David Van Reybrouck presents Terry Bouricius’s proposal for sortition-based government system in an article in De Corresponedent. I don’t read Dutch and the automatic translation is pretty poor, but, if nothing else, the graphics describing the system are very nice. [English version of the diagram added below.]
Filed under: Press, Proposals, Sortition | 10 Comments »
Liberation has an interview with David Van Reybrouck by Béatrice Vallaeys about his sortitionist message.
An automatic translation of the preamble with my touch ups:
To counter distrust toward politics, Belgian historian and writer David Van Reybrouck advocates deliberative democracy, where allotted citizens lend a hand to elected officials.
“We despise elected officials, we venerate the elections.” Thus says David Van Reybrouck in a recently published essay, Against elections. Born in 1971 in Bruges, David Van Reybrouck strives with an undeniable talent to demonstrate “a fatigue of Western democracy”, but he also offers a remedy: instead of the appointment rituals where people are invited to cast their votes for a particular candidate, he proposes the creation of an allotted legislature. “The realities of our democracies disillusions people at an alarming rate. We must ensure that democracy does not wear itself out,” he says, convinced that elections are a cause of paralysis of democracy. His credo: not only the right to vote, but the right to speak.
Filed under: Books, Elections, Press, Proposals, Sortition | Tagged: David Van Reybrouck, democracy, elections, fatigue, sortition | 20 Comments »
Keith Rossiter writes in the Plymouth Herald:
A COMMON cry from some Herald readers is that councillors are corrupt/incompetent/self-serving (delete as you wish), and above all that they should not be paid for their services.
[…]
Challenged to step up to the plate themselves, they may say – with some justification – that “it’s all a stitch-up”. You can only get elected with the help of a party machine, and parties only select their pals.
We got the idea of democracy from the Ancient Greeks, and perhaps it’s time to go back to Ancient Greece and borrow the other half of their brilliant concept.
The Athenians used a machine to pick people to hold public office or to do jury duty. The device, called a kleroterion, ensured randomness in allocating important civic positions in much the same way that a lottery ensures randomness in picking the winning ticket. (Of course, we’ve all met conspiracy theorists who claim that’s also a stitch-up.)
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Filed under: Academia, Applications, Athens, Juries, Press, Sortition | Tagged: Deliberative poll, fishkin | Leave a comment »
A splendid piece with excellent contributions from Barbara and Peter. (I spoke to the producer and gave him a lot of pointers, but couldn’t do the interview because of a 3-week break in Tenerife)
I was delighted that most of the programme was devoted to lotteries for school and university places. The case for university entrance by lot was well made, as a difficult but inevitable method of choosing between generally well-qualified applicants.
However no mention was made of the highly successful Dutch medical school entry lottery which has stood up very well over the decades. Pity!
Lotteries for school places (seats in the US) produced a less satisfactory result. The obvious fairness of lottery and the unfairness of nearness-to-school were demonstrated.
But the result of using the lottery, especially in Brighton, is deemed ‘unsatisfactory’ because the desired social mixing has not been achieved.
This is entirely predictable, because entry to the lottery is voluntary. Only the determined (middle-classes) go for it. If a representative outcome didn’t happen, at least all parents/children had a rough equality of chance.
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Filed under: Applications, Distribution by lot, education, Press, schools | 10 Comments »
A recent segment on the BBC radio show Analysis is titled “The Philosophy of Russell Brand”. The audience is warned ahead of time to hold on to their hats as “Jeremy Cliffe enters a world without rules, without government, but with plenty of facial hair”. Following this introduction, and the expected sound bites from the Brand-Paxman interview, the segment talks about the attention Brand received, the Occupy/Indignados protest movement and features interviews with Paolo Gerbaudo, David Graeber, Michael Hardt, Peter Turchin, Daniel Pinchbeck, and a few friends of Cliffe.
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Filed under: Academia, Athens, Elections, History, Juries, Participation, Press, Proposals, Sortition, Theory | Tagged: Analysis, anarcho-populism, David Graeber, direct democracy, Indignados, Jeremy Cliffe, localism, Occupy, Peter Turchin, Russell Brand | 20 Comments »
As was mentioned here before, some time ago Prof. Alexander Guerrero and his ideas about the use of sortition in government were the subject of an article in The Boston Globe.
I thank Prof. Guerrero for alerting me to a recently published essay of his about sortition in the online magazine Aeon. The essay presents Guerrero’s proposal, but starts with an interesting analysis of the failure of elections and follows the proposal with an analysis of the promise of sortition.
The lottocracy
Elections are flawed and can’t be redeemed – it’s time to start choosing our representatives by lottery[…]
The celebrity comic Russell Brand is gesticulating wildly, urgently, in a hotel room, under the bright lights of a television interview. ‘Stop voting, stop pretending, wake up. Be in reality now. Why vote? We know it’s not going to make any difference. We know that already.’ He is responding to his interviewer, Jeremy Paxman, who is taking him to task for never having voted.
We are brought up to think that voting is important, that it is a necessary condition of being a politically serious person, that we can’t complain about politics if we don’t vote. This last principle has echoes of the more reasonable parental admonition, said of lima beans or cauliflower: don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. But that principle is based on sound epistemological grounds: you might, for all you know, like cauliflower or lima beans. The voting thing is, as Brand argues, stupid. There are ways of participating in public affairs other than voting. For example, one can become a celebrity and call for revolution in a television interview.
Filed under: Academia, Athens, History, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 47 Comments »
Commenter ee notes an article by Boyd Tonkin in The Independent in which Tonkin, after warming up to the issue of popular displeasure with the electoral system, writes:
Most of the sounder proposals to refresh faith in democracy invoke some kind of “deliberative” process. Informed citizens should, in this model, have the opportunity to take part in every link of the decision-making chain rather than simply issue a yes/no verdict at its finale. In practice, how might this noble notion work? Well, here’s one idea that has even less chance of rapid realisation than an 11 per cent pay hike for MPs. We should fill at least some public offices by lottery.
“Sortition”, or the allocation of civic duties by lot, has a distinguished history. If ancient Athens practised it to supply most rotating city offices, then everyone in modern Britain understands it – and almost all respect it. The jury system still commands near-universal consent. People know that jury service modifies the risks of pure “sortition”. It makes provision for reasonable refusal or deferment, for challenges on the grounds of competence or conduct, and above all for guidance from a corps of impartial professionals – in this case, judges. If qualified random selection allows us to send someone down (or not) for life, then why not to decide on speed bumps and swimming pools?
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Filed under: Deliberation, Press, Sortition | 3 Comments »
Although the following is not an example of sortitionally selected participants, it does highlight the ‘contagion effect’ of a focused, widely-reported deliberation by diverse and contending political positions.
I suppose a comparison could be made to Fishkin’s Deliberative Democracy events. This one was in Canada in 1991.
Excerpting from a message from Tom Atlee of the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation:
I’d like to highlight what I think of as the most innovative example of that “contagion effect…beyond direct participants” — the 1991 Maclean’s “The People’s Verdict” initiative.
http://www.co-intelligence.org/S-Canadaadvrsariesdream.html
Maclean’s is Canada’s big glossy newsweekly. Key features of their initiative and July 1, 1991 issue were:
a. a citizen deliberative group chosen to embody the diversity – specific differences – found in the conflicted Canadian population;
b. powerful group process and facilitation (by Roger Fisher of GETTING TO YES fame)(even though the group ultimately transcended the process for their key interpersonal breakthrough);
c. an article early in their multi-article coverage that featured half-page bios (with pictures) of each of the dozen participants, which allowed readers to learn which participants they identified with and which ones they initially viewed as adversaries;
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Filed under: Participation, Press, Proposals | 1 Comment »
A small media disturbance has been caused by Russell Brand‘s anti-voting message. Jeremy Paxman scolds him on TV with the usual threadbare formulas of electoralism. Robert Webb re-joins Labour. Brand has even found the occasional supporter.
I particularly like this:
I know, I know my grandparents fought in two world wars (and one World Cup) so that I’d have the right to vote. Well, they were conned.
I only wish that when Paxman asked Brand what his alternative to the current system is, he would have replied: “sortition!” It seemed like Brand himself wished he had something concrete to say. Please consider writing to Brand to tell him what he has been missing. He could be the high-profile champion sortition needs.
Filed under: Action, Elections, Press, Sortition | Tagged: anti-voting, Jeremy Paxman, Russel Brand | 11 Comments »
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Equality by lot 