I agree with columnist Murithi Mutiga’s argument last Sunday about elections. Do away with elections and go for selection by lot.
In a stroke, party/tribal politics loses all meaning. Campaigning becomes obsolete.
A body of people representing all walks of life without vested interests sits in the House.
The process is simple, cheap and fair. It is not on the Western liberal model either.
As Prof Dobson of Keele University (UK) wrote in The Guardian recently [see here], if this was good enough for the ancient Greeks, who invented democracy, why not for us?
Gary Gutting is a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and an editor of Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Mark Fredrickson found a post of his on the New York Times online opinion pages. The post is set up as a dialog between the author and Socrates. It is a typical mix of valid points and elitist dogma.
SOCRATES: I’m against it.
GUTTING: I see what you mean. It’s going to be nasty, brutish, and long — not to say immensely expensive — but of course if we want a democracy, there’s no alternative.
S: I disagree. You shouldn’t hold the election at all. You should flip a coin instead.
G: You don’t see any difference between Obama and Romney?
S: Oh, I do. I’m very impressed with Obama, no question. He’s intelligent, courageous, self-controlled and has a good sense of justice. Just the sort of person I had in mind for my philosopher-rulers. But none of that’s going to make a difference to the American voters. The election’s likely to be close, and in any case the outcome will turn on the October unemployment report, the price of gas, an Israeli attack on Iran, who has the most money for attack ads in the last two weeks or some other rationally irrelevant factor that you don’t yet have any hint about.
G: But surely you’d prefer to let Obama make his case to the American people rather than let blind chance decide the outcome?
S: I think letting the American people decide is no different from leaving it to chance. The vast majority of you don’t know enough about the issues or the candidates to make anything like a reliable decision. (It was the same in Athens in my day.) Continue reading →
A few weeks ago, I got contacted by “The Point,” a weekly online panel discussion show put out by the Young Turks. The format of the show is that an expert delivers a “point” on some issue of the day, and then the panel discusses it for 15 minutes or so (with 3 points to a 45-minute show). They asked me to contribute a “point” about lotteries. The reason they asked me was because one of the panelists, Walter Kirn, had recently written an article on Obama’s decision to raffle off a dinner to a randomly-selected campaign donor. See–
I originally tried making a point specifically about Obama’s lottery, but the producer of the show wanted a more general point about lotteries. The resulting show is online:
I’m at the start of the second segment (about 18 minutes into the show). The show has been up for a couple of weeks, but I’ve been traveling, and only had the time to watch it yesterday. The good news is that they give a plug both to my book and to Equality by Lot (in the closing credits). The bad news is that the discussion of my point is complete garbage. None of these idiots seem to have even heard of lotteries before me. I think the hostess might even think I invented the idea of allocating goods by lot! I plan to drop them a line, but you might want to make a few comments on Youtube.
I am writing to you following your article “Plutocratic vistas: America’s crisis of democracy”. I am a committed sortition supporter and advocate and a member of a group of like-minded people. We have a blog – Equality by Lot (https://equalitybylot.wordpress.com) – devoted to discussing and promoting sortition as a tool of democracy.
I liked your article a great deal. Articles discussing sortition in one way or another appear occasionally in the mainstream press (you can find a running record of such articles on Equality by Lot – the most prominent of these is Joe Klein’s 2010 Time article ”How Can a Democracy Solve Tough Problems?”). I think yours was substantially different. Continue reading →
George Scialabba writes in the LA Review of Books and in Salon about the history of plutocratic control of elections in the U.S. and offers sortition as an alternative.
Scialabba has the following excerpt from the 1897 book Equality by Edward Bellamy:
“But why did not the people elect officials and representatives of their own class, who would look out for the interests of the masses?” […] Continue reading →
Yoroku: Japan’s energy future too important to be left to experimental polling method
Once upon a time, in ancient Athens, state policy was decided not by elected representatives, but by a great assembly of all eligible citizens. Five hundred of these citizens were also chosen by lot for the Bouletai, or council, which spent time deliberating the issues facing Athens and drawing up bills for the assembly’s consideration.
In the modern world, a small-scale version of this selection by lot and the group deliberation that was such an important part of Athenian democracy is being resurrected by U.S. academics in the form of deliberative polls. Continue reading →
Harvard Magazine has an article about Lawrence Lessig’s reform proposals. Lessig has been promoting his proposal for “democracy vouchers”, but it turns out that he has another proposal to make – a Constitutional Convention selected by sortition:
[Lessig] writes: “I recognize that of all the insanity strewn throughout this book, this will strike readers as the most extreme. Ordinary citizens? Are you crazy? Proposing amendments to our Constitution? When two-thirds of Americans can’t even identify what the Bill of Rights is?”
Roughly 2,500 years ago, the citizens of Athens developed a concept of democracy that’s still hailed by the modern world. It was not, however, a democracy in which every citizen had a vote. Aristotle argued that such a practice would lead to an oligarchy, where powerful individuals would unduly influence the masses. Instead the Athenians relied on a simple machine to randomly select citizens for office. It’s an idea whose time has come again.
Two separate research initiatives—one from a pioneering cryptographer and a second from a team based at Stanford University—have proposed a return to this purer, Athenian-style democracy. Rather than expect everyone to vote, both proposals argue, we should randomly select an anonymous subset of electors from among registered voters. Their votes would then be extrapolated to the wider population. Think of it as voting via statistically valid sample. With a population of 313 million, the US would need about 100,000 voters to deliver a reliable margin of error.
Joshua Mostafa wrote to call attention to an interview with Jacques Rancière:
Jacques Rancière was interviewed by Le novel Observateur on the French presidential election. He argues that elections, despite being touted as the height of democracy, are anti-democratic, oligarchical procedures. He does not confine his criticism to the right, or to the likely winner of the election, François Hollande, whose weak-tea, centrist version of socialism cuts no ice with the philosopher, but also to the purported champion of the left, Front de Gauche candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon: ‘A true campaign of the left would denounce the office of president itself.’
In principle and in historical origin, representation is anti-democratic. Democracy was founded on the idea of equal competence of all. The usual mode of selection for office was drawing lots… Representation is an oligarchic principle: it has always been associated with power representing not the population but the status or competence that bases its authority over that population: birth, wealth, knowledge, etc. Read more (in French) »
A letter proposing sortition for the House of Lords by John Slinger – a Labour activist – is published in the Financial Times:
The report this week of the Joint Committee on the Draft House of Lords Reform Bill has led to a tired and polarised debate, resulting in two equally unattractive options. The conservationists wish to preserve an anachronistic, undemocratic body, which nonetheless carries out its responsibility to revise legislation with aplomb due to the expertise of its members. The reformers cling to the totem of elections to bestow on the Lords some semblance of democracy, yet offer no explanation on how to manage the inevitable constitutional clash between the newly legitimate Lords and the previously supreme Commons, or how the full range of expertise would be preserved. Instead, we require radical reform accommodating the best features of both options while mitigating their inherent deficiencies. One little-discussed idea is for a system of Citizen Senators, selected by lot as with juries. Continue reading →
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