Proposals | Equality by lot

Demiocracy, Chapter 19: Advantages of this army-of-Davids (multiple-Demi-legislature) arrangement

Posted on April 23, 2024 by Roger Knights

1. There would be less susceptibility to emotional proposals too motivated by fear or hope. Proxy electorates, which are specialized (expert on some topic), seasoned (from years of semi-monthly oversight sessions), and “select” (sifted upward through multiple ballotteries) at the state and national levels, would have more information, and would have acquired greater insight through discussion and debate. So they would more realistically assess what is possible (including adventurous proposals that just might work but affront conventional wisdom) and be less likely to divert down false trails and garden paths, and to ignore possible second-order effects. Their lesser credulity would insulate them from panics and propaganda. Their greater experience would simultaneously deliver aspiring politicians from the temptation to take advantage of their immaturity—of the virtual standing invitation that big-electorate, big-arena voters present to be played for Suckers. This inbuilt temptation of mass susceptibility eternally fuels the demonic dynamic—the co-dependent tragedy and farce—of DeMockery. (Its hidden “root,” to repeat, is its seemingly righteous, too-“wide,” electorate.)

2. Demiocracy’s decentralization would make a putsch more difficult, especially if it includes decentralization of the executive branch. (I.e., substantial independence of the executive departments from the chief executive, via PE-election of their heads.) Thus making tyranny less likely, a big concern of the Founders. Also insulating the government from a potty (barmy) POTUS. (“There is, of course, no such thing as a harmlessly mad emperor.” —Gore Vidal, Julian, Ch. 19.)

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Filed under: Books, Elections, History, Participation, Proposals, Sortition | Leave a comment »

Trends in Theorizing Sortition

Posted on April 17, 2024 by peterstone

Delighted to see my new review essay (co-authored with Audrey Plan, one of our department’s former Ph.D. students) appear in print. The essay deals with recent theoretical work on sortition. You can check it out here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00208345241247492.

I should add that Yanina Welp, a friend of mine, is publishing shortly a similar paper in the same journal focused more on the empirical literature on sortition. Not sure when that will appear.

Filed under: Academia, Deliberation, Elections, Proposals, Sortition, Theory | Leave a comment »

Sortition, “a beacon for billions”

Posted on April 10, 2024 by Yoram Gat

A few days ago, the Portland Press Herald published a bold, “completely original” plan for city government, about which “political philosophers will be writing for millennia”. Sortition is an important part of this plan.

First, competitive elections will be abolished. No more “vote for me.” No more sloganeering. No more name recognition. Instead of popularity contests, members of every representative office in our city will be elected by sortition, or through a lottery system, with officials chosen at random for a term of one year. We will have 66 districts, each containing roughly 1,000 people. This will make our city a true government of the people. The mechanics of election-by-sortition are simple: An algorithm will randomly select a name from the city’s draft rolls.

Next, we are proposing a tricameral system of government: a 66-person Popular Assembly of Legislative Supremacy (“PALS”), a House of Landlords and Yeomanry (“HOLY”) and a three-person Supreme High-most Unlimited Council of Knowledge Systems (“SHUCKS Troika”). Our nine-person City Council will be gone. So will be our city manager. All three new branches have key roles, but the PALS shall be our chief lawmaking and deliberative body.

Sortition shall select the members of the 66-person PALS branch. The idea is simple: It could be you. PALS will be a raucous parliament made up of average citizens, all chosen at random.

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

Demiocracy, Chapter 17: Initial adoption & procedural details

Posted on March 23, 2024 by Roger Knights

Experiments in oversight-only IVEs (i.e., IVEs that don’t elect legislators) of governmental bodies could start small, at the local level, and work upward, to the county, state, and national levels, if justified by prior success.

Then the power of electing a portion of the legislators under their supervision could be phased in, as experience warrants, and as voters approve, and IVEs would become PEs (Proxy Electorates).

Voters might be glad to delegate the election of certain low-level officeholders, like dogcatchers, sewer commissioners, and comptrollers to Proxy Electorates. Voters know little of their qualifications and characters—and don’t want to know. Let George Do It is their unspoken attitude.

New PE members would be given a crash course on their assigned topic, and on the rules and customs of being a Proxy Elector.

PEs would gather, usually online, at regular intervals (more frequently at high levels) to hear their officeholders—and their critics—speak, and to interrogate them. They would not gather only at election time.

In the intervals between these gatherings, Proxies would have a private cyberspace forum and a Zoom site in which they could converse among themselves about what had occurred at those gatherings.

A Secretariat’s personnel would preside at meetings, take minutes, schedule speakers, maintain a library, do background checks on candidates, provide orientation sessions for newcomers, etc.

Training would include inside-look “documentaries” of the deliberations of good-outcome PEs of the past, to serve as models for how to behave. There should also be documentaries about bad-outcome PEs, as object-lessons in what not to do.

The control of important political knowledge by leaders constitutes, of course, a very basic element in perpetuating power politics. —Robert J. Pranger, The Eclipse of Citizenship, 1968, p. 46.

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Filed under: Books, Elections, Proposals | 8 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: Student government | 8 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.
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Filed under: Opinion polling, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 6 Comments »

Kalypso Nicolaidis proposes a permanent EU citizen assembly

Posted on March 7, 2024 by Yoram Gat

CEPS is “a think tank and forum for debate on EU affairs”, founded in Brussels in 1983. CEPS has a project it calls Ideas Lab whose aim is “to provide a high-level intellectual forum for exchanges concerning the wide range of current and pressing issues faced by the EU”. In this forum, Kalypso Nicolaidis, chair of global Affairs at the New Florence School of transnational governance at the European University Institute in Florence, is proposing to set up a permanent allotted EU citizen assembly.

Nicolaidis writes:

Why Citizens’ Panels haven’t quite cut it…

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Demiocracy, Chapters 6 & 7: Demiocratic Representation of the Voiceless, by Means of a Novel “Bal-lottery” Technique

Posted on January 31, 2024 by Roger Knights

There are certain segments of the population (specified in the next chapter) who are often poorly treated, but who can’t complain about it to their higher-ups—or, really, to anyone—because they can’t speak out as a group, lacking representatives.

These groups, by their nature, are not in a position to allow election campaigns. They would either not be feasible, or would be too disruptive.

Nor would it be feasible for representatives to be selected completely by chance, because: 1) They would be treated dismissively, as mere nobodies, by the officials above them; and 2) They would not be as enthusiastic about, or effective at, their duties as certain others in their group—persons who would tend to be selected by a bal-lottery.

These groups should therefore employ the novel (AFAIK), election-free bal-lottery technique described in Item 2 above to select representatives.

I urge sympathizers of such underdogs to promote this means of representation. Equally, I urge “uber-dogs” to heed it, as it is in their interest to be wise in time.

Here’s a simplified example. Let’s say that some group has 1000 members, and that the agreed-upon ballot-to-lot ratio is 50:50. (For voiceless groups the ratio would be 100:0.) INTO the bal-lottery box might therefore go 10 ballots BY each member, nominating other members, and 10 lots FOR each member, automatically.

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Filed under: Elections, Proposals, Sortition | Leave a comment »

Clay Shentrup: Election by Jury

Posted on January 21, 2024 by Yoram Gat

Clay Shentrup wrote to announce the Election by Jury website he created.

If you were accused of a crime, who would you want deciding your fate?

A panel of randomly selected jurors, all of whom have spent multiple weeks sitting in a courtroom, listening to all the relevant facts and arguments put forward by both sides

A popular vote open to hundreds of thousands of people in your county, the vast majority of whom only know a few sound bites about the case, which they heard from a biased and one-sided source

The premise behind “Election by Jury” is simple: we believe that our government, just like the criminal justice system, will function better if our representatives are elected after weeks of deliberation by a panel of randomly selected jurors. These jurors would hear from the candidates and their expert-witnesses, deliberate among themselves, and cast their votes in secret.

Here are a few of the most compelling benefits of our proposal:

An “electorate” that is better informed

Better ways of combating misinformation

Breaking away from echo-chambers

Filed under: Elections, Proposals, Sortition | 10 Comments »

Demiocracy, Chapter 3: What’s the Solution? Why

Posted on January 15, 2024 by Roger Knights

By narrowing each electorate’s topical and electoral scope, and by simultaneously and necessarily multiplying the number of electorates, we enable every issue and every candidate to be thoroughly and continuously evaluated by everyday citizens. In other words, we replace P-dominated DeMockery with demos-dominated democracy.

In addition, by restricting each legislator’s topical domain, we enable ordinary citizens, who are not typically fluent in multiple political domains (unlike members of the current “political class”), to become viable political candidates, also vastly expanding the role of the demos.

Democracy should be rule by an informed public opinion acting, after deliberation, in the public interest. But, in a mass-electorate DeMockery, the average voter will NOT be adequately informed, and will engage in little deliberation—resulting in misgovernment.

The problem with letting everybody vote too is that people are really easily manipulated and they’re really undereducated. They don’t have any incentive to pay attention to the real issues, what’s at stake and what are the consequences of each vote. They just vote with whatever feels good. And they’re busy, and they’re tired … and they don’t have the time, and they don’t have the incentive to be enlightened. They don’t have the incentive to have an objective, enlightened approach to how you handle the future of our society. —“Joe Rogan’s harsh truth about American voters” —Podcast, viewed November 6, 2023.