A citizen lottery for leadership, a real democracy

Posted on February 6, 2024 by Yoram Gat

Carlos Acuña an attorney from El Centro, California, writes in the Calexico Chronicle:

The upcoming national elections later this fall, not to mention the upcoming recall in … gulp, Calexico, bring to mind the legend of Faust. For those unfamiliar with the name a Medieval legend revolves around a man, Faust, who made a deal with the devil. Faust, in exchange for knowledge and the hedonistic life, offered his soul to the devil. The devil gladly agreed. The devil had vacancies to fill, that sort of thing; hell has no homeless; all are welcome.

Faust was not alone. Your garden-variety political candidate pretty much brings Faust to mind. Political office seekers tend to be a self-selecting lot; unlike the ancient Greek system of sortition — reflected in our modern jury system — where citizens got selected at random to represent the population at large in the halls of leadership and political decision-making. Those hungry for power jockey for position; sadly, those who want it most, deserve it least. The Greeks knew it, 2,300 years ago … Hence, their citizen lottery for leadership, real democracy. A side effect from that: the Greeks not knowing who among them would be picked, made sure everyone got a first-rate education, including ethics …
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Israeli minister: “Ministers can’t make ends meet”

Posted on January 24, 2024 by Yoram Gat

While criticizing tax increases planned by the Israeli government, it was suggested to the Minister for National Goals, Orit Strock, that ministers should “cut back on all the bounty [they] receive”. Strock replied: “What bounty? No minister receives a fat salary. I know ministers who are unable to make ends meet, despite working hard day and night, and even some ministers who are supported financially by their parents”.

The salary of Israeli ministers is about 4 times that of the average worker, and well into the top decile of incomes.

Filed under: Elections, Press | 2 Comments »

Another Crisis-of-Democracy book

Posted on January 20, 2024 by Yoram Gat

Erica Benner is “a political philosopher who has held academic posts at St Antony’s College, Oxford, the London School of Economics and Yale University”. Her new book, Adventures in Democracy: The Turbulent World of People Power, is a contribution to the “Crisis of Demcoracy” genre. In an article in the Financial Times Benner lays out her outlook, rather standard for the genre, which includes a mention of Athens and sortition.

Democracies have always presented themselves as beacons of human progress. In 431BC, the statesman Pericles declared that Athens’s democracy was “the school for all Greece” — while over the past two centuries, democracy warriors everywhere have measured their countries’ success or failure by comparison with western models: American, British, French, Swedish.

It’s harder to do now that these formerly self-congratulating democracies are doing battle with new and older demons. Today, millions of people around the world crave freedom from authoritarian rule. Yet when they hear almost daily that the liberal heartlands are plagued with inflation, strikes, high crime rates, gun violence and ill-informed voters who care little about truth, many of them doubt that democracy is the best alternative.

Note how oppression is carefully left out of what “plagues” the “liberal heartlands”, and how blame for the troubles is laid at the feet of the masses – “ill-informed voters who care little about truth” – rather than at those of the powerful.

Benner concludes with a mention of sortition and some useful bromides:

We see the same urgent need to give more effective authority and voice to people on the ground inside today’s older democracies. There are organisations around the democratic world whose members advocate the creation of citizen assemblies, chosen by lot instead of personality-driven or partisan campaigns, to advise and monitor existing branches of government. By avoiding pathological rivalries among (and within) political parties, such assemblies might stand a better chance of coming up with policies aimed at narrowing the gaps in unbalanced societies.

But even well-crafted institutions can’t function without popular support. Change has to start with our own attitudes. Take other people’s beliefs and discomforts more seriously than ideologies that preach faith in the inevitable progress of whatever you think best. Fight to take power back, of course, from democracy’s most obvious enemies — extremists, insatiable plutocrats and tyrannical leaders. But also take a more modest, closer-to-home kind of responsibility: for getting our own hypercompetitive societies and psyches into better shape.

Filed under: Academia, Books, Press, Sortition | 3 Comments »

Demiocracy: A Demos-Dominant Democracy, Chapter 1a: The Founders’ Foundation—Neighborly Nomination

Posted on January 8, 2024 by Roger Knights

If a parliament … is the method, then certainly let us set about discerning the kind of suffrages, and rest no moment till we have got them. —Carlyle, A Carlyle Reader, p. 432.

The fact is, however, that no practical substitute for the present type of representative government, with its dependence on the system of permanent party organizations, has yet been devised…. —James Hogan, Election and Representation, 1945, p. 55.

The recruitment of the deserving by their “familiars” was the basis of the Founders’ political system. Therefore, LET US VOTE the way they intended: not for party politicians, but FOR FELLOW CITIZENS IN OUR “NEIGHBORHOODS”—physical, social, collegial, and familial—who deserve it—hopefully because they exhibit “the requisite wisdom and virtue.”

Let us no longer vote for a slate of presidential electors, whom we don’t know, but rather for people whom we DO. Some of these nominees would become, by random selection, our presidential electors—in other words, our designated political Proxies.

We would thereby select our choices, not settle for a pre-selected name on a menu—hopefully (because we don’t really know his character) the “Least Evil” one of the bunch. Our free selections, on the other hand, would be of better-known quantities, constituting our personal “Best Men” (and Women).

Our Proxy Electors (PEs) would constitute a new and very different Electoral College — a “Popular” one.

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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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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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