Elections | Equality by lot

2010 midterm elections: a call to action

Posted on August 11, 2010 by Yoram Gat

The U.S. mid-terms elections are drawing near, and with them a valuable opportunity for promoting an alternative mechanism for appointing officials, as voters are made to choose between two candidates, neither of which they find very appealing. Disappointment with Obama, the man who was perceived as the alternative to a widely unpopular president, is palpable, and while approval for Republicans in Congress has recovered slightly as approval for Democrats has sunk, both parties now suffer from similarly low ratings.

I suggest taking advantage of the opportunity by creating a half-page ‘sortition manifesto’ and foisting it upon the unsuspecting members of the public as they approach the voting booths. An alternative or additional way to disseminate the manifesto – requiring some monetary expenditure but less effort – would be through a web ad placed on a search engine.

The manifesto could be written as a collaborative effort of all those who are interested in participating. The comments section here could serve as a place to express interest in taking part, and for some initial brainstorming. Work on a specific document could follow.

Filed under: Elections, Opinion polling, Sortition | 24 Comments »

More sortition advocacy by Marxists

Posted on July 3, 2010 by Yoram Gat

Paul Cockshott writes:

In a modern oligarchy like France, Britain or the USA, what Aristotle called the magistracy is elected. In these elections those with education and money have a huge advantage. The election process is expensive – there are the costs of advertising and campaigning. Historically, in Europe at least, workers’ parties have been able to partly get round this by collecting dues from hundreds of thousands or millions of members. But when standing candidates they usually face the hostility of the privately owned mass media, which is hard to offset.

They are also under pressure to present candidates who are far from being “of indigent circumstances and mechanical employments”. Their first generation of leaders may be of that sort: Ramsay MacDonald or Lula. But later they attempt to present candidates who are educated and polished: Obamas and Blairs. In consequence the elected representatives of popular parties tend to be from higher classes than their supporters. They tend, in consequence, to be markedly cautious in implementing the full rigour of a socialist programme when in office.

Democratic selection by lot suffers none of these disadvantages. It guarantees that the assembly will be dominated by the working classes. It guarantees that the assembly will be balanced in terms of sex, age, ethnic origin, etc. As such it would constitute the most favourable possible grounds for achieving a majority for socialism.

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

A government composed of fledgling lawmakers

Posted on May 3, 2010 by Yoram Gat

Gordon S. Wood, a professor emeritus of history at Brown, writes at the New York Times to warn the displeased U.S. voters about the dangers of booting out the incumbents.

The article is quite interesting for the elitist conception of “democracy” it presents. The couching of this conception in democratic terms produces unintended irony at several points in the article, such as:

[T]he men who led the revolution against the British crown and created our political institutions were very used to governing themselves.

The author sums his message in the last sentence of the article:

[P]recisely because we are such a rambunctious and democratic people, as the framers of 1787 appreciated, we have learned that a government made up of rotating amateurs cannot maintain the steadiness and continuity that our expansive Republic requires.

Filed under: Elections, History, Opinion polling | 2 Comments »

Athenian Democracy in the British Museum

Posted on April 25, 2010 by Yoram Gat

I recently visited the British Museum and found that among the hundreds of displays devoted to the ancient Greek world and specifically to ancient Athens, there is one display box titled “Democracy”.

The box contains, among other items, a storage jar dated 490-480 depicting Theseus (“credited with the invention of democracy”), a drinking cup dated 490-480 depicting Athena watching over the Greeks at Troy as they vote to decide whether Ajax or Odysseus should receive the arms of the dead Achilles, and several jurymen pinakia, such as the one below, which belonged to one Archilochos of Phaleron and is dated 370-362.

The box carries the following description:

Classical Athens was the world’s first democracy. The tyrants who had ruled the city for some 50 years were expelled at the end of the 6th century BC and, from 460 onwards, all male Athenian citizens governed law and politics by debating and voting in a popular assembly. State offices and legal juries were filled by drawing lots. Not everyone, however, was included in this democracy, and women, resident foreigners and slaves were excluded. Nevertheless, Athenian democracy was a starting point for the development of modern democracies.

It is interesting that despite the mention of the practice of sortition in Athens, the text endorses the conventional modern view of equating democracy with elections and equating democratic progress with the widening of electoral rights.

Filed under: Athens, Elections, History, Sortition | 6 Comments »

Lottery Voting

Posted on April 20, 2010 by peterstone

I’m reading Allan Gibbard’s paper on Lottery Voting, i.e., the “Random Dictator” rule. According to this rule, people vote for candidates the same way they normally would, but instead of the votes being counted, one vote is selected at random, and the outcome of that vote implemented. (“Manipulation of Schemes that Mix Voting with Chance,” Econometrica 45, April 1977). There have been a number of philosophical discussions of the idea over the years–most notable Akhil Reed Amar’s paper in the Yale Law Journal (1984)–but Gibbard’s paper is the central paper on the mathematics of the rule. Unhappily, the paper is very technical, and I find myself stuck at one point in the argument. Does anyone know the paper particularly well? I could use some guidance here.

Filed under: Elections, Sortition, Theory | 4 Comments »

Women’s seat reservation lottery in India

Posted on March 30, 2010 by Conall Boyle

India, the ‘world’s largest democracy’ proposes lottery-cum-rotation to encourage women’s representation: Rajya Sabha (upper house of India) passes Women’s Reservation Bill Mar 9, 2010

NEW DELHI: The controversial yet historic Women’s Reservation Bill, ensuring 33% reservation to women in Parliament and state legislative bodies, was passed in the Rajya Sabha on Tuesday after two days of high drama that saw suspension of seven members who violently disrupted proceedings.

The bill seeks to reserve for women 181 of the 543 seats in the Lok Sabha and 1,370 out of a total of 4,109 seats in the 28 State Assemblies.

(It seems that the 1/3 of constituencies to be reserved for women will be decided by a (one-off?) lottery; after that the ‘reserved’ constituencies will be rotated.) Continue reading →

Filed under: Elections, Sortition | 3 Comments »

Media vouchers

Posted on March 13, 2010 by Yoram Gat

Anticipating the supposed upcoming collapse of the corporate news system, Robert McChesney and John Nichols are looking for ways to fund the news media (book, interview). They support a voucher system.

The idea is very simple: every American adult gets a $200 voucher she can use to donate money to any nonprofit news medium of her choice. […] This funding mechanism is the centerpiece of our policy recommendations, and we mean for it to apply to public, community and all other nonprofit broadcasters and the new generation of post-corporate newspapers as well as Internet upstarts. […] Qualifying media ought not, in our view, be permitted to accept advertising; this is a sector that is to have a direct and primary relationship with its audience. These media can accept tax-deductible donations from individuals or foundations to supplement their income. […] We would also suggest that for a medium to receive funds it would have to get […] at least 100 people to sign on.

The authors do not state this explicitly, but it seems that their conception of the voucher system for news media is very similar to the standard conception of the electoral system for government. Continue reading →

Filed under: Distribution by lot, Elections | 5 Comments »