Asset or approval voting =?= sortitional selection

Posted on July 8, 2013 by Common Lot Sortitionist

As a result of my video entries to the Looking at Democracy contest, the following message came to my Common Lot website:

I’ve been a proponent of legislative juries for some time. We also promote advanced proportional representation systems.
ScoreVoting.net/Asset.html
ScoreVoting.net/RRV.html

Here was our Looking At Democracy contest entry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=db6Syys2fmE

… I’d like to devote the rest of my life to democracy reform. The legislative jury idea is one I’m quite fond of. Feel free to join our discussion forum and share your thoughts. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/electionscience

Best,
Clay Shentrup
The Center for Election Science

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Filed under: Elections, Juries, Sortition | 32 Comments »

A common man must ask a man of influence for whom he must vote

Posted on June 30, 2013 by Yoram Gat

Lawrence Lessig points to a quote of Patrick Henry at the Virginia Ratifying Convention in which he points at the weakness of the virtue-based justification for elections:

It has been said, by several gentlemen, that the freeness of elections would be promoted by throwing the country into large districts. I contend, sir, that it will have a contrary effect. It will destroy that connection that ought to subsist between the electors and the elected. If your elections be by districts, instead of counties, the people will not be acquainted with the candidates. They must, therefore, be directed in the elections by those who know them. So that, instead of a confidential connection between the electors and the elected, they will be absolutely unacquainted with each other. A common man must ask a man of influence how he is to proceed, and for whom he must vote. The elected, therefore, will be careless of the interest of the electors. Continue reading →

Filed under: Elections, History, Theory | 3 Comments »

Representation in the electoral system

Posted on June 29, 2013 by Yoram Gat

Theoretical considerations show that the electoral system cannot be expected to produce government that represents the values and interests of the general public. The two mechanisms advanced for the idea that the electoral system is representatives – the virtue based mechanism and the rewards based mechanism – both do not withstand scrutiny. The widespread support for the 2011 anti-government protest movement in the West indicates that in many countries the public sentiment is that government is indeed not representative.

In a 2005 paper called “Inequality and democratic responsiveness” Martin Gilens makes an empirical study of representativity:

Abstract By allowing voters to choose among candidates with competing policy orientations and by providing incentives for incumbents to shape policy in the direction the public desires, elections are thought to provide the foundation that links government policy to the preferences of the governed. In this article I examine the extent to which the preference/policy link is biased toward the preferences of high-income Americans.
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Filed under: Academia, Elections | 1 Comment »

Nicholas Gruen: Establish special-purpose ‘democratic’ elites

Posted on June 12, 2013 by Yoram Gat

Nicholas Gruen, CEO of Lateral Economics, Chairman of the Australian Centre for Social Innovation, an entrepreneur involved in a number of internet startups, wants to use sortition to “cut through the weaknesses of ‘vox pop democracy'”:

It turns out that it’s in the opposition’s interest to oppose government policy even where most informed people think the government is right, perhaps even where most of the people think it’s right. Whereupon the process of undermining community sentiment begins apace. On abstract and complex subjects, lots of effort can be expended emphasising uncertainties, nursing resentments, breaking the law to obtain emails and then using them to smear scientists’ motivations etc. Who cares that careful investigation showed that these emails didn’t illustrate what they were taken to illustrate? By then the caravan has moved on.

Other areas where there’s been strong consensus based around expert opinion which have then been exploited by oppositions include tax reform of virtually every hue from the mining tax to CGT, FBT and GST reform.
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Filed under: Elections, Juries, Sortition | 10 Comments »

Machiavelli and the principle of distinction

Posted on June 3, 2013 by Yoram Gat

In chapter XLVII of his Discourses, Machiavelli tells two stories:

The Roman People having become annoyed with the Consular name, and wanting to be able either to choose as Consuls men of the Plebs, or to limit their authority, the Nobility in order not to discredit the Consular authority by either change, took the middle course, and were content that four Tribunes with Consular power be created, who could come from the Plebs as well as from the Nobles. The Plebs were content with this, as it seemed to them to destroy the Consulship and give them a part in the highest ranks. From this a notable case arose, that when it came to the creation of these Tribunes, and they could have selected all Plebs, the Roman people chose all Nobles. Continue reading →

Filed under: Athens, Elections, History, Theory | 12 Comments »

ParPolity

Posted on April 27, 2013 by Yoram Gat

Tomas Mancebo wrote to point out a proposal for a constitutional system by Stephen Shalom called Participatory politics, or ParPolity, which contains a sortition-based element.

The main part of the proposal is a “nested councils” structure – a standard proposal of a hierarchical structure of elected bodies where each body elects a representative to a higher-level body:

Unlike typical direct elections, a good political system must give people an organic connection to those they elect so they can adequately monitor their performance and remove them when necessary. There cannot be large or remote constituencies that render monitoring impossible or even burdensome.

Unlike typical indirect elections, a good political system must ensure that the people’s will does not get attenuated through each intermediate level of voting.
Continue reading →

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

Mencken: The two kinds of democracy

Posted on April 12, 2013 by Yoram Gat

H.L. Mencken‘s 1927 book Notes on Democracy is an interesting document. On the one hand it is a candid expression of a proud elitist worldview. Mencken spends considerable space explicitly denigrating the average person. In short:

There are men who are naturally intelligent and can learn, and there are men who are naturally stupid and cannot. (p. 17)

Such views cannot be expressed in polite society today, and although it is pretty clear that Mencken is aware that his stridency is politically incorrect, it is also pretty clear that he is expressing ideas that were acceptable, even conventional wisdom, in elite circles of his time.

On the other hand, Mencken devotes much attention to the problems of the electoral process as well (which he identifies with democracy). His anti-democratic attitude allows him to criticize the electoral system in a way that those with commitments either to the existing system or to democracy usually cannot afford. As Mencken damns voters for being stupid and electoral politicians for being scoundrels, Mencken points at several problematic fundamental characteristics of the system, belying his main thrust which focuses on personal characteristics. Here, for example, is the principle of distinction:

Democratic man is stupid, but he is not so stupid that he does not see the government as a group of men devoted to his exploitation that is, as a group external to his own group, and with antagonistic interests. (p. 197)

Mencken’s treatment of “direct democracy” – the standard remedy for the problems of the electoral system – is rather insightful: Continue reading →

Filed under: Books, Elections, History, Participation | 13 Comments »

Putsch: Iceland‘s crowd-sourced constitution killed by parliament

Posted on April 11, 2013 by keithsutherland

Extracted from Thorvaldur Gylfason’s blog:

Following its spectacular plunge from grace in 2008 when its banking system crashed, Iceland invited the people of Iceland to draft a new post-crash constitution designed inter alia to reduce the likelihood of another crash. A National Assembly was convened comprising 950 individuals selected at random from the national registry. Every Icelander 18 years or older had an equal chance of being selected to a seat in the assembly. Next, from a roaster of 522 candidates from all walks of life, 25 representatives were elected by the nation to a Constitutional Assembly to draft a new constitution reflecting the popular will as expressed by the National Assembly. Believe it or not, the Supreme Court, with eight of its nine justices at the time having been appointed by the Independence Party, now disgraced as the main culprit of the crash and in opposition, annulled the Constitutional Assembly election on flimsy and probably also illegal grounds, a unique event. . .

Filed under: Elections, Initiatives, Sortition | 7 Comments »

Readers’ responses

Posted on April 1, 2013 by Yoram Gat

This is my summary of points raised in the comment thread for my article in Haayal Hakore.

Representativity of sortition

  1. Would the sampled delegates produce representative policy?

    1. Would they bother to spend the effort to study public policy?

    2. Wouldn’t they be easy to manipulate?

    3. Wouldn’t they be easy to bribe?

    4. Wouldn’t they promote narrow interests, hoping to be rewarded later?

  2. Since there are many population characteristics, the sample would be unrepresentative according to some of those.

  3. If people can opt out, then shy people and people with interesting personal lives would be under-represented.

  4. The training and service experiences would likely cause people to change their minds about various issues and in this way become unrepresentative.

  5. Sampling probabilities – how likely is misrepresentation due to chance variations?

  6. Continue reading →

Filed under: Elections, Proposals, Sortition | 9 Comments »

Sortition: a democratic alternative to the electoral system

Posted on March 27, 2013 by Yoram Gat

In order to achieve representative government political officers must be selected as a statistical sample of the population

This essay is an English version of an essay of mine that was recently published in Hebrew on the Israeli website Haayal Hakore. A lively discussion followed in the comment thread. I hope to pursue some the topics raised by commenters in upcoming posts.

2011 has seen an outpour of popular frustration with government. Mass demonstrations erupted in both Arab countries and Western countries. Over a year later, it appears that the results of the Arab Spring are very different from the results of the Western protests. While in some Arab countries the protests led to an overthrow of the government and significant political changes, the protest in the West dissipated almost everywhere leaving very little impact on the political structure. (Some claim that the protests in the West increased public political awareness and activism, but even if such claims are to be believed, political institutions were unaffected; the only exception is Iceland where some structural change has taken place.)

The difference between the outcomes in Arab countries and in the West can be explained by a fundamental difference in the agendas of the protests. The protesters in the Arab countries had a very clear and specific demand – removing an unelected, or only nominally elected, government and establishing an electoral system similar to the Western model. The Western protesters on the other hand expressed discontent with government policy, but had no clear demands about how things should be changed. The general message of the protest in the West was that public policy is not as it should be – it is serving the elites (“the 1%”) rather than serving the bulk of the population (“the 99%”). But while policy demands were sometimes presented (with varying degrees of coherence and emphasis) no program was laid out of how government should be changed in order to promote policy change.

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Filed under: Elections, Proposals, Sortition | 97 Comments »

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