Images that appeared on Equality-by-Lot in the passing year.
Filed under: Elections | 6 Comments »
2015 review – images
Posted on December 22, 2015 by Yoram Gat
Prinz and Garry: Democracy is due for an overhaul – could lawmaking-by-jury be the answer?
Posted on December 18, 2015 by Yoram Gat
In an article in The Conversation, Janosch Prinz and John Garry, both from Queen’s University Belfast, advocate for legislation by ad-hoc allotted bodies.
They start off by recounting a standard list of instances of electoral disfunction:
Many will agree that, in practice, democracy leaves a lot to be desired. The system often falls short of its ideals: whether it’s the US congress causing a total government shutdown; Australian prime ministers being ousted by internal party politics; or the UK’s disproportionate electoral system allocating only one seat to a party which received close to 4m votes.
This misses the point. None of these examples is an indication of a problem inherent in elections. The problem with electoralist systems is not that they don’t function but that they function in favor of electoral elites and their allies rather than for the average person.
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Filed under: Academia, Ballot measures, Elections, Juries, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 2 Comments »
The Dunning–Kruger effect and its implications for voting
Posted on November 28, 2015 by Yoram Gat
is a cognitive bias wherein relatively unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than is accurate.
The effect is named after David Dunning and Justin Kruger of the department of psychology at Cornell University who published a paper in 1999 which described a series of experiments which they conducted which demonstrated the effect.
In an interview, Dunning described his understanding of the effect as follows:
Dunning: [I]f you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent.
[Interviewer:] Why not?
Dunning: If you knew it, you’d say, “Wait a minute. The decision I just made does not make much sense. I had better go and get some independent advice.” But when you’re incompetent, the skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is. In logical reasoning, in parenting, in management, problem solving, the skills you use to produce the right answer are exactly the same skills you use to evaluate the answer. And so we went on to see if this could possibly be true in many other areas. And to our astonishment, it was very, very true.
Filed under: Academia, Elections, Experiments | 38 Comments »
Koop: Allotted assemblies allow the elected to renege on campaign promises
Posted on November 14, 2015 by Yoram Gat
Kevin Mooney wrote to point out an article in the Ottawa Citizen. In the article Royce Koop, an associate professor in the Department of Political Studies at the University of Manitoba, argues against repeating the electoral reform process carried out in British Columbia and Ontario provinces.
Koop makes two arguments. The first is the somewhat tautological point that “tak[ing power] from elected representatives and giv[ing it] to the people […] threatens representative democracy by taking decision-making power from MPs and handing it to citizens, [while] representative democracy is best served by allowing MPs to represent the interests of their constituents through their votes, rather than by seizing MPs’ power and handing it to citizens”.
The more interesting argument (which to a large extent is in fact contradictory to the first one) is a much more practical one:
[T]he use of citizens assemblies and referendums would have the effect of allowing politicians to escape from being accountable to the public for their actions.
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Filed under: Academia, Elections, Press, Sortition | 8 Comments »
Threlkeld: Democratizing Public Institutions
Posted on November 8, 2015 by Yoram Gat
This is another one of the five sortition-advocacy pieces that Simon Threlkeld published in 1997-1998.
Democratizing Public Institutions: Juries for the selection of public officials
A rational analysis suggesting the use of juries of citizens instead of government monopoly for the purpose of selecting public decision-makers
Simon Threlkeld
Humanist in Canada, Spring 1997
A wide variety of public officials are chosen by the government. Among such officials are the various regulatory commissions, boards and tribunals, the boards of public broadcasters, judges, coroners and justices of the peace.
This government monopoly on the selection of so many decision-makers leaves a great deal to be desired. In the first place it is undemocratic because the people have no say in who the decision-makers are. In a more democratic society the selection of such decision-makers would be in the hands of the citizens, not the government.
A further problem is patronage. Where the government selects public officials, patronage is common. Patronage discriminates against people who lack the right political connections and turns public offices into the spoils of electoral victories. Distaste for patronage is near universal amongst citizens.
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Filed under: Elections, Juries, Proposals, Sortition | Leave a comment »
Eyes on Canada: site of the next Citizens’ Assembly using sortition?
Posted on October 30, 2015 by Brett Hennig
[Repost from http://www.sortitionfoundation.org/canada_citizens_assembly ]
J
ustin Trudeau, who will become the new Canadian Prime Minister next week after winning the general election on October 19, has promised that the election will be the “last election” based on the first-past-the-post system.
But without it, he would not have won a parliamentary majority, so there will be considerable pressure from within his own party to renege on, or avoid fulfilling, his promise.
What is more interesting, however, is that Canada has a compelling history of using sortition in Citizens’ Assemblies to address provincial electoral reform – it happened in British Columbia in 2004 and in Ontario in 2006.
Filed under: Elections, Press, Sortition | 6 Comments »
Class, not party
Posted on September 22, 2015 by Yoram Gat
Ray Fisman, a Boston University economist, and Daniel Markovits from Yale Law School write in Slate about “The distributional preferences of an elite”, a study they recently published in Science magazine. In the final paragraphs they say:
Elites’ preferences matter. The American elite overwhelmingly dominates both campaign finance and political lobbying, and American policymakers themselves come overwhelmingly from elite circles—the powerbroker Yale Law alumni mentioned above represent just the tip of a vast iceberg.
Our results thus shine a revealing light on American politics and policy. They suggest that the policy response to rising economic inequality lags so far behind the preferences of ordinary Americans for the simple reason that the elites who make policy—regardless of political party—just don’t care much about equality. Hemingway’s illusory but widely shared view that the only thing that separates the rich from the rest is their money thus disguises a central pathology of American public life. When American government undemocratically underdelivers economic equality, the cause is less party than caste.
Democracy gives the mass of citizens a path for protest when the gap between ordinary views and a closed rank of elite opinion grows too great. The populist insurgencies that increasingly dominate the contests to select both the Republican and Democratic candidates in the upcoming presidential election show the protest path in action. Elites—in both parties—remain baffled by Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders’ appeal; and they prayerfully insist that both campaigns will soon fade away. Our study suggests a different interpretation, however. These bipartisan disruptions of elite political control are no flash in the pan, or flings born of summer silliness. They are early skirmishes in a coming class war.
Filed under: Academia, Elections, Experiments, Press | 5 Comments »
The ancient Greek view on what democracy is
Posted on September 19, 2015 by Yoram Gat
This topic came up recently. Here is the most thorough discussion of this matter in the primary sources that I am aware of. Aristotle is describing here (Politics, 1317a-1318a) what he considers as the conventional wisdom of his time:
And for this inquiry we must take into view all the features that are popular and that are thought to go with democracies; for it comes about from combinations of these that the kinds of democracy are formed, and that there are different democracies and more than one sort. In fact there are two causes for there being several kinds of democracy, first the one stated before, the fact that the populations are different （for we find one multitude engaged in agriculture and another consisting of handicraftsmen and day-laborers, and when the first of these is added to the second and again the third to both of them it not only makes a difference in that the quality of the democracy becomes better or worse but also by its becoming different in kind）; and the second cause is the one about which we now speak. For the institutions that go with democracies and seem to be appropriate to this form of constitution make the democracies different by their combinations; for one form of democracy will be accompanied by fewer, another by more, and another by all of them. And it is serviceable to ascertain each of them both for the purpose of instituting whichever of these kinds of democracy one happens to wish and for the purpose of amending existing ones. For people setting up constitutions seek to collect together all the features appropriate to their fundamental principle, but in so doing they make a mistake, as has been said before in the passage dealing with the causes of the destruction and the preservation of constitutions. And now let us state the postulates, the ethical characters and the aims of the various forms of democracy.
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Filed under: Athens, Books, Elections, History, Participation, Sortition | 57 Comments »
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