Robert Dahl was a prominent political scientist and an early advocate of using sortition in government. He proposed advisory allotted bodies in his 1970 book After the Revolution and made a similar proposal (“mini-populi”) in his 1989 book Democracy and Its Critics.
Democracy and Its Critics presents, among other ideas, a careful and coherent critique of the power of “guardian” bodies like the supreme court. In general, Dahl was noted for being unusually clear in his argumentation in a field whose main occupation is a struggle to explain the advantages of a government system in terms of an ideology which is in plain conflict with it. As an illustration, here is a striking passage from Dahl’s A Preface to Democratic Theory (1956):
The absence of specific meaning for terms like “majority tyranny” and “faction” coupled with the central importance of these concepts in the Madisonian style of thinking has led to a rather tortuous political theory that is explicable genetically rather than logically. Continue reading →
A recent segment on the BBC radio show Analysis is titled “The Philosophy of Russell Brand”. The audience is warned ahead of time to hold on to their hats as “Jeremy Cliffe enters a world without rules, without government, but with plenty of facial hair”. Following this introduction, and the expected sound bites from the Brand-Paxman interview, the segment talks about the attention Brand received, the Occupy/Indignados protest movement and features interviews with Paolo Gerbaudo, David Graeber, Michael Hardt, Peter Turchin, Daniel Pinchbeck, and a few friends of Cliffe. Continue reading →
As was mentioned here before, some time ago Prof. Alexander Guerrero and his ideas about the use of sortition in government were the subject of an article in The Boston Globe.
I thank Prof. Guerrero for alerting me to a recently published essay of his about sortition in the online magazine Aeon. The essay presents Guerrero’s proposal, but starts with an interesting analysis of the failure of elections and follows the proposal with an analysis of the promise of sortition.
The lottocracy Elections are flawed and can’t be redeemed – it’s time to start choosing our representatives by lottery
[…]
The celebrity comic Russell Brand is gesticulating wildly, urgently, in a hotel room, under the bright lights of a television interview. ‘Stop voting, stop pretending, wake up. Be in reality now. Why vote? We know it’s not going to make any difference. We know that already.’ He is responding to his interviewer, Jeremy Paxman, who is taking him to task for never having voted.
We are brought up to think that voting is important, that it is a necessary condition of being a politically serious person, that we can’t complain about politics if we don’t vote. This last principle has echoes of the more reasonable parental admonition, said of lima beans or cauliflower: don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. But that principle is based on sound epistemological grounds: you might, for all you know, like cauliflower or lima beans. The voting thing is, as Brand argues, stupid. There are ways of participating in public affairs other than voting. For example, one can become a celebrity and call for revolution in a television interview.
The Youth Parliament of Belgium is a yearly conference of French-speaking youth in Belgium which is organized by the Parliament of the French Community in Belgium. Every year the Youth Parliament discusses four decrees that are proposed by four “ministers”. The Parliament decides whether to adopt or reject each of the decrees.
The 2013 Youth Parliament adopted a decree titled “Décret visant à réformer l’exercice du pouvoir des citoyens, de leurs assemblées et de leur gouvernement” (“Decree to reform the exercise of power of citizens, their assemblies and their government”), which, if I understand correctly, was authored by Pierre-Yves Ryckaert, a political activist.
The decree opens so (automated translation with my touch-ups):
After more than two hundred years of the representative parliamentary system, one thing is clear: this system which is supposed to derive its legitimacy from the consent of voters appears to create a structural and insidious monopolization of power by a class of professional politicians. The elite politician created by elections is bound to be limited to short-term policies, in a context where they are no longer sufficient to cope with the challenges of tomorrow. This led some citizens and elected officials to question the foundations of this system. Continue reading →
Commenter ee points to a couple of videos in which Brandon Joyce makes a presentation about sortition on Channel 9 WPDN Public Distribution Network in Kensington, Philadelphia, PA.
Joyce got to the idea of sortition by reading Rancière. He starts out by pointing out the aristocratic or oligarchical nature of elections. He then puts out up a list of advantages of sortition over elections:
Dispenses with elections, campaigns, campaign finance
Partially free us from “particratic” polarization, ideologies, loyalties
Results in a far more accurate representation of “We, the People.” (“Get politicians out of politics!”)
Engages and empowers populace
Mitigates the corruption of long-entrenched power an d political class (for a time, at least)
Posted on December 8, 2013 by Common Lot Sortitionist
Although the following is not an example of sortitionally selected participants, it does highlight the ‘contagion effect’ of a focused, widely-reported deliberation by diverse and contending political positions.
I suppose a comparison could be made to Fishkin’s Deliberative Democracy events. This one was in Canada in 1991.
Excerpting from a message from Tom Atlee of the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation:
I’d like to highlight what I think of as the most innovative example of that “contagion effect…beyond direct participants” — the 1991 Maclean’s “The People’s Verdict” initiative.
Maclean’s is Canada’s big glossy newsweekly. Key features of their initiative and July 1, 1991 issue were:
a. a citizen deliberative group chosen to embody the diversity – specific differences – found in the conflicted Canadian population;
b. powerful group process and facilitation (by Roger Fisher of GETTING TO YES fame)(even though the group ultimately transcended the process for their key interpersonal breakthrough);
c. an article early in their multi-article coverage that featured half-page bios (with pictures) of each of the dozen participants, which allowed readers to learn which participants they identified with and which ones they initially viewed as adversaries; Continue reading →
A 1976 book named Un-vote for a new America by Ted Becker, Paul Szep and Dwight Ritter* offers, among other ideas for political reform, the idea of using sortition for selecting half the members of the U.S. Congress:
[I]f the reader makes even the most superficial survey of the world’s “democracies” particularly zeoring in on the national legislatures, it will be obvious that they are all dominated by elites, business or political. All of them claim to represent the people; obviously they don’t. They merely represent the elites’ view of what is in the “public interest” and we are told, correspondingly, that what they decide to be the public interest is, ipso facto, the public interest. Continue reading →
This past week, Oliver Dowlen organized a very good workshop in London on “Sortition and the Consolidation of Democracy.” In addition to the academic speakers, we heard a talk from a representative from a Greek civic organization named Politeia 2.0. The group is working with James Fishkin and Stanford’s Center for Deliberative Democracy to use randomly selected deliberative bodies. They want to use these groups to develop proposals to reform the Greek constitution. They have a website at http://www.polites2.org/en/.
Posted on October 14, 2013 by Common Lot Sortitionist
[This item was pointed out by other Kleroterians as well.]
The first three minutes of this video commentary in “Business Day” of The Sydney Morning Herald is a ‘modest proposal’ to choose the Senate as juries are chosen — but excluding members of political parties, or their families, from the lot.
The original concept of the Senate to be the states’ house of review has long since been betrayed. While the major parties in less divisive times might have done some horse trading, the reviewing will now be left to those much-maligned odds and sods with the balance of power.
So to bring balance to the odds and sods, it would make sense to have many more of them and no political parties. Yes folks, it’s time to introduce Senate duty – conscription to the upper house. Continue reading →
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Equality by lot 
Senate by Lot in Australia?
[This item was pointed out by other Kleroterians as well.]
The first three minutes of this video commentary in “Business Day” of The Sydney Morning Herald is a ‘modest proposal’ to choose the Senate as juries are chosen — but excluding members of political parties, or their families, from the lot.
Filed under: Elections, House of Lords, Juries, Press, Proposals, Sortition | Tagged: allotment, legislature, media_commentary, random_selection, selection by lot, Senate, sortition, upper_chamber, voteless_democracy | 4 Comments »