There is considerable disagreement regarding the political potential of sortition. Dowlen (2008) argues that sortition is not primarily a system of representation as its invention in classical time predates the discovery of probability. Fishkin (2009) has long advocated sortition as a method of deliberative polling but has not (to date) suggested that it should be incorporated permanently into the system of governance. A host of writers (including the present author) have argued that sortition should either replace or supplement the institutions of electoral democracy as part of a mixed constitutional settlement. At the opposite end of the spectrum to Fishkin a small number of brave souls (mostly active on this blog) have argued for the wholesale replacement of electoral democracy by sortition. In this post I argue that, for purely conceptual reasons, the role of sortition can only be one, albeit an essential, part of a mixed constitution and that the attempt to extend its usage beyond this role undermines any claims that it may have to be a democratic mechanism. My case is based on some partially developed arguments in Pitkin (1967).
In her book The Concept of Representation, Hannah Pitkin argues that there are a variety of aspects to representation – aesthetic, symbolic, formalistic, descriptive and active – the latter two being the most relevant to political representation. Descriptive representation involves “standing for” and requires a degree of identity between the representative and her constituency, as evidenced by contemporary demands for all-women candidate shortlists and positive discrimination on account of ethnic minorities. Random selection is the best way of achieving descriptive representation, hence James Fishkin’s choice of this method for his Deliberative Polling programme. On the other hand, Active representation requires the representative (in a similar manner to a trustee or advocate) to act in the interests of her constituents; there is no intrinsic need for the representative to in any way mirror their identity, thereby justifying electoral representation in single-member constituencies. According to Pitkin, descriptive representation does not cover what the representatives do, while active representation is indifferent to who does it. Continue reading →
From Walter Isaacson’s review of Bettany Hughes’ The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens and the Search for the Good Life (New York Times, February 11, 2011):
Hughes intersperses the story of Socrates’ trial in 399 B.C. with some wonderful details. We learn, for example, about the workings of the mechanical device that randomly selected, from 6,000 names, the jury of 500 Athenian citizens (yes, 500) that assembled at the law court to hear the case. This kleroterion, a replica of which can be viewed at the Agora Museum in Athens, was a proto-computer that used carved slots to send metal disks down a chute. “Every means possible has been thought of to prevent corruption,” Hughes writes. “Alphabetical blocks of seats, secret ballots, random-selection machines.” Her quest for authentic detail even leads her to grind up hemlock and sniff it. “It releases a nose-wrinkling sour smell,” she reports.
Paul Cockshott is offering the Greek political structure as an alternative to the Roman model:
When the American revolutionaries were trying to establish their state – and that is the stable form of bourgeois state that has survived – they looked at historical models. And there were two models available for them, there was Rome and Athens. They had to choose between these, and it is actually no accident that they chose Rome, that the United States constitution is largely based on the Roman ideas of constitution – it’s a republic, it’s not a democracy. It was constructed as a state by slaveholders who saw what had been the most stable slaveholder state in the past: Rome. And they modeled their state on that.
But there’s another model, and that’s the Athenian model of direct democracy, and the Greeks, over a period of hundreds of years, developed mechanisms to prevent aristocratic domination of the state. Continue reading →
Our ongoing debate on Egypt got me thinking about the connection (or lack of it) between sortition and religion. Fustel de Coulanges’ 1864 account, that lot was the revelation of divine will, was discredited by Headlam in 1891 and nobody has sought to revive it. Similarly, as Conall Boyle points out in his edition of Gataker, lotteries were only acceptable in the Judaeo-Christian tradition in so far as they didn’t involve claims about divine revelation.
On the other hand Oliver Dowlen argues that the disappearance of lot may well be connected with religious factors, as sortition appears to have been a victim of the Reformation:
There are many reasons why the process of selecting nominators by lot might have been lost in the transition from Venice to the New World. . . The drawing of the lottery was very much a public process, witnessed by the whole community or reggimento. To the puritan settlers this could have seemed a very foreign, bizarre public ritual which smacked of superstition – even Catholicism. The secret ballot, on the other hand, conformed to the Protestant ideal that the private individual should be alone in his judgement and answerable only to God. (Dowlen, Political Potential of Sortition, p.163)
The question that I’m leading up to – and it’s no more than that – is would sortition-based politics be more acceptable to Muslim sensibilities than (Western) electoral politics, and might this possibly account for the failure of electoral democracy in the Arab world?
Posted on February 1, 2011 by Common Lot Sortitionist
I found this PBS documentary enlightening. From my understanding of the classical Athenian political system, this presentation overplays the role of elections and underplays the role of sortition. [Obtained through Netflix.]
Athens: The Dawn of Democracy
2007 NR 120 minutes
In this PBS program, historian Bettany Hughes explores the realities of ancient Athens’s “Golden Age” and uncovers a mix of brilliant, humanity-changing philosophies and dark, war-like themes that co-existed in one turbulent time and place. Although ancient Athens still retains its reputation as a pure and shining democracy, its history tells a more complicated story that includes slavery, black magic and an unquenchable thirst for war.
Cast: Bettany Hughes
Genres: Documentary, Historical Documentaries, PBS Documentaries, TV Documentaries
As usual, the presentation is made in such a way as to imply that sortition was used solely in the courts, eliding its more crucial, and less familiar, roles in government.
Matt Kosko, a student at the University of Pittsburgh, writes a letter to the students’ newspaper, The Pitt News:
To the Editor,
Election season is upon us, and the gatekeepers of respectable opinion at The Pitt News are once again insisting on the “crucial” importance of the SGB election (of course, every election is claimed to be “crucial” by those who fetishize representative government). But if I may, I’d like to dispute the idea that elections have anything to do with students “exercis[ing] their democratic power,” as the editors insist.
All the way back to Aristotle, it used to be understood that elections are a mark of aristocracy, where a few of the “best” people are selected to rule over the undifferentiated masses; free elections in representative systems produce governments that are in fact highly unrepresentative of the population at large in terms of race or class. In contrast, selection by lot is a principle of democracy as in the ancient Greek democracies, where officials were chosen randomly from the population. If we want to make our student government democratic, we would do well to abolish the elected SGB and replace it with a body chosen by lot among the student population.
This body would have no legislative power, just the power to enforce decisions ratified by a majority of students.
After a long hiatus, I’d like to return to commenting on Constellations’ recent symposium on “Representation and Randomness.” (See part one of this review.) To take up where I left off…
Hubertus Buchstein entitled his contribution to the symposium “Reviving Randomness for Political Rationality: Elements of a Theory of Aleatory Democracy.” In this contribution, Buchstein promises to “show that incorporating the factor of chance might…be of interest for contemporary democracies in terms of reform policy and how it could be achieved in practice.” In doing so, he attempts an ambitious array of tasks. The paper begins by “listing five potential functions of the lottery in the realm of politics” (p. 436). It then briefly considers the reintroduction of lotteries to modern politics via the American jury. (Two small historical quibbles: while it is true, as Buchstein says, that U.S. law has required random jury selection only since 1968, the practice was used at various times since the early days of the Republic. Also, the random selection of American military conscripts predates the Vietnam War. It was used in World War II, for example.) Then it addresses some theoretical problems raised in contemporary democratic theory (primarily by Habermas). Then it examines various recent small-scale projects involving randomly-selected citizens (notably James Fishkin’s deliberative opinion polls). Then it considers how random selection might address the problems of contemporary democratic theory that were raised earlier. It concludes with a few additional reform proposals involving random selection that might be worthy of further consideration.
The October issue of Harper’s Magazine has an excerpt from Roger D. Hodge’s upcoming book, The Mendacity of Hope: Barack Obama and the Betrayal of American Liberalism. [Copy of the excerpt is here.]
In an ideal system of public campaign financing, in which all political speech has been equalized by law, in which political advertising is banned and persuasion stripped of its commercial aspect—the corporate businessman and the millionaire (not to mention the billionaire) would still stand taller than the common citizen. In fact, as the political theorist John P. McCormick has argued, the wealthy are likely to dominate any political regime that chooses its magistrates and lawmakers solely by means of election.
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Equality by lot 