Sortition adovcacy in Chile

Posted on February 8, 2013 by Yoram Gat

Tomas Mancebo wrote to point out an article in a Chilean alternative publication, El Ciudadano, advocating sortition.

Mauricio Vergara writes (machine translation with my touch-ups):

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.

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Filed under: Athens, Press, Sortition | 3 Comments »

Vote! or others will choose for you.

Posted on January 19, 2013 by Yoram Gat

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.
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Filed under: Elections, Press | 1 Comment »

Brief Irish Appearance of Sortition

Posted on January 17, 2013 by peterstone

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).
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Filed under: Academia, Athens, Press, Sortition | 4 Comments »

Prof. Irad Malkin: Democracy without democracy

Posted on January 4, 2013 by Yoram Gat

Prof. Irad Malkin, a professor of Ancient History in Tel Aviv University, writes in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz (my translation):

The days of democracy are short and few. In ancient Greece it lasted 200 years and its age in the modern era is similar. Modern democracy draws is ideological roots from ancient democracy, mainly from Classical Athens: since the people is sovereign, the government is called democratic, said Pericles the leader of Athens. But modern democracy does wrong to the basic democratic idea of equality and accessibility, since it chose to adopt some of the democratic ideas of Athens and reject the way in which Athens sustained its government. The Athenians did not think that it was possible to disconnect the governmental mechanism from its guiding principle; for the mechanism is what guaranteed democracy, the sovereignty of the people, the accessibility and the rotation: democracy, said Aristotle, is ruling and being ruled in turns.

So what did we forget? What did we give up? The lottery. More than anything else the democratic government relied on the lottery rather than on voting. Magistrates, cleric and jurists (that served as judges in Athens), and even government ministers – all were selected by lottery – and there was no “prime minister”. Please do not smile: “The rule of the people has the fairest name of all: ‘equality before the law’ (isonomia)… In this government, officials are selected by lot, and are held accountable and proposals are brought before the people… for all things are possible for the majority.”

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Filed under: Academia, Athens, Press, Sortition | 2 Comments »

“Put the right man in the right job”

Posted on January 1, 2013 by Yoram Gat

Burin Kantabutra writes to the Thai Nation:

Random assignments will make situation worse

Police chief Adul Saengsingkaew refuses to reconsider his order to select officers randomly from a pool of 4,000 specialist investigators nationwide and send them to fill vacancies in the strife-ridden South. This lottery is wrong from top to bottom.

The concept of a national police force goes directly against former prime minister Anand Panyarachun’s “Seven Pillars of Sustainable Democracy”, one of which is decentralisation. A police force must, by its nature, be localised, for each region differs from others – especially the South. For example, how many cops in Bangkok or Isaan speak Yawi and understand Islam and its culture? How will they communicate effectively with locals, let alone investigate? The cops from each region should be drawn from, and be accountable to, the region’s citizenry, through its elected representatives. Not only the police lottery, but the department itself, is built upon a false premise, one of national homogeneity.

Not surprisingly, those who are forced to do anything will not be willing workers, and are likely to be ineffective – further aggravating the volatile situation down south. Continue reading →

Filed under: Distribution by lot, Press | 4 Comments »

2012 review – sortition-related events

Posted on December 29, 2012 by Yoram Gat

There were 100 posts on Equality-by-Lot in 2012. Reviewing those posts, here is what appears to me most noteworthy.

The most notable sortition-related news of the year was the petering out of the 2011 protest movement in the West (Occupy/OWS/Indignados). While in several Arab countries the 2011 protests (“The Arab Spring”) led to significant changes in government structure, in the West the protest movements seem to have dissipated without having a noticeable impact on governmental institutions, power distribution or policy.

A fundamental reason for the failure of the Western protest movement is that in contrast to the Arab movement the Western protesters lacked a clear agenda of institutional reform. The agenda of the Arab protest movement was aimed explicitly at dismantling the existing power structure and setting up a structure that was generally modeled after the Western electoral model. The Western protest on the other hand did not offer an agenda for institutional reform. Having not presented an agenda for reform, it is hardly surprising that no reform took place.

What the protest movement lacked is a proposal to move away from an electoral system toward a sortition-based system.

On the positive side, going over the posts of the past year I was struck by how many different sortition advocates have appeared (or, to be more accurate, have become known to me) during the year, including a few semi-high profile figures:

Ètienne Chouard (and here, here, and here), Lawrence Lessig, David Chaum, Jacques Rancière, Clive Aslet, Jim Gilliam, Loïc Blondiaux, and Andrew Dobson and other readers of the Guardian.

Happy New Year, and best wishes for 2013.

Filed under: Academia, meta, Press, Sortition | 12 Comments »

I like you as a voter

Posted on December 5, 2012 by Yoram Gat

Ever since Socrates

It is a long standing tradition to deride sortition for putting in power unqualified people. The critics of sortition interviewed by Kevin Hartnett carry this tradition to the present.

Whether it is because the average person is incorrigibly incompetent, or just because they are inexperienced, the bottom line is the same: you just cannot hand power to the average person and expect good government. Socrates put it this way:

[N]o one would care to apply [sortition] in selecting a pilot or a flute-player or in any similar case, where a mistake would be far less disastrous than in matters political.

The straightforward argument is that the unqualified would simply make poor decisions:

There are ways in which we want our elected officials to look like us and then there are other ways in which we want them to be better than us. We actively try to select for some skills and talents when we choose politicians. (Susan Stokes, professor of political science at Yale University)

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Filed under: Academia, Athens, Elections, Press, Sortition | 16 Comments »

The case for governing by lottery

Posted on December 2, 2012 by Yoram Gat

Kevin Hartnett has an article about sortition in the Boston Globe “Ideas” section.

The performance of our elected officials has led many people to wonder whether we might as well just pluck people at random and send them to Washington. For a small but fervent group of political philosophers, that’s not a joke—it’s a serious idea.

The piece focuses mainly on the ideas of Alexander Guerrero, who is a professor at the department of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, and who, we learn, has an upcoming book on sortition called “The Lottocratic Alternative”. Others mentioned as proposing various ways to use chance in politics are Richard Thaler, and Peter Stone (“a lecturer in political science at Trinity College in Dublin and contributor to Equality by Lot, a blog about lottocratic politics”) and Scott Wentland.
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Filed under: Academia, Press, Sortition | 17 Comments »

News Limited sings the praises of sortition

Posted on November 10, 2012 by Yoram Gat

Vikki Campion writes in news.com.au about the wonders sortition can do for those communities looking for ways to save money:

Consulting the people – radical approach to democracy

THEY sacked sister cities, slashed mowing services and cut spending on glossy council brochures.

A pilot panel of 36 randomly selected mums, dads, students, retirees and pensioners have taken hold of Canada Bay Council’s budget for the next four years, slashing and burning inefficiencies and finding new revenue to address its mounting infrastructure backlog.

The pioneers were guinea pigs in an Australian-first method of community consultation which could be the future for cash-strapped councils which need to cut waste instead of raising rates.

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In praise of … drawing lots (in The Guardian UK)

Posted on November 7, 2012 by Conall Boyle

In praise of … drawing lots

Experts say that a legislature drawn from the people at random would be more representative, especially of minority communities

Forget campaigns that cost $5.8bn, and which ignore voters outside swing states and seek to reduce their number within them. None of those issues troubled the process by which Egypt’s 10 million Copts chose a new pope. First, over 2,000 clergymen and laymen shortlisted three candidates. Next, a blindfolded boy, himself chosen by lottery, picked out a plastic ball containing one of the three names, the idea being that his right hand doubles as the hand of God. Thus was Pope Tawadros II chosen. Experts say that a legislature drawn from the people at random would be more representative, especially of minority communities. Think it couldn’t happen here? Jury selection shows we are already happy to leave some crucial appointments to chance. And in May, in Runnymede’s Chertsey South and Rowtown ward, the Tory and the independent tied at 503 votes apiece. How was this democratic deadlock broken? By drawing lots, of course.

Filed under: Elections, Press, Religion, Sortition | 5 Comments »

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