Open letter: Sortition as a tool of democracy

Posted on August 3, 2012 by Yoram Gat

Dear Mr. Scialabba,

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.
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Filed under: Elections, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 22 Comments »

Scialabba: Plutocratic vistas: America’s crisis of democracy

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Yoram Gat

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?” […]
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Filed under: Athens, Elections, Fiction, History, Juries, Press, Proposals, Sortition | Leave a comment »

Japan’s energy future too important to be left to experimental polling method

Posted on July 12, 2012 by Yoram Gat

An opinion piece in The Mainichi:

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

Ordinary citizens? Are you crazy?

Posted on June 19, 2012 by Yoram Gat

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?”

Filed under: Press, Proposals, Sortition | 4 Comments »

David Chaum: Random-sample elections

Posted on May 18, 2012 by Yoram Gat

Joshua Davis writes in Wired:

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.

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Filed under: Academia, Athens, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 14 Comments »

Jacques Rancière on elections

Posted on May 5, 2012 by Yoram Gat

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) »

Filed under: Athens, Press, Sortition | 8 Comments »

Slinger: Chance for reform that is truly radical

Posted on April 28, 2012 by Yoram Gat

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.
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Filed under: House of Lords, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 1 Comment »

A groundswell for sortition at the Guardian

Posted on April 25, 2012 by Yoram Gat

Polly Toynbee wrote an article in the Guardian about House of Lords reform.

The comments thread had quite a few people suggesting to appoint House of Lords members by sortition, such as:

hermionegingold

simple

scrap the current lot of decrepit aristos, religious creme de la creme & former politicians bribed to give up their seats for ‘new blood’ and have lords lotto with the people of this nation like we do with jury service.

it can’t possibly be any worse than what we have now & who knows, with ‘token’ interest taken out of the equation they might actually get things done.

stranger things have happened.

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Filed under: House of Lords, Press, Sortition | 2 Comments »

Clive Aslet: Appointment by lot for the House of Lords

Posted on April 24, 2012 by Yoram Gat

Clive Aslet writes in the Mail Online:

[E]ven the Conservatives back a largely elected chamber. They have to; democracy is the only show in town. But leaving aside the constitutional impasse that would ensue once an elected upper house started to throw its weight around, who would really want it? Our elected politicians are not exactly revered. In fact they’re reviled. The last thing we need is more of them. We need a different type of animal in the Lords – experts, great legal brains — but not appointees of the prime minister, thank you very much. It’s a conundrum. Everyone who thinks about it comes up with a different answer.

If David Cameron really believed in the Big Society, he would advocate true democratic involvement: appointment by lot. It could work like the jury system. Ordinary people serve a term as scrutineers of parliamentary legislation. You could be sure they would bring a lot more practical experience to the table than their oppos in the Commons.

Otherwise the only way forward I can see is for the Lords to revert to their origins. There are far too many Lords for the chamber to accommodate; let them fight it out.

Filed under: Elections, House of Lords, Press, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Pluchino et al. in the Guardian

Posted on April 17, 2012 by Yoram Gat

Marc Abrahams, the editor of the bimonthly annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize, turns in his “Improbable research” column in the Guardian to Pluchino et al. in support for sortition:

Improbable research: why random selection of MPs may be best

Mathematical research indicates that parliaments work best when some, though not all, members are chosen at random

Democracies would be better off if they chose some of their politicians at random. That’s the word, mathematically obtained, from a team of Italian physicists, economists, and political analysts.

The team includes the trio whose earlier research showed, also mathematically, that bureaucracies would be more efficient if they promoted people at random.

[…]

The scientists made a simple calculation model that mimics the way modern parliaments work, including the effects of particular political parties or coalitions. In the model, individual legislators can cast particular votes that advance either their own interests (one of which is to gain re-election), or the interests of society as a whole. Party discipline comes into play, affecting the votes of officials who got elected with help from their party.

But when some legislators are selected at random – owing no allegiance to any party – the legislature’s overall efficiency improves. That higher efficiency, the scientists explain, comes in “both the number of laws passed and the average social welfare obtained” from those new laws.

Filed under: Athens, Press, Sortition | Leave a comment »

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