“They Can Do It All on a Computer”

Posted on May 2, 2013 by peterstone

“They Can Do It All on a Computer”

Google Alerts directed me to this brief article. Not particularly exciting, but I wonder what people think of the idea of random selection taking place entirely on a computer like this. Happens quite a lot, I gather–I think that’s how the Dutch medical school lottery is done. But it’s rather hard to verify that a lottery is fair when it’s just a guy typing commands into a computer in the comfort of his office. Thoughts? Does this matter?

Filed under: Distribution by lot, Juries, Press, Sortition | Tagged: , , | 28 Comments »

“Absolutely fundamental deficits in understanding”

Posted on February 25, 2013 by Yoram Gat

A British judge was very unhappy with the jury in a high-profile trial last week:

Vicky Pryce, the ex-wife of the disgraced cabinet minister Chris Huhne, faces a retrial next week over taking speeding points for him because a jury failed to reach a verdict, after suffering what the judge described as “absolutely fundamental deficits in understanding”.

The Guardian seemed to concur:

Mr Justice Sweeney discharged the panel of eight women and four men following more than 15 hours of deliberations, and a day after they submitted 10 questions that indicated they had not grasped the basics of their task,

but assembled a set of professionals defending the jury institution:
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Filed under: Academia, Juries, Press | 12 Comments »

Legal bribery

Posted on November 18, 2012 by Yoram Gat

Politicians making money

As Steven M. Davidoff, a professor at the Michael E. Moritz College of Law at The Ohio State University, reminds his readers, legal bribery is endemic to elections-based systems (admittedly, he probably would not phrase it this way).

Of course, this arrangement in which retired (or on-leave) politicians are awarded large sums of money by private interests is very convenient to both politicians and powerful private interests. This fact makes it unlikely that this phenomenon would be addressed effectively in a system dominated by the interests of those groups, despite the obvious conflicts of interests involved and the despite the equivalence for-all-intents-and-purposes of the activities involved to acts of illegal bribery.

Ideologically, as well, electoralism makes it natural for politicians to claim that their monetary rewards are justified. Just like manufacturers who manage to sell their products to a large number of people and can claim that the popularity of their products is an indication of their high quality, successful politicians can claim that the fact that the were elected is evidence of their high qualifications. It is only fair, then, according to the rules of the free market, that they are rewarded handsomely for providing their skills, once they are not in office, to private employers. Any mechanisms aiming to limit the ability of former politicians to sell their skills would not only be unfair to those politicians but would also be a disincentive for highly skilled individuals to entering politics and using those skills in the public interest. Prof. Davidoff sums up this outlook in the last paragraph of his article:

I can’t begrudge politicians making money after years of relatively low-paid public service.

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Filed under: Elections, Juries, Proposals, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Should Citizen Jurors have a right to anonymity?

Posted on November 16, 2012 by Conall Boyle

Yes, they should, says the Irish Constitutional Convention. No they shouldn’t, says an condemnatory editorial in the Irish Times.

The faceless sixty-six

It’s bad enough that the Government should severely circumscribe the agenda of the constitutional convention, but it is bizarre and unprecedented decision to turn it into an advertising focus group by allowing its 66 “citizen” members to remain anonymous takes the biscuit. What price transparency, supposedly one of our new core values?

[…]

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Filed under: Juries | 20 Comments »

Scialabba: Plutocratic vistas: America’s crisis of democracy

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Yoram Gat

George Scialabba writes in the LA Review of Books and in Salon about the history of plutocratic control of elections in the U.S. and offers sortition as an alternative.

Scialabba has the following excerpt from the 1897 book Equality by Edward Bellamy:

“But why did not the people elect officials and representatives of their own class, who would look out for the interests of the masses?” […]
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Filed under: Athens, Elections, Fiction, History, Juries, Press, Proposals, Sortition | Leave a comment »

Popular Sovereignty Network

Posted on July 8, 2012 by keithsutherland

I attended the first meeting of the Popular Sovereignty Network yesterday at Queen Mary, University of London. The first talk, by Melissa Lane (politics, Princeton) was on Athenian democracy. Professor Lane took issue with the assumption that the Athenian franchise for office-holding was open to all male citizens over 30, drawing attention to the Solonic prohibition on the thetes holding office (as opposed to participating in the assembly and courts). The source for the Solonic prohibition is Aristotle’s Politics, VII 3. Scholars like Hansen and Sinclair claim that by the 4th Century the prohibition had become a ‘dead letter’, but there is no real evidence for this.

Her talk then took an unusual turn when she shifted the focus to the election of (some) officeholders, on the basis of universal (by Athenian standards) suffrage. I questioned her on the number of elected offices and she claimed it was 100 (out of around 700); nevertheless she used this to argue that Athenian democracy was not so different from its modern Schumpeterian form, in which all citizens elect officeholders and then hold them to account.

This was all a little odd (why focus on the minority of elected officials?), and not particularly convincing, so perhaps she was just trying to stir things up. But I did find her contrast between office-holding and assembly/courts to be illuminating. She disputed Hansen’s claim that ‘ruling and being ruled in turn’ referred to rotation in office, claiming that it referred more to the assembly and the courts. Jury service did involve very significant rotation and, with the 4th century innovation of the nomothetai, serious legislative power was involved. Membership of the council was a collegial office, so Aristotle’s remark could have referred to this (Hansen claims that most eligible citizens would have served on the council at least once), but note her earlier comments on the Solonic prohibition.
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Filed under: Athens, Elections, History, Juries, Participation, Sortition | 2 Comments »

Are Sortitionists sincere?

Posted on June 16, 2012 by Conall Boyle

Do sortitionists really believe their own rhetoric? A Citizen’s Jury will be called using the method of random selection. They then proceed to chew over the issue at hand, and normally decide by voting!

What’s the matter with these guys? Surely the matter should be resolved, either by Unanimity, or failing that by a lottery, weighted by the votes of the CJ?

I was inspired to pose this question after reading a piece about the rise of Majority Voting which is mostly about French and Catholic Church experiences.

The Anglo-juridical Jury (12 citizens drawn at random) used to require unanimity, and still needs 10/12 to convict. Who so?

Filed under: Juries, Religion, Sortition | 20 Comments »

3rd Paris Sortition Conference

Posted on May 7, 2012 by keithsutherland

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

Programme
Registration

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.

Filed under: Distribution by lot, Elections, History, Juries, Sortition | 3 Comments »

Internal-dynamics design parameters

Posted on April 5, 2012 by Yoram Gat

In a previous post I enumerated some design parameters of decision making bodies that affect their power: binding authority, term of service, permanence, purview, and policy drawing power. Those parameters, except for term of service, describe the explicit amount of power the body can exert on other parts of the political system. Term of service, on the other hand, affects the power of the body by its influence on the behavior of the members of the body. A recent item about a policy jury brought forward three more design parameters that, like term of service, affect the body’s power through their influence on the dynamics within the body:
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Filed under: Athens, Juries, Sortition | 2 Comments »

Daniel Baron: The Power of the Lot: Are People Obliged to Participate in Political Lotteries?

Posted on November 28, 2011 by Yoram Gat

Daniel Baron of the Institute of Sociology, RWTH Aachen University introduces his article, The Power of the Lot: Are People Obliged to Participate in Political Lotteries? as follows:

While empirical research in the field of aleatoric democracy usually focuses on the deliberative outcomes of these procedures (Fishkin & Luskin 1999; Fishkin et al. 2000), theoretical approaches mainly ask whether political lotteries, compared to traditional ways of recruiting political personnel (esp. elections), are just or not (Stone 2007, 2009). Further discussions broach the subjects of political representation, equality or input- and output-legitimacy (Buchstein 2009a). Down to the present day, a key question to ask when focusing the problem of legitimacy of aleatoric democracy has been most widely ignored: whether laypersons chosen by lot should be compelled to participate in the committee where they have gained a seat, or whether sortition should be founded on the principle of voluntariness.

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Filed under: Juries, Sortition, Theory | 15 Comments »

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