Posted on April 28, 2024 by Yoram Gat
The French discussion of “participative democracy” has recently produced several texts expressing suspicion of the way “participative devices” are being used by government to produce supposedly democratic outcomes.
Guillaume Gourgues writes in la vie des idées:
By setting up citizen consultations that it selects and organizes itself, the State sidesteps democratic procedures and institutions. There is the risk of a gradual drift towards a form of “participatory authoritarianism”.
On March 22, 2023, as he began his speech in the face of protests over pension reform, Emmanuel Macron defended the legitimacy of his reform by affirming that it followed a “democratic path” which began with “months of consultation”.
The claim of having followed a “democratic path” by the President, punctuated by regular reminders of “consultation” and “participation” mechanisms, is perplexing, as the political conduct of pension reform is obviously marked by the choice to reduce democratic debate to its strict minimum.
[This choice is highlighted when,] in the shadow of the pension reform, the citizens’ convention on the end of life, convened by the government, delivered its final opinion on April 2, 2023, after three months of deliberation.
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Filed under: Academia, Books, Elections, Participation, Press, Sortition | 1 Comment »
Posted on April 12, 2024 by Yoram Gat
Phil Wilson, a retired mental health worker, makes a pretty good, as well as entertaining, case for sortition on Resilience.org. Some excerpts are below, but the entire piece is pretty well written.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers: Can Sortition Save Us From the Zombies of Extinction?
If, like me, you live in the brain consuming fog of American culture, you might never have heard of sortition. Randomly selected citizens rather than ruling class proxies will make the important decisions in a future society that chooses to employ sortition as its fundamental political philosophy.
We need sortition to replace the poisonous, deformed contraption that we bizarrely call democracy. Let me try to explain.
Any available elective office summons demons, fiends and gargoyles from the burning sewage pits of hell – things with eyes pulsating, greedy and murderous. We want to keep these monsters calmly interred beneath the soil, and that can only occur if voting is treated like small pox.
Look at the wreckage surrounding us. We voted for it.
Most people who seek power in any political system are mentally deformed and broken – these are the people we try not to marry or even sit near at the pub, but we elect them with barely a thought.
We can’t have anarchy – we need a way to gather benign bureaucrats and harmless functionaries. We have seats in congress, seats in the senate, chairpersons and committee seats, and there has to be a method, other than voting for batshit, flaming, spirits of death – chosen by corporate goons. We need to simply match chairs with rumps. Give us body snatchers – blind ones with big nets.
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Filed under: Elections, Press, Sortition | 1 Comment »
Posted on April 10, 2024 by Yoram Gat
A few days ago, the Portland Press Herald published a bold, “completely original” plan for city government, about which “political philosophers will be writing for millennia”. Sortition is an important part of this plan.
First, competitive elections will be abolished. No more “vote for me.” No more sloganeering. No more name recognition. Instead of popularity contests, members of every representative office in our city will be elected by sortition, or through a lottery system, with officials chosen at random for a term of one year. We will have 66 districts, each containing roughly 1,000 people. This will make our city a true government of the people. The mechanics of election-by-sortition are simple: An algorithm will randomly select a name from the city’s draft rolls.
Next, we are proposing a tricameral system of government: a 66-person Popular Assembly of Legislative Supremacy (“PALS”), a House of Landlords and Yeomanry (“HOLY”) and a three-person Supreme High-most Unlimited Council of Knowledge Systems (“SHUCKS Troika”). Our nine-person City Council will be gone. So will be our city manager. All three new branches have key roles, but the PALS shall be our chief lawmaking and deliberative body.
Sortition shall select the members of the 66-person PALS branch. The idea is simple: It could be you. PALS will be a raucous parliament made up of average citizens, all chosen at random.
Filed under: Elections, Fiction, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 4 Comments »
Posted on April 1, 2024 by Yoram Gat
Gillian Dymond writes in The Conservative Woman:
AN article in the online publication Civil Service World last February announced that former civil servant Sue Gray is working with Labour on plans to introduce citizens’ assemblies should the party, as is likely, win the next election. These assemblies are very much in vogue, with recent examples having allegedly helped secure ‘yes’ votes for abortion and gay marriage in the Irish Republic. The less enthusiastic amongst us, however, might conclude that they are just another charade to be played out within the parameters of permitted debate, with a view to ensuring, in the words of Nick Cohen back in 1999, that ‘the public can only want what the public gets’.
Choice of subject matter is only one of the many ways in which citizens’ assemblies may be subverted and controlled.
How, for instance, are the questions put to participants chosen, and what are the implications of the wording in which they are framed?
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Filed under: Applications, Press, Sortition | 3 Comments »
Posted on March 23, 2024 by Yoram Gat
A referendum in Ireland on March 8 resulted in a “no” vote for constitutional changes. The rejected proposals were the product of a process involving an allotted citizen assembly. An article by Rory Carroll in the The Guardian offers an illuminating review of the aftermath of the failure of the proposed changes at the polls.
Irish referendum fiasco puts future of lauded citizens’ assemblies in doubt
Debates involving 99 randomly selected people were hailed as a model for the world, but some say faith has been eroded
When Ireland shattered its history of social conservatism by passing a 2015 referendum on same-sex marriage and a 2018 referendum on abortion, progressives credited its citizens’ assembly.
Ninety-nine randomly selected people, who are brought together to debate a specific issue, had weighed evidence from experts and issued policy recommendations that emboldened the political establishment, and voters, to make audacious leaps.
Governments and campaigners around the world hailed Ireland as a model for how to tackle divisive issues and a modern incarnation of the concept of deliberative democracy that dated back to ancient Athens.
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Filed under: Applications, Press, Sortition | 20 Comments »
Posted on March 20, 2024 by Yoram Gat
Fortune tells the story of Marlene Engelhorn who is busy dispensing with €25 million which she inherited.
Engelhorn settled on an idea: Let 50 strangers decide how to give it away.
Those strangers, all of whom live in Engelhorn’s native Austria, will meet for the first time this weekend at a hotel in Salzburg. Dubbed the Guter Rat, or Good Council, they were chosen through a statistical process run by research group Foresight and range in location, age, race, socioeconomic background and other demographic factors chosen in an effort to be representative of the overall Austrian population.
Engelhorn’s goal is not only to give away €25 million, but also to spark conversations on wealth inequality. She’s frustrated that her windfall wasn’t taxed — Austria eliminated its inheritance tax in 2008 — and doesn’t see traditional philanthropy as a good solution because it still gives her too much power.
“I’m just one brain, I’m just one person and so to me, this is a huge relief knowing that the process of redistribution is much more legitimate and thorough and democratic than I could ever do it,” she said in an interview. “Nobody needs another foundation.”
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Filed under: Applications, Press, Sortition | 2 Comments »
Posted on March 19, 2024 by Yoram Gat
Continuing what is a bit of a tradition, Evan Tao, a Brown University student, proposes employing sortition to select student government at Brown.
Over the past decade, many countries have held citizens’ assemblies in which citizens are randomly selected to deliberate and make policy recommendations to legislators. Hundreds of these assemblies have been held around the world with great success. An Irish citizens’ assembly’s proposal to legalize abortion was sent to a national referendum; in France, an assembly submitted recommendations on combating climate change to the incumbent government. Citizens’ assemblies can be effective pilot programs, proving to the public that sortition works. Ideally, they will become regularized and eventually hold direct legislative power in local government.
If I’ve convinced you that lotteries are preferable to elections, and you’re wondering what to do about it, we can start right here at Brown. Our student government election process has room for improvement. I don’t know about you, but I only voted for the people who asked me to or who had cute posters, neither of which seem like a good indication of the best future leader. Voter turnout in the class of 2026 first-year elections was only 33.5 percent. And, as we saw with the recent Undergraduate Finance Board budget surplus fiasco, who our student government representatives are matters. Let’s make it an opt-in lottery at Brown—and then take it to the rest of the country.
Filed under: Academia, Press, Proposals | Tagged: Student government | 8 Comments »
Posted on March 15, 2024 by Yoram Gat
Iain Walker, executive director of The newDemocracy Foundation, has an opinion piece in The Jerusalem Post. Walker offers Israel and its allies advice about what government they should set up in Gaza (once they tire of killing tens of thousands of its inhabitants).
Gaza needs democracy without elections
Instead of elections, Athenian democracy used a simple random draw among citizens (known as “sortition”).
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu receives regular criticism for failing to share the plan for Gaza after the military role concludes. The lack of an official position on this subject could stem from the fact that all over options are unattractive, and so a new approach is required.
Israel as an occupying force is undesirable, it would draw global criticism and simply push off the problem to a later date.
Equally, traditional electoral democracy is an unworkable option.
With polls reflecting up to 80% support for Hamas among Gaza residents, elections would only allow for some incarnation of Hamas to emerge newly empowered – an untenable situation following its acts of terror targeting civilians.
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Filed under: Opinion polling, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 6 Comments »
Posted on February 6, 2024 by Yoram Gat
Carlos Acuña an attorney from El Centro, California, writes in the Calexico Chronicle:
The upcoming national elections later this fall, not to mention the upcoming recall in … gulp, Calexico, bring to mind the legend of Faust. For those unfamiliar with the name a Medieval legend revolves around a man, Faust, who made a deal with the devil. Faust, in exchange for knowledge and the hedonistic life, offered his soul to the devil. The devil gladly agreed. The devil had vacancies to fill, that sort of thing; hell has no homeless; all are welcome.
Faust was not alone. Your garden-variety political candidate pretty much brings Faust to mind. Political office seekers tend to be a self-selecting lot; unlike the ancient Greek system of sortition — reflected in our modern jury system — where citizens got selected at random to represent the population at large in the halls of leadership and political decision-making. Those hungry for power jockey for position; sadly, those who want it most, deserve it least. The Greeks knew it, 2,300 years ago … Hence, their citizen lottery for leadership, real democracy. A side effect from that: the Greeks not knowing who among them would be picked, made sure everyone got a first-rate education, including ethics …
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Filed under: Academia, Athens, Elections, Press, Sortition | Leave a comment »
Posted on January 24, 2024 by Yoram Gat
While criticizing tax increases planned by the Israeli government, it was suggested to the Minister for National Goals, Orit Strock, that ministers should “cut back on all the bounty [they] receive”. Strock replied: “What bounty? No minister receives a fat salary. I know ministers who are unable to make ends meet, despite working hard day and night, and even some ministers who are supported financially by their parents”.
The salary of Israeli ministers is about 4 times that of the average worker, and well into the top decile of incomes.
Filed under: Elections, Press | 2 Comments »
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Equality by lot 