Demiocracy: Less is more

Posted on November 6, 2024 by Roger Knights

Once our “allotteds” have had their names drawn, what role should they play? I suggest that of elector rather than officeholder, for these reasons.

Most importantly, imposing a low burden on the participating-allotteds means that many of them will be available to oversee officeholders for the entirety of their terms, not just at Election Day. (Electors will see, over a private Internet channel, monthly reports from “their” officeholders and their critics. For which they will be well paid.)

Electors can throw their weight around during inter-election periods by signaling to their officeholders, e.g. via straw votes, their preference regarding bills up for debate. So there is not much real loss of power in being an elector.

Perhaps the most important advantage of elevating the allotteds only to electorhood is that it leaves existing officeholders in place, at least until the next election. This will arouse less opposition from members of the status quo, and make for a smoother transition.

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

Bernard Manin, 1951-2024

Posted on November 3, 2024 by peterstone

Hello All,

I just received the news that Bernard Manin has passed away. I learned this through Melissa Schwartzberg, one of his many excellent students. Sortition fans probably know that Manin’s book The Principles of Representative Government (1996) was one of the first major works to consider the respective democratic credentials of sortition and election. Contrary to what many suggest, he did not share Aristotle’s view that election was inherently aristocratic; rather, he suggested in his book that election was inherently Janus-faced, with both aristocratic and democratic dimensions. His book also raised the important question how sortition came to be eclipsed by election as a democratic selection mechanism. Beyond this book, Manin made many important contributions to debates about deliberation, representation, and other central topics in contemporary political theory.

I only met Manin once, at a workshop at Sciences Po organized by Gil Delannoi. He had many kind words about my book on lotteries for which I was very grateful. Sorry I did not have more opportunity for conversation with him. RIP, Professor Manin.

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

Ballotocracy: A step beyond lottocracy

Posted on November 3, 2024 by Roger Knights

We all know what lottocracy means: Sample Sovereignty. In other words, the elevation of a representative sample of the whole community to legislative seats, replacing elected legislators.

The case for this replacement seems strong:

Per Rousseau, there is less of a “representative” interference between the whole body and the legislators, meaning the General Will is more truly ensconced, and its actions more democratically legitimate.

Democracy means the rule of the considered common sense of the community. But a mass-electoral system gives each voter such a tiny influence on election results that most pay little consideration to political affairs. And an electoral system implies party government, which roils the waters and impairs considered consideration of the issues. And the influence of professional party politicians, pelf (money), propaganda, and the press (more generally, the media) further shapes and restricts the democratic dialogue. This is only a partial list of the demerits of what I call DeMockery (a mockery of democracy). Many others have noted them too.

The public, according to polling, seems disillusioned to an unprecedented level with DeMockery and ready for a change.

And yet there have been no powerful movements toward full lottocracy. Only randomly chosen advisory entities have been created. (And even they have shown flaws, as in Ireland recently.) The public and public intellectuals apparently need a strong inducement to move beyond today’s mass-electoral system.

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Filed under: Academia, Elections, Participation, Proposals, Sortition | 17 Comments »

Sabine Hossenfelder on democracy, republic and sortition

Posted on November 3, 2024 by Yoram Gat

Sabine Hossenfelder is a physicist and fairly prominent YouTube figure with over 1.5 million followers. Her clips are about the physical sciences, but she occasionally strays outside this area. Her most recent video is titled “Is the USA a Democracy or a Republic?”. The analysis she offers is not too perceptive in my mind, but it does have the advantage of mentioning the idea of selecting political decision making bodies using a lottery. This idea gets a brief teaser in the introduction and a bit more detail toward the end of the video.

Naturally, most of the thousands of comments to the video focus on the democracy vs. republic matter, but at least one comment does pick up on the sortition idea:

Problem with representative democracy is that strangers, who do not know you, cannot represent you. The premise is simply false.

Voting is entering a contract, asking to be ruled by a handful of strangers. Extending them Power Of Attorney, four years into the future … If you sign that, whatever happens, you have no right to complain, because you accepted the deal.

Here is what we should do instead : Government by lottery

1000 citizens randomly selected. 200 replacements selected every year, giving five years in government for each. Then perhaps a quarterly online voting session for the rest of us; Yes/No to the bill with slimmest decisive vote, in the 1000-man parlament during that quarter.
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Filed under: Elections, Press, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Dawkins’ Office-seeks-the-man electoral college, Roger Knight’s “Demiocracy”

Posted on October 29, 2024 by Roger Knights

Richard Dawkins writes in The Spectator:

The Electoral College is nonsense

In an ideal world, I wouldn’t have chosen an election year for my American book tour. It’s not that I dislike elections generally. And — praise be — a population of 300 million Americans has managed to raise one presidential candidate who is not a convicted felon awaiting sentence.

No, my problem with American elections — and it viscerally distresses me every four years — is the affront to democracy called the Electoral College. I’ve done the math. The Electoral College can hand you the presidency even if your opponent receives three-quarters of the popular vote. Of course that’s a hypothetical extreme. The familiar reality is that campaigns ignore all but a handful of “swing” states.

A genuine electoral college, however, could work rather well. Voters in every state would elect respected citizens to meet in conclave to find a president — like a university search committee or the College of Cardinals. They’d headhunt the best in the land, interview them, study their publications and speeches, exhaustively vet them — and finally after a secret ballot announce the verdict in a puff of white smoke.
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Filed under: Elections, History, Press, Sortition | 12 Comments »

Opening the People’s House: A New Vision for Executive Leadership in the United States

Posted on October 15, 2024 by Nick Coccoma

By Nick Coccoma, Max Goodman, and Dr. Paul Zeitz off #unifyUSA


The Imperial Presidency

As we approach the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, it’s time for some straight talk. Our presidential system, once the envy of the world, now struggles to meet the complex challenges of the 21st century. The concentration of power in a single president has led to executive orders on steroids, whiplash between administrations, and a growing disconnect between the American people and their leadership. And with the Supreme Court recently declaring the president above the law, the threat of tyranny looms larger than ever.

But what if there was a way to reinvigorate our democracy, tapping into the collective wisdom of everyday Americans while preserving the efficiency needed for effective governance? What if—just like the legislature and judiciary—we could create an executive branch that truly embodies the spirit of “We the People?”

Today, we propose just that: a bold reimagining of the executive, one that draws on our deepest American values of freedom, community, and service to create a more responsive, accountable, and effective government. Once again, our vision hinges on one bold idea: empowering everyday Americans through democratic lotteries.

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

Betting on Real Democracy

Posted on October 12, 2024 by Nick Coccoma

By Nick Coccoma, Max Goodman, and Dr. Paul Zeitz of #unifyUSA

During the March on Washington a crowd stretches from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument
Photo by Unseen Histories on Unsplash

The Problem with Elections

As of July 2024, only 16% of Americans approve of Congress.  Think about what that means – more than 4 in 5 US citizens disapprove of the main institution of our democracy – a legislature of their own representatives.  Many aspects of our elections are transparently broken. Through the machinations of entrenched partisanship, gerrymandering, and dark money, only 30 (~7%) of the 435 seats in the House remain competitive in 2024. It’s no wonder so many of us feel deprived of a voice in government.  But it doesn’t need to be this way.  Effective reforms are well-studied, and there’s a bold, practical toolkit available to help defeat our democratic demons. In many cases we can scrap electoral politics entirely while still advancing our sacred democratic experiment.

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Filed under: Elections, History, Proposals, Sortition | 1 Comment »

The Case for a People’s Convention in the U.S.

Posted on October 11, 2024 by Nick Coccoma

Moral, Legal, and Practical Imperatives to Restore the American Republic

By Nick Coccoma, Max Goodman, and Dr. Paul Zeitz of #unifyUSA.

American democracy is falling apart, a slow-motion car wreck we’ve been watching for years. But this crash wasn’t caused by an outside force. We’ve been run off the road by our own founding document: the U.S. Constitution. We know—sacrilege! Yet it must be said. And as legal scholar Rosa Brooks puts it, it’s our collective worship of the document that’s tying us down: 

How did it happen that the United States, which was born in a moment of bloody revolution out of a conviction that every generation had the right to change its form of government, developed a culture that so many years later is weirdly hidebound when it comes to its form of government, reveres this piece of paper as if it had been handed by God out of a burning bush, and treats the Constitution as more or less sacred? Is it really such a good thing to have a document written almost 250 years ago still be viewed as binding us in some way? How would we feel if our neurosurgeon used the world’s oldest neurosurgery guide, or if NASA used the world’s oldest astronomical chart to plan space-shuttle flights?

She’s right. The Constitution’s like a Macintosh computer from 1984. Innovative when it first came out; painfully inadequate for the tasks of today. We’ve tried to keep it running with patches and workarounds, but there’s only so much you can do with outdated hardware. 

Many people know this, yet they despair of making updates. Along with being the oldest on earth, the Constitution’s also the most difficult to change. Article V presents an absurdly high bar to clear. Since 1791, we’ve revised it only 17 times. 

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

Patrick Deneen on democracy, populism and sortition

Posted on October 2, 2024 by Yoram Gat

Patrick Deneen is a professor of political science at Notre Dame university. He is a fairly prominent public intellectual in US politics, popular especially among the Republican elite. His 2018 book, Why Liberalism Failed, drew quite a bit of attention.

A piece by Deneen has recently been published by the Notre Dame magazine. It is a surprisingly, even impressively, good. The heavy punches just keep coming. Here are some excerpts.

Democracy and Its Discontents

The claim that our democracy is imperiled should rightly strike fear in the souls of citizens, but it ought also to give pause to any student of politics. During most of the four decades I have studied and written about democracy, political scientists, and especially political theorists such as myself, would begin not with a claim about the relative health of democracy, but rather with a seemingly simple question: What is democracy?

Yet according to a dominant narrative among today’s academics, public intellectuals, media personalities and even many citizens, it is largely assumed that we know what democracy is. Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Athens, Books, education, Elections, History, Press, schools, Sortition | 17 Comments »

“Sortition might be the only way”

Posted on September 19, 2024 by Yoram Gat

Reddit user “totalialogika” wrote the text below in the Reddit r/PoliticalScience forum. The commenters on that forum dismissed the text with various versions of “Sir, this is a political science sub. Please go rant somewhere else”. This raises the question of what makes a certain text a piece of “political science” as opposed to “a rant”. Is it merely that the style needs to conform to certain customs, or is there more to it than that?

Sortition might be the only way

We need to rely on Jury Duty rule to eliminate corrupt and sociopathic politicians, especially those who make a career out of their rhetoric.

And for those who claim “expertise” and “experts” are the only thing that can rule. It is expertise to pervert the rule of law and to promote special interests and experts versed in hollow promises and empty talk meant to address emotional and not rational responses from the denizens.

The degeneration of today’s political system in America is the symptom of how inadequate is an archaic system setup by a few million settlers at the 18th Century for the interests of a patriarchal racist and male dominated country, and now inadequate to serve the need of a 350 million people strong superpower. There were of course attempts at putting lipstick on the pig i.e Civil Rights reforms and more access for minorities and women, but those are as ineffectual and “for show”.
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Filed under: education, Elections, History, Sortition | 7 Comments »

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