Does anyone know of organizations, publications or websites that discuss sortitional selection of legislatures in German?
Filed under: Academia, Books, Experiments, Proposals, Sortition | Tagged: Austria, Citizen Legislature, German, Germany, politics, random selection, representative democracy, selection by lot, sortition, Switzerland | 9 Comments »
Where is sortition (both its history and potential) being studied?
[Many researchers have been mentioned before on Equality by Lot, and it would be helpful to have a current list in one place.]
Filed under: Academia, Experiments, schools, Sortition, Theory | Tagged: demarchy, democracy, research, sortition | 2 Comments »
Watched a TED talk this evening featuring a Stanford Business School Professor. (We’ve never met.) He presented a study suggesting that people might have more difficulty with certain types of tasks if they are presented with a difficult choice in advance than if the choice is made for them–even if the choice is made for them randomly. The argument isn’t completely clear to me, but that’s par for the course for TED. The talk is here–
Baba Shiv: Sometimes it’s good to give up the driver’s seat
Filed under: Experiments, Theory | Leave a comment »
I presume the list would start with Athens, then Florence & Venice, and include the Citizen’s Assembly of British Columbia.
The hardest question I have to answer is: Where has this been tried and where IS it NOW being used?
Filed under: Experiments | Tagged: examples, experiments, sortition | 13 Comments »
Mark Fredrickson writes:
I am a follower of the Kleroterian blog, and I am excited to announce
that I have something to contribute. As a possible lead up to a field experiment for my dissertation (Department of Political Science, University of Illinois), I undertook a survey experiment in which subjects either read a story about an elected committee or a randomly selected committee (along with several other manipulations). I recently completed my first draft and have published a working paper: Returning to the Cradle of Democracy.The data and computations for the analysis are also available online: election-sortition-corruption-survey-experiment.
I hope your readers find it useful, and I look forward to their feedback.
The paper’s abstract:
The hallmark of modern democracies is the competitive election. This
institution is seen as the primary connection between leaders and the population. This has not always been the case. Sortition, the random selection of leaders from the population, served as the primary institution of democracy in ancient Athens. How would citizens in a modern democracy react to the use of sortition to select leaders? This study employs a survey experiment in which subjects read about a local development grant, overseen by either an elected or randomly selected committee. I fi nd that sortition encourages more citizens to seek leadership positions, though other forms of participation remain unchanged. I also find that despite a stated preference for election, subjects see the two committees as equally capable and responsible, even when confronted with corrupt acts and closed door meetings.
Filed under: Experiments, Participation, Sortition | 5 Comments »
An e-petition calling for rioters to lose their benefits has hit 100,000 signatures and become the first to be considered for a Commons debate.
It has dwarfed others on the government website, which has struggled to deal with the volume of people accessing it.The petition has now been formally referred to a committee which will decide whether to hold a debate.
As I argued in Part 1 of this thread, e-petitions would be an excellent way of setting the agenda for an allotted legislature. Others have claimed that any form of elective or referendum-based system allows the agenda to be set by the rich and powerful (in particular media and lobby groups); but in the case of the London riots, the media has been reflecting (rather than initiating) public anger (by contrast to phone hacking, where the “outrage” has largely been manufactured by the commercial rivals of News International, including the BBC). Anyone who examines the most popular e-petitions would find it hard to argue that they were being manipulated by the rich and powerful. Although many of the petitions have a right-wing and populist flavour, there is no equivalent in the UK of Fox TV or the shock-jock radio networks which have helped fuel Tea Party support in the US. The media in the UK (especially the BBC) are normally viewed as considerably more left-liberal than the population in general, so it would appear that the e-petitions site is a reasonable indication of public priorities, hence my argument that it should become an instrument for setting a democratic agenda for an allotted legislature.
The only problem I have with the present arrangements is that the parliamentary debate is left to MPs and government ministers. As has been argued consistently on this forum, elections do not lead to a descriptively-representative chamber and the decision-making process is poor from an epistemic perspective (MPs do not have a wisdom that the rest of us lack, and are no longer viewed as “honourable” members). Hence my own petition (signatures welcome) for an allotted chamber to debate any e-petition that exceeds the threshold. If MPs and ministers wish to take part in the debate then they should act as advocates, arguing the case for or against the petition under deliberation.
Filed under: Experiments, Initiatives, Participation | 14 Comments »
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, 2011OPINION: 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 »
David Teira of Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (Madrid) asks
Sorry if my question is too simple, but I’d be grateful if anyone pointed out the references of empirical studies on our taste for lotteries in the allocation of scarce goods. Are there people who do not like lotteries as allocation mechanisms, independently of whether they are fair or not?
Filed under: Distribution by lot, Experiments, Opinion polling | 3 Comments »
Bert Olivier, Professor of Philosophy at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, read Joe Klein’s recent post supporting Deliberative Polling®, and found it interesting.
Following up on Klein’s suggestion regarding the kleroterion, that opportunities for “deliberative democracy” be created on a larger scale along this avenue, could lead in the direction of greater democratic participation in the Arendtian sense of “action”. Such a process could only be salutary for democracy, as long as it is not restricted to matters economical, but expanded to include really tough political issues as well — starting at a local level, and then slowly broadening it to regional and national levels. Perhaps this way the meaning of “democracy” could be recuperated.
Filed under: Athens, Experiments, Initiatives, Sortition | 2 Comments »
First we had the movie by Madeleine Sackler The Lottery. Now along comes another one
Waiting for “Superman,” in theaters this fall, offers the best evidence to date that charter schools are no longer a reform sought by conservatives alone: the film was directed by Davis Guggenheim of An Inconvenient Truth fame.
You can read more about this movie (including a trailer which includes an actual lottery draw!) at
http://www.firstshowing.net/2010/05/08/watch-this-davis-guggenheims-waiting-for-superman-trailer/
I found out about this from reading an article about New York charter schools by Marcus A. Winters (a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute ) called ‘The Life-Changing Lottery’ in City Journal
http://www.city-journal.org/2010/20_3_democracy-prep.html
(Winters accepts uncritically the pro-charter research by economist Caroline Hoxby of Stanford U. Others doubt the efficacy of charters, notably Steven Levitt of Chicago and ‘Freakonomics’ fame. Both rely on the ‘natural scientific experiment thrown up by lottery choosing. Details in my new book ‘Lotteries for Education’)
Filed under: Distribution by lot, Experiments, schools | 5 Comments »
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