Mitchell: Democracy has failed! We are being called in like relief firemen, like the Home Guard. Where will it stop?

Posted on April 23, 2015 by Yoram Gat

Victoria Coren Mitchell writes about Ed Miliband’s proposal of having citizens ask the Prime Minister questions every week:

It’s Ed Miliband who is promising that, under his leadership, we would be allowed to go into the House of Commons and ask things. His wheeze is for prime minister’s questions to be extended, every Wednesday, to people who will be allowed to stand up and put whatever questions they like to the leader of the country, on behalf of the rest of us. I love this plan, save only my small confusion that this is what prime minister’s questions ALREADY IS.

I mean, tell me if I’ve missed the concept of our entire democracy; I speak as someone who could only manage grade C in GCSE chemistry (“Draw a picture of a test tube”, “A what?”); but I understood members of parliament to be people who go to Westminster and speak on behalf of the rest of us – specifically, when it comes to prime minister’s questions, in the form of putting questions to the prime minister.

It’s lovely to see politicians come out with clear ideas and policy, but Ed Miliband’s idea here is so massive that it is rather terrifying. Its implication is that our whole system has broken down. If “members of the public” are needed to go in on Wednesdays and ask questions on behalf of the nation, that can only mean members of parliament are not currently doing it. In which case, the entire constituency principle has fallen apart. Democracy has failed! We are being called in like relief firemen, like the Home Guard. Where will it stop? Will I get a phone call saying that, henceforward, I am to be home secretary every other Monday? Will you have to do the budget?

We all know that Westminster’s makeup is not precisely representative: it’s almost entirely white, overwhelmingly male, and filled increasingly with people who have spent their entire lives in politics. But I thought we were still, broadly, trusting them to operate on behalf of their constituencies and ask the questions that we would ourselves.

Filed under: Participation, Press, Proposals | Leave a comment »

Public integrity reform Texas 2015

Posted on April 13, 2015 by constitutionalism

At present Texas vests authority for prosecuting cases of official misconduct in the district attorney of one county, now Travis County, which contains the capital city of Austin, and until recently, the additional work was funded by an appropriation by the State Legislature. This is done because the Texas Constitution vests authority for criminal prosecutions in local county and district attorneys. Neither the State Attorney General nor any state-level official has such authority.

Two controversial prosecutions by the Public Integrity Unit in predominantly Democratic Travis County were clearly political and have led to calls for reform. the first was prosecution of U.S. Rep. Tom Delay, essentially for laundering campaign contributions through the National Republic Party. He was convicted in Travis County but the verdict was reversed on appeal. However, it ended his career in the U.S. Congress.

The second case arose after the Travis County District Attorney was arrested, and later convicted, for DWI, and was video recorded acting very badly, trying to throw her weight around. Governor Rick Perry demanded she resign, or else he would veto the next appropriation for the Unit. She refused, and he did. But Travis County kept the Unit going at reduced strength using County funds. It then hired a special prosecutor who obtained an indictment against Perry for making a felonious threat to a public official in threatening to exercise his veto power. As this is being written, that case is still in the Travis County District Court.

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Filed under: Juries, Proposals, Sortition | Tagged: , , , | 2 Comments »

Sortition and the need for Internal Deliberation

Posted on April 1, 2015 by jgarry20151

What should randomly selected citizens actually do when they are deliberating? Should the deliberation occur in their heads or should it be talk-based? This internal-versus-external deliberation question is core to any discussion of the legitimacy of decisions reached by randomly selected citizens. In the attached paper, presented at a conference in Dublin last Friday, we suggest, to put it bluntly, that talking is bad and imagining is good. We further suggest, and operationalise, distinct ways of facilitating imagined deliberation and present tentative experimental findings as to their relative effectiveness. This draft paper is very much a work in progress but we would welcome any thoughts (including robust disagreement).

Imaginative Randomocracy: A General Model of Citizen Decision Making Applied to Northern Ireland (and the UK)

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How to introduce sortition in policy-making without constitutional change

Posted on February 22, 2015 by John Burnheim

The salient feature of modern democracy is that those who wield legislative and administrative power are chosen by popular vote in open competition between candidates. In practice the candidates generally present themselves as representatives of a party with a distinct ideological emphasis. Some voters who share a particular ideological position will normally support the same party, though they may disagree on many matters of policy. Others, less ideologically committed, are “swinging voters”, taking a more pragmatic view of which party to support. In either case, voters are constrained to chose between packages of personalities, policies and promises. The processes by which the parties arrive at these packages are not very transparent and are widely distrusted. For good reason, as I shall attempt to explain.

The alternative I propose is that the policies we adopt in any specific sphere of public decision-making should be determined by bodies that are statistically representative of those most directly affected by what happens in that sphere. These bodies would have no formal constitutional status. They would depend for their authority on community recognition. We would constrain our elected representatives to activate those decisions in legislation and administration on penalty of not being elected or re-elected.

Instead of being consumers faced with a choice between packages over whose contents we have little influence, we forfeit any attempt to impose an ideological flavour on the whole range of public decisions and concentrate on getting sound decisions in those matters that affect us most. The focus of these bodies would be on specific problem areas. There would be no attempt to prescribe for every possible eventuality. The whole would be treated as an ecosystem that mostly looks after itself, as various interactions adapt to eacn other. It is far too complex and unpredictable to be planned, but its stability and development are constantly being threatened by various human activities that may need to be regulated or eliminated.
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Filed under: Elections, Proposals, Sortition | 21 Comments »

“There is no data to show that uninformed voters make worse decisions than informed voters.”

Posted on February 12, 2015 by Yoram Gat

As Time magazine reports, low voter turnouts worry some people:

In Los Angeles, as in many cities, voter turnout for local elections tends to be pathetic. In 2013, only 16% of registered voters weighed in on an election that would help determine the city council, mayor, school board, and a potential tax increase. In other words, 84% of registered voters didn’t bother to vote. And the number of potential voters is much higher, of course, since plenty of eligible voters aren’t registered.

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Filed under: Academia, Elections, Participation, Proposals | 2 Comments »

Down with Elections! Part 6: conclusion

Posted on February 6, 2015 by campbellwallace

DOWN WITH ELECTIONS!

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6

PART 6

The Mandate

One of the justifications claimed for elections is that they are the only mechanism by which the citizens give a mandate to those who govern them. “We can’t just leave choosing our representatives to chance. When we vote, we give the winning candidate a mandate.”

But who actually gives this mandate? Surely not those who vote against the winners. And not those who don’t vote, for whatever reason. So it must be those who vote for the winning candidates? Suppose you vote in an electorate where your candidate wins by a handsome margin. If you hadn’t voted at all, he would still have won. If you had voted for another candidate, once again, he would still have won. In short, your vote made no difference at all. How then can you say that you have had even the tiniest part in giving that candidate a mandate?

Only if the other voters are so divided between candidates that your vote is the deciding one, can you be said to have made a difference, and then, of course, you are in a sense a “dictator”, as the political scientists put it when speaking of this problem. In saying this, I’ve assumed a winner-takes-all, first past the post system. Is the situation different in a proportional or a preferential system? Not really. Most of the time, your vote makes no difference at all. And the statement that “we can’t leave choosing our representatives to chance” – as though chance plays no part in elections – is just laughable.

Overheard in a pub in Godelpus:

(Yes, the names have been changed to protect the guilty.)

Two men sat down at the next table.

“I didn’t catch what you were saying about a mandate” said one.

His friend took a deep swig of beer before replying. “It brings back painful memories”, he said, slowly. “I don’t know if you remember when Harry Bolt got elected?”

“That was that very close election, wasn’t it?”
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Filed under: Elections, Proposals, Sortition | 27 Comments »

New Democratic Seeds / Gentils Virus Manifesto

Posted on January 26, 2015 by Ahmed R. Teleb

The Chouardists are at it, this time with a new site (in five languages) calling for an allotted constitutional assembly. They explain their project in six “chapters” that you can see along with a visitor count on the left margin. Here is the main page followed by the first part. They have also included what appears to be an endless number of videos of Chouard and some other resources.

It is the explicit proposal which should rally the millions of citizens whose political impotency is programmed in the constitution.

Because it is not the role of the people in power to write the rules of their own power

“We want a democratic Constitutional Assembly, therefore randomly drawn.”

By reading the 6 chapters of this website, you will understand that if you want to change anything in the mechanisms of our current society, you will have to make this message your one and only claim: from its application the rest will follow. To understand the strength of this message, please take a few minutes to read through the six chapters of the website, they are very short.
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Filed under: Action, Applications, Initiatives, Proposals, Sortition | Tagged: , , , | 12 Comments »

Down with Elections! Part 2

Posted on January 25, 2015 by campbellwallace

DOWN WITH ELECTIONS!

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6

PART 2

Direct Democracy

One possible alternative to representative democracy is “direct democracy”. In this, every citizen votes on every decision. This happens in clubs and associations of course, where it works quite well. When members vote on which candidates should fill an office (Honorary President, Secretary etc), they generally know the candidates personally, and so are well able to judge their capabilities, and in any case the responsibilities and powers mandated are very limited, both in scope and in time (annual elections are the rule). Moreover, club members very often vote directly on practical issues, and these are almost always on matters well understood by the members. Further, they are free to propose amendments, and so when the matter comes to the vote, they are voting on the question which they want to decide, and not on some ambiguous question which a party in power can interpret to suit itself. They are also free to put matters on the agenda, and to call for a vote of no-confidence in office-bearers.

Direct democracy also occurs occasionally in representative democracy in the form of a referendum, where its use is often much more dubious. A lot depends on the way in which the choice is framed: a party in power may put it in such a way as to split the opposition. The matter may be technical; often the full ramifications of the choice are not made clear to the public; they cannot propose amendments, or discuss it beforehand on an equal basis, because debate is largely controlled by the media or the government. The referendum in France on the proposed European Constitution in 2007 exemplified these problems: the public was presented with a long and incomprehensible (at least to non-specialists) document whose implications were not at all clear. An irritated public voted against it (mostly in order to spite President Chirac), and in doing so pointed out another defect of referenda: the voters’ verdict is not necessarily given on the question that is officially posed.

Proponents of direct democracy would extend the principle to every decision made by the community, and some of them suggest that only measures passed unanimously should be implemented. To the obvious objection that this is impractical in a large modern state of tens or hundreds of millions, the true believers reply that the state should be abolished, to be replaced by small autonomous communities of a few thousand.
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Filed under: Proposals, Sortition | 78 Comments »

Chwalisz: Are we electoral fundamentalists?

Posted on January 10, 2015 by Yoram Gat

Claudia Chwalisz writes in 3am magazine:

Representative democracy today seems to be at an impasse. Low voter turnout, falling party membership, plummeting trust in politicians, the fierce rise of populist parties. These trends, together with political fragmentation, disengagement among young generations, and backlash against the political elite who have failed to govern responsibly, highlight democracy’s dilemma. Though much has been written about this democratic crisis, less has been proposed in terms of solutions. Belgian historian David Van Reybrouck’s recent book, Contre les élections [Against Elections], attempts to fill this gap of ideas. Although it has not yet been translated into English, as is obvious from what I discuss below, his analyses are critically important in the current climate.

Chwalisz’s long article mostly revolves around Van Reybrouk’s book, but also mentions Gilens and Page. She seems to some extent skeptical of Van Reybrouck’s progressivist outlook and ends thusly:

[T]he dilemma of how to get elected elites to relinquish their grip on the seats of power remains unresolved. Perhaps the starting point is to question ourselves: are we, in fact, electoral fundamentalists?

Filed under: Athens, Books, History, Juries, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 4 Comments »

“A people’s grand jury” – a possible model for the application of sortition

Posted on January 9, 2015 by Yoram Gat

Glen Ford writes in Black Agenda Report:

A Black People’s Grand Jury in St. Louis, Missouri, this weekend delivered a “true bill of indictment” for first degree murder against former Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in the death of Black teenager Michael Brown. Black people “can and must take matters into our own hands,” said Omali Yeshitela, one of four prosecutors that presented evidence[.]

The 12 jurors, all of them from greater St. Louis, spent January 3rd and 4th reviewing some of the same evidence presented by county prosecutor Bob McCulloch to the mostly white grand jury that failed to indict Wilson, in November.

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Filed under: Applications, Juries, Proposals | 16 Comments »

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