Expectations of commitment by the allotted, part 2/2

Posted on April 18, 2022 by Yoram Gat

Part 1 is here.

The alternative

The alternative to the path of low commitment, with all its inevitable implications that undermine the democratic potential of sortition, is to expect, indeed, to demand, high level of commitment by the allotted to the political process. In short, political decision making should be seen, both by society and by the allotted, as a full time job. It should be a well compensated, intellectually demanding undertaking. The following attributes should be part of the design of any high powered allotted chamber, such as an allotted parliament:

  1. Service terms should be measured in years – say four years.
  2. Personal initiative and collaboration with other members of the allotted body would be expected. Unless special circumstances exist, frequent physical presence at the workplace would be expected.
  3. The activity of the members would be overseen by an allotted body, with which the members would be expected to cooperate. The oversight body would produce reports about the activities of the members. In cases of clear dysfunction the oversight body could sanction members. The body would refer cases of suspected malfeasance to the courts.
  4. The details associated with the design and the work processes of the allotted chamber, as well as budgets and member salaries, would be determined, and adjusted on an ongoing basis, by the chamber itself or by a different long-term allotted chamber such as the oversight body.

    5. Continue reading →

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Another round in the Herefordshire citizen assembly controversy

Posted on March 8, 2022 by Yoram Gat

A previous post mentioned a letter to the editor of the Hereford Times expressing objections and distrust of the process around the Herefordshire Citizens’ Climate Assembly and in particular asking what the cost of the process was.

Councillor David Hitchiner, Leader of Herefordshire Council, has now responded to the letter. Hitchiner reports that the total cost was £70,000, with Sortition Foundation receiving £8,456 plus VAT and Impact Consultancy and Research, receiving £30,000 (which, Hitchiner emphasizes, is a bargain).

The letter also asked Hitchiner whether he “subscribes to the view that our politics are in fact broken and, if so, what the council has been doing about it?”

Hitchiner answers:

Thankfully we live in a country with a democratic system. I do not consider that it is perfect.

Too few people do not [sic] exercise their democratic right to vote, and the elected are not even close to being a cross section of our society by age or socio-economic groupings.

For this reason consultation in decision making is especially important.

My hope is that more people in Herefordshire will respond to our consultations, and also decide to vote at the next election in response to the way in which this administration has gone about discharging the faith placed in us at the last election.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the commenters, both of them, are not impressed. One of them, letmehelp, writes:
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Sortition in Vox

Posted on January 14, 2022 by Yoram Gat

In another manifestation of sortition making progress in the English-speaking world, the U.S. news website Vox has an article about this idea. The author is Dylan Matthews.

[I]f you want to know what Congress will do in 50 years, seeing what ideas are percolating in the academy can be surprisingly informative.

That’s why I’ve been struck by the growing popularity, among academics, of a radical idea for rethinking democracy: getting rid of elections, and instead picking representatives by lottery, as with jury duty. The idea, sometimes called sortition or “lottocracy,” originates in ancient Athens, where democracy often took the form of assigning positions to citizens by drawing lots.

But lately it’s had a revival in the academy; Rutgers philosopher Alex Guerrero, Yale political theorist Hélène Landemore, and Belgian public intellectual David Van Reybrouck have been among the most vocal advocates in recent years. (If you’re a podcast fan, I recommend Landemore’s appearance on The Ezra Klein Show.) The broad sense that American democracy is in crisis has provoked an interest in bold ideas for repairing it, with lottocracy the boldest among them.

It is worth noting that the article talks explicitly about “getting rid of elections”, rather than “complementing elections”, or employing some other vague phrasing regarding the future use of the electoral mechanism.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Elections, Participation, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 2 Comments »

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 »

Large Scale Secure Sortition Part 1: Generating Randomness Collectively with In-Person Gatherings

Posted on December 5, 2021 by graytmatter

Matthew Gray is a Mathematician, Software Engineer, and Theoretical Computer Scientist currently teaching at Renton Technical College after working at Microsoft Norway. His primary research interests are in Secure Multiparty Computation, Quantum Cryptography, and Coding Theory. Over the last year he has been researching how sortition can be conducted in secure and trustworthy ways.

Judging from the aftermath of contested elections around the world, if large numbers of people question the fairness of a sortition selection there could be dire consequences. Our current systems for generating the randomness needed for selections are not secure enough to silence those questions, especially when used to select national representatives. The current systems are all centralized and non-participatory, some are vulnerable to local cheating, and all are vulnerable to sabotage from well-resourced malicious actors, such as state security services. This article proposes a new option. It lays out a specific decentralized and participatory method of selecting representatives by explains how two people can go about fairly choosing one of them to be selected and then showing how the method can be scaled up for larger selections. It also touches on some of the mathematics surrounding these methods.

Current systems for generating the randomness needed for drawings fall into two main categories. First are physical systems such as dice, floating balls, or names in hats. These work better in small communities where every member can show up and observe. But even in those spaces, if people distrust their neighbors, they will worry about the dice being weighted or someone sneaking extra copies of their name into the hat. Second are digital systems that take some outside sources of randomness and process them to get some final randomness. These outside sources of randomness include stock market indexes, lava lamps, or cameras whose lenses have been painted over. 

Digital systems tend to involve math that is fairly complicated, don’t feel that random, and aren’t interesting to look at. Also, because of the complicated math involved, there’s a chance that these processes aren’t actually random after all. Neither category produces systems that involve citizens or are particularly resilient to sabotage efforts. Weighting dice or hacking a computer is easy. Manipulating the stock market is hard but may not be beyond the abilities of a state security service. However if we include everyone in the process of generating the randomness we can create systems that have no single point of failure.

To introduce the ideas used by the system I am about to propose, let’s imagine that the team captains (Luka and Hugo) in the last FIFA World Cup didn’t trust the coin that was going to be used at the start of the match. One way they could generate the “coin flip” together is for both captains to bring their own coins and flip them simultaneously. If both coins land on the same side (i.e. both heads or both tails) then France wins the coin toss, if they land on different sides (i.e. heads tails or tails heads) then Croatia wins. What is important to note here is that even if one coin is weighted, as long as the other one is unweighted, then the overall “coin flip” is fair. 

Figure 1. The odds of each possible result when one captain brings an 80/20 coin, and the other brings a 50/50 coin.

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Report Back from the Hannah Arendt Center Conference on Sortition, part 3/3

Posted on November 3, 2021 by Ahmed R. Teleb

Shmuel Lederman: “Representative Democracy”

Lederman’s intervention began with a theme quite familiar to this forum but one that still surprises the general public, probably due to our prevailing Whiggish and/or mythological approach to teaching political history—at least in the US.

Until the 19th century, elections were considered “an anti-democratic or aristocratic form of government.” It was assumed that winners of elections would be powerful or celebrity-like figures, Lederman underscored. The question that he attempts to answer is, “how did elections come to be associated with ‘democracy’ beginning in the early 1800s?” In an upcoming APSR [I think] article he argues that European Imperialism and Colonialism had to do with the recognition of elections as “democratic.” Lederman reasons that one cannot separate—as Western political theorists have—John Stuart Mill’s thoughts on the proper form of government for India (and other “barbarian and semi-barbarian” parts of the world)–tutelage or “enlightened despotism”–from his thoughts on “the only rational form of government” (for civilized Europeans) generally. You “cannot take out the East India Co.” from Mill’s thought and be left with something democratic, insists Lederman.

Rather, Lederman explained, there is a common thread between the “civilizing” trope in regard to the “backward” places on Earth in the 19th century and the “meritocracy” myth behind today’s electoral representative government. “Enlightened despotism” and “representative government” were and remain mutually reinforcing ideas.

Lederman underscores that there were democratic alternatives to representative government at the beginning of the 19th century (and earlier). There were, for example, among workers’ movements schemes for pyramidal council systems that would involve the population as a whole in decision making. The very fact that Mill, like the American founders and French republicans, had to make a case for representative government reflects the fact those alternatives were seen as a threat. [One might add that perhaps humans are not by nature simply willing to let others rule over them; but that might get this blog censored for being “populist.”] Evidence that the council system and freedom as self-government, the themes of Arendt’s On Revolution, were not mere aberrations in her political thinking, Lederman adds, can be found in her letters to her long-time friend and mentor Karl Jaspers. In the letter Arendt expresses her pleasure that the book earned his “approval,” because “every word you wrote strikes at the very heart of what I mean to say… Heinrich’s experience, of councils, to the experience of America.”

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Report Back from the Hannah Arendt Center Conference on Sortition, part 2

Posted on November 2, 2021 by Ahmed R. Teleb

Reporting from Bard College’s Hannah Arendt Center Annual Conference by Ahmed R. Teleb

The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College recently hosted a two-day in-person and live webcast conference on sortition on Oct 14-15, which I attended online. Each day of the conference also included a midday break-out small group discussions in person and online. Estimated participants came to about four hundred, who, in my estimation, demonstrated enthusiasm for participatory democracy through sortition, but also a dose of critical awareness of, among other things, organizational and economic/structural difficulties with participation via sortition and in general.

I share here my impressions of the panels I attended and my most significant take-aways. This Conference marks an important step, because the Arendtian perspective on mini-publics and citizen councils has long been missing from the discussion of sortition. As it happens, this is also my area of research. From this perspective, “The meaning of politics is freedom,” as David Van Reybrouck quoted Arendt during his intervention, and not just “better” policy or results. Of course, I see these as going hand in hand. Freedom of people to actively shape the world they live in tends also to create better results from a public perspective but it is a by-product rather than the basis. As Shmuel Lederman put it, “benevolent dictatorship” and “representative government” follow the same logic that has roots in 19th century European colonialism.

P.S. The word sortition was a non-issue for the activists, practitioners, and members of the public who attended—the exception being Peter McLeod who used “civic lottery.” As a nice surprise, the three mayors/managers of the small NY towns who participated in Van Reybrouck’s class all plan to (attempt to) implement some kind of citizen assembly or citizen jury to tackle the issue that each brought to the class as one needing an innovative solution. One, whose town has exactly one traffic light, promised on the spot that she can get a PERMANENT citizens’ assembly approved by the city council and that funding the project would be a non-issue.

Opening Address by Roger Berkowitz: Revitalizing Democracy, Sortition, and Citizen Power

The American Founders, remarked Berkowitz, were “scared of democracy,” at least those identifying themselves as Federalists. He went on to quote from Federalist papers that stressed the instability of “ancient democracies” and “petty republics of Greece,” Fed # 9, 10. They emphasized the importance designing a system in which elites run the government, via an “elective system”. Moreover, they feared “factions,” and thought that an “extended republic” would be THE preventative measure against them, Fed 10, 51, since imposing a unity of will was not practical. Madison thought, we could “replace virtue with size.”

So far, well-known territory, although a bit different than the mythologized version taught in middle and high schools in the U.S. Berkowitz replied that for Arendt, factions are the very reflection of the basic human condition of plurality. He then went on to summarize Hannah Arendt’s assessment of the American system as articulated in her book On Revolution and the “Crisis of the Republic.” But Arendt did praise, for example, the “federal principle,” because its discovery, “was partly based upon an experience, upon the intimate knowledge of political bodies whose internal structure predetermined them, as it were, and conditioned its members for a constant enlargement whose principle was neither expansion nor conquest but the further combination of powers.” This kind of local-based power from the bottom up, Arendt saw as analogous to the council system or the town-hall system, one that permitted just about anyone to appear and act in public.

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Report Back from the Hannah Arendt Center Conference on Sortition, part 1

Posted on November 1, 2021 by Ahmed R. Teleb

On October 14-15 Wayne Liebman and I (and we presume many other followers and contributors to EbL) attended (online) the HAC’s Annual Conference: “Revitalizing Democracy: Sortition, Citizen Power, and Spaces of Freedom.” We each independently wrote our impressions and comments. Below is Wayne’s overview. Subsequent parts contain more detailed summary and commentary on what I considered the most important of the presentations, where I also attempted to add some US context for international readers, or other context for those not immersed in the world of Arendt studies. That appears in brackets or under the heading “commentary.”

We invite anyone else who attended to correct or complement what we have below. I am sure each of us came from a different perspective and took note of different aspects of the event. And we hope this provokes some discussion of some familiar and new themes. Throughout, I use the word citizen in a POLITICAL not a legal sense, as I believe most speakers do. [P.S. Subjectively, the highlights of the conference for me were the interventions from Akuno and Lederman]. ~ AT

NOTES FROM THE CONFERENCE by Wayne Liebman
Revitalizing Democracy, Hannah Arendt Center, Bard College

“Representative government is in crisis today, partly because it has lost, in the course of time, all institutions that permitted the citizens’ actual participation, and partly because it is now gravely affected by the disease from which the party system suffers: bureaucratization and the two parties’ tendency to represent nobody except the party machines.”

(Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic, 1970)

If you missed the livestream of this year’s Revitalizing Democracy Conference, you can watch the videos online HERE. My subjective (activism oriented) highlights follow.

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Sortition by elimination

Posted on October 22, 2021 by Yoram Gat

Worries are sometimes expressed about the impossibility of generating a sample of people at random in a way that cannot be manipulated by powerful actors. Sources of physical data are either too predictable to be of use or require machinery that is too arcane or sensitive to be effectively publicly verifiable. Social sources of data – such as the stock market or blockchain transactions – may be influenced powerful forces in society. Many randomizations that rely on explicit and symmetrical inputs from the public as a source of randomness have to utilize aggregation procedures that may allow those with advance knowledge of others’ inputs to manipulate the outcomes. With the prevailing mood of generalized distrust in institutions, a randomization mechanism would have to be completely open and verifiable to have a reasonable chance of inspiring confidence.

My proposal for such a mechanism is a simple elimination procedure which works as follows. At the outset, one candidate is eliminated. This candidate then gets to eliminate another, who then gets to eliminate another, and so on. The selection thus proceeds by sequential elimination of candidates until only one, or however many appointees are desired, remain.

This procedure is easily verifiable by any observer since it is self-contained and does not involve secrets, fancy machinery or fancy calculations. All the decisions involved are made in the open and cannot be foreseen in advance.

In addition to being manipulation resistant, this procedure has the advantage that it involves all interested citizens in the selection procedure and allows them to influence the outcome. By creating a new form of mass political participation, this procedure addresses the oft-heard objection to sortition that it deprives people from having influence over the appointment of decision makers.

In fact, while, like any form of mass participation, the impact made by any single decision-maker is minute, this form of participation is more meaningful than electoral participation because the choice made by each person – who to eliminate – is entirely unrestricted. This is in contrast which the electoral choice which is restricted a-priori by a primaries process in which the field of candidates is drastically narrowed-down. In the proposed procedure, citizens are completely free to make their elimination choices as they see fit, even if it may be seen as a sign of good citizenship to make this choice at random.

A minor technical point: The first candidate to be eliminated, the starting point of the elimination chain, can be chosen arbitrarily – this is not a position of decisive power, but rather the opposite, a position of disadvantage. If no other procedure is found suitable, an election can be used to select this person.

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Abizadeh: Representation, Bicameralism, Political Equality, and Sortition

Posted on September 30, 2021 by Yoram Gat

A paper by Arash Abizadeh.

Representation, Bicameralism, Political Equality, and Sortition: Reconstituting the Second Chamber as a Randomly Selected Assembly

Perspectives on Politics, 2020

Abstract

The two traditional justifications for bicameralism are that a second legislative chamber serves a legislative-review function (enhancing the quality of legislation) and a balancing function (checking concentrated power and protecting minorities). I furnish here a third justification for bicameralism, with one elected chamber and the second selected by lot, as an institutional compromise between contradictory imperatives facing representative democracy: elections are a mechanism of people’s political agency and of accountability, but run counter to political equality and impartiality, and are insufficient for satisfactory responsiveness; sortition is a mechanism for equality and impartiality, and of enhancing responsiveness, but not of people’s political agency or of holding representatives accountable. Whereas the two traditional justifications initially grew out of anti-egalitarian premises (about the need for elite wisdom and to protect the elite few against the many), the justification advanced here is grounded in egalitarian premises about the need to protect state institutions from capture by the powerful few and to treat all subjects as political equals. Reflecting the “political” turn in political theory, I embed this general argument within the institutional context of Canadian parliamentary federalism, arguing that Canada’s Senate ought to be reconstituted as a randomly selected citizen assembly.

Filed under: Academia, Elections, Participation, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 4 Comments »

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