Demiocracy, Chapter 1b: The (Mass-Electoral) System Is the Problem

Posted on January 12, 2024 by Roger Knights

It’s been famously said that the general will cannot be represented—only a factionalizing “will of all.” And it’s been found, after man tore free, that Rousseau’s warning was correct.

Rousseau’s fears about representative institutions are everywhere confirmed within the politics of power: Leaders, players or actors become isolated from an audience. —Robert J. Pranger, The Eclipse of Citizenship, 1968, p. 27.

However, the general will can be incarnated in the State—“virtually” incarnated—by inserting a small, or “demitasse,” sample from the whole population. “Demiocracy” is the name I’ve adopted for this Demi-incarnated democracy.

It is rational to use a sample when using the whole would be impossible, awkward, or undesirable. We use a sample as juries for those reasons. Likewise, we use samples in focus groups, in surveys of TV viewership, and in opinion polling.

Demiocracy’s behavior will be revolutionary, though probably not (fortunately) as revolutionary as Rousseau hoped.

To make a revolution is a measure which, prima fronte, requires an apology. —Edmund Burke.

Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas. —Alfred North Whitehead.

The state begins by being absolutely a work of the imagination. Imagination is the liberating power possessed by man. —Ortega y Gasset.

All great truths begin as blasphemies. —George Bernard Shaw.

A man with a new idea is a Crank, until the idea succeeds. —Mark Twain.

A really new idea affronts current agreement. —White’s Observation.

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Filed under: Ballot measures, Elections, Proposals, Sortition, Theory | 8 Comments »

Mueller, Tollison and Willett advocating sortition in 1972

Posted on December 27, 2023 by Yoram Gat

“Representative Democracy via Random Selection”, a 1972 paper by Dennis Mueller, Robert Tollison, and Thomas Willett in Public Choice Journal is one of the earliest pieces of sortition advocacy in modern times. The proposal made and discussed is a radical one: selecting the legislature by lot. The fairly short paper covers many crucial issues: eligibility for the allotment pool, compensation, body size, etc.

If we accept that some form of national representation is efficient, the remaining task is to decide on the best practical form of such representation. We would like to propose for consideration the selecting of a national legislature at random from the voting populace. Dahl [After the Revolution, 1970, pp. 249-153] recently suggested a similar procedure, although only to give advisory votes, and the idea has historical origins in Athenian democracy and in the work of Rousseau [The Social Contract, 1762, Book IV, Chapter III]. Such a procedure would be a significant improvement over the existing political system in several ways. The incentive for pork barrel activities in order to secure votes would no longer be present since random selection would be independent of geographic base, and for the same reason minorities would be represented in correct proportion to their numbers in the society. Representation by random selection would also return political power to individual voters and give better artivulation of voter preferences in the legislative process without sacrificing the efficiencies of representation. The legislature would not be composed of median position representatives as under two-party, geographic representation. Voter abstention or uninformed voting would not be problems under this proposal, and perhaps voter alienation would be less in this case also. If viewed as a replacement for the current forms of national representation, the random selection system removes direct sanctioning power through the ballot from the voter and replaces this control mechanism with a more subtle method of articulating voter preferences on national issues. We would argue that although the final outcome is not clearcut, such a change in representative procedure could be understood by voters as the formal embodiment of democratic equality in an ex ante rather than ex post sense. One could also argue that the mass media aspect of political campaigning would be less of a problem under the random selection system, although this is not certain since the outcome depends on how this system of representation is meshed with existing political institutions (e.g., the Presidency). Finally, and importantly, it should be stressed that random selection of representatives avoids all of the traditional problems in voting theory of intransitivities in voting outcomes and the like in establishing a system of proportional representation [See Duncan, The Theory of Committees and Elections, 1958, Chapter 11]. The application of voting theory is confined in this case to the operations of the random legislature once selected, and this feature of representation by lot is an important justification for establishing and operating proportional representation in this way.

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Selection by lottery can make the university system more egalitarian

Posted on November 24, 2023 by Yoram Gat

ِA proposal by Sam Mace for randomization in university admittance. Conall Boyle’s work on this idea gets a mention.

It’s Time to Sort the University

University is the gateway to a better life. But the gap between elite and non-elite institutions and their admissions contradicts our self-convinced myths about meritocracy that we have developed. The best and the brightest do not necessarily attend our highest caliber and best funded institutions. Instead, all too often, it is the most well connected, the richest, and a lucky few others who are allowed to grace so many hallowed halls.

The reasoning behind the expansion of universities in the 20th century was to dramatically alter people’s economic and social status. But today, what kind of university someone goes to all too often determines their life path. Attending an Oxford or a Harvard may radically change a young person’s life, whereas for someone attending a Bradford or an Alabama State, this is far less likely to happen. Given the increasing pressures on funding for humanities and other scholarly subjects such as ancient history and classics, attending certain universities will soon include an irrevocable decision on what a student can study.

Therefore the question must be not just how many people can go to university but how fair is the admissions process for the very best universities. This question and similar ones about the role of universities has not just been asked by progressives but also by conservatives such as Christopher Lasch and Patrick Deneen. The fear of elite concentrations of economic, social, and cultural capital is keenly felt across the ideological spectrum. It is a problem that plagues the Anglosphere.

The exams to assess who gets a spot at university are more ruthlessly competitive than ever before. We use invigilators to ensure fairness and tie ourselves in knots over the ethics of using tools such ChatGPT, yet few of us are questioning the fairness of the admissions system in the first place. The enormous demand for the most prestigious universities sparks an ugly reality of fraud and inequality.
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Allotted assemblies for overcoming coalition discord

Posted on November 20, 2023 by Yoram Gat

An op-ed in the Belgian La Libre.

How allotted citizen assemblies could have prevented the failure of the fiscal reform

By Eric Jourdain

Whereas the necessary fiscal reform plan is figured in the government agreement, the seven parties of the Vivaldi government have not reached an agreement. It is time to put the brakes on the particracy, to reanimate democracy and to give an unexpected role to the prime minister.

On July 22nd, our prime minister Alexander De Croo was extremely disappointed. He published an open letter in the written press deploring the fact that “the political class is sometimes so preoccupied by its own matters that it forgets the people and the causes that it must serve”. This was after the failure of the fiscal reform, when the prime minister realized with bitterness that the seven parties which compose the Vivaldi coalition would not reach an agreement on approving yet another version of the fiscal reform presented by the finance minister.

The reform project did figure in the federal government accord presented in September 2020, which explicitly planned for a balanced budget and the reduction in the fiscal pressure on the workers (employees, civil servants and self-employed).

In a country which has the ambition to reach a work participation rate of 80%, one would think that this reform would serve the general interest. In fact, more people at work translates automatically to an increase in contributions to social programs and to fiscal revenue, and a decrease in social expenses by the community.

How to allow a prime minister to resolve this impasse in the future?

By adding a few articles to our constitution specifying the following points:

  • Define what is an allotted citizen assembly.
  • Stipulate that when a reform project set out in the government accord is not adopted within 3 years after the formation of the legislature, the head of government may invoke a new article in the constitution. The new article, say Article X, would allow the prime minister to convene a Citizen Assembly via sortition to which he would propose to adopt the legislation that the parties refuse to adopt. The vote of the Assembly would be binding.

In case of a positive vote, that would mean that the prime minister and the Citizen Assembly have together prevented an impasse, and possibly a governmental crisis. This would get around the harmful effects of particracy.
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A Modest Proposal for Peace in Israel and Palestine

Posted on November 17, 2023 by johnhuang865

As I hear about all the news in Israel and Gaza, I can’t help but think how sortition might help. What do people have to lose by trying something different after decades of failed peace talks? I’m just some rando on the internet but here is my modest proposal:

Create a Citizens Assembly for Peace

Construct an assembly of about 500 Israeli and Palestinian citizens. This assembly will not be strictly democratic; instead, it will be composed of 50% Israelis and 50% Palestinians. Delegates will be chosen by lottery and with some stratification if desired.

Require that all citizen delegates swear an oath of nonviolence while participating in the assembly. Any delegate that violently attacks another delegate will be thrown out and prosecuted.

Making a decision

  • To immediately ratify a proposal, at least 65% of the Israeli side and 65% of the Palestinian side must ratify the proposal.
  • To eventually ratify a proposal, at least 51% of the Israeli side and 51% of the Palestinian side must ratify the proposal. Proposals with only this double-majority support (51% and 51%) must be re-affirmed by a subsequent Citizens’ Assembly, with new delegates, called in one years time.

Participation from Governments and Authorities

Israeli government officials, military officials, Hamas officials, PLO officials, UN officials, etc. would be invited to participate with guarantees they will not be arrested or attacked at the peace talks. These officials will have NO agenda setting power and NO voting power. They will have the power to speak and be heard. They will have the power to submit proposals for consideration and submit amendments for consideration.

To enforce the peace, some international 3rd party will have to broker this participation as well as maintain security. Extreme security measures will need to be made to protect the delegates as they become targets for extremists.

A Requirement of Fraternization

Israeli and Palestinian participants are required to fraternize with one another. The delegates will be split into small group sessions with a random mix of the two sides of various proportions, with around 10 delegates per small group. Group compositions will be changing from time to time to encourage co-mingling with many different people. Multiple translators should be available for each small group to facilitate communication.

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Consumerocracy to better the conditions of the free market

Posted on October 19, 2023 by theodorestathis

In previous articles, I have presented the reasons that do not allow today’s supposedly democratic regimes to stop the frantic course of unfair and provocative distribution of the wealth produced. In the series of those articles I also presented a peaceful way, through which non-democratic regimes can be transformed into democratic ones, whose existence is essential for a market to function free. These ideas are found in greater details in my book entitled A Therapy for Dying Democracies, published by Dorrance Publishing Co., which aim at braking the course of corrupt capitalism and thus gradually freeing the free market from the chains with which it has been enslaved over time.

An important intervention in many areas of business’ activity is, in my steadfast opinion, the use of a special type of public company, by which it is possible to transform the market, controlled by speculators and monopolies, into a free one. The specificity of this company is due to the fact that it must satisfy certain prerequisites, which derive from a fundamental axiomatic principle of democracy that recognizes equal state or power status to each citizen.

On the basis of this principle of democracy, what could be the case in the field of consumption? But of course the obvious one which I call: consumerocracy, similar in meaning to democracy, where consumers in the field of consumption have equal power status, regardless of the volume of purchases made by each consumer. That is, the same low prices of goods and equal opportunities for all, something that unfair competition does not provide.

To deal with profiteering, the special type of company is used, which intervenes in ways that allow the instrument-tool of consumerocracy to give its customers-consumers the notorious equal state status. One way, in which the company achieves this for its clients, is the full return of its net profits to its customers-consumers, provided that the initial capital invested for the establishment of this special type of company remains at market value constant.

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The way to democracy: democratically operating political parties

Posted on October 6, 2023 by theodorestathis

Sortition as a concept and as a method of selecting members of a deliberative group has been in the headlines for some time now and the most important gain the followers of sortition have gotten from it it is that more people now know about its purpose and of its use, especially as being a potential alternative to election for selecting members of a board of an organization or of other institutional bodies, as is the case of legislative assemblies for local, regional and national level.

The purpose of its use up to now, as far as I know, has been to bring into the deliberations of existing governmental legislative assemblies more democracy. This remains to be seen, for this new approach has first to be accepted by the present systems of government, which are based on their main futures on those of republicanism, which at the same time are being called democracies, even though they do not have any connection to democracy. Unless some of the followers of sortition have it as part of their revolutionary program through which they plan to get to power, even though revolutions have been abandoned even by the Marxists, since the time of Hitler’s lesson on how to grab power with only just through elections.

It is though about time to give more attention to the peaceful ways, which can lead to power without any revolutions and without methods creating abnormal conditions in the present republican systems of government, for the purpose of democracy is not to divide but to unite the people. That is what my approach, presented by articles and comments in this blog and in a more expanded way in my book with the title: A Therapy for Dying Democracies intends to do. In my view this approach has several advantages over other approaches on matters concerning the quality of representation and the method of materializing peacefully the objective, which is to have at last democracy at work.

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The American Academy of Arts and Sciences recommends citizen assemblies

Posted on August 19, 2023 by Yoram Gat

In 2020 the American Academy of Arts and Sciences published the report of its Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship.

The report is a useful example of how the liberal U.S. establishment views the state of the political system and for the kind of ideas it generates for institutional reforms. A set of self-appointed reformers, highly credentialed by the establishment, functions as the tribunes of the people. The report is ostensibly based on “listening sessions” held with various groups in the U.S., but of course the entire exercise is controlled from beginning to end by elite actors and it is completely up to the commission members to select the makeup of the groups “listened to” and to channel their “input” into the a set of recommendations. In fact, regarding the makeup of the groups in the “listening sessions”, the report specifically asserts that “[t]he intent of this strategy was not to collect a statistically representative sample, but to cast a wide net and surface the personal experiences, frustrations, and acts of engagement of a diverse array of Americans”.

The Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship was established in the spring of 2018 at the initiative of then Academy President Jonathan Fanton and Stephen D. Bechtel, Jr., Chair of the S. D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation. Mr. Bechtel challenged the Academy to consider what it means to be a good citizen in the twenty-first century, and to ask how all of us might obtain the values, knowledge, and skills to become still better citizens. Since 1780, projects that work to bolster American citizens’ understanding of and engagement with the institutions of their government have been a hallmark of the Academy’s work.

The background for the commission’s work is a grim picture of disintegration of social cohesion and distrust in institutions. As is standard practice, the real-world causes of this situation are left unclear. Abstract economic issues like inequality and mobility are mentioned, and it is asserted (citing Gilens and Page) that “[c]ongressional priorities, studies have shown, now align with the preferences of the most affluent”. However, real-life, specific outcomes of those “congressional priorities”, such as food insecurity, lack of medical care, indebtedness, declining life spans, or incarceration rates are not discussed.
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A poll finds a plurality of Britons support an allotted House of Lords

Posted on June 29, 2023 by Yoram Gat

A story in the Byline Times.

The Idea to Overhaul the House of Lords that Politicians Aren’t Talking About

YouGov polling suggests strong potential support across the board for a very different chamber to replace the House of Lords

Josiah Mortimer
28 June 2023

There is significant public support for overhauling the House of Lords in a way that is almost never discussed in political debate, according to a newly published poll.

YouGov, commissioned by the Sortition Foundation – a social enterprise which campaigns for greater use of citizens’ assemblies – has shed some new light on public opinion regarding Lords reform.

Typically, the debate is about moving to an elected second chamber – for instance, using a proportional voting system to more fairly reflect how the public vote than under the Commons’ winner-takes-all ‘First Past the Post’ system. Others suggest an ‘indirectly’ elected house, whereby council leaders or regional mayors would fill a new Senate of the Nations and Regions.

The latter idea stems largely out of fears of a directly-elected second chamber simply replicating the House of Commons, or ‘worse’ in their eyes, having more legitimacy and therefore power over MPs.

But the Sortition poll adds another option for the first time: replacing the Lords with a permanent citizens’ assembly made up of ordinary people, reflective of the UK population.

Out of the options presented for the future of the Lords, this was the most popular with 23% of public support. The idea came top among all major party supporters (bar Liberal Democrats, who marginally prefer an elected second chamber).
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Martin Wolf: Citizens’ juries can help fix democracy

Posted on May 29, 2023 by Yoram Gat

Sortition has found a fairly prominent advocate in the Financial Times‘s Martin Wolf. Wolf was introduced to the idea by Nicholas Gruen and is highly influenced by him. Wolf has written a book offering sortition as a solution to “ailing Western polities”. His prominent position and impeccable institutional credentials make him possibly the most prominent promoter of sortition in the Anglophone world.

Wolf is now repeating his argument in an article in the Financial Times. In particular he is implying that the “failure” of Brexit would not have happened if the decision whether to leave or remain were made by an allotted body. But Wolf goes farther and proposes a permanent allotted chamber with not insignificant powers.

“Brexit has failed.” This is now the view of Nigel Farage, the man who arguably bears more responsibility for the UK’s decision to leave the EU than anybody else. He is right, not because the Tories messed it up, as he thinks, but because it was bound to go wrong. The question is why the country made this mistake. The answer is that our democratic processes do not work very well. Adding referendums to elections does not solve the problem. But adding citizens’ assemblies might.

In my book, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, I follow the Australian economist Nicholas Gruen in arguing for the addition of citizens’ assemblies or citizens’ juries. These would insert an important element of ancient Greek democracy into the parliamentary tradition.
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