Equality by lot

David Grant wrote to draw attention to an online proposition and voting exercise at Slate magazine. Readers are asked to propose pieces of reform for the U.S. constitution and to vote for their favorite proposals.

David wrote a proposal titled “Use sortition, not elections, for a Citizen House“.

Browsing around at random, I found a similar proposal: “Select our representatives by lottery“.

Voting for those proposals is an easy way to highlight the idea of sortition. Registration to the site (free and easy) is needed in order to vote. You can vote more than one proposal.

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Part 2 of a post by Campbell Wallace. Part 1 is here.

There are some matters that were not touched on, or were skimmed over, in my first article.

(Note: I shall continue to refer to the members of legislative bodies as MPs, which you may translate “representatives” or “deputies” or whatever. Similarly for “House”, “Chamber”, and “Parliament”; translate to what is appropriate in your country.)

One House or Two?

This will depend on the circumstances of the country involved. In a very small country, a city-state for instance, it might be adequate to have a single House chosen from all the community with no geographical circumscriptions. In a large country one might have one chamber chosen from the entire population, with a second chamber, chosen by geographic regions like today’s electorates, in order to protect local interests. Although I am not convinced of the absolute necessity of this latter approach, a good case can be made for an Upper House or Senate as a “House of Review” with powers limited to referring legislation back to the lower house with amendments. The fact that this slows legislation down is generally regarded as a good thing; laws should not be rushed.

Number of MPs

Again, this will depend on the circumstances of the country. There is nothing magical about the number 500 which I have suggested; more might be appropriate for a large country. For a small country some smaller number might be chosen, but it would be a false economy to make the number too small. It should be noted, though, that with a new ballot every six months, even a number smaller than ideal should give reasonable fairness; even if the representation is a bit skewed at any one moment, over a period of time things will even out. I think 200 might be a reasonable lower limit for a very small country.
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Found the following blog post recently: Random Politics and the Lords of Chaocracy.

It recommends some system called “Chaocracy,” which is discussed by Pete Carroll in a book called Psybermagick.

Apparently, “Chaocracy” is very similar to Burnheim’s “Demarchy,” although I doubt Burnheim would see his system as having much to do with chaos.

[I found the excerpt below in the Amazon preview of the book, -Yoram]
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Gene Callahan has attended a panel about sortition and, seemingly like most people with any interest in sortition, came up with his own variant – a 3-stage process:

1. Voting – people who get a certain number of votes go to the next stage.
2. Random selection – of the people who made it to this stage, a certain number are selected at random and go to the next stage.
3. Election – the people who reach this stage stand for popular elections.

If the bar in the first stage is set low enough, it may not involve mass politics – one could supposedly get to the second stage simply by getting the votes of one’s friends and acquaintances. This stage would serve to limit the sortition pool to fairly well motivated people who have some spare time on their hands. Whether this is a good filtration mechanism is unclear.

The random selection of the second stage would limit the ability of interested parties to influence the outcome of the elections by carefully selecting the candidates from the vast pool of the entire population. Taken to the extreme, there could be a single person promoted to the third stage, resulting in the elimination of the election round altogether.

Otherwise, mass political effects would rule this last stage and it may be expected that, as usual, superficialities would determine who, among the candidates, would win the elections. The winner would also be able to argue (and believe) that they deserve their position of power due to having won a competition, and such a mindset would potentially have the same corrupting influence that it does in the existing system.

Filed under: Proposals, Sortition | 25 Comments »