Elections | Equality by lot

2013 review – sortition-related events

Posted on December 30, 2013 by Yoram Gat

Ahmed Teleb suggested the following as the most noteworthy sortition-related events of 2013:

the publication of Hélène Landemore’s book, Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many, which has a section called “Elections versus Random Selection”:

Random lotteries would indeed produce what is known as ‘descriptive representation’ of the people […] ensuring statistical similarity of thoughts and preferences of the rulers and the ruled.” (p. 108),

and

Filed under: Books, Elections, meta, Press, Sortition | Tagged: 2013, year end review | 23 Comments »

Teleb: If Crowds Are Wise, Why Isn’t Congress?

Posted on December 21, 2013 by Yoram Gat

Ahmed Teleb makes the wisdom-by-diversity argument against elections and more specifically against first-past-the-post systems:

We’ve all heard of the “wisdom of crowds” especially after James Surowiecki’s 2004 best-selling book by that name and Scott Page’s 2007 “The Difference.” […]

So why does the US Congress, a crowd of 535, seem so remarkably un-wise?
Continue reading →

Filed under: Books, Elections | Tagged: wisdom of the crowds | 43 Comments »

2013 review – statistics

Posted on December 20, 2013 by Yoram Gat

Below are some statistics about the fourth year of Equality-by-Lot. Comparable numbers for last year can be found here.

2013	Page views	Posts	Comments
Jan	1,665	9	118
Feb	1,273	3	17
Mar	1,329	5	111
Apr	1,783	12	163
May	1,628	11	84
June	1,499	11	118
July	1,801	9	148
Aug	1,578	5	82
Sept	1,730	10	182
Oct	2,518	12	234
Nov	1,629	9	147
Dec (to 20th)	950	4	34
Total	19,383	100	1,438

Note that page views do not include visits by logged-in contributors – the wordpress system does not count those visits.

Posts were made by 10 authors during 2013. (There were, of course, many other authors quoted and linked to.)

There are currently 116 email and WordPress followers of this blog. In addition there are 24 Twitter followers (@Klerotarian) and 43 Facebook followers.

Searching for “distribution by lot” (with quotes) using Google returns Equality-by-Lot as the second result (out of “about 109,000 results”), as well as the third and fourth results. Searching for “sortition” returns Equality-by-Lot as the 9th result (out of “about 60,800 results”).

Filed under: Elections, meta, Sortition | 1 Comment »

No equality for women without sortition

Posted on December 16, 2013 by Yoram Gat

The essay below was written at the suggestion of Campbell Wallace. It is meant as an attempt to recruit feminists to the cause of sortition. As an aside, it is worth mentioning, I think, that while, of course, men could be feminists, and some are, it is still somewhat embarrassing that all of the regular writers on Equality-by-Lot are men (I believe).

Almost 100 years ago, as the suffragist struggle in the US was approaching its successful culmination with the 19th Amendment, the feminist-anarchist activist Emma Goldman wrote her essay “Woman Suffrage”. It opens so:

We boast of the age of advancement, of science, and progress. Is it not strange, then, that we still believe in fetich [sic] worship? True, our fetiches have different form and substance, yet in their power over the human mind they are still as disastrous as were those of old. Our modern fetich is universal suffrage. Those who have not yet achieved that goal fight bloody revolutions to obtain it, and those who have enjoyed its reign bring heavy sacrifice to the altar of this omnipotent deity. Woe to the heretic who dare question that divinity!

And later:

There is no reason whatever to assume that woman, in her climb to emancipation, has been, or will be, helped by the ballot.

Electoral fetish

The veracity of Goldman’s opening statements has not diminished by the passage of time. Indeed, “electoral fetish” is a two-word description of most of the political discourse of the last 100 years, both public and academic. As for Goldman’s last assertion, it may be considered somewhat extreme, but what is clear is that 100 years of women’s suffrage have not brought women anywhere near equality with men. If attaining suffrage was a tool of emancipation (rather than merely the milestone it surely was), then it is evident that this tool was not nearly as powerful as its most ardent promoters believed it would be¹.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Elections, History, Sortition | 46 Comments »

Russell Brand doesn’t vote

Posted on November 3, 2013 by Yoram Gat

A small media disturbance has been caused by Russell Brand‘s anti-voting message. Jeremy Paxman scolds him on TV with the usual threadbare formulas of electoralism. Robert Webb re-joins Labour. Brand has even found the occasional supporter.

I particularly like this:

I know, I know my grandparents fought in two world wars (and one World Cup) so that I’d have the right to vote. Well, they were conned.

I only wish that when Paxman asked Brand what his alternative to the current system is, he would have replied: “sortition!” It seemed like Brand himself wished he had something concrete to say. Please consider writing to Brand to tell him what he has been missing. He could be the high-profile champion sortition needs.

Filed under: Action, Elections, Press, Sortition | Tagged: anti-voting, Jeremy Paxman, Russel Brand | 11 Comments »

How could Sortition fix any of this?

Posted on November 3, 2013 by Conall Boyle

An excellent piece in today’s (London) Independent on Sunday on the impotence of not just citizens, but politicians and even Prime Ministers in the face of global economic power

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/power-to-the-people-dont-make-me-laugh-8919136.html

So what is the point of replacing powerless politicians with citizen’s juries?

Filed under: Elections, Juries, Sortition | 36 Comments »

Monobina Gupta: The tyranny of the elected representatives

Posted on October 27, 2013 by Yoram Gat

Monobina Gupta writes in www.dnaindia.com:

Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Admi Party can be an answer to the tyranny of the elected representatives

Who would have thought that the bespectacled, mild-mannered, boyish looking Arvind Kejriwal is going to give the two domineering national parties such a scare in the imminent contest for Delhi? Not so long ago, such a reckless suggestion would surely have been met with laconic condescension even acidic contempt from Congress and BJP heavyweights. At the height of the Anna Hazare-led anti-corruption upsurge two years ago, these politicians, ensconced in their risk-free comfort zones, had one crisp message for the street protestors: Fight us, if you will but only in the electoral battlefield. ‘The tyranny of the unelected’, they fumed. As if elections were the only means of acquiring political legitimacy. All other protests, by this reckoning, deserved derision unless they acquired a momentum threatening to upset the electoral applecart of the ‘elected.’
Continue reading →

Filed under: Elections, Press, Sortition | 5 Comments »

Senate by Lot in Australia?

Posted on October 14, 2013 by Common Lot Sortitionist

[This item was pointed out by other Kleroterians as well.]

The first three minutes of this video commentary in “Business Day” of The Sydney Morning Herald is a ‘modest proposal’ to choose the Senate as juries are chosen — but excluding members of political parties, or their families, from the lot.

The original concept of the Senate to be the states’ house of review has long since been betrayed. While the major parties in less divisive times might have done some horse trading, the reviewing will now be left to those much-maligned odds and sods with the balance of power.

So to bring balance to the odds and sods, it would make sense to have many more of them and no political parties. Yes folks, it’s time to introduce Senate duty – conscription to the upper house.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Elections, House of Lords, Juries, Press, Proposals, Sortition | Tagged: allotment, legislature, media_commentary, random_selection, selection by lot, Senate, sortition, upper_chamber, voteless_democracy | 4 Comments »

To avoid pathological outcomes

Posted on October 14, 2013 by constitutionalism

Sortition is proposed as a remedy to some pathologies in our present constitutional systems, but if not done well, it could introduce some pathologies of its own. Some of these have been discussed, but we need to focus for a moment on how it could go wrong, and what we could do to avoid that.

Sortition and pillage

Sortition is often offered as a way to avoid having those elected pillage the public fisc for their own benefit or that of their constituents, sometimes called patronage. Public choice theory examines how special interests invest more than most others to influence public decisions for their benefit, by both the selection of decisionmakers and pressure on them to favor those interests to retain office or advance in office. Once elected, officials become a special interest unto themselves, and public choice processes operate within government institutions as well as on elections.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Athens, Elections, History, Sortition, Theory | Tagged: public choice, sortition, special interests | 15 Comments »

David Van Reybrouck: Against elections

Posted on October 6, 2013 by Yoram Gat

Ad van der Ven wrote to draw attention to David Van Reybrouck’s argument in favor of sortition. Van Reybrouck is a prize winning Flemish Belgian author writing historical fiction, literary non-fiction, novels, poetry, plays and academic texts.

His latest book is Tegen verkiezingen (Against elections) (machine translation with my touch-ups):

Our representative democracy is increasingly in the doldrums. Its legitimacy is affected: fewer and fewer people vote, voters are less predictable in their choice, and the membership of political parties is decreasing dramatically. It is the efficiency of less democracy: since long term government is problematic, politicians increasingly align their policies to the next election. It all leads to what is called by David Van Reybrouck democratic fatigue. But how do tackle it? Papering over the cracks – that is what is happening now mainly. There are some renovation trends here and there. Reybrouck fears that this kind of marginal solutions is no longer sufficient and that the existing system will result in more and more crises.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Athens, Books, Elections, History, Participation, Press, Proposals, Sortition | Tagged: David Van Reybrouck | 71 Comments »