Foley and Yoon: Sortition for the Student Assembly at the College of William and Mary

Posted on May 11, 2024 by Yoram Gat

Just two months ago, Evan Tao proposed applying sortition to selecting the student body of a Brown University. A similar proposal is now made by Michael Foley and Grant Yoon from the College of William and Mary.

Student Assembly officials shouldn’t be elected, they should be randomly selected. This somewhat radical idea has roots in ancient Athens where, for centuries, public officials were chosen via sortition. Sortition is the selection of public officials by lottery rather than election. We know, it sounds like an insane idea, but bear with us. Our goal with this article is not to convince you that sortition is a perfect system that should be implemented everywhere, we haven’t even convinced ourselves of that, but rather that it is a system with enough merit to be worth trying, and that the College of William and Mary’s Student Assembly offers the perfect laboratory within which we can test out the concept.

Our argument for sortition at the College boils down to this: randomly selected legislators would govern more effectively and promote a more inclusive culture surrounding student government on this campus.

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Sortition and Socialism Online Conference: Call for presenters

Posted on May 11, 2024 by richwbrown

Sortition and Socialism Online Conference

Call for Presenters

The International Network of Sortition Advocates (INSA) is proud to announce our first conference, ‘Sortition and Socialism’, on Saturday the 31st of August. The aim of the conference is to help develop the theory of sortitional-democratic models of plebeian power and socialism, and build closer connections between theorists of sortition and deliberative democracy and leftwing theoreticians and activists. We invite speakers from both scholarly and activist backgrounds to explore the role of appointment by random selection within struggles for liberation and proposed alternatives to capitalism.

Invited speaker: Camila Vergara (University of Essex)

Presenter Information

Conference Date & Time: Saturday 31st August 2024, 15:00-19:00 UTC

The deadline for applications is the 7th of July. Talks should be no longer than 25 minutes; there will be a 20-minute Q&A after each talk, and a panel discussion at the end of the day in which all speakers are invited to participate. Applicants should email an abstract of their proposed presentation, along with a short bio, to <facilitator@insa.site>.

INSA is a volunteer organisation aimed at connecting pro-sortition academics, advocates, and activists around the world, to share resources and tactics and advance the theoretical understanding of sortition. As a functionally-defined network, we are multi-partisan, acting as a clearing house for sortition advocates of many different political stripes, conditionally brought together by our common interest in advancing sortition in theory and practice.

If you are a supporter of the use of sortition in politics or other realms, or interested in learning more about what sortition has to offer, you are invited to join our Discord server at <https://discord.gg/6sgnrphp6w>.

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Lafont argues that normal people cannot be trusted with power

Posted on May 4, 2024 by Yoram Gat

Cristina Lafont, Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University, presents her anti-sortition position as being based on participationist ideology. In a debate with Brett Hennig and Samuel Bagg, which took place in August 2022, Lafont initially makes the standard participationist arguments:

[T]he very idea of having something like a lottocracy, where we change the political system, my main concern is it is not democratic. It is a way of empowering the few, the very few the tiny, tiny few randomly selected people to do the thinking and the deciding for the rest of the citizenry. Whereas the citizens really are just supposed to blindly defer to whatever decisions they make. They have no formal tools of holding them accountable or of collectively shaping which political agenda we are going to have. They just can only blindly refer to whatever those very few people decide, and to me, that is really not democratic. Blind deference is quintessentially a non-democratic relationship of political inequality where you have just decision makers who are not accountable, they can decide anyway they like as they see fit, and then you have people who just follow and obey and have no other way of shaping their decisions. That’s my main concern.

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Filed under: Academia, Elections, Participation, Sortition | 34 Comments »

Make believe participation

Posted on April 28, 2024 by Yoram Gat

The French discussion of “participative democracy” has recently produced several texts expressing suspicion of the way “participative devices” are being used by government to produce supposedly democratic outcomes.

Guillaume Gourgues writes in la vie des idées:

By setting up citizen consultations that it selects and organizes itself, the State sidesteps democratic procedures and institutions. There is the risk of a gradual drift towards a form of “participatory authoritarianism”.

On March 22, 2023, as he began his speech in the face of protests over pension reform, Emmanuel Macron defended the legitimacy of his reform by affirming that it followed a “democratic path” which began with “months of consultation”.

The claim of having followed a “democratic path” by the President, punctuated by regular reminders of “consultation” and “participation” mechanisms, is perplexing, as the political conduct of pension reform is obviously marked by the choice to reduce democratic debate to its strict minimum.

[This choice is highlighted when,] in the shadow of the pension reform, the citizens’ convention on the end of life, convened by the government, delivered its final opinion on April 2, 2023, after three months of deliberation.

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Filed under: Academia, Books, Elections, Participation, Press, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Hallam: The existing political system is taking us to hell

Posted on April 25, 2024 by Yoram Gat

Roger Hallam, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, writes:

This week in the Portuguese elections, the far right surged to 18% of the vote while the two main parties collapsed to around 25% each. This is now a pattern across western democracies. The collapse in support of the centre left and centre right and the rise of the populist left and right forces. At the moment, the momentum is with the radical right.

The conventional wisdom of the liberal political class, as shown in endless opinion articles, is that the centre right and left have to, in various unspecified ways, get their act together and stop the rise of the extremes. “Will Europe ever learn?”, one Guardian article writes. What does that actually mean apart from a vague appeal for people to be nice?

It is vague because there is, in fact, no effective structural response to the rise of the political outsiders. Both the centre right and centre left are ideologically committed to an international neo-liberal regime that systematically undermines the incomes and the identities of the majority. This international regime has also shown itself incapable of fulfilling its first political duty: to protect the lives and livelihoods of the people. The elites pouring more carbon in the air will now take us over 2C.
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Demiocracy, Chapter 19: Advantages of this army-of-Davids (multiple-Demi-legislature) arrangement

Posted on April 23, 2024 by Roger Knights

1. There would be less susceptibility to emotional proposals too motivated by fear or hope. Proxy electorates, which are specialized (expert on some topic), seasoned (from years of semi-monthly oversight sessions), and “select” (sifted upward through multiple ballotteries) at the state and national levels, would have more information, and would have acquired greater insight through discussion and debate. So they would more realistically assess what is possible (including adventurous proposals that just might work but affront conventional wisdom) and be less likely to divert down false trails and garden paths, and to ignore possible second-order effects. Their lesser credulity would insulate them from panics and propaganda. Their greater experience would simultaneously deliver aspiring politicians from the temptation to take advantage of their immaturity—of the virtual standing invitation that big-electorate, big-arena voters present to be played for Suckers. This inbuilt temptation of mass susceptibility eternally fuels the demonic dynamic—the co-dependent tragedy and farce—of DeMockery. (Its hidden “root,” to repeat, is its seemingly righteous, too-“wide,” electorate.)

2. Demiocracy’s decentralization would make a putsch more difficult, especially if it includes decentralization of the executive branch. (I.e., substantial independence of the executive departments from the chief executive, via PE-election of their heads.) Thus making tyranny less likely, a big concern of the Founders. Also insulating the government from a potty (barmy) POTUS. (“There is, of course, no such thing as a harmlessly mad emperor.” —Gore Vidal, Julian, Ch. 19.)

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Demiocracy, Chapter 5b: Three Long-Term Cases of sortition from a nominated sample, Like Demiocracy’s “Ballottery”

Posted on April 18, 2024 by Roger Knights

Amish Religious Practices

Amish ministers and deacons are selected by lot out of a group of men nominated by the congregation. They serve for life and have no formal training. Amish bishops are similarly chosen by lot from those selected as preachers. — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish_religious_practices.

The Amish employ something akin to what I call a ballottery to select ministers. The congregation (= the general public) nominates (= ballots for) those it considers worthy, and a lottery selects a minister from among those worthies. A second lottery (structurally similar to what I call a “stacked” ballottery) selects a bishop from those selected ministers.

It should be obvious that if those clerics were selected at random from the congregation, they would not perform as well as those drawn from a democratically pre-approved group, and that they would have less legitimacy because of that poorer performance, and of the mechanical way they had been chosen. These considerations of competence and legitimacy apply equally to the next two cases below.

It will be objected that these cases all have to do with the the choice of executive officeholders. But the importance of elevating competence and credibility still applies to deciding on the method of choosing legislators and electors, although incapacity among them would not be as blindingly obvious. Nevertheless, that is hardly a reason to prefer mediocrity, or accept it. Indeed, its subtler manifestation is an even stronger reason to guard against it.

PS, from Wikipedia:

(Note that the Greek word for “lot” (kleros) serves as the etymological root for English words like “cleric” and “clergy” as well as for “cleromancy”.)

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Filed under: Athens, Elections, History, Religion, Sortition | 4 Comments »

Trends in Theorizing Sortition

Posted on April 17, 2024 by peterstone

Delighted to see my new review essay (co-authored with Audrey Plan, one of our department’s former Ph.D. students) appear in print. The essay deals with recent theoretical work on sortition. You can check it out here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00208345241247492.

I should add that Yanina Welp, a friend of mine, is publishing shortly a similar paper in the same journal focused more on the empirical literature on sortition. Not sure when that will appear.

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Democracy an unknown system of government

Posted on April 16, 2024 by theodorestathis

My comments on the discussion at Deliberation and Structure.

Democracy is defined by its axiomatic principles. These to be satisfied one must invent appropriate instruments. This has been and still is the problem. From the discussion that is going on I get the impression that the method of constructing a citizens’ assembly is the use of lot. This tells me, that those who use this method of constructing citizens’ assemblies have no idea about the workings of democracy. Citizens’ assemblies are formed by all citizens of certain age in a region, in a city, in a state, in a nation. Meanwhile, in order for the citizens’ assembly to be operational we segment the entire population into small groups. A citizens’ assembly for an organization is made up of all its members. If the organization is large then the citizens’ assembly is segmented into smaller once. In those assemblies the participants pinpoint problems concerning their living standards or problems of a different nature. Which problems and in what order are to be solved the participants of the citizens’ assembly vote. The solving of these problems is what we call the development program of the region. The approved problems are being assigned to an infrastructure or infrastructures for solving them in the best possible way. These infrastructures are constructed in certain ways so as to make sure that the problems will be solved within the set timetable and as agreed.
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Sortition in the New Testament 

Posted on April 15, 2024 by Roger Knights

A notable example [of cleromancy] in the New Testament occurs in the Acts of the Apostles 1:23-26 where the eleven remaining apostles cast lots to determine whether to select Matthias, or Barsabbas (surnamed Justus) to replace Judas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleromancy

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