescu was disqualified on openly political grounds, Le Pen and Imamoglu are being disqualified due to being convicted for illegal actions (or may be convicted and disqualified in the case of Imamoglu who has been arrested but not convicted or officially disqualified yet, I believe). The merits of the cases against Le Pen and Imamoglu may (or may not) be very different, but unlike the case of Georgescu, formally these cases are of the same type in the sense that they are both matters of legal determination rather than of setting political limits on candidates.
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Filed under: Elections, Press | 1 Comment »

Aristocrats and oligarchs: Out. Posties, mums, nurses and neighbours: In.

Posted on March 22, 2025 by Yoram Gat

A story from PA media:

Demonstrators disrupt House of Lords to demand abolition of unelected chamber

Nick Lester and Abbie Llewelyn, PA Political Staff, 20 March 2025

Protesters have disrupted proceedings in the House of Lords demanding the abolition of the unelected chamber.

Protester Lucy Porter, 50, a primary school teacher from Leeds, told the PA news agency she was “campaigning for a house of the people”.

On the Lords, she said: “It’s a symbol of everything that’s outdated. “We don’t have a functioning democracy in this country.”

The leaflets, apparently modelled on an album by the Sex Pistols punk band, had written on them: “Never mind the Lords here’s the House of People.” On the other side it stated: “Aristocrats and oligarchs: Out. Posties, mums, nurses and neighbours: In. Replace the House of Lords to save the UK.”

The protesters said they were acting on behalf of Assemble, an organisation that campaigns for the Lords to be abolished and replaced by a citizens’ assembly.
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Filed under: Elections, House of Lords, Press, Sortition | 2 Comments »

Should a Citizens’ Assembly Complement the European Parliament?

Posted on March 20, 2025 by Yoram Gat

A new book with the title “Should a Citizens’ Assembly Complement the European Parliament?” has been published by the European University Institute. The book is made of a 30-page proposal by Kalypso Nicolaidis for setting up a permanent allotted citizen assembly as part of the EU governance structure followed by about 20 short responses from different authors including many who are known names in the sortition milieu.

From a cursory look, the for and against arguments are predictable and well-worn, but someone possessing a strong character and an iron discipline may be able to go through the whole thing and find some new ideas.

Filed under: Academia, Books, Elections, Proposals, Sortition | Leave a comment »

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