Lottery for public office: a method to improve democracy
The concept of democracy has been associated, in different historical periods, with two very different methods for selection of public officials and accountability: the popular election of representatives and sortition (drawing names at random). In the last two hundred years democratic theory has assumed that the only democratic method to choose public officials is the election of representatives by popular vote. However, from its origins in Athens (435 BC) until well into the nineteenth century, the concept of “democracy” used to refer to the use of sortition for the selection of public officials (Manin 1997).
A segment on today’s Take Two featured an interview with a immigration policy expert on the Diversity Visa Lottery, a quirky program based partly on random selection that rewards applicants from countries that are under-represented among the nation’s immigrant diasporas. The Senate immigration reform bill proposes doing away with the program.
If the diversity visa sounds familiar, that’s because a related fiasco made headlines two years ago: In the spring of 2011, thousands of applicants were mistakenly informed they’d won an immigrant visa by the U.S. government, and then — whoops! — told there had been a computer glitch and that the good news was a mistake.
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?
Most of the world’s people are decent, honest and kind. Most of those who dominate us are inveterate bastards. This is the conclusion I’ve reached after many years of journalism. Writing on Black Monday, as the British government’s full-spectrum attack on the lives of the poor commences, the thought keeps returning to me.
He asks:
So the age-old question comes knocking: why does the decent majority allow itself to be governed by a brutal, antisocial minority?
He is looking for inspiring, transfiguring ideas that will show a way out of this predicament. Please join me and write a note to Monbiot to offer sortition as such a crucial idea.
Posted on March 1, 2013 by Common Lot Sortitionist
These two articles about the salaries, or lack thereof, offered to state legislators make me wonder about two aspects of any prospective sortitioned legislature.
The first is the question of how to attract and sustain participation, particularly regarding financial support.
The second, consequentially, is whether or not citizens should be required to actively submit their names to the pool for sortition. [“Not required” would be, then, as juries are chosen. “Required” would require registration…and possibly, further, a basic competence test — a la driver’s licences.]
Granted, both topics have been previously discussed in this blog. But I recall there is no agreement about either.
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,
Louis Laurent, a Belgian MP, is calling for the use of sortition in order to achieve “true representation” (machine translation with my touch-ups):
Louis Laurent demands the dissolution of “all political parties” responsible, according to him, for the current poor governance, corruption and cronyism at all levels of government.
Laurent demands the creation of a “citizen” parliament assembled by sortition, in order to guarantee true representation.
The Greeks discovered the blunder of representative democracy and it took them 800 years to eliminate the oligarchy and institute a distinct democratic design.
The solution was the creation of a large assembly, where members are selected by lot, yes! … A raffle, where those citizens who meet certain requirements have equal opportunity to be selected and to influence the country’s policies as representatives.
The Israeli elections are three days away and the campaign is reaching its inevitable crescendo. Something called “movement for social media” is adding its contribution to the cacophony with a celebrity clip whose message is “Vote! or others will choose for you.” (In Hebrew ‘vote’ and ‘choose’ are the same word.)
The campaign organizers explained back in October that it was prompted by falling voter turnout rates in Israel. Voter turnout has dropped from close to 80% throughout the second half of the 20th century to under 70% in the three elections of the first decade of the 21st. Continue reading →
Short article by Stephen Kinsella, a lecturer in economics at University of Limerick, on Ireland’s democracy deficit. I am always happy to hear the word “sortition” discussed. I’m amazed by how many people–even academics, even political scientists, even scholars studying democracy–are not familiar with the term.
The process of selecting officials in ancient Greece was called sortition. All citizens – men of course – were eligible for elected office. Effectively, the citizens drew lots for ministries (the one with the shortest straw probably became minister for health). Continue reading →
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Equality by lot 