Yet another kleroterion reference in mass media

Posted on September 22, 2010 by Yoram Gat

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.

Filed under: Athens, Elections, History, Sortition | Leave a comment »

Stephen James Kerr: ‘Against Proportional Representation’

Posted on September 12, 2010 by Yoram Gat

‘Dissident writer and independent scholar’ Stephen James Kerr writes Against Proportional Representation:

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.

Filed under: Elections, History, Sortition | 16 Comments »

“Representation and Randomness” in Constellations

Posted on September 6, 2010 by Yoram Gat

The September issue of the journal Constellations contains four articles under the heading “Representation and Randomness”. The articles are:

  • Representation, Responsive and Indicative by Philip Pettit
  • Reviving Randomness for Political Rationality: Elements of a Theory of Aleatory Democracy by Hubertus Buchstein
  • Lot and Democratic Representation: A Modest Proposal by Alex Zakaras
  • Random Selection, Republican Self-Government, and Deliberative Democracy by Yves Sintomer

Filed under: History, Sortition, Theory | 2 Comments »

Joe Klein: Deliberative poll for budget policy

Posted on September 3, 2010 by Yoram Gat

Joe Klein, Time columnist and “living incarnation of American ‘conventional wisdom’“, proposes to replace Obama’s budget commission with a Fishkin Deliberative Poll. Klein sees the DP as

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.)

Filed under: Athens, History, Sortition | 11 Comments »

Australian prime minister proposes “people’s assembly” on climate

Posted on August 6, 2010 by Yoram Gat

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.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Athens, History, Initiatives, Sortition | Leave a comment »

The lottery of Greek democracy

Posted on July 20, 2010 by Yoram Gat

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.

Filed under: Athens, History | 7 Comments »

It’s OK for Muslims to use lotteries

Posted on July 17, 2010 by Conall Boyle

That is the clear message from a new paper from Crone & Silverstein ‘THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST AND ISLAM: THE CASE OF LOT-CASTING’ in the Journal of Semitic Studies, 2010, 55(2):423-450.

The abstract includes

It focuses on the practice of using lot-casting to allocate inheritance shares, conquered land, and official functions, and briefly surveys the history of this practice from ancient through Hellenistic to pre-Islamic times in order to examine its Islamic forms as reflected in historical and legal sources. It is argued that the evidence does suggest continuity between the ancient and the Islamic Near East, above all in the first century of the hijra, but also long thereafter, if only at a fairly low level of juristic interest.

You can read the full paper ($25 for non-academics) at http://jss.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/55/2/423 (or go to my website www.conallboyle.com).

We have seen previously a case where the use of a lottery to share out goods has been rejected on religious grounds by Muslims: Lotteries for Cab Licenses.

This paper shows that although limited, lotteries can be found in the Quran (2 examples), and that most of the various strands of the Muslim traditions have accepted the judicial use of lotteries to divide property. (Thanks to Keith Sutherland and Anthony Barnett for drawing our attention to this paper.)

Filed under: Distribution by lot, History | Leave a comment »

A government composed of fledgling lawmakers

Posted on May 3, 2010 by Yoram Gat

Gordon S. Wood, a professor emeritus of history at Brown, writes at the New York Times to warn the displeased U.S. voters about the dangers of booting out the incumbents.

The article is quite interesting for the elitist conception of “democracy” it presents. The couching of this conception in democratic terms produces unintended irony at several points in the article, such as:

[T]he men who led the revolution against the British crown and created our political institutions were very used to governing themselves.

The author sums his message in the last sentence of the article:

[P]recisely because we are such a rambunctious and democratic people, as the framers of 1787 appreciated, we have learned that a government made up of rotating amateurs cannot maintain the steadiness and continuity that our expansive Republic requires.

Filed under: Elections, History, Opinion polling | 2 Comments »

Athenian Democracy in the British Museum

Posted on April 25, 2010 by Yoram Gat

I recently visited the British Museum and found that among the hundreds of displays devoted to the ancient Greek world and specifically to ancient Athens, there is one display box titled “Democracy”.

The box contains, among other items, a storage jar dated 490-480 depicting Theseus (“credited with the invention of democracy”), a drinking cup dated 490-480 depicting Athena watching over the Greeks at Troy as they vote to decide whether Ajax or Odysseus should receive the arms of the dead Achilles, and several jurymen pinakia, such as the one below, which belonged to one Archilochos of Phaleron and is dated 370-362.

The box carries the following description:

Classical Athens was the world’s first democracy. The tyrants who had ruled the city for some 50 years were expelled at the end of the 6th century BC and, from 460 onwards, all male Athenian citizens governed law and politics by debating and voting in a popular assembly. State offices and legal juries were filled by drawing lots. Not everyone, however, was included in this democracy, and women, resident foreigners and slaves were excluded. Nevertheless, Athenian democracy was a starting point for the development of modern democracies.

It is interesting that despite the mention of the practice of sortition in Athens, the text endorses the conventional modern view of equating democracy with elections and equating democratic progress with  the widening of electoral rights.

Filed under: Athens, Elections, History, Sortition | 6 Comments »

Allotted Lamas

Posted on April 8, 2010 by Yoram Gat

It turns out that allotting lamas has been a state sanctioned system since 1792, and the modern day Chinese are adherents:

As the Dalai Lama ages, speculation swirls around the mystery of his reincarnation – and the question of who will assume religious and political leadership of the Tibetan diaspora after he dies.

The Dalai Lama has played with the idea of controlling his reincarnation and possibly designating his successor before he dies, in order to pre-empt Chinese efforts to control the selection of the next Dalai Lama, as they did for the current Panchen Lama.

Regardless of what novel methods the Dalai Lama adopts, conflict instigated by China – and divisions that dilute the authority and prestige of the exile religious establishment headquartered in Dharmsala, India – are inevitable.

The new governor of the Tibetan Autonomous Region declared that designation of the next Dalai Lama would strictly adhere to the state-controlled model dating to the Qing Dynasty: selection by lot from a golden urn under government supervision.

The Dalai Lama has apparently been grooming the young leader of the Kagyu or Black Hat sect – the Karmapa – as the leader of Tibetan Buddhism in exile.

Filed under: History, Sortition | 3 Comments »

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