Proposals | Equality by lot

Plan to DUMP legislators by lottery!

Posted on May 15, 2011 by Conall Boyle

Plans to reform House of Lords could include a lottery to cull peers

Nick Clegg’s white paper to include several options for cutting second chamber seats to 300 by 2015

guardian.co.uk
Patrick Wintour
Wednesday 11 May 2011 21.13 BST

A lottery could be used to decide which peers are thrown out of the House of Lords under one method being discussed to cut the second chamber down to as few as 300 members.

Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, will seek to re-energise his political reform agenda next week when he publishes a white paper on an elected second chamber that will set out plans to cull remaining hereditary and appointed peers.

The government is expected to leave open the question of which peers are selected to stay, but a favoured option being canvassed is for each party group to hold a random draw for each phase of the removal of peers.
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Filed under: House of Lords, Proposals | 5 Comments »

Between Burke and the Anti-Federalists: An Epistemic Argument for Descriptive Representation

Posted on May 11, 2011 by keithsutherland

New paper by Helene Landemore (Yale) just uploaded to SSRN:

Abstract: This paper proposes an interpretation of representative assemblies that strikes a conceptual middle ground between Burke’s ideal of an assembly of trustees and the Anti-Federalists’ ideal of a mirror image of the people. The normative appeal of this conceptual middle ground is supported by an argument emphasizing the epistemic properties of a descriptive assembly of trustees deliberating about the common good. Building on findings about the importance of cognitive diversity for efficient collective problem-solving, the paper argues that given the nature of political problems, a case can be made for the epistemic superiority of descriptively representative assemblies over less accurately descriptive ones. The paper further defends sortition as the best way to ensure descriptive representation over alternatives such as quotas and gerrymandering.

Keywords: representation, deliberation, cognitive diversity, epistemic democracy, delegates, trustees, Burke, Anti-Federalists

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

Machiavellian Democracy

Posted on April 14, 2011 by keithsutherland

John P. McCormick’s new book (Machiavellian Democracy, CUP, 2011) is a fascinating attempt to appropriate insights from Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy (1513-17) in order to moderate some of the worst excesses of modern ‘democracy’ – in particular the Florentine’s advocacy of class-based magistracies to constrain the oppressive ‘humor’ of the grandi (political elite). Machiavelli’s template for this is the institutions of the Roman republic, especially the People’s Tribunes. Roman Tribunes were elected exclusively from plebeian ranks and were charged with popular advocacy; McCormick’s suggestion is that a modern equivalent (for the US) might involve fifty-one tribunes selected by an annual sortition from the whole population (apart from the wealthiest 10% of family households). The powers of the tribunes would be three-fold (p.184):

1. To veto, by majority vote, one piece of congressional legislation, one executive order and one Supreme Court decision p.a.

2. To call one annual referendum p.a. which, if ratified, would take on the force of federal statute.

3. To initiate impeachment proceedings against one federal official from each of three branches of government. McCormick is particularly attracted to the Roman practice of political trials – any citizen could publicly accuse magistrates of malfeasance and this would prompt a hearing in a voting assembly, which could comprise the entire citizenry.

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Filed under: Books, Distribution by lot, Elections, Proposals, Sortition, Theory | 12 Comments »

Sortition in Student Government

Posted on April 8, 2011 by peterstone

A Stanford graduate student recently came up with the following thought experiment, part of a sustained tirade against the student government there–

http://tusb.stanford.edu/2011/04/suppose-we-abolished-the-assu-today-a-thought-experiment.html

Filed under: Proposals, Sortition | Tagged: Student government | 1 Comment »

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 21^st 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: