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 →
Ad van der Ven wrote to draw attention to David Van Reybrouck’s argument in favor of sortition. Van Reybrouck is a prize winning Flemish Belgian author writing historical fiction, literary non-fiction, novels, poetry, plays and academic texts.
His latest book is Tegen verkiezingen (Against elections) (machine translation with my touch-ups):
Our representative democracy is increasingly in the doldrums. Its legitimacy is affected: fewer and fewer people vote, voters are less predictable in their choice, and the membership of political parties is decreasing dramatically. It is the efficiency of less democracy: since long term government is problematic, politicians increasingly align their policies to the next election. It all leads to what is called by David Van Reybrouck democratic fatigue. But how do tackle it? Papering over the cracks – that is what is happening now mainly. There are some renovation trends here and there. Reybrouck fears that this kind of marginal solutions is no longer sufficient and that the existing system will result in more and more crises. Continue reading →
Like many other authors discussing sortition (Dahl, Leib, Zakaras, Fishkin, and others), Stone and Dowlen choose, then, to drastically downgrade sortition from a tool of radical democratic reform (as presented by C&P, or earlier by C.L.R. James) to an add-on to the electoral system. Such a retreat is certainly not warranted by the theoretical considerations discussed in the first part of the article. The claim that sortition can be expected to produce good government can be put on a much more solid theoretical foundation than the faulty intuitive argument provides. An alternative argument works by employing the properties of sampling in order to extend self-representation of the decision-making group into representation of the entire population. It goes as follows:
A small group of people, under reasonably favorable conditions, is able to represent its own interests. This claim is not directly associated with sortition, but is rather a claim about the political dynamics of small groups of people in general. The claim is that when a small group of people, meeting on an a-priori egalitarian basis, has the opportunity to make collective decisions that would promote the interests of the members as they perceive them, then it will tend to do so. This is a situation which most people would be familiar with – group decision making in the family, within a group of friends or with colleagues. “A small group” is taken to be a group in which all-to-all communication is possible. The upper size limit of such a group would depend on the circumstances, but even under the most favorable circumstances a few hundred people seems like the most that would fit the description.
Policy that promotes the interests of a small group of people which are selected as a sample of a larger group will tend to promote the interests of the larger group as well. Since the interests of a group selected as a sample of a larger group are typical of those of the entire group, policy that promotes the interests of the sample would tend to promote the interests of the group. In particular, if a certain policy promotes the interests of a majority of the members of the sample then that policy is likely to promote the interests of a majority in the population. There would be some obvious exceptions to this extension from sample to population. Policy that applies directly to the members of the sample in their role as members – their salaries for example – affects interests for which the sample members are very atypical. In a government by sortition such exceptions would have to be treated separately.
I’ve recently published two articles that might prove of interest. First, I wrote a review essay dealing with the Imprint Academic series on Sortition and Public Policy. It’s just appeared in the latest issue of Redescriptions: Yearbook of Political Thought, Conceptual History and Feminist Theory (volume 16, 2012/2013). It’s been in the pipeline for a while, and so regrettably does not cover the latest offerings in the series (such as Conall Boyle’s interesting book on educational lotteries). The issue is at https://jyx.jyu.fi/dspace/handle/123456789/42047
Second, Comparative Education Review just published a symposium on “Fair Access to Higher Education: A Comparative Perspective” (volume 57, no. 3, August 2013). It contains a paper of mine entitled “Access to Higher Education by the Luck of the Draw.” The paper deals with university admissions in general and the Irish case in particular. It’s available on JSTOR at http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/669235, but only if your library/university subscribes.
Sorry to be incommunicado. I’ve been away for much of the summer, and have a very busy term ahead of me, but I hope to rejoin the conversation soon.
“Democracy in America has failed. The Framers would not have been surprised.
The central idea of the American Experiment is that our several states have united to form a republic of strictly limited federal power, not a democracy. Without understanding this kernel idea, that the founders repudiated democracy and consciously labored to restrain it, there simply no possibility of understanding the meaning of America.
The specific conditional campaign that will bridle democracy, that will restore federalism in Madison’s sense, is one that mobilizes support for the passage of the Twenty-Eighth Amendment (below) to randomize the election of Congressmen and Senators, and indirectly, the President of the United States.”
Jeffrey Edward Green’s book of the above title (OUP, 2010) is a tightly-argued, highly-readable and courageous attempt to defend the indefensible – a normative theory of passive spectator democracy. The book swims against the current of democratic theory by claiming that all other normative theories (including the deliberative and participatory variants) are doomed and misguided attempts to establish democracy as the voice of the people (vox populi, vox dei). Green is agnostic as to whether this was possible in classical Athens, but it’s entirely impossible in large modern states. However as well as being impossible, it’s undesirable, as most citizens have no settled political views; besides which, electoral democracy, as Dahl famously put it, establishes rule by minorities. So much for the general will.
Green’s alternative is the ‘ocular’ tradition whereby the people don’t speak, they hold a watching brief over the political elite. The theory has its origins in the writings of Max Weber and was developed (and distorted) by Carl Schmidt and Joseph Schumpeter. Unlike with Bernard Manin’s ‘audience democracy’, Green makes no attempt to argue that the current ‘metamorphosis’ of representative government maintains any of the putative virtues of the classical theory of democracy (partial autonomy of representatives, trial by discussion etc), it is simply a way of identifying political charisma (a Weberian sociological term). Green denies that elections are an indirect way for citizens to influence public policy and agrees with Schumpeter that they are simply a way of selecting political leaders, although it is hard to understand Winston Churchill’s 1945 defeat by the decidedly uncharismatic Clement Attlee in any way other than the aggregation of policy preferences. Continue reading →
An automatic translation of the introduction of the proposal (with my touch-ups) is as follows:
A motion for a resolution on the revision of the electoral system and the establishment of the draw members of the Federal Parliament of the Kingdom of Belgium
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Introduction
The Kingdom of Belgium has gone through its history, a plurality of policies by landscapes from the bipartisan confrontation (1830-1893) to extreme multiparty (1965-present), all with a common point, the election. Belgium claims, like all Western countries which have adopted the same system, to be a representative democracy. Representative democracy is a “system in which elected representatives by the people develop and pass legislation.” This system, highly controversial for many years, does not give the people the opportunity to express itself and to pass laws (as in a direct democracy), but has “the great disadvantage of vesting the decision making power, not in the people themselves as the idea of democracy suggests, but in representatives elected by the people and governments designated indirectly, not to mention even more indirect selection of public agencies and other institutions.” Continue reading →
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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 »