A semi-direct model for a more participative democracy

Posted on April 2, 2011 by Yoram Gat

Armando Vieira offers a reform program with some of the high-tech participative characteristics offered by Matteo Martini:

Abstract

Here I propose a new political system that will become possible in a society where all its citizens will be connected to the Internet. Its main philosophy is inspired in the free market mechanism, and I will call it semi-direct democracy. The main points of this model are: i) the substitution of political parties by a set of non-profit political organisations specialized to deal with most aspects of the executive and the legislative power; and ii) the introduction of a constant electronic scrutiny by the citizens of the activities of these organisations. The emergence of this system will be enhanced by the increasing need for more representativity and transparency in public affairs, on one hand, and the increasing incapacity of the actual political system to deal with an increasingly complex society, on the other.

Keywords

Semi-direct democracy, e-government, e-democracy.
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Filed under: Participation, Proposals | 14 Comments »

I-Democracy

Posted on March 30, 2011 by Yoram Gat

In the following post Matteo Martini presents a proposal for government reform. Martini’s criticisms of the electoral system are similar to those made by sortition advocates, but his proposed remedy is different.

A system-nation can be defined as “democratic” if the actions taken within such system-nation are according to the will of the people who are part of such system.

A major problem with current governments, including the so-called “democratic” ones, is that the actions of the government of a nation are not according to the will of the majority of the population of that nation: some of the laws that most of the people would like to see brought forward are not even discussed, while the government passes laws and does things that are not according to the will of the majority of the electorate.
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Filed under: Elections, Participation, Proposals | 49 Comments »

Random Selection as an Obligation of Citizenship

Posted on February 17, 2011 by Yoram Gat

William K. Dustin introduces his book and website:

I am the author of a book entitled Toward an Ethic of Citizenship: Creating a Culture of Democracy for the 21st Century which was published in 1999. After completing the book, I created a website, www.ethicofcitizenship.com, to promote the book and the idea of random selection. Until very recently I was unaware of any other websites advocating the same idea. As a result of an email I received on a totally different topic, I discovered The Common Lot website which then led me to the Equality by Lot site.

The idea for the book arose out of a little known political scandal, known as “phonegate”, that occurred in Minnesota in the early 1990’s in which a number of legislators were found to have been abusing their phone privileges. The hubris of the legislature in response to the discovery of this abuse not only made me rather angry, but, since I had been called for jury duty the year before, gave me the idea that service in the legislature ought to be a duty of citizenship like jury duty. Continue reading →

Filed under: Proposals, Sortition | 14 Comments »

Inshallah

Posted on February 15, 2011 by keithsutherland

Our ongoing debate on Egypt got me thinking about the connection (or lack of it) between sortition and religion. Fustel de Coulanges’ 1864 account, that lot was the revelation of divine will, was discredited by Headlam in 1891 and nobody has sought to revive it. Similarly, as Conall Boyle points out in his edition of Gataker, lotteries were only acceptable in the Judaeo-Christian tradition in so far as they didn’t involve claims about divine revelation.

On the other hand Oliver Dowlen argues that the disappearance of lot may well be connected with religious factors, as sortition appears to have been a victim of the Reformation:

There are many reasons why the process of selecting nominators by lot might have been lost in the transition from Venice to the New World. . . The drawing of the lottery was very much a public process, witnessed by the whole community or reggimento. To the puritan settlers this could have seemed a very foreign, bizarre public ritual which smacked of superstition – even Catholicism. The secret ballot, on the other hand, conformed to the Protestant ideal that the private individual should be alone in his judgement and answerable only to God. (Dowlen, Political Potential of Sortition, p.163)

The question that I’m leading up to – and it’s no more than that – is would sortition-based politics be more acceptable to Muslim sensibilities than (Western) electoral politics, and might this possibly account for the failure of electoral democracy in the Arab world?

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Filed under: Distribution by lot, History, Proposals, Sortition | 21 Comments »

For Egypt, Are Elections the Way Forward?

Posted on February 14, 2011 by Yoram Gat

Sa’ada Abu Bakr wrote the following essay.

The people of Egypt are standing at an historic crossroad. But to hear other people tell it, Egyptians are travelling down the highway to democracy. They’ve been stalled for decades but now their engines are revving and they are all but on their way to western style democracy. First stop: free and fair elections.

To all those who died and sacrificed, it would be a disservice to commence this trip without fully examining the destination and any and all alternatives. Required reading before you embark on this journey is Animal Farm by George Orwell. Moral: If new people are put into any version of the same system, no matter how reformed, you will eventually end up with the same results. The problems may be to a lesser degree, more benign, but you will not have the freedom for which people died.

As an American who dabbled in local politics, consider this my postcard from Destination: Democracy. I don’t wish you were here. Sure, I have a vote; I have a voice, but it is not heard. If you have a voice which you can’t use, are you in a worse position than one who can use their voice, unheard? What is the difference?

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Filed under: Proposals, Sortition | 19 Comments »

The Party’s Over: Blueprint for a Very English Revolution

Posted on February 3, 2011 by keithsutherland

Greg requested an outline of my structural proposals for the introduction of sortition, so here goes. It’s a talk I gave recently to the University of Brighton Philosophy Society. The focus is the UK parliament, but the principles are more general.

It’s become a commonplace that our political arrangements are in bad shape. Party leaders know we’ve twigged that there is no connection between manifesto commitments and actual policies, yet for some reason we don’t call their bluff – those of us who still turn out to vote give politicians the benefit of the doubt by maintaining that polite fiction called democracy. Party membership has declined catastrophically since the middle of the last century – parties now do little more than reflect what focus groups say we want, rather than continuing to stand for a particular manner of thinking, or specific socio-economic interests. So what is the point of the party?

The argument that I want to put forward this evening is that tinkering around with the electoral system by introducing AV or proportional representation is just re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. What is needed is clear thinking, we need to bring to bear the tools of the philosopher via:

  • A clear analysis of the relevant concepts and categories
  • A thorough understanding of the history of political thought

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Filed under: Distribution by lot, Elections, Initiatives, Proposals | 51 Comments »

The Enfranchisement Lottery – a commentary

Posted on December 18, 2010 by keithsutherland

I assume that everyone has by now read Claudio López-Guerra’s excellent paper. It was circulated on Conall Boyle’s email list and is available from the author: claudio.lopezguerra@cide.edu. The paper compares the enfranchisement lottery with universal suffrage and concludes that, although the former is clearly an improvement from an epistemic point of view (ensuring that voters are properly informed), universal suffrage wins on account of being more conducive to political stability. I would like to make the alternative case – the epistemic benefits come out on top because political stability is ensured by factors other than the ‘perceived fairness’ of universal suffrage.

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Filed under: Distribution by lot, Elections, Proposals, Sortition | 9 Comments »

Fran Barlow proposes a system of government

Posted on November 22, 2010 by Yoram Gat

[This article was originally posted as a comment by Fran Barlow.]

For me the key question of representative governance turns on the legitimacy question. In what senses, if at all, is the exercise of executive power a bona fide expression of the attempt to meet all of the legitimate and contested claims of the community the sovereign ostensibly serves?

To qualify in this way, it seems to me that the legislature, in its composition, must be and be seen to be rather like the population as a whole in its composition. All of us are far more inclined to suppose that people who are socially like us are more likely to resist doing things we’d fundamentally object to and to be predisposed to serving the interests we see as valuable. That the legislature is like the populace as a whole isn’t a guarantee against them acting recklessly or like tyrants, but it makes it less likely.

On the other hand, we surely know that large sections of the populace aren’t highly informed about policy, even in a big picture sense. This is one of the contextual factors that subverts good policy because career politicians can exploit this ignorance (or complain that it constrains them) to do things that amount to very poor policy. In my view, sortition (or any proposed system of governance) should foster inclusivity and empowerment. We ought to want a better informed and more engaged citizenry. My outline below aims at ensuring that over time, the pool of people who are engaged with policy and have the skills to analyse and develop good policy grows.

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Filed under: Elections, Proposals, Sortition | 11 Comments »

Law in Action

Posted on November 11, 2010 by keithsutherland

The armchair constitution-building on this forum has been, for the most part, abstract and speculative, so I’d like to bring it down to earth with a specific case-study. The recession in the UK has been serious and the consensus amongst economists is that any enduring recovery will be export-driven, as the home market is still highly indebted. In the last two years the domestic market in China has grown rapidly and most countries are now targeting their exports in that direction (the UK currently accounts for only 1% of Chinese imports). But China has an appalling human rights record, leading some to say that the UK should have a similar policy to China as with South Africa in the apartheid regime. Thus we have a classical political dilemma, so let’s explore possible outcomes in the light of three constitutional models:

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Filed under: Proposals, Sortition | 56 Comments »

Compulsory Voting

Posted on November 5, 2010 by peterstone

The latest issue of the British Journal of Political Science features an article by Annabelle Lever on compulsory voting. See–

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayFulltext?type=1&fid=7908207&jid=JPS&volumeId=40&issueId=04&aid=7908205

Lever notes that (pp. 902-903),

Most proponents of compulsory voting believe that voters should have the option to vote for ‘none of the above’, although none of them ever discuss what should happen if that option turns out to have the largest share of the vote in an election, or is sufficient to turn it into the major ‘opposition’ party.

Lever may wish to consider the proposal by Filimon Peonidis made at

http://www.uclouvain.be/cps/ucl/doc/etes/documents/Peonidis.AllottedMPs.pdf

In effect, Peonidis proposes that 1) people be permitted to vote “none of the above” and that 2) if “none of the above” wins any legislative seats, those seats be allocated randomly among the eligible population. In effect, those voting for “none of the above” are voting against the candidates offered and for candidate selection via sortition.

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

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