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.
This is becoming so commonplace that it may be time to launch a “sortition media index” instead of having separate posts. But, for now, here is another mass media reference to sortition, this time from the Arizona Daily Star. The two-paragraph pro and con analysis is pretty perceptive, I think:
to heck with voting
History magazine had a recent piece about an ancient Greek machine that was an early forerunner to the lottery system.
A kleroterion ensured absolute randomness in picking men to sit on juries and to perform other civic duties.
Presumably, a council of 500 would serve for precisely one term, ferreting out the answers to sticky problems.
Huh. A lottery instead of elections. Less posturing for the next race could spell less gridlock. There could be less likelihood of ingrained corruption. There might be a greater cross-section of the community instead of picks made by a fraction of voting-age people.
There could be downsides, too. Less institutional memory might strengthen the role of lobbyists or tempt those seated to reinvent the wheel every year.
The reference to History magazine is apparently with regard to an item which Google Alerts caught back in July.
The result of such a radical constitutional change [i.e., a switch to sortition based representation] would be a complete transformation of the relationships between citizens and their representatives.
Citizens chosen for office by sortition would not be chosen for office by anything other than chance. They would therefore not “represent” a voter or a constituent in the way that persons elected to office can claim to represent others by virtue of their being chosen by the votes of citizens. Likewise, no representative chosen by lot would have a basis to exclude or ignore a certain section of the citizenry “because they’ll never vote for me.” Representatives would merely be statistically representative of the community from which they come, as they would be selected out of that community. Hence the relationship between representative and constituency would be fundamentally different under a sortition system from the current system of relations. The representative would remain an indivisible part of the whole.
Between the representative and the other citizens there would be no faithless promises to be made, no manipulative relationship to be established. Holding political office would be like performing volunteer work in the community, with nothing to be gained privately thereby. This is supposed to be the essence of civics in western liberal states, but the domination of politics by private interests has perverted it into a laughable cartoon. Nobody in western liberal states takes the ideal of “public service” seriously any longer. Politics is merely self-advancement wearing public drag.
The use of sortition would prevent the ambitious and self-seeking from gaining control over our institutions for purposes against the public interest. Nothing could be gained, and there would be no institutional framework to allow the self-seeking to take over our institutions for their own ends. Statistically, MPs would be representative of the whole society, just as a random sample used for polling purposes is judged to be today. Lawyers could go back to practicing law in the courts. Business people could go back to minding their own business.
a magical contraption that could take the process of making tough decisions in a democracy, shake it up, dramatize it and make it both credible and conclusive[,]
and concludes with an odd mixture of platitudes and populism:
I’ll bet the kleroterion would produce results bolder and more credible than anything Obama’s commission will recommend. “People are tired of the elites telling them what to do,” says Fishkin. Perhaps it’s time to turn that process upside down.
(It is not quite clear, however, how Klein’s proposal allows the people to tell the elites what to do, given that he is proposing advisory powers only.)
The Brisbane Times reports that a “people’s assembly” to investigate climate change is being proposed by the Australian prime minister, Julia Gillard, as part of her re-election platform:
A JULIA Gillard government would create a ”citizens’ assembly” of ”real Australians” to investigate the science of climate change and consequences of emissions trading, under a plan to build a national consensus for a carbon price.
[…]
Few details will be given [in an upcoming speech] about how the citizens’ assembly would operate, other than that an independent authority would select people from the electoral roll using census data. Membership would be optional.
The BBC History Magazine, “Britain’s bestselling history magazine”, has a recent short article called “The lottery of Greek democracy” by Michael C. Scott.
Interestingly, despite its title, the article manages to mention the use of chance solely for nominating juries, avoiding any mention of sortition.
My favourite item in the Epigraphical museum is in fact not an inscription per se, but actually a machine made originally of wood and stone: the kleroterion. A what? A kleroterion was used to ensure absolute randomness in the allocation of particularly important civic positions, in particular the allocation of men to juries that sat in the many Athenian court rooms.
[ Description of the workings of a Kleroterion. ]
This machine was, in essence, just like the lottery machines used in so many national lotteries in countries around the world today. It provided the Athenians with a definitive way of ensuring that the important organs of their system of democracy were not tainted by corruption. This machine, combined with the fact that most juries were 500 people strong, made bribing juries in advance a practical impossibility and helped reassure the citizens of Athens that when a decision was made, it was made on the strength of the arguments alone. The kleroterion is thus a remarkable testament to a remarkable civilization.
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Equality by lot 