Irish citizen assembly process terminates in rejection by referendum

Posted on March 23, 2024 by Yoram Gat

A referendum in Ireland on March 8 resulted in a “no” vote for constitutional changes. The rejected proposals were the product of a process involving an allotted citizen assembly. An article by Rory Carroll in the The Guardian offers an illuminating review of the aftermath of the failure of the proposed changes at the polls.

Irish referendum fiasco puts future of lauded citizens’ assemblies in doubt

Debates involving 99 randomly selected people were hailed as a model for the world, but some say faith has been eroded

When Ireland shattered its history of social conservatism by passing a 2015 referendum on same-sex marriage and a 2018 referendum on abortion, progressives credited its citizens’ assembly.

Ninety-nine randomly selected people, who are brought together to debate a specific issue, had weighed evidence from experts and issued policy recommendations that emboldened the political establishment, and voters, to make audacious leaps.

Governments and campaigners around the world hailed Ireland as a model for how to tackle divisive issues and a modern incarnation of the concept of deliberative democracy that dated back to ancient Athens.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Applications, Press, Sortition | 21 Comments »

Heiress is letting 50 strangers give her €25 million fortune away

Posted on March 20, 2024 by Yoram Gat

Fortune tells the story of Marlene Engelhorn who is busy dispensing with €25 million which she inherited.

Engelhorn settled on an idea: Let 50 strangers decide how to give it away.

Those strangers, all of whom live in Engelhorn’s native Austria, will meet for the first time this weekend at a hotel in Salzburg. Dubbed the Guter Rat, or Good Council, they were chosen through a statistical process run by research group Foresight and range in location, age, race, socioeconomic background and other demographic factors chosen in an effort to be representative of the overall Austrian population.

Engelhorn’s goal is not only to give away €25 million, but also to spark conversations on wealth inequality. She’s frustrated that her windfall wasn’t taxed — Austria eliminated its inheritance tax in 2008 — and doesn’t see traditional philanthropy as a good solution because it still gives her too much power.

“I’m just one brain, I’m just one person and so to me, this is a huge relief knowing that the process of redistribution is much more legitimate and thorough and democratic than I could ever do it,” she said in an interview. “Nobody needs another foundation.”

Continue reading →

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

A Brown University student proposes sortition at Brown

Posted on March 19, 2024 by Yoram Gat

Continuing what is a bit of a tradition, Evan Tao, a Brown University student, proposes employing sortition to select student government at Brown.

Over the past decade, many countries have held citizens’ assemblies in which citizens are randomly selected to deliberate and make policy recommendations to legislators. Hundreds of these assemblies have been held around the world with great success. An Irish citizens’ assembly’s proposal to legalize abortion was sent to a national referendum; in France, an assembly submitted recommendations on combating climate change to the incumbent government. Citizens’ assemblies can be effective pilot programs, proving to the public that sortition works. Ideally, they will become regularized and eventually hold direct legislative power in local government.

If I’ve convinced you that lotteries are preferable to elections, and you’re wondering what to do about it, we can start right here at Brown. Our student government election process has room for improvement. I don’t know about you, but I only voted for the people who asked me to or who had cute posters, neither of which seem like a good indication of the best future leader. Voter turnout in the class of 2026 first-year elections was only 33.5 percent. And, as we saw with the recent Undergraduate Finance Board budget surplus fiasco, who our student government representatives are matters. Let’s make it an opt-in lottery at Brown—and then take it to the rest of the country.

Filed under: Academia, Press, Proposals | Tagged: | 9 Comments »

Iain Walker: Gaza needs democracy without elections

Posted on March 15, 2024 by Yoram Gat

Iain Walker, executive director of The newDemocracy Foundation, has an opinion piece in The Jerusalem Post. Walker offers Israel and its allies advice about what government they should set up in Gaza (once they tire of killing tens of thousands of its inhabitants).

Gaza needs democracy without elections

Instead of elections, Athenian democracy used a simple random draw among citizens (known as “sortition”).

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu receives regular criticism for failing to share the plan for Gaza after the military role concludes. The lack of an official position on this subject could stem from the fact that all over options are unattractive, and so a new approach is required.

Israel as an occupying force is undesirable, it would draw global criticism and simply push off the problem to a later date.

Equally, traditional electoral democracy is an unworkable option.

With polls reflecting up to 80% support for Hamas among Gaza residents, elections would only allow for some incarnation of Hamas to emerge newly empowered – an untenable situation following its acts of terror targeting civilians.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Opinion polling, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 6 Comments »

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 …
Continue reading →

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

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.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Books, Elections, Press | 5 Comments »

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.

    Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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

« Previous Page — Next Page »