A proposal to solve a very urgent problem – part 1 of 2

Posted on July 27, 2014 by John Burnheim

Global action on the global problem of human-induced climate change is stalled. In most countries action has become a victim to internal politics and also to the absence of any international authority capable of organising a concerted response. Everybody waits for others to do something.

The politics involved in the workings of the UN prevent it from providing a solution to the absence of an international authority, and attempts to get one set up by treaty seem hopeless.

In this situation even the scientific authority of the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) has come into question. It is alleged to be biased and complicit in the attempts of certain vested interests to exploit fear of catastrophe. Also it is not effectively answerable to anybody. There is obviously not just some plausibility but some substance in these accusations.

There is no doubt that everybody who works for the IPCC is already convinced that climate change is dangerous and that it is at least exacerbated by our use of fossil fuels. They want to find more evidence for their view. They may be nominally responsible to the UN, but in practice that is illusory.
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Filed under: Academia, Applications, Proposals, Sortition | 9 Comments »

Kleristocracy and Neoconservatism: Spot the Difference

Posted on July 22, 2014 by keithsutherland

Kleristocracy is a term, coined by Jon Roland, for the concentration of political power in sortition-based systems, and has been advocated by a number of commentators on this blog. It’s struck me recently that this has a lot in common with the neoconservative worldview that has led to such disastrous outcomes in (for example) Iraq and Libya and I want to use this post to explore the parallels.

Neoconservatives argue that the goal of foreign policy is the liberation of oppressed nations from tyranny – ideally through their own efforts, if not then with a bit of help from the “forces of freedom” – followed by the institution/imposition of democracy, enabling the self-organising powers of “the people” to operate in an unfettered manner. Kleristocrats also argue that “the people” should be liberated from tyranny (of the rich and powerful) and empowered by “real” democracy – the only difference between kleristocrats and neoconservatives being the use of an alternative balloting method.
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Filed under: Ballot measures, Elections, Sortition, Theory | 71 Comments »

A Citizen Jury in Action: Report from Morris Rural Climate Dialog

Posted on July 19, 2014 by Ahmed R. Teleb

Speaking of Citizen Juries, I’ve wanted to share something about this “Rural Climate Dialogue” since I attended as an observer last month in a small town in the Minnesota prairie. Below are excerpts from the participants. The the full report includes a statement to the public drafted entirely by the 15 randomly selected participants and an explanation of the CJ process as facilitated by the Jefferson Center.

Personally, I was quite impressed by what these regular people–the youngest a high school teenager, the eldest in her 80s–were able to do. They actually listened, engaged each other, and decided together. Unanimity was not required but almost always reached. Even their writing-in-committee was well done.

I was very impressed with this group’s ability to come together as community members, as neighbors, and talk about these things in an open, civil, and friendly manner.

I have to admit when I came here when people talked about climate [change] I thought ‘oh come on’ – did I ever learn a lot. I am grateful.

I think I’ll be a little bit more active and learn a little bit more in the future as a result of that. The overall experience was wonderful and the people were great.

We are the ones responsible for making these decisions…I’m thrilled and honored to be a part of a process that reminds me why this grand [democratic] experiment continues. And it’s not been perfect, and it will not be perfect, but we can always make it better, and things like this are a start. Thank you for the opportunity.

Filed under: Action, education, Experiments, Juries, Participation, Sortition | Tagged: , , , | 9 Comments »

Just How Do CJs support ‘Freedom and Democracy’?

Posted on July 18, 2014 by Conall Boyle

In a spate of moronic ‘reforms’ Education Ministers in England (of all parties) have vowed to set schools free from the dead hand of local (elected!) authorities. Hence there are Academies, Free Schools, Foundations including some for-profit schools. Yet all of these are funded by the State through taxpayer money.

So how should these ‘free’ schools be governed? A Governing Body, but chosen by election? No, no! Continue reading →

Filed under: Applications, education, Participation, schools, Sortition | Tagged: , | 10 Comments »

Michael Schulson: How to choose?

Posted on July 15, 2014 by peterstone

A few weeks back, I was interviewed for an article in Aeon Magazine. That article, entitled “How to Choose? When Your Reasons Are Worse than Useless, Sometimes the Most Rational Choice Is a Random Stab in the Dark,” has now appeared online.

Some interesting sources cited in it (and not just my book…).

Filed under: Applications, Distribution by lot, education, Juries, Press, schools, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Donald McCabe: Choose House by Lot

Posted on July 3, 2014 by Yoram Gat

An item from the Vergne bibliography:

Choose House by Lot

Published by The New York Times: March 15, 1991

To the Editor:

In “Expanded Congress Would Help Women” (letter, Feb. 24), Prof. Wilma Rule suggests a complicated scheme for the selection of members of the House of Representatives so that women and minorities may be fairly represented. As I understand the methods she recommends, however, there is no guarantee of any such effect. In any case, she ignores a simple means of choosing Representatives that would have the desirable results she wants, as well as others.

If members of the House were chosen by lot, instead of being elected (with still only one member for each district), the laws of statistics would assure that every part of our population would be represented very nearly proportionally. In addition, veto power over legislation would belong to a body that was not composed of professional politicians, who would have no interest in being re-elected and would therefore be subject to limited influence.
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Filed under: Academia, Athens, Elections, History, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 1 Comment »

The Vergne lotteries literature database

Posted on July 1, 2014 by Yoram Gat

Antoine Vergne has shared his database of lotteries related literature. The database currently contain 365 items touching on a variety of topics related to distribution-by-lot and sortition, covering theory, practice, history and advocacy, and ranging in time from antiquity to the present.

For those who are interested to access the list, it is available in bibliographical format and as a report.

The database is managed as a Zotero library. Readers who wish to help manage and extend the database are invited to leave contact information below or to email me (the address is here).

Filed under: Academia, Books, Distribution by lot, History, Juries, meta, Press, Proposals, Sortition | Tagged: | 5 Comments »

“Academic Choice Theory” in Political Science?

Posted on June 30, 2014 by Ahmed R. Teleb

There is a rather brilliant satire on the Naked Capitalism blog about how the incentives (positive feedback loops) create a systemic bias among economists to expound theories that support the status quo or the biggest wallets. Sortition and rotation of economists is suggested as a remedy.

What kinds of proposals could help to minimize value destruction by academic economists? You are quite right that from the point of view of the public this issue looms large. Even in most Western democracies, more than half of the total GDP is allocated according to principles promoted by agents subject to Academic Choice dynamics, i.e. economists. One simple remedy to the large negative externalities generated through their academic entrepreneurship could be to shrink the size of the sector of academic economists.

Another approach is indicated by the game theoretic insight that winning strategies in competitive games usually involve a random element. Following this principle, ever since antiquity trials have been decided by juries who are chosen by lot. We should therefore strongly consider periodically repopulating economics departments with people selected at random.

I wonder how many political scientists see a kind of “academic choice theory” in operation in the profession?

Filed under: Academia, Sortition, Theory | Tagged: , , | 1 Comment »

How Athenians Managed the Political Unaccountability of Citizens

Posted on June 29, 2014 by keithsutherland

Recent discussions on this blog have focused on the need for ongoing political accountability in any sortition-based political system, so I thought this article by Farid Abdel-Nour and Brad L. Cook in the current issue of History of Political Thought would be of interest:

Abstract: The political unaccountability of ordinary citizens in classical Athens was originally raised as a challenge by ancient critics of democracy. In tension with that criticism, the authors argue that attention to the above challenge is consistent with a defence of Athenian democratic politics. In fact, ordinary citizens’ function in the Assembly and courts implicitly included the burden of justifying their own political decisions to an imagined authority, as if they could be brought to account. By means of practices that encouraged this self-scrutiny, Athenians marked the challenge of citizens’ political unaccountability as an unavoidable but manageable aspect of their democracy.

The authors argue that ‘one type of practice placed citizens’s political decisions under the external gaze of other citizens, another placed them under the gaze of the gods, and yet another placed them under the gaze of an internal imagined audience’ (p. 445).
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Filed under: Academia, Athens, History, Sortition | 37 Comments »

I pester George Monbiot once more

Posted on June 19, 2014 by Yoram Gat

About a year ago I wrote to George Monbiot about sortition. At the risk of becoming a nuisance, I have just written to him again:

Again, sortition

Dear George,

Having just read your article “An Ounce of Hope is Worth a Ton of Despair”, I feel compelled to write to you again about a subject I have written to you about before: sortition.

As you may remember, sortition is the democratic alternative to elections. Instead of choosing decision makers by voting – which inevitably leads to having decisions made by members of an ambitious and well resourced elite – why not select decisions makers as a statistical sample of the population? Why not put some of those people who “consistently hold concern for others, tolerance, kindness and thinking for themselves to be more important than wealth, image and power” in a position where they can set policy instead of forcing them to choose between members of a self-serving elite?
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Filed under: Action, Elections, Press, Sortition | 1 Comment »

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