The third sortition conference will take place on May 24-25 at CEVIPOF, Science-Po, Paris. Programme:
Gil Delannoi, Update on the research programme Bernard Manin, Principles of Representative Government revisited Keith Sutherland, The triumph of election: Natural right or wrong? Andrei Poama, Virtues and limits of judicial luck: Reasons for randomising the choice of jurors and verdicts
I’d greatly appreciate advance feedback on my own paper which challenges Manin’s central argument as to why sortition hasn’t been considered as a candidate for representative government.
The reformist idea of “direct democracy” is a recurring theme among critics of the dominant modern elections-based system of government. However, “direct democratic” systems, when considered as systems for representing popular interests, suffer from much the same problems that afflict elections-based systems.
The promise of “direct democracy”
The standard description of the Athenian democracy emphasizes the role of the Assembly. According to this description having thousands of Athenians assemble 40 times a year to discuss and vote on policy decisions was the main democratic mechanism in Athens. This institute, supposedly, distributed political power widely within the group of Athenian citizens. Wikipedia puts it this way:
It [Athens] remains a unique and intriguing experiment in direct democracy, a political system in which the people do not elect representatives to vote on their behalf but vote on legislation and executive bills in their own right.
John McCormick’s recent book Machiavellian Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2011) has already attracted some attention on this blog. Interested readers might like to know that the journal The Good Society has published a symposium on it.
Using a lottery to name the members of a citizen legislature would make that legislature more truly representative of the population and uncouple the link between money and the influence it buys in elections.
That was part of a message David Grant delivered to 17 people gathered Saturday in the Reading Friends Meetinghouse. Continue reading →
Along with its famous opening sentence: ‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains’ Rousseau’s Social Contract is best known for its clear distinction between sovereignty and government. The latter was a delegated administrative function: the ‘Prince’ could either be single, few, or many (monarchy, aristocracy or democracy) but was a mere servant of the sovereign popular will. Although Rousseau argued that democratic government was more suitable for small states, he had no problem in principal with the notion of elected delegates administering government under the watchful eye of the sovereign people and subject to their dismissal if the delegated mandate was breached. Continue reading →
WE BOAST of the age of advancement, of science, and progress. Is it not strange, then, that we still believe in fetich 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 diety. Woe to the heretic who dare question that divinity!
Toward the end of the essay, Goldman writes:
History may be a compilation of lies; nevertheless, it contains a few truths, and they are the only guide we have for the future. The history of the political activities of men proves that they have given him absolutely nothing that he could not have achieved in a more direct, less costly, and more lasting manner. As a matter of fact, every inch of ground he has gained has been through a constant fight, a ceaseless struggle for self-assertion, and not through suffrage. There is no reason whatever to assume that woman, in her climb to emancipation, has been, or will be, helped by the ballot.
[I]f Boris [Johnson] knew his Plato, which he ought to, having been to Eton and everything, then he would recognise in the protests, riots and strikes that have marked this year a sign that the people ain’t happy with the situation. He would also recognise himself as being a member of the short-sighted oligarchy – oligarchy meaning “control by a wealthy minority”. Reading Plato’s Republic, I was struck by the parallels with a typical cycle that he describes. In Platonic terms, it would seem that an oligarchy has taken over UK plc, and that this oligarchy has made too many loans, thereby pauperising the people, and now fails to see what is happening right beneath their noses: that the people are talking about revolution. The good news, though, is that a real democracy may be in store:
Plato writes that when the pursuit of riches remains unchecked, resentment breeds:
YouTube has a talk by Prof. Alan Ryan discussing what he calls “real democracy, using lotteries in the way the ancient world used them”, and contrasting it with the existing system – which he describes as being similar to the Roman system – a system mixing elements of monarchy, aristocracy and monarchy. Ryan concludes by endorsing Fishkin’s “Deliberative Polling”.
Part one:
Part two:
This is a thoughtful, if brief, lecture and the points that are raised are worth discussing, I think, in comments and in future posts.
Why did the American founders ignore the case for sortition? It was well known at the time that sortition was one of the primary mechanisms of Athenian democracy and this explains why Madison and his Federalist chums (who were no democrats) ignored it. But even Antifederalists (who argued the democratic case for descriptive representation) failed to propose sortition as a means to establish a legislature that was a ‘portrait in miniature’ of the whole community. According to Bernard Manin it was philosophy – in the form of the Natural Right theory of consent – that was the principle cause of the ‘triumph of election’ (Manin, 1997, Ch.2). But is this true?
James Fishkin points out that the etymological root of ‘deliberation’ (deliberationem) is ‘weighing’ (2009, p.35), so when a randomly-selected assembly member of an allotted chamber (AC) ‘like me’ weighs up the arguments and judges accordingly then I am descriptively represented. But is it possible to take this further and argue that I thereby consent to the judgment of a randomly-selected assembly? The argument for this further claim would need to take the following lines (paraphrasing Fishkin, 2009):
Someone ‘like’ me would, ex hypothesi, exercise judgment in the same way that I would myself. The argument does not require a definition of the ‘likeness’ criteria (age, gender, occupation, political preferences etc.), as the randomization process in principle reflects the incidence of any quality in the general population.
The number of representatives ‘like me’ in an allotted assembly would be proportionate to the number in the general population. If the sample is not sufficiently fine-grained to accurately reflect the distribution of any quality deemed to be salient to the exercise of political judgment then the sample numbers would need to be increased accordingly: only a relatively small sample would be needed to provide an accurate gender balance, whereas the proportional representation of, say, albinos or molecular microbiologists would require a larger sample. The rapid growth of the polling industry is a testimonial to the accuracy and validity of the probability sampling principle.
Therefore the aggregate judgment of the allotted assembly would represent the considered judgment of the whole population. This was the principle behind the nomothetai (legislative assemblies) introduced in fourth-century Athens.
All electors are currently deemed to consent to the results of a general election, whether or not ‘their’ candidate was victorious; so the same principle should apply to the result of a vote in an allotted assembly (the only difference being the employment of one or other of the two mechanisms – election or sortition – that constitute a ‘ballot’.) Although one might argue that the ‘consent’ involved is at best tacit, hypothetical (or some other form of ‘useful fiction’), the same is true in both instances of the ‘ballot’.
Bernard Lewis, “renowned Islamic scholar”, shares with the readers of the Jerusalem Post what he undoubtedly thinks is a real-politik theory of democracy, the product of his decades of study:
The Arab masses certainly want change. And they want improvement. But when you say do they want democracy, that’s a more difficult question to answer. What does “democracy” mean? It’s a word that’s used with very different meanings, even in different parts of the Western world. And it’s a political concept that has no history, no record whatever in the Arab, Islamic world.
In the West, we tend to get excessively concerned with elections, regarding the holding of elections as the purest expression of democracy, as the climax of the process of democratization. Well, the second may be true – the climax of the process. But the process can be a long and difficult one. Consider, for example, that democracy was fairly new in Germany in the inter-war period and Hitler came to power in a free and fair election.
We, in the Western world particularly, tend to think of democracy in our own terms – that’s natural and normal – to mean periodic elections in our style. But I think it’s a great mistake to try and think of the Middle East in those terms and that can only lead to disastrous results, as you’ve already seen in various places. They are simply not ready for free and fair elections.
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Equality by lot 