Lawrence Lessig: Democracy vouchers

Posted on December 17, 2011 by Yoram Gat

Jorge Cancio drew my attention to Lawrence Lessig’s proposal for fixing government.

We should have seen this coming: if McChesney and Nichols offered us a fix for elitist media by using media vouchers, Prof. Lessig will have us fix elitist government using democracy vouchers (book, article, interview):

So long as elections cost money, we won’t end Congress’s dependence on its funders. But we can change it. We can make “the funders” “the people.” Following Arizona, Maine and Connecticut, we could adopt a system of small-dollar public funding for Congress.

Here’s just one way: almost every voter pays at least $50 in some form of federal taxes. So imagine a system that gave a rebate of that first $50 in the form of a “democracy voucher.” That voucher could then be given to any candidate for Congress who agreed to one simple condition: the only money that candidate would accept to finance his or her campaign would be either “democracy vouchers” or contributions from citizens capped at $100. No PAC money. No $2,500 checks. Small contributions only. And if the voter didn’t use the voucher? The money would pass to his or her party, or, if an independent, back to this public funding system.

Lessig apparently doesn’t perceive that his proposed fix is reproducing in dollars what the system already implements in votes. After all, if a candidate cannot win without money, the candidate surely cannot win without votes. If the rich are influential in the current system because it takes money to gather votes, why won’t they remain influential because it would take money to gather voucher money?

Filed under: Elections, Press, Proposals | 15 Comments »

Americans’ approval of Congress is at all time low: 9%

Posted on October 29, 2011 by Yoram Gat

A New York Times/CBS opinion poll finds that only 9% of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing, and only 10% feel that they can “trust the government in Washington to do what is right”. Both of those numbers are the lowest on record.

Filed under: Elections, Opinion polling, Press | 1 Comment »

New Paper on Appointment to office by lot in Ancient Athens

Posted on August 28, 2011 by gtridimas

“Constitutional choice in ancient Athens: The rationality of selection to office by lot” by George Tridimas (University of Ulster) is forthcoming in Constitutional Political Economy.

Abstract:

Contrary to modern democracies ancient Athens appointed large numbers of government officers by lot. After describing the Athenian arrangements, the paper reviews the literature on the choice between election and lot focusing on representativeness of the population, distributive justice, minimization of conflicts, quality of appointees and administrative economy. It then examines why in drawing up the constitution a self-interested citizen may give up voting for government officials and appoint them by lot. It is shown that appointment by lot is preferred when the effort required to choose candidates is less than the benefit expected from their actions as government officials. It is also found that, given the choice, office motivated candidates may unanimously agree to selection by lot but not to election.

Filed under: Athens, Elections, Participation, Sortition, Theory | 5 Comments »

One of Bill McClellan’s readers writes in

Posted on July 29, 2011 by Yoram Gat

Google Alert netted another fine catch:

Democracy seeming like Greek to U.S.

Bill McClellan
stltoday.com, July 29, 2011

Not long ago, I wrote a column in which I suggested we select our leaders through a lottery [Stupid vs. immoral? Let’s leave governing up to chance, June 8, 2011]. We would avoid tiresome campaigns and the lies and misrepresentations therein, and we would rid ourselves of campaign contributions and the time-honored practice of buying influence and favors.

It was a whimsical idea. Or so I thought. But one of the joys of writing a newspaper column is hearing from people who know more than I do about the subjects I write about.

David C. sent me this note: “Today’s column made me think of ancient Athens, one of the most thoroughgoing democracies in western history (at least for those who weren’t slaves). They had a system of government very similar to your idea of government by lottery. As the Marxist historian C.L.R. James wrote in his essay, ‘Every Cook Can Govern’: ‘Perhaps the most striking thing about Greek democracy was that the administration (and there were immense administrative problems) was organized upon the basis of what is known as sortition, or, more easily, selection by lot. The vast majority of Greek officials were chosen by a method which amounted to putting names into a hat and appointing the ones whose names came out.'”

Filed under: Athens, Elections, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 3 Comments »

Edip Yuksel: Lotteries elections: Disinfecting democracy from lobbies

Posted on July 26, 2011 by Yoram Gat

In 1998, Edip Yuskel, “an Islamic reformer”, wrote an article proposing selecting Congress using sortition:

Every citizen who meets the qualifications enumerated in Article I, sections 2 and 3 of the Constitution could become a candidate by filling out a simple application form. This application can be automatically done during voter registration. Every registered person will have an equal chance of becoming a member of Congress. The election or selection can be conducted by mechanical devises or computers with sufficient security and supervision.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Elections, Participation, Proposals, Sortition | 45 Comments »

Government quality and government selection

Posted on July 9, 2011 by Yoram Gat

[M]en err in two ways, either by ignorance or by malice.

Francesco Guicciardini, Dialogue on the Government of Florence

A model of government quality and government selection mechanism quality

The two chief desirable characteristics of government are

  • representativity (r): the government is representative when its efforts are aimed at promoting the general interests (rather than personal or narrow interests), and
  • competence (c): the government is competent when it is able to enact effective policy in accordance with its aims.

A representative, competent government enacts policy that effectively promotes the general interest.

Modeled in this way, the quality of a government is a function of its representativity and its competence, q = q(r,c), increasing in both arguments (e.g., q(r,c) = r c). The quality of a mechanism for selecting a government is measured by its tendency to produce high-quality governments.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Elections, Sortition | 29 Comments »

Comment on CJs in Ireland

Posted on June 30, 2011 by Conall Boyle

Interesting observations by a randomly selected barrister (lawyer) on Citizens’ Assembly experiment in Ireland. The organisation behind it,  ‘Wethecitizens’, is non-governmental, and looks excellent. For non-Irish: Oireachtas is Government, Seanad is the Upper House, like the House of Lords. It is sad to see that this exercise did not recommend Sortition for the Seanad.

Need to work out what a citizens’ assembly is before deciding to have one

CONOR NELSON
Thu, Jun 30, 2011

OPINION: I was selected to take part in the citizens’ assembly – but what exactly is the aim of the experiment?

LAST WEEK, I was selected randomly to participate in an experimental citizens’ assembly. It met over a day and a half last weekend at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham (originally to be the seat of the Oireachtas in 1922).

I met lots of people who were engaged and pleased to be selected. The event was run by the “We the Citizens” project, funded by Atlantic Philanthropies, the organisation founded by Chuck Feeney.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Elections, Experiments, House of Lords, Participation | 1 Comment »

Karatani on sortition

Posted on June 30, 2011 by Yoram Gat

Kojin Karatani writes in his book, Transcritique (2001, translated by Sabu Kohso, p. 182ff):

There is one crucial thing we can learn from Athenian democracy in this respect. The ancient democracy was established by overthrowing tyranny and equipped itself with a meticulous device for preventing tyranny for reviving. The salient characteristic of Athenian democracy is not a direct participation of everyone in the assembly, as always claimed, but a systematic control of the administrative power. The crux was the system of lottery: to elect public servants by lottery and to surveil the deeds of public servants by means of a group of jurors who are also elected by lottery. […] My point is that the core of the system invented to stop the fixation of power in Athenian Democracy lay not in the election itself, but in the lottery. Lottery functions to introduce contingency into the magnetic power center. The point is to shake up the positions where power tends to be concentrated; entrenchment of power in administrative positions can be avoided by a sudden attack of contingency. It is only the lottery that actualizes the separation of the three powers. If universal suffrage by secret ballot, namely, parliamentary democracy, is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, the introduction of a lottery should be deemed the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Disappointingly, Karatani steps away from sortition, without providing a real reason – off-handedly blaming “the people” for not being ready for a radical solution:

Can we choose all representative by lottery in all elections? That is not realistic; the system itself would be too arbitrary to gain the trust of the people.

Instead, he offers a lottery among top vote getters, claiming it will reduce factionalism, and making a vague unexplained promise that such a mechanism will “free the power center from fixation in the long run”:

[W]hat is preferable to us would be to choose the most crucial post by lottery: namely choosing three candidates by secret vote (three in one choice) and then finally electing one by lottery. Because the last and most crucial stage is determined by contingency, factional disputes or conflicts over successors would not make sense.

Filed under: Athens, Books, Elections, Proposals, Theory | 1 Comment »

U.S. presidential elections: a perpetual cycle of disappointment

Posted on June 26, 2011 by Yoram Gat

The Wall Street Journal has a chart illustrating the pattern of high approval rating for incoming U.S. presidents followed, almost invariably, by disappointment. Bill Clinton seems the only clear exception to this pattern since WWII.

Filed under: Elections | 1 Comment »

The New International Encyclopedia on Elections

Posted on June 14, 2011 by Yoram Gat

The 1905 edition of the The New International Encyclopedia opens its entry on elections with the following paragraph:

ELECTION, in politics, is the choice of public officers by the vote of those who are entitled to exercise the elective franchise. This is to be distinguished, on the one hand, from the appointment of officers by a superior, as by a king, a president, a governor, or a mayor; and, on the other hand, from their selection by lot. The last-named method of choosing public officers was considered by Aristotle one of the characteristic features of a popular government. It has been advocated by other writers, because of its tendency to prevent the formation of political parties. Party organization, the caucus, the coalition of different factions, the corruption of voters, the falsification of election returns, the interest of a particular candidate and kindred evils, it is argued, will all be swept away if officers are selected by lot.

Filed under: Elections, Sortition | Leave a comment »

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