America Should Be Ripe for Sortition

Posted on January 5, 2024 by Roger Knights

Here are a few instances where DeMockery has badly failed us, and where Demiocracy [to be explained later] would have done a better job—and had greater legitimacy with the public, because of its Everyman composition. The priorities of common folk are not as much warped by the Pernicious P’s. (Their relative resistance to Propaganda, for instance, was portrayed by the cynicism of the “proles” in the saloon-set scenes in 1984.)

To me, as to the alienated Greeks I posted about yesterday, these outrages are not just incidental accidents, but revelations of the essential objectionable character of the political class that is nurtured and sustained by DeMockery.

There’s no such thing as a cheap politician. — Ferdinand Lundberg, Scoundrels All, 1968.

  1. The Great Depression, Part 1. I’ve read that some officials wanted the Federal Reserve to be more hawkish in 1927, because a house of cards was a-building due to its loose credit policy. But moderating the roaring Twenties then would have impinged on the wealth of Wall Streeters and dimmed the GOP’s presidential prospects in 1928, so pressure was applied to keep the party going. Even if this speculation isn’t 100% correct, it is the SORT of thing that is likely occur under DeMockery. For instance:

    Also to blame is former President Donald Trump, who repeatedly pressured and even threatened to fire Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell to continue to keep the interest rates low to aid his re-election campaign. When Mr. Trump was first elected, the 2007-09 recession and its aftereffects had more or less ended. But he wanted low interest rates to artificially boost the economy at great expense. He met with the Fed chairman to remind him of his expectations. —Letter to the WSJ, April 10, 2023, by A. Salinity.

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Filed under: Books, Elections, History, Press, Sortition | 10 Comments »

Is Greece Ripe for Sortition?

Posted on January 2, 2024 by Roger Knights

In the First World, Greece seems like the ripest country for sortition, mainly because of widespread exasperation with the entire political system in the wake of its March 2023 railway disaster.

The BBC reported on March 12, 2023:

This tragedy has shaken Greece. So many of the lives lost were young and it has unleashed a national outpouring of grief and outrage mostly directed against the country’s ruling classes. Not for the first time, Greeks feel betrayed by their politicians.

According to early polling, 87% say there are other causes beyond human error, and guilt needs to be assigned. Every day new revelations about the sordid state of Greece’s train network cause more horror, anger and distrust of the political class.

A class that neglected the rail system, privatised operations, spent millions on security systems only to let them rot and wasted vital EU funding.

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Filed under: Elections, Press, Sortition | 6 Comments »

William Hague gets on board

Posted on December 27, 2023 by Nicholas Gruen

176f2153-9614-43a7-aeda-57a4acd7cebb_300x300William Hague has caught the bug for democratic lottery. And he writes about it well. This simple sentence is a nice little microcosm. “Social media companies are poisoning the democratic world with the addictive spread of narrow and intemperate opinions.” Hear hear.

Writing about the proposal of sortition in Ireland seven years ago, Hague takes up the story.

This idea was met by considerable scepticism. The Irish opposition party of the time, Fianna Fail, thought that “an issue of such sensitivity and complexity” could not be dealt with adequately in this way. The chosen citizens would just reflect the existing deep divisions in society. They would not be sufficiently expert. A judge-led commission would have more expertise and carry more weight. That would be more “intellectually coherent”.

Yet the citizens’ assembly was established nonetheless, and over the following six months something fascinating and inspiring occurred. An appointed chairwoman and 99 “ordinary” people, chosen at random and therefore completely varied in age, gender, regionality and socioeconomic status, did a remarkable job. They adopted some commendable principles for their debates, including respect, efficiency and collegiality. They listened to 25 experts and read 300 submissions. They heard each other out and compromised more effectively than elected representatives.

The result was an overwhelming recommendation that the constitution should be changed, and a clear majority view that the relevant section of it should be deleted and replaced, permitting their parliament to legislate on abortion in any way it saw fit. This was later endorsed in a historic referendum. One of the country’s most intractable issues had been resolved clearly and decisively, in a way the political parties could not have managed and would not have dared. …

[Then after summarising some of the ways in which democracy is coming apart, Hague continues.] At a time when all these trends are turning people against their own compatriots and reducing debate to simplistic and unsubstantiated assertions, it has to be a source of hope that if you put 100 random people in a room with an important question and plenty of real information, they will often prove that democracy isn’t yet finished. They will listen patiently, think clearly and find solutions. Somewhere, in this gathering darkness of hatred, lies and opposing cultural identities, there are open-minded and constructive citizens willing to turn on a light.

He also notes how many of his fellow parliamentarians are against the idea. It’s easy to say that that would reduce their power, but in my experience it’s not nearly so simple. Politicians think their job is to come up with good policy. They do try, but the whole fabric of political life is keeping powerful people happy. But they live in hope. Perhaps one day more of them will realise that to actually do good policy you need allies. And a citizen assembly is a useful ally for a positive centrist government (from either the left or right), just as the accord was a very powerful ally for the Hawke and Keating Governments.

My one disappointment is that, Hague’s imagination does not run beyond the idea of citizen assemblies as bodies with only advisory power. But I would say that, wouldn’t I?

More here.

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Mueller, Tollison and Willett advocating sortition in 1972

Posted on December 27, 2023 by Yoram Gat

“Representative Democracy via Random Selection”, a 1972 paper by Dennis Mueller, Robert Tollison, and Thomas Willett in Public Choice Journal is one of the earliest pieces of sortition advocacy in modern times. The proposal made and discussed is a radical one: selecting the legislature by lot. The fairly short paper covers many crucial issues: eligibility for the allotment pool, compensation, body size, etc.

If we accept that some form of national representation is efficient, the remaining task is to decide on the best practical form of such representation. We would like to propose for consideration the selecting of a national legislature at random from the voting populace. Dahl [After the Revolution, 1970, pp. 249-153] recently suggested a similar procedure, although only to give advisory votes, and the idea has historical origins in Athenian democracy and in the work of Rousseau [The Social Contract, 1762, Book IV, Chapter III]. Such a procedure would be a significant improvement over the existing political system in several ways. The incentive for pork barrel activities in order to secure votes would no longer be present since random selection would be independent of geographic base, and for the same reason minorities would be represented in correct proportion to their numbers in the society. Representation by random selection would also return political power to individual voters and give better artivulation of voter preferences in the legislative process without sacrificing the efficiencies of representation. The legislature would not be composed of median position representatives as under two-party, geographic representation. Voter abstention or uninformed voting would not be problems under this proposal, and perhaps voter alienation would be less in this case also. If viewed as a replacement for the current forms of national representation, the random selection system removes direct sanctioning power through the ballot from the voter and replaces this control mechanism with a more subtle method of articulating voter preferences on national issues. We would argue that although the final outcome is not clearcut, such a change in representative procedure could be understood by voters as the formal embodiment of democratic equality in an ex ante rather than ex post sense. One could also argue that the mass media aspect of political campaigning would be less of a problem under the random selection system, although this is not certain since the outcome depends on how this system of representation is meshed with existing political institutions (e.g., the Presidency). Finally, and importantly, it should be stressed that random selection of representatives avoids all of the traditional problems in voting theory of intransitivities in voting outcomes and the like in establishing a system of proportional representation [See Duncan, The Theory of Committees and Elections, 1958, Chapter 11]. The application of voting theory is confined in this case to the operations of the random legislature once selected, and this feature of representation by lot is an important justification for establishing and operating proportional representation in this way.

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Sortition in 2023

Posted on December 22, 2023 by Yoram Gat

Equality-by-Lot’s traditional yearly review post.

In terms of interest in sortition, 2023 saw a continuation of the trend of previous years. Throughout 2023, there was a steady beat of activity around the world proposing or reporting the application of sortition in various ways for various purposes, along with a stream of condemnations and warnings against the idea.

This included some fairly high profile pieces, with the most notable one being an op-ed in the New York Times. Among the most high profile applications was the French End-of-Life panel. The head of the CESE, the institution that organized this body, proposed expanding the use of allotted bodies.

While the The academics continued their back-and-forth, sortition found a new fairly high-profile advocate in Martin Wolf, the chief economics commentator at the Financial Times, who was introduced to the idea by Nicholas Gruen.

An even more influential sortition advocate this year was Yanis Varoufakis, who put allotted citizen councils as a main component of his democratization agenda. His organization, DiEM25, created a deliberative democracy collective devoted to discussing this idea.

Two notable books dealing with sortition published this year were the late Maurice Pope’s The Keys to Democracy that was originally written in the 1980’s and Yves Sintomer’s The Government of Chance.

This activity indicates a level of interest that is generally comparable to that of the last couple of years. There is a persisting sense of recovery of the prevailing elections-based system from the crisis of 2016 which diminishes any immediate interest in sortition as a tool for contending with popular discontent. As long as there is no widespread unrest, it is likely that interest in sortition will continue to simmer. However, it is important that sortition activists continue to look for ways to spread awareness of the idea in the population so that when a new crisis does occur, sortition is a present viable alternative to the status quo. If it is not, then in all likelihood anti-democratic sentiments would gain ground as a result of popular frustration. Examples of such outcomes already appeared in 2023 in Argentina and the Netherlands.

Filed under: Academia, Applications, Books, Elections, Press, Sortition | 2 Comments »

Upcoming drawing of a Michigan redistricting commission member

Posted on December 21, 2023 by Yoram Gat

The U.S. state of Michigan has an allotted redistricting commission. Following the resignation of Dustin Witjes, one of the commission’s four Democratic members, a replacement member is going to be allotted on January 3rd. The allotment is going to be live-streamed on the internet.

Following Witjes’ resignation on Wednesday, [state Rep. Ann] Bollin said it was long overdue.

“His prolonged absence from Michigan while collecting pay as a member of the redistricting commission is unacceptable. This situation has exemplified a lack of accountability and a disregard for the responsibilities tied to this crucial role,” she said.

With Witjes’ resignation, the Michigan Department of State will host a random selection at 3:30 p.m. Jan. 3 to choose a replacement.

The Michigan constitution requires new commissioners to be randomly selected from the remaining pool of semi-finalist applicants who affiliate with the same party as the departing commissioner.

“Of the 200 semi-finalists randomly selected in June 2020, there are 52 remaining who affiliate with the Democratic Party,” stated a release.

The drawing will be livestreamed on the MICRC’s social media accounts.

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Point of View: Shoring Up Democracy

Posted on December 4, 2023 by Yoram Gat

Jack Graves writes in the East Hampton Star:

An Op-Ed in The Times not long ago [the author presumably refers to this. -YG] suggested that the ballot in this country be replaced by “sortition” — appointment by lot, which democratic Athens used in the 5th and 4th centuries B.C.E. to stock its populous Council, Assembly, and jury courts.

While the level of participation was very high, putting to shame our apathetic turnouts, Athenian democracy wasn’t at the root all that democratic: Women had no voice, neither did resident aliens, who could not own property; there were slaves, as many as 100,000 in the 4th century, it’s estimated in Thomas N. Mitchell’s “Athens: A History of the World’s First Democracy,” and in its Golden Age an aristocratic general and gifted orator, Pericles, essentially called the tune.

Socrates, who was to be sentenced to death for impiety, wasn’t a fan, nor were Plato and Aristotle, though he saw some potential good in it. Socrates said, “It is absurd to choose magistrates by lot where no one would dream of drawing lots for a pilot, a mason, a flute player, or any craftsman at all though the shortcomings of such men are far less harmful than those that disorder our government.”

Frankly, I see no reason why sortition would work any better in the United States, a vastly larger country, than the representative democracy (or democratic republic, if you will) that we already have; though it’s clear that the Electoral College has skewed things, according to smaller states’ disproportionate power, and, because of the winner-take-all allocation of electoral votes, focuses presidential campaigns on battleground states.

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

Selection by lottery can make the university system more egalitarian

Posted on November 24, 2023 by Yoram Gat

ِA proposal by Sam Mace for randomization in university admittance. Conall Boyle’s work on this idea gets a mention.

It’s Time to Sort the University

University is the gateway to a better life. But the gap between elite and non-elite institutions and their admissions contradicts our self-convinced myths about meritocracy that we have developed. The best and the brightest do not necessarily attend our highest caliber and best funded institutions. Instead, all too often, it is the most well connected, the richest, and a lucky few others who are allowed to grace so many hallowed halls.

The reasoning behind the expansion of universities in the 20th century was to dramatically alter people’s economic and social status. But today, what kind of university someone goes to all too often determines their life path. Attending an Oxford or a Harvard may radically change a young person’s life, whereas for someone attending a Bradford or an Alabama State, this is far less likely to happen. Given the increasing pressures on funding for humanities and other scholarly subjects such as ancient history and classics, attending certain universities will soon include an irrevocable decision on what a student can study.

Therefore the question must be not just how many people can go to university but how fair is the admissions process for the very best universities. This question and similar ones about the role of universities has not just been asked by progressives but also by conservatives such as Christopher Lasch and Patrick Deneen. The fear of elite concentrations of economic, social, and cultural capital is keenly felt across the ideological spectrum. It is a problem that plagues the Anglosphere.

The exams to assess who gets a spot at university are more ruthlessly competitive than ever before. We use invigilators to ensure fairness and tie ourselves in knots over the ethics of using tools such ChatGPT, yet few of us are questioning the fairness of the admissions system in the first place. The enormous demand for the most prestigious universities sparks an ugly reality of fraud and inequality.
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Allotted assemblies for overcoming coalition discord

Posted on November 20, 2023 by Yoram Gat

An op-ed in the Belgian La Libre.

How allotted citizen assemblies could have prevented the failure of the fiscal reform

By Eric Jourdain

Whereas the necessary fiscal reform plan is figured in the government agreement, the seven parties of the Vivaldi government have not reached an agreement. It is time to put the brakes on the particracy, to reanimate democracy and to give an unexpected role to the prime minister.

On July 22nd, our prime minister Alexander De Croo was extremely disappointed. He published an open letter in the written press deploring the fact that “the political class is sometimes so preoccupied by its own matters that it forgets the people and the causes that it must serve”. This was after the failure of the fiscal reform, when the prime minister realized with bitterness that the seven parties which compose the Vivaldi coalition would not reach an agreement on approving yet another version of the fiscal reform presented by the finance minister.

The reform project did figure in the federal government accord presented in September 2020, which explicitly planned for a balanced budget and the reduction in the fiscal pressure on the workers (employees, civil servants and self-employed).

In a country which has the ambition to reach a work participation rate of 80%, one would think that this reform would serve the general interest. In fact, more people at work translates automatically to an increase in contributions to social programs and to fiscal revenue, and a decrease in social expenses by the community.

How to allow a prime minister to resolve this impasse in the future?

By adding a few articles to our constitution specifying the following points:

  • Define what is an allotted citizen assembly.
  • Stipulate that when a reform project set out in the government accord is not adopted within 3 years after the formation of the legislature, the head of government may invoke a new article in the constitution. The new article, say Article X, would allow the prime minister to convene a Citizen Assembly via sortition to which he would propose to adopt the legislation that the parties refuse to adopt. The vote of the Assembly would be binding.

In case of a positive vote, that would mean that the prime minister and the Citizen Assembly have together prevented an impasse, and possibly a governmental crisis. This would get around the harmful effects of particracy.
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Filed under: Academia, Elections, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Low acceptance rate as an anti-democratic excuse

Posted on November 11, 2023 by Yoram Gat

An argument against sortition that is fairly common among academics is that allotted bodies are not representative because the acceptance rates of offered seats are low. It is often claimed that “experience has shown” that “less than 10%” of people are willing to serve on allotted bodies. Such a finding, it is claimed, is grounds for not using sortition at all, for limiting the powers of allotted bodies, or for various forms of meddling in the way allotted bodies are made up.

Despite the fact that it is sometimes admitted that acceptance rates change depending on the circumstances, the “fact” of low acceptance rates is largely treated as being an immutable, if unfortunate, obstacle to the representativity of allotted bodies. In fact, however, it is obvious that acceptance rates can be easily increased, quite possibly reaching fairly close to 100%, if compensation for acceptance is high enough. How many people would refuse to commit a few weekends to participating in an allotted body if they are paid a few months’ worth of the median salary for their efforts? The answer to this question is obviously that (while we can probably make a good guess) we do not know for sure. But equally obviously it would be fairly easy to find out by running a few experiments.

It is a small miracle then that all those who busy themselves with attacking sortition by arguing that low acceptance rates make allotted bodies unrepresenative have not argued strongly for running such experiments. One may suspect that complaints about low acceptance rate is a tool for resisting the democratic power of sortition, rather than a real concern coming from people with a genuine interest in democratizing society.
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Filed under: Academia, Experiments, Opinion polling, Press, Sortition | 5 Comments »

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