Sortition, “a beacon for billions”

Posted on April 10, 2024 by Yoram Gat

A few days ago, the Portland Press Herald published a bold, “completely original” plan for city government, about which “political philosophers will be writing for millennia”. Sortition is an important part of this plan.

First, competitive elections will be abolished. No more “vote for me.” No more sloganeering. No more name recognition. Instead of popularity contests, members of every representative office in our city will be elected by sortition, or through a lottery system, with officials chosen at random for a term of one year. We will have 66 districts, each containing roughly 1,000 people. This will make our city a true government of the people. The mechanics of election-by-sortition are simple: An algorithm will randomly select a name from the city’s draft rolls.

Next, we are proposing a tricameral system of government: a 66-person Popular Assembly of Legislative Supremacy (“PALS”), a House of Landlords and Yeomanry (“HOLY”) and a three-person Supreme High-most Unlimited Council of Knowledge Systems (“SHUCKS Troika”). Our nine-person City Council will be gone. So will be our city manager. All three new branches have key roles, but the PALS shall be our chief lawmaking and deliberative body.

Sortition shall select the members of the 66-person PALS branch. The idea is simple: It could be you. PALS will be a raucous parliament made up of average citizens, all chosen at random.

Filed under: Elections, Fiction, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 4 Comments »

The Keys to Democracy by Maurice Pope

Posted on October 7, 2023 by Yoram Gat

Maurice Pope’s book The Keys to Democracy is the third book ever written advocating the use of sortition as a major component of a modern government. (The two earlier ones being Ernest Callenbach and Michael Phillips’s A Citizen Legislature and John Burnheim’s Is Democracy Possible?, both first published in 1985. Pope, who seems to have started writing at about the same time, was apparently unaware of either.) The great strengths of Pope’s writing are his independence of thought and his evident sincerity. Coming early into the field, and being a classicist rather than a political scientist, Pope was clearly breaking new ground, following his own logical train of thought. He was thus free from the burden of formulaically making connections to prior writings and from the petty-political considerations of self-promotion. This unique situation made a thoroughgoing impact on the book as a whole.

Authors of works about sortition (including Pope) generally share the ostensible aim of achieving some measure of democratization of society. But while this general aim is broadly shared, the consensus ends there because the detailed aims and the proposed mechanisms for achieving them vary widely. At the conservative end, the problem with the existing system is conceived as some sort of sclerosis. The main symptom of the problem is fatigue, or a lack of confidence. Sortition-based institutions are then seen as a way to infuse the system with new blood or new vigor, rejuvenating a system that is essentially sound but has for various reasons, that generally remain vague, fallen into a bad state. Associated with this view of things are generally quite modest proposals – advisory bodies that “help” current decision makers make more informed decisions. Even those more informed decisions are perhaps less important than the mere fact that allotted citizens are widely recognized as having had a part in the process. Indeed, what exactly the problems are with the current outcomes of the process and what are the expected improvements in terms of policy is usually not specified. In fact, sometimes the entire point is to have the allotted citizens themselves become more informed rather than making any changes in decision making. Writings in this vein tend to be heavy with references to the canon of “deliberative democracy” and light on the idea that democracy is a regime of political equality.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Athens, Books, Elections, Fiction, History, Juries, Participation, Press, Sortition | 10 Comments »

The call to abolish elected chambers all together began to spread like wildfire

Posted on August 10, 2022 by Yoram Gat

Modern Ghana publishes a short futuristic piece by Brett Hennig (falsely mis-attributing it to other writers).

The End Of Politicians: Time For Real Democracy

It all started in the small countries of north-western Europe. The movement began way back in 2011-12 when one of them went without a government for almost 2 years. But it wasn’t until 2020 that the first regional parliament there instituted a second chamber of randomly selected citizens to review legislation. That made other governments around the world takes note. Then, after the global crisis of 2023-25 people hit the streets, leaders paid attention, and randomly selected, representative “citizens’ chambers” began to flourish. Canada replaced its Senate with a citizens’ chamber and, finally – after years of campaigning – the House of Lords in the UK was also replaced with a representative, randomly selected “House of the People”. It wasn’t long after that – when people began to realise that these assemblies work well and make good, fair, trusted decisions – that the call to abolish elected chambers all together began to spread like wildfire.

Then it happened. After the political crisis in north America in 2039 a couple of US states responded to the crisis by completely replacing their elected legislature with a citizens’ chamber. First it was Oregon, and then the big one: California. Now, in 2050, some countries have followed suit. Among the early adopters were Belgium and The Netherlands in Europe. Who would be next was hard to predict: The depth and breadth of the political movement depended crucially on the local conditions and historical context of each country. Yet the movement continues to grow: Slowly, politicians are becoming a thing of the past. They are now commonly seen as a bizarre historical artefact of that brief period in the 1900s, between the time when parliaments elected by universal suffrage became the norm across half the planet, and the 21st-century spread of the new sortition democracy based on universal, representative random selection.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Fiction, Press, Sortition | 2 Comments »

A graphic novel advocating sortition

Posted on May 14, 2022 by Yoram Gat

A new short illustrated fictional work set 5 years into the future follows Tom, an Architecture student in Marseille, who is allotted to sit on the French National Assembly. The work, written (in French) by Béatrice and Salomé Mabilon, is entitled Nous ne sommes pas en démocratie: Plaidoyer pour le tirage au sort (We are not living in a democracy: a plea for sortition) and is available both in print and as an e-book. Béatrice Mabilon is a professor of education and has written in the past in favor of sortition.

Excerpt (my translation):

Julien [Tom’s assistant, who is also a former allotted representative]: “At the beginning when I was allotted it was like a blank page, I felt like anything is possible. But we had a long way to go. In the previous system, power was arrogated by an oligarchy that formed a closed circle. The representative system was in crisis…”
Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Books, Elections, Fiction, Sortition | 5 Comments »

Varoufakis on democracy

Posted on December 20, 2020 by Yoram Gat

An excerpt from a 2019 discussion between Yanis Varoufakis, the Greek economist and politician, leader of the MeRA25 party, and Caroline Lucas, the only Green Party UK MP.

CL: Your country is seen as the birthplace of democracy. In your opinion has there ever been a really good democracy we can look at and say, ‘That was when it was working well’?

YV: Democracy is always unfinished business. It is imperfect by design, especially in societies with vested interests vying for domination. But the merits of studying ancient Athenian democracy, which only lasted a few decades, is that it was the first and last time the poor controlled the government. Which is, interestingly, Aristotle’s definition of democracy. It was a remarkably radical idea that control over the instruments of the state should be independent of wealth.

CL: How did it work?

YV: Back in the times of the grand debates at the Pnyx, which was the parliamentary space in ancient Athens, there were two opposing parties: the Aristocrats and the Democrats. The Aristocrats hated democracy with a passion – but all the great philosophers we now eulogise like Aristotle and Plato were on the side of the Aristocrats. Nevertheless, the Aristocrats, who hated democracy, supported elections. And the Democrats did not.

CL: That sounds very paradoxical.

YV: The argument was that the Aristocrats could afford to buy influence in an election, so elections were an enemy of democracy. Democrats supported a lottery – sortition, as it is called today. Every official position in Athenian democracy was elected by lottery, including judges. Their terms were confined to six months. The only posts not sorted by lottery were the general, who had to know how to conduct a war, and bankers. The officials responsible for minting the money and for quality control of products like wine were slaves. Why? Because citizens had the right not to be beaten. Slaves did not. The idea was that bankers had to fear that they would be beaten up if they messed up the finances of the city. I think this is a splendid proposal for the City of London!
Continue reading →

Filed under: Athens, Books, Elections, Fiction, History, Mass action, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Hugo Bonin: Democracy by lottery

Posted on September 28, 2018 by Yoram Gat

The newspaper Le Journal de Montréal has an article by Jacques Lanctôt about Hugo Bonin’s book, La Democratie Hasardeuse [Original in French, my translation].

Games of chance in politics

“With luck, things will turn out well.” Who has not heard this saying at some point? A chance encounter, a decision taken offhandedly, a delay that turned out for the best, any of those may change our life.

Hugo Bonin believes that luck may be beneficial in politics as well even if it is not a magical solution to all our problems of representation. In a well structured essay, well supported by numerous concrete examples stretching as far back as antiquity (Athens and Rome) and where a future that is almost within our reach is imagined, Bonin aims to show that sortition is a hundred-fold better than the so-called representative elections.

Sortition has its limits but its great merit is that it takes no account of distinctions between races, genders, ages or social classes. John and Jane Doe are worth just as much as the elitist clique of doctors, lawyers and businessmen who have been governing us for too long a time.

More “egalitarian”
In an electoral regime such as the one know here and elsewhere in the West, the voters vote to elect the supposedly better candidate. While in an allotment system, the notion of “better” does not exist because everybody are equally politically qualified. Thus, this is “an egalitarian and a democratic procedure” where all external considerations are excluded.

Random selection is already practiced here in Québec and elsewhere. We need only consider jury selection in a criminal trial. Made of lay people rather than experts, following the British law, this jury is called upon to analyze the evidence and render a decision after deliberation.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Books, Elections, Fiction, History, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Sortition in eight flavors

Posted on April 5, 2018 by Common Lot Sortitionist

In four screenplays, a short stage play, a long essay, a novella and a novel I consider the pros and cons of using sortition (random selection) to ensure that policy-making bodies accurately represent the people they serve.

The Fight for Random – wild magical realist screenplay

Random Takes Off – political action drama screenplay

Democracy at Random – road trip screenplay addressing eugenics and income

Random Takes Baltimore – municipal version of “Random Takes Off” screenplay

Next Step for Democracy – a short comedic educational stage play

Why Elections Are the Problem and How to Make Democracy Real — annotated essay

On the Citizen House: A Disquisitional Fiction – a disputatious novella

The Common Lot: A Novel – as stated

Detailed descriptions at https://amazon.com/author/grantd.

Filed under: Fiction, Sortition | 11 Comments »

On the Citizen House: A Disquisitional Fiction

Posted on July 18, 2017 by Common Lot Sortitionist

On the Citizen House: A Disquisitional Fiction is a novella of ideas in the form of socratic dialogue wrapped up in a road trip. Formatted as a proto-screenplay, description is sparse, characterization thin. Dialogue and visuals dominate.

The Citizen House is the world’s first national legislature chosen as the original Athenian democrats did — by sortition (by random selection). Two representatives face the challenges of advocating for their disparate views (eugenics / universal basic income) in a legislature demographically more reflective of the entire population than any other.

Amazon e-book: http://tinyurl.com/yao8lckx

68 pages, single spaced. 22,800 words.

Filed under: Fiction, Sortition | 2 Comments »

“Anyone have any better ideas?”

Posted on March 25, 2017 by Yoram Gat

Terry Bouricius pointed out the following story in The Onion, “America’s finest news source”:

Humanity Surprised It Still Hasn’t Figured Out Better Alternative To Letting Power-Hungry [Depraved People] Decide Everything

NEW YORK—Noting that it has had thousands of years to develop a more agreeable option, humankind expressed bewilderment this week that it has yet to devise a better alternative to governing itself than always letting power-hungry assholes run everything, sources worldwide reported.

Individuals in every country on earth voiced their frustration that, in spite of generations of mistreatment, neglect, and abuse they have suffered at the hands of those in positions of authority, they continue to allow control over the world’s governments, businesses, and virtually every other type of organization and social group to fall to the most megalomaniacal pricks among them.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Fiction, Press | 5 Comments »

Sortition in fiction

Posted on October 27, 2016 by constitutionalism

Most of what is written about sortition, or what I prefer to call fetura, is academic or polemic, but I have recently published a novel in which it features prominently. You might enjoy reading how this might unfold in the real world, or at least the real world of alternative history science fiction.

New Amazon Kindle book by Jon Roland

Wayward World: A new kind of hero must set history on a different course to save Earth from destruction almost a thousand years in the future.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MPW3Y10

You don’t need a Kindle device to read it. Almost any browser will do, with a plugin, or get the app. This is a fundraising project for the Constitution Society. All the revenues go to it.

Still making some minor edits to it that should be live in a day or so. Internet slow for you? If you can get to the book, reading it can give you something to do while you wait.

An interstellar planet is on a collision course with Earth in 1000 years. To get humanity ready to divert it, human technical progress needs to be advanced more rapidly, and history will take a wrong turn in 1265. Our heroes have to take Earth on a different course, without being around for the entire thousand years, so they have to set up institutions that can continue to move things forward and avoid several disasters that will set humanity back even further. They face strong resistance and many hazards, but are led by one who has the skill and charisma needed, if she can survive long enough.

One of the advantages of the Kindle edition is that it has live links to many web pages that provide background on much of the content discussed in the chapters.

Filed under: Fiction, Sortition | 2 Comments »

Next Page »