Proposals | Equality by lot

Interview with Kristinn Már Ársælsson

Posted on December 1, 2012 by Yoram Gat

Kristinn Már Ársælsson, of the Icelandic government reform group Alda, advocates sortition in the following interview:

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Paradise Lost, Paradise Found: The True Meaning of Democracy, by Arthur D. Robbins (Review)

Posted on November 27, 2012 by keithsutherland

Take me down to the paradise city
Where the grass is green and the girls are pretty
Oh won’t you please take me home
Guns ‘N Roses

This fascinating book is unique amongst radical theories of democracy in that it’s written by a clinical psychologist with a particular interest in psychopathology – as such his primary emphasis is on the (two-way) relationship between political systems and character. Whereas most books focus on the institutional level, Dr. Robbins constantly reminds us that entities like ‘governments’ and ‘nations’ are merely abstractions, by adding (in parentheses) ‘person or persons in power’ every time he uses the word ‘government’. History is ‘nothing but a vast battlefield after the battle is over – a mountain of the corpses of men, women, and children from around the world and across time who have been slaughtered to satisfy the warriors in their quest for blood and glory’ (p.229). Political leaders are subjected to psychoanalytic scrutiny and are (with the exception of a small number of Athenian statesmen) mostly diagnosed in terms of psychopathy – not just the obvious cases (Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot) or even the usual suspects (Alexander of Macedon, Genghis Kahn, Napoleon), but also less extreme examples like George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Theodore Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. Dr. Robbins explains the development of psychopathy in terms of dysfunctional childrearing and early maternal relationships, so history is, in effect, reduced to the psychiatrist’s couch. Strangely enough (given his idolisation of Athenian democracy) this explanation is derived from Greek literature, forcing him to conclude that the dysfunctional relationship between mother and son is limited to the Greek aristocracy (p.303). Given that such psychopathic individuals – ‘a special subset of men’ – are fundamentally different from ‘us’ (p.309), then the goal of democracy is not so much ‘power to the people’ as making sure that the bad guys don’t get hold of the reins. Rotation of office (and/or mass participation in government) is not so that we may all, as Aristotle put it, ‘rule and be ruled in turn’ but simply to reduce the likelihood of handing power to a psychopath.

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Filed under: Books, Elections, Participation, Proposals, Sortition | 4 Comments »

Legal bribery

Posted on November 18, 2012 by Yoram Gat

Politicians making money

As Steven M. Davidoff, a professor at the Michael E. Moritz College of Law at The Ohio State University, reminds his readers, legal bribery is endemic to elections-based systems (admittedly, he probably would not phrase it this way).

Of course, this arrangement in which retired (or on-leave) politicians are awarded large sums of money by private interests is very convenient to both politicians and powerful private interests. This fact makes it unlikely that this phenomenon would be addressed effectively in a system dominated by the interests of those groups, despite the obvious conflicts of interests involved and the despite the equivalence for-all-intents-and-purposes of the activities involved to acts of illegal bribery.

Ideologically, as well, electoralism makes it natural for politicians to claim that their monetary rewards are justified. Just like manufacturers who manage to sell their products to a large number of people and can claim that the popularity of their products is an indication of their high quality, successful politicians can claim that the fact that the were elected is evidence of their high qualifications. It is only fair, then, according to the rules of the free market, that they are rewarded handsomely for providing their skills, once they are not in office, to private employers. Any mechanisms aiming to limit the ability of former politicians to sell their skills would not only be unfair to those politicians but would also be a disincentive for highly skilled individuals to entering politics and using those skills in the public interest. Prof. Davidoff sums up this outlook in the last paragraph of his article:

I can’t begrudge politicians making money after years of relatively low-paid public service.

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Filed under: Elections, Juries, Proposals, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Alda

Posted on November 14, 2012 by Yoram Gat

Alda is an Icelandic organization promoting reform of Iceland’s government system, including the use of sortition in various ways. A member, Kristinn Már Ársælsson, has an article on the openDemocracy site:

After the crash that destroyed Iceland’s economy, Icelanders started to take an interest in new forms of political and economic governance.

[…]

In some respect, Icelanders have made their voices and interests heard in a way people of other countries have not. The protests after the crash got us a new government, the head of the central bank and the financial inspection agency were axed and a process to make a new constitution with the active involvement of the people was initiated.

[…]

These are important achievements. Things that other countries could learn from. But frankly, most of these developments were also controversial in Iceland and overall, they could have been executed more efficiently. For example: the idea that the general public should be actively involved in creating a new constitution is indubitably right. But this could have been better carried out. The selection process didn’t have the legitimacy it needed and random selection should have been used as well. The time given to the process was too short. There was not enough debate all over the country and in the media. Of course, in comparison with the constitution being rewritten by a small group of politicians in closed session, as usually happens, the new process was great. But it could have been better.

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Filed under: Elections, Proposals, Sortition | 20 Comments »

The Random Assignments of Legislators to Constituencies

Posted on October 29, 2012 by peterstone

Scott Wentland (Longwood University) and I are working on a paper in which we explore the idea of randomly assigning legislators to districts when they come up for reelection. The working paper has received some attention at the Washington Post‘s blog: Would Congress work better if legislators were randomly assigned?

Kudos to Scott for his well-thought-out words to the press. We hope to have a revised version ready before the year is out. When it’s done, we’ll let you know.

Filed under: Elections, Press, Proposals | 2 Comments »

Thomas Fleming: Down With Democracy!

Posted on September 5, 2012 by Yoram Gat

Thomas Fleming, editor of the American monthly Chronicles: a Magazine of American Culture, author of several books on ethics (The Morality of Everyday Life) and politics (Socialism, The Politics of Human Nature), contributor to newspapers, magazines, and academic journals on both sides of the Atlantic, and formerly a professor of Greek and Latin at several universities, is again proposing following the Athenian example.

It turns out that the American political system had been in reasonably good shape until Martin Van Buren copied the party system from the UK, and in doing so put the US government on the path of corruption. The final nail in the coffin, Fleming asserts, was the institution of primaries, replacing the corrupt but still useful party leaders as the determinants of party candidates.

Taking a break in dispensing dubious historical synopses, Fleming moves to the present:

If this is democracy, I am ready to try an alternative. Whenever anyone dares to criticize democracy, he is inevitably slapped down with Churchill’s witticism that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried. What neither Churchill nor his millions of quoting admirers have ever explained is what they mean by democracy. Indeed, after decades of studying political theory–and discussing such matters with the learned and the wise–I still have no clue as to what people mean when they use the word, other than their opinion that democracy is decidedly a good thing.

Cheerleaders for democracy, the American way of life, and my sweet old etcetera tell us that the principles of one man/one vote and representative government are the essence of our democratic liberty. Interestingly, the people who are credited with inventing the institution and certainly gave us the word–I mean of course the Greeks–did not regard elections as particularly democratic.

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

Gary Gutting: Should We Cancel the Election?

Posted on August 24, 2012 by Yoram Gat

Gary Gutting is a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and an editor of Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Mark Fredrickson found a post of his on the New York Times online opinion pages. The post is set up as a dialog between the author and Socrates. It is a typical mix of valid points and elitist dogma.

SOCRATES: I’m against it.

GUTTING: I see what you mean. It’s going to be nasty, brutish, and long — not to say immensely expensive — but of course if we want a democracy, there’s no alternative.

S: I disagree. You shouldn’t hold the election at all. You should flip a coin instead.

G: You don’t see any difference between Obama and Romney?

S: Oh, I do. I’m very impressed with Obama, no question. He’s intelligent, courageous, self-controlled and has a good sense of justice. Just the sort of person I had in mind for my philosopher-rulers. But none of that’s going to make a difference to the American voters. The election’s likely to be close, and in any case the outcome will turn on the October unemployment report, the price of gas, an Israeli attack on Iran, who has the most money for attack ads in the last two weeks or some other rationally irrelevant factor that you don’t yet have any hint about.

G: But surely you’d prefer to let Obama make his case to the American people rather than let blind chance decide the outcome?

S: I think letting the American people decide is no different from leaving it to chance. The vast majority of you don’t know enough about the issues or the candidates to make anything like a reliable decision. (It was the same in Athens in my day.)
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Filed under: Athens, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 5 Comments »

Party policies?

Posted on August 23, 2012 by Jacob Richter

Without political programs there are no political movements.

I’m putting this very mildly with this article (though I may not be as mild with my comments), but this is a different spin on the Exclusions post by Yoram Gat. Over there, I suggested that policy proposals be the exclusive domain of expert bodies filled by random selection, with the general body being left to vote up or down on each line of every policy proposal. In other words, I put forward stratified sampling.
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Filed under: Proposals, Sortition | 29 Comments »

Open letter: Sortition as a tool of democracy

Posted on August 3, 2012 by Yoram Gat

Dear Mr. Scialabba,

I am writing to you following your article “Plutocratic vistas: America’s crisis of democracy”. I am a committed sortition supporter and advocate and a member of a group of like-minded people. We have a blog – Equality by Lot (https://equalitybylot.wordpress.com) – devoted to discussing and promoting sortition as a tool of democracy.

I liked your article a great deal. Articles discussing sortition in one way or another appear occasionally in the mainstream press (you can find a running record of such articles on Equality by Lot – the most prominent of these is Joe Klein’s 2010 Time article ”How Can a Democracy Solve Tough Problems?”). I think yours was substantially different.
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Filed under: Elections, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 22 Comments »

Scialabba: Plutocratic vistas: America’s crisis of democracy

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Yoram Gat

George Scialabba writes in the LA Review of Books and in Salon about the history of plutocratic control of elections in the U.S. and offers sortition as an alternative.

Scialabba has the following excerpt from the 1897 book Equality by Edward Bellamy:

“But why did not the people elect officials and representatives of their own class, who would look out for the interests of the masses?” […]
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Filed under: Athens, Elections, Fiction, History, Juries, Press, Proposals, Sortition | Leave a comment »