Aristocrats and oligarchs: Out. Posties, mums, nurses and neighbours: In.

Posted on March 22, 2025 by Yoram Gat

A story from PA media:

Demonstrators disrupt House of Lords to demand abolition of unelected chamber

Nick Lester and Abbie Llewelyn, PA Political Staff, 20 March 2025

Protesters have disrupted proceedings in the House of Lords demanding the abolition of the unelected chamber.

Protester Lucy Porter, 50, a primary school teacher from Leeds, told the PA news agency she was “campaigning for a house of the people”.

On the Lords, she said: “It’s a symbol of everything that’s outdated. “We don’t have a functioning democracy in this country.”

The leaflets, apparently modelled on an album by the Sex Pistols punk band, had written on them: “Never mind the Lords here’s the House of People.” On the other side it stated: “Aristocrats and oligarchs: Out. Posties, mums, nurses and neighbours: In. Replace the House of Lords to save the UK.”

The protesters said they were acting on behalf of Assemble, an organisation that campaigns for the Lords to be abolished and replaced by a citizens’ assembly.
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Filed under: Elections, House of Lords, Press, Sortition | 2 Comments »

A New Advocate for a Randomly-Selected House of Lords

Posted on November 27, 2024 by peterstone

The Mirror recently ran an article about Baroness Smith of Llanfaes, currently the youngest member of the House of Lords. She is a Plaid Cymru nominee for a peerage who advocates for both Welsh independence and a randomly-selected House of Lords.

Meet the youngest House of Lords member plotting to bring it down from the inside

Next week, the Baroness will speak in favour of radical change at an event in Westminster calling for a House of Citizens – where every person in the country would have the chance to be randomly selected for a stint in the second chamber, as for jury service.

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The Demos institute tries to sell allotted citizen assemblies to the Labour government

Posted on August 7, 2024 by Yoram Gat

The UK institute Demos describes itself as follows:

Founded in 1993 in response to a shortage of new ideas in British politics, we’ve spent three decades cementing our place as a trusted expert on democratic renewal, public service reform and digital rights. As movements, ideologies and governments have come and gone, our commitment to collaborative politics has remained a constant at the heart of the British political landscape.

The institute has a recently published a report titled a “Citizens’ white paper”, written by four authors: Miriam Levin, Polly Curtis, Sarah Castell, and Hana Kapetanovic. The policy proposals revolve around introducing randomly selected citizen bodies of various flavors into the UK political system. For example:

RECOMMENDATION 1: Announcement of five flagship Citizens’ Panels to feed into new Mission Boards

Showcase a new partnership between government and the public by announcing a role for citizens in the Mission Boards: a Citizens’ Panel of 100 randomly selected and demographically representative people for each Mission Board. These Citizens’ Panels will help to refine the priorities within each mission, work through trade-offs and choices inherent in actions considered by Mission Boards, and inform the Missions’ policies to give people a stake in meeting the challenges ahead.

The report suffers from much the same weakness as most of the sortition-related work of academics and institution-related experts. The authors address themselves to established powers in the UK – elected politicians and the civil service. The report is aimed to convince this audience that setting up allotted bodies would be useful them – increasing legitimacy for their decisions, reducing public resistance and distrust.
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Filed under: House of Lords, Proposals, Sortition | 4 Comments »

Monbiot has a change of heart on sortition

Posted on June 19, 2024 by Yoram Gat

Back in 2017, after a minor campaign of harassment, Guardian columnist George Monbiot weighed in on sortition. At the time his verdict was that the idea was nothing short of “a formula for disaster” and instead he offered his readers the usual electoral fixes such as campaign finance reforms, voter education and proportional representation. Well, seven years later, Monbiot has had a significant change of heart:

General elections are a travesty of democracy – let’s give the people a real voice

Our system is designed for the powerful to retain control. Participatory democracy and a lottery vote are just two ways to gain real representation

[G]eneral elections such as the one we now face could be seen as the opposite of democracy. But, as with so many aspects of public life, entirely different concepts have been hopelessly confused. Elections are not democracy and democracy is not elections.
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Filed under: Books, Elections, History, House of Lords, Press, Sortition | Tagged: , , , , | 7 Comments »

A poll finds a plurality of Britons support an allotted House of Lords

Posted on June 29, 2023 by Yoram Gat

A story in the Byline Times.

The Idea to Overhaul the House of Lords that Politicians Aren’t Talking About

YouGov polling suggests strong potential support across the board for a very different chamber to replace the House of Lords

Josiah Mortimer
28 June 2023

There is significant public support for overhauling the House of Lords in a way that is almost never discussed in political debate, according to a newly published poll.

YouGov, commissioned by the Sortition Foundation – a social enterprise which campaigns for greater use of citizens’ assemblies – has shed some new light on public opinion regarding Lords reform.

Typically, the debate is about moving to an elected second chamber – for instance, using a proportional voting system to more fairly reflect how the public vote than under the Commons’ winner-takes-all ‘First Past the Post’ system. Others suggest an ‘indirectly’ elected house, whereby council leaders or regional mayors would fill a new Senate of the Nations and Regions.

The latter idea stems largely out of fears of a directly-elected second chamber simply replicating the House of Commons, or ‘worse’ in their eyes, having more legitimacy and therefore power over MPs.

But the Sortition poll adds another option for the first time: replacing the Lords with a permanent citizens’ assembly made up of ordinary people, reflective of the UK population.

Out of the options presented for the future of the Lords, this was the most popular with 23% of public support. The idea came top among all major party supporters (bar Liberal Democrats, who marginally prefer an elected second chamber).
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Interview with the Classical Republican

Posted on May 12, 2023 by peterstone

I was interviewed some time ago about sortition for the Classical Republican. It was a wide-ranging conversation that included discussion of this blog. The interview is now on Youtube, and can be viewed here. Note that the Classical Republican has an entire Youtube playlist devoted to sortition which features, in addition to my interview, an extended conversation with longtime sortition advocate Oliver Dowlen and other interesting videos. The playlist can be found here.

Filed under: Academia, Books, History, House of Lords, Proposals, Sortition, Theory | 5 Comments »

Martin Wolf on Democratic Capitalism (and me as it turns out!)

Posted on February 4, 2023 by Nicholas Gruen

Martin Wolf is talking up a storm on the crisis of democratic capitalism, and he’s supporting sortition as you can hear from around 11 minutes in where I’ve set it up to begin.

In case you’re interested, here’s the presentation he gave before the panel session recorded above.

Filed under: Applications, Books, Elections, House of Lords, Juries, Press, Proposals, Sortition | Tagged: , , , , | 19 Comments »

New second chamber could be filled using a process of random selection

Posted on December 23, 2022 by Yoram Gat

Andrew Carruthers, a reader of the Scottish The National, writes the following in a letter to the editor:

THE Labour party has again proposed to scrap the House of Lords. This raises the question of what form a replacement House should take, not just in Westminster but also in a potentially independent Scotland.

The obvious answer is some form of democratically elected forum, as indeed Labour suggests. The Lords itself is unrepresentative and not a model to follow. But “democratically elected” systems also have problems. Not least is that most seats in any election do not change party, so most of the individuals “elected” are actually chosen by a small clique of the incumbent party’s faithful. In other words, they are jobs for the boys rather than being democratically responsive in any meaningful way.

A further issue is that the sort of people who put themselves forward as candidates may have laudable ambitions, but are not necessarily the sort of person you and I would actually prefer to be in charge. Clearly not every political hopeful is a self-seeking egomaniac, but the very fact that they are putting themselves forward will always raise a suspicion – just think Boris Johnson (but not for too long).
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Filed under: Elections, House of Lords, Juries, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Landemore in Foreign Policy

Posted on December 10, 2021 by Yoram Gat

Prof. Hélène Landemore has a hard-hitting new article in Foreign Policy magazine. From the outset, Landemore’s subtitle aims right at the heart of modern democracy dogma:

Democracy as it was envisioned was never about real people power. That’s what needs to change.

This radical attack on the electoralist system keeps on coming, paragraph after paragraph. Landemore seems ready now to finally correct the conventional terminology (the unwillingness to do away with this convention was a huge burden for her in Open Democracy):

The systems in place today once represented a clear improvement on prior regimes—monarchies, theocracies, and other tyrannies—but it may be a mistake to call them adherents of democracy at all. The word roughly translates from its original Greek as “people’s power.” But the people writ large don’t hold power in these systems. Elites do.

Representative government, the ancestor of modern democracies, was born in the 18th century as a classical liberal-republican construct rather than a democratic one, primarily focused on the protection of certain individual rights rather than the empowerment of the broader citizenry. The goal was to give the people some say in choosing their rulers without allowing for actual popular rule.

The Founding Fathers of the United States, for example, famously wanted to create a republic rather than a democracy, which they associated with mob rule. James Madison, in particular, feared the tyranny of the majority as much as he disliked and rejected the old monarchical orders.

Another important attribute of the article is that Landemore is making it explicit that exclusion from government is not merely a matter of making people “feel involved”, but rather translates into unrepresented interests:
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Filed under: Academia, Applications, Athens, Books, Deliberation, Elections, History, House of Lords, Juries, Mass action, Participation, Press, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Social Inventions Journal Extracts on Sortition

Posted on October 20, 2018 by Roger Knights

Here, for the sake of bibliographic completeness, are proposals for forms of sortition published in the Social Inventions Journal’s (SIJ), annual compilations from the Institute for Social Inventions, up until 2002, when it ceased publication.

Additional suggestions were posted to its website for several more years, until it was hacked and disabled, making it impossible for me to look through it. Its backup versions on the Wayback Machine do not allow one to see more than the first 25 or so entries under its “Politics” category. (I wish some charitable foundation would fund its restoration to archive status, at a minimum.)

From Re-Inventing Society, 1994, “Random selection of Lords,” by T.M. Arting Stoll, page 190

How about random selection from the population of people to serve one year in a Senate replacing the Lords?

From Best Ideas, 1995, “Voter juries, vetoes and feedback,” by Geof Mulgan and Andrew Adonis, page 245

[SIJ Editor’s note:] Adapted extract from an article by Geof Mulgan and Andrew Adonis in Lean Democracy, issue No. 3, £5, of a journal from the think tank Demos, 9 Bridewell Place, London EC4V 6AP (tel. 0171 353 4479, fax 0171 3534481; e-mail Demos@Demon.Co.UK>).

If democracy means self-government, it is doubtful whether Britain and other western countries should be called full democracies.

A critical democratic dimension, the personal involvement of citizens in government, has gone almost entirely neglected.

We have three moderate, specific proposals for change:

Voter juries [good term—RK]: the piloting, at the national and local level, of voter juries to assess the pros and cons of contested policy proposals. They would be established on a similar basis to judicial juries, but without formal constitutional authority.

Voter vetoes: The introduction of voter vetoes, giving citizens at national and local level the right to call consultive referenda on strongly contested legislation or council decisions. At national level one million citizens would need to sign a petition for a referendum to take place.

Voter feedback: Local experiments to engage people in deliberation on local issues of controversy using the combined television and telephone networks being built by cable companies in conurbations, in collaboration with local authorities and other local institutions.

From Creative Speculations, 1997, “Citizen juries for considering policy options,” by the Institute for Public Policy Research, pages 234–36
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