Irish higher education minister laments the cruelty of random selection

Posted on September 1, 2023 by Yoram Gat

It turns out that entry to higher education programs (“courses”) in Ireland is determined by attaining some cutoff grade. Due to “grade inflation” many programs find themselves over-subscribed and select candidates via a lottery. The Irish higher education Minister Simon Harris expressed his misgivings about the use of random selection:

Random selection can be a particularly cruel and difficult way that you get the max points perhaps required, but you still find yourself not guaranteed a place in the course.

Mr. Harris’s empathy toward the anguish of those with good grades not having a guaranteed place is rather moving. Such students must be more anguished, it seems, than those who are denied a place in a program because they do not meet the cutoff grade.

For more on the convoluted elitist logic behind such statements, see my three part review of Connal Boyle’s book Lotteries for Education.

Filed under: Academia, Applications, Books, Distribution by lot, education, Press, schools | Leave a comment »

Adam Grant endorses randomly selected officials

Posted on August 22, 2023 by Nicholas Gruen

In an excruciating piece in the NYT (unpaywalled version), business guru Adam Grant endorses sortition, but in a risible form in which one randomly selects officials, rather than has a body of randomly selected people. This is all based on a psych experiment that showed that leaders chosen at random do better than those chosen by the group apparently.

Eliminate voting, and candidates with dark triad traits would be less likely than they are now to rise to the top. Of course, there’s also a risk that a lottery would deprive us of the chance to select a leader with distinctive skills. At this point, that’s a risk I’m willing to take. As lucky as America was to have Lincoln at the helm, it’s more important to limit our exposure to bad character than to roll the dice on the hopes of finding the best.

Besides, if Lincoln were alive now, it’s hard to imagine that he’d even put his top hat in the ring.  … A lottery would give a fair shot to people who aren’t tall enough or male enough to win. It would also open the door to people who aren’t connected or wealthy enough to run. Our broken campaign finance system lets the rich and powerful buy their way into races while preventing people without money or influence from getting on the ballot. They’re probably better candidates: Research suggests that on average, people who grow up in low-income families tend to be more effective leaders and less likely to cheat — they’re less prone to narcissism and entitlement.
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Filed under: Academia, Elections, Experiments, Press, Sortition | 15 Comments »

Under sortition, no matter what your cause is, you have no lever to force the government to act

Posted on August 4, 2023 by Yoram Gat

Adam Lee writes a polemic for sortition in OnlySky, a website billing itself as being “dedicated to protecting America’s secular democracy through reality-based journalism, storytelling, and commentary”. Lee covers standard ground – Athens using sortition and rejecting elections, the statistical representativity of allotted bodies, the unrepresentativity of elected bodies, Ireland’s use of sortition. (One thing that I have not heard before is that Ireland will soon have another constitutional referendum for adopting or rejecting a proposal by the allotted constitutional convention, this time for deleting Article 41.2 of the Irish constitution which is concerned with making sure mothers do not neglect “their duties at the home”.)

Lee offers two potential problems with a sortition-based system. The first is the statistical possibility of unrepresentative samples:

What if we choose 100 representatives by lot and get 75 QAnon-believing evangelicals? A legislature that’s far out of the mainstream could wreak tremendous harm or radically reshape society in disastrous ways.

The other is problem is that

even if [the system is] representative, it wouldn’t necessarily be responsive. People mounting a campaign on issues that matter to them is one of the safety valves of democracy. If there’s a problem that the government is ignoring—anything from potholed streets to rampant gun violence to unpopular wars—someone can, and probably will, run for office on a platform of fixing it.

Under sortition, that’s impossible. No matter what your cause is, you have no lever to force the government to act. You have to sit back and hope that someone who shares your views gets chosen on the next go-round.

Lee concludes:

Despite these problems, I can see real potential for sortition—if not as the sole basis for government, then maybe as a component of it. What if, instead of a House and a Senate, we had one democratically elected chamber and one made up of citizens chosen by lot?

Filed under: Athens, Elections, History, Press, Sortition | 29 Comments »

Larry Bartels wants democratic theory to focus on elites

Posted on July 23, 2023 by Yoram Gat

Larry Bartels is an American political scientist. In 2016 he published, together with Christopher Achen, the book Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government, in which the authors argued that voters can’t really tell what’s good for themselves. One possible takeaway from this argument could have been that elections are not a democratic mechanism. A recent interview with Bartels, on the occasion of the publication of a new book of his, indicates that he draws a very different conclusion. Bartels gives up on the people altogether (“they are what they are”) and wants to focus democratic theory on the behavior of elites.

I think what we need is a theory of democracy that has some real understanding of, on one hand, the inevitable power and leeway of political elites and, on the other hand, the goals they should strive to achieve when they exercise that power. Much of our thinking about democracy is very focused on ordinary citizens and what they should or shouldn’t be doing in their role in the process.

I’ve come increasingly to think that that’s a futile exercise. Ordinary people are pretty much what they are. We have a pretty good sense of how they behave. There are a lot of commonalities in their behavior across political systems with different cultures and different institutions. In all those places, regardless of the role of citizens, it’s the political leaders who really call the shots. So what we need is a better understanding of what democratic leadership entails, and how institutions can be made not to ensure, but at least to increase the probability that leaders will govern in enlightened ways, and on behalf of the interests of ordinary citizens.

Bartels ends on an overtly aristocratic note, where, perhaps taking a page from the Chinese, he wants to cultivate better elites. But at the same time he is overtly pessimistic and warns his audience that we should not expect too much from democracy.

[W]hat would a better system of democracy look like? I don’t have the answer to that. I do have the sense that we tend to focus too much on trying to avoid every conceivable threat to democracy and to imagine that if only we got the system and the rules right, that the system would operate happily in perpetuity. I think in reality there’s a huge gray area between democracy and autocracy, and lots of different dimensions in which democracies perform better or worse. Maybe the sense that a lot of people in the U.S. and elsewhere have now that we’re in a period of crisis is a belated recognition that democracy in all times and places is partial and risky and chancy.

[W]hat we really have to focus on is how we can socialize leaders to want the right things, and constrain them to avoid the worst excesses of misuse of power in political systems.

Filed under: Academia, Books, Elections, Press, Theory | 1 Comment »

Where does the legitimacy of citizen conventions come from?

Posted on July 10, 2023 by Yoram Gat

Clément Viktorovitch for France Info, April 2023 [Original in French].

Where does the legitimacy of citizen conventions come from?

In France we have already had two citizen conventions: the first in 2020, dealing with the climate, the second very recently, dealing with end-of-life issues. But where does legitimacy of such institutions come from? Why should we trust 150 allotted citizens?

This question is fundamental: citizen conventions are being established, in France and abroad, as a component of representative democracies. Let’s quickly recall the procedure: draw at random several dozens, or even hundreds of individuals, who then meet regularly, for several months, until they formulate their recommendations on the question with which they are dealing. This is what we would like to clarify. Why should we accept that a handful of citizens, selected by chance, would be vested with the power to influence the decisions on subjects that concern all, without us being able to say a word about it, whereas we already have our elected bodies?
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Filed under: Elections, Press, Sortition | 4 Comments »

A poll finds a plurality of Britons support an allotted House of Lords

Posted on June 29, 2023 by Yoram Gat

A story in the Byline Times.

The Idea to Overhaul the House of Lords that Politicians Aren’t Talking About

YouGov polling suggests strong potential support across the board for a very different chamber to replace the House of Lords

Josiah Mortimer
28 June 2023

There is significant public support for overhauling the House of Lords in a way that is almost never discussed in political debate, according to a newly published poll.

YouGov, commissioned by the Sortition Foundation – a social enterprise which campaigns for greater use of citizens’ assemblies – has shed some new light on public opinion regarding Lords reform.

Typically, the debate is about moving to an elected second chamber – for instance, using a proportional voting system to more fairly reflect how the public vote than under the Commons’ winner-takes-all ‘First Past the Post’ system. Others suggest an ‘indirectly’ elected house, whereby council leaders or regional mayors would fill a new Senate of the Nations and Regions.

The latter idea stems largely out of fears of a directly-elected second chamber simply replicating the House of Commons, or ‘worse’ in their eyes, having more legitimacy and therefore power over MPs.

But the Sortition poll adds another option for the first time: replacing the Lords with a permanent citizens’ assembly made up of ordinary people, reflective of the UK population.

Out of the options presented for the future of the Lords, this was the most popular with 23% of public support. The idea came top among all major party supporters (bar Liberal Democrats, who marginally prefer an elected second chamber).
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Filed under: House of Lords, Opinion polling, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Psychologizing the electoralist phenomenon

Posted on June 24, 2023 by Yoram Gat

Steve Taylor, a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Leeds Beckett University wrote a piece in The Conversation offering his explanation for trouble with the electorlist system. Taylor writes:

The ancient Greeks practised direct democracy. It literally was “people power”. And they took measures specifically to ensure that ruthless, narcissistic people were unable to dominate politics.

Recent political events show that we have a great deal to learn from the Athenians. Arguably, a key problem in modern times is that we aren’t stringent enough about the people we allow to become politicians.

There’s a great deal of research showing that people with negative personality traits, such as narcissism, ruthlessness, amorality or a lack of empathy and conscience, are attracted to high-status roles, including politics.

In a representative democracy, therefore, the people who put themselves forward as representatives include a sizeable proportion of people with disordered personalities – people who crave power because of their malevolent traits.
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Filed under: Academia, Athens, Elections, History, Press, Sortition, Theory | 25 Comments »

Wallonia: A first citizen commission to discuss democracy

Posted on June 16, 2023 by Yoram Gat

An article by Eric Deffet published in Belgian Le Soir on June 14th, 2023.

The Walloon parliament has approved the creation of a first deliberative commission with a mix of allotted citizens and elected officials. Creating a mirror-in-mirror situation, this commission will discuss… the creation of a permanent commission to serve alongside the legislature.

Several years after Brussels, Wallonia is getting ready to launch its own experimentation with a first deliberative commission mixing elected officials and allotted citizens. The legal framework has long existed and the green light for a real life test has been given on Wednesday in the assembly. It responds to demands for citizen participation and transparency following the revelations on the dysfunction of the regional parliament. The participants will be drawn from the National Register: 30 citizens and as many additional fill-ins, who will have to represent the Walloon population.
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Filed under: Applications, Elections, Press, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Peter Jones: The lost art of persuasion

Posted on June 9, 2023 by Yoram Gat

In his column “Ancient and Modern” published in the Spectator Australia, Peter Jones warns his readers against the “Maoist re-education” of the young, generated by the “cancellation” tactics wielded by those “urging gender changes on children who rather feel like it”. In the process, Jones gives his readers a sketch of the Athenian system, including its reliance on sortition, presenting it as a model of good government, where policy was decided based on debate, persuasion and “peaceful agreement”, rather than the outrageous tactics he decries.

Despite mentioning selection by lot, Jones ignores the role of the allotted Council in Athenian politics. When talking about “the all-powerful Assembly” Jones does not consider the question of whether this Assembly in reality provided an arena where isegoria was more than a formality. It also remains unclear whether Jones advocates for the radical change that would be required in order to turn the Western political system into something that is more akin to the Athenian system and providing “more political control over tyrants and oligarchs”. His focus on activists causing an “uproar and silently glueing [themselves] to tarmac” may indicate that leaving those aside we are already living in a system which embodies the ideals of democracy. An off-handed comment about the “rights” of free speech being “rescindable” may also provide a hint regarding Jones’s mindset.

What would ancient Greeks have made of the current protests relating to the oil industry and identity reassignment? Very little indeed.

The Greek invention of democracy (‘people power’) emerged in the late 6th century bc after strong popular demand for more political control over tyrants and oligarchs. The result was a system in which all male citizens over 18 debated and determined all political questions in the regular Assemblies. Most official posts were held, usually for one year, by citizens who presented themselves for selection by lot (voting was considered meritocratic, not democratic), with serious consequences for failure.
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Filed under: Athens, Elections, History, Press, Sortition | 10 Comments »

Fung and Lessig: How AI Could Take Over Elections

Posted on June 8, 2023 by Owen Shaffer

An article in Scientific American by Archon Fung and Lawrence Lessig presents a parallel approach to my research on democracy and artificial intelligence. Citizens’ assemblies are a good way to fix this, by solving emotionally charged issues prior to an election. Even better, nested assemblies could replace much of the election process.

Sen. Josh Hawley asked OpenAI CEO Sam Altman this question in a May 16, 2023, U.S. Senate hearing on artificial intelligence. Altman replied that he was indeed concerned that some people might use language models to manipulate, persuade and engage in one-on-one interactions with voters.

Here’s the scenario Altman might have envisioned/had in mind: Imagine that soon, political technologists develop a machine called Clogger – a political campaign in a black box. Clogger relentlessly pursues just one objective: to maximize the chances that its candidate – the campaign that buys the services of Clogger Inc. – prevails in an election.

As a political scientist and a legal scholar who study the intersection of technology and democracy, we believe that something like Clogger could use automation to dramatically increase the scale and potentially the effectiveness of behavior manipulation and microtargeting techniques that political campaigns have used since the early 2000s. Just as advertisers use your browsing and social media history to individually target commercial and political ads now, Clogger would pay attention to you – and hundreds of millions of other voters – individually.

Filed under: Academia, Elections, Press, Sortition | 9 Comments »

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