Write a note to George Monbiot

Posted on April 15, 2013 by Yoram Gat

Update: Monbiot responded as follows:

Interesting: many thanks for this Yoram. G

George Monbiot is frustrated with government:

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.

Here is what I wrote:

Continue reading →

Filed under: Action, Press, Sortition | 11 Comments »

How to insure sortition would be attractive to most?

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.

http://www.alamogordonews.com/opinion/ci_22656513/n-m-s-citizen-legislature-is-an-oxymoron

http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2013/feb/27/where-do-nevadas-legislators-rank-nationally-salar/

Filed under: Press, Sortition | 4 Comments »

“Absolutely fundamental deficits in understanding”

Posted on February 25, 2013 by Yoram Gat

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,

but assembled a set of professionals defending the jury institution:
Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Juries, Press | 12 Comments »

A Belgian MP calling for sortition

Posted on February 9, 2013 by Yoram Gat

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.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Elections, Press, Sortition | 2 Comments »

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.

Continue reading →

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.
Continue reading →

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).
Continue reading →

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.”

Continue reading →

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 »

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