A 2022 talk by Prof. Matheson Russell from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, makes the standard case for sortition. Such presentations emphasize amiablity and “empirical findings” at the expense of political power and scientific rigor.
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A timeless phenomenon, observed everywhere, is that fewer and fewer citizens believe, and rightly so, that their participation in public affairs can change the existing unjust and miserable type of regime. This is confirmed by the turnout, which falls continuously from election to election. Exactly what it takes for the various saviors to germinate, and this is exactly what is happening nowadays, that will protect us from our many ills. Unfortunately, the Hitler regime, a product of Weimar “democracy”, reminds fewer and fewer people of the evils that lie ahead.
The full paper is here.
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INSA Online Summit 2024
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Reddit user “totalialogika” wrote the text below in the Reddit r/PoliticalScience forum. The commenters on that forum dismissed the text with various versions of “Sir, this is a political science sub. Please go rant somewhere else”. This raises the question of what makes a certain text a piece of “political science” as opposed to “a rant”. Is it merely that the style needs to conform to certain customs, or is there more to it than that?
Sortition might be the only way
We need to rely on Jury Duty rule to eliminate corrupt and sociopathic politicians, especially those who make a career out of their rhetoric.
And for those who claim “expertise” and “experts” are the only thing that can rule. It is expertise to pervert the rule of law and to promote special interests and experts versed in hollow promises and empty talk meant to address emotional and not rational responses from the denizens.
The degeneration of today’s political system in America is the symptom of how inadequate is an archaic system setup by a few million settlers at the 18th Century for the interests of a patriarchal racist and male dominated country, and now inadequate to serve the need of a 350 million people strong superpower. There were of course attempts at putting lipstick on the pig i.e Civil Rights reforms and more access for minorities and women, but those are as ineffectual and “for show”.
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Filed under: education, Elections, History, Sortition | 7 Comments »
David Cottam is a British historian and former principal of Sha Tin College, an international secondary school in Hong Kong, and a columnist in the China Daily Hong Kong Edition. In a recent column he writes about sortition.
Hong Kong, currently a hybrid of democratic and meritocratic government, is ideally placed for developing [a system with an element of sortition]. Like ancient Athens, its compact size and well-educated population would readily facilitate such a move. Introducing an element of sortition into the Legislative Council would answer the call for greater representation of the people without risking a return to the sort of partisan conflict and obstructionism that previously characterized the legislature. This would establish Hong Kong as a model of modern government, truly representing the people but without the vested interests and divisiveness of warring political parties. Such a system would also reflect Hong Kong’s unique amalgam of Western and Chinese influences, combining democratic values with the nonpartisan Confucian values of harmony and social cohesion. Indeed, this could provide an excellent model of government, not just for the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, but for any place wanting to enhance political participation, reduce partisan division, and ensure that the common good rather than party interests always prevails.
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Google Meet joining info video call link: https://meet.google.com/ntz-xguv-bsb
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. http://www.INSA.site
You are invited to join our Discord server at https://discord.gg/6sgnrphp6w
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The first post regarding the recently released report by the UK think tank Demos proposing the use of allotted bodies as part of the British political system is here.
In this part of the post, I highlight some quotes collected by the authors of the Demos “Citizens’ white paper“, from their interviews with former and present ministers and civil servants as well as interviews with members of the public at large. The picture which emerges from those interviews is not new: the elites are frustrated that public is too unruly, and that they are making unreasonable demands on the political system. Some of them hope that allotted bodies could be a tool for getting the people in line.
The people, on the other hand, feel that the elites are self serving at their expense. While the idea of giving decision power to allotted bodies is seen favorably, there is a lot of suspicion that this would be just another elite ploy. A member of the public expresses this attitude so:
Overall, no, I don’t think we’ve got a say. You give your vote to one party. And that’s the end of it, basically, you probably like to believe that you’re doing the right thing by voting for that party. But the proof is in the pudding, and I’ve never seen it happen yet.
A civil servant offers an the explanation for this:
Policymakers, be they the politicians and their advisors or the civil servants, do not look like the country either in all of its entirety, and quite a lot of them will not have had to go to the Jobcentre Plus, or many of them, given the age profile, and particularly younger ones will probably have not had to interact with the social care system yet.
This explanation hints at the principle of distinction – the decision makers are different from the public at large. However, the civil servant does not clarify whether they see this difference as resulting in decision makers lacking necessary knowledge, or a in having different interests and world views. A lack of knowledge can presumably be fixed relatively easily, while the second effect is much more stable.
Naturally, an elected politician thinks this difference between decision makers and the public applies to civil servants but the elected are not like this at all. He or she says:
But if you think about it, [civil servants] don’t engage with people day in day out, having discussions with constituents.
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Christina Lafont, in her 2020 book, Democracy Without Shortcuts, routinely asserts that, because a minipublic excludes the mass public, the mass public must “blindly defer” to its decisions. Those words at face value imply that the mass public would be blindsided by its decisions. That is not her full meaning, but I’ll criticize that part of it first.
There are four mechanisms by which the public could descry and/or influence the machinations of a lottocracy.
1a. By pairing and “checking” any lottocratic legislative chamber with an elected House.
Any legislation considered in, or passed by, a lottocratic House would be subject to public scrutiny when it reached the elected House, and even before that, during election campaigns for that House. The public would not be taken unawares (for what it is worth). The majority of lottocratic reformers, as far as I know, are only asking for this single-House, or half-a-loaf, power, so Lafont is not justified in insinuating that any empowered lottocratic legislature would be scarily secretive and all-powerful. It would only be influential, and it would have to negotiate openly in compromise-seeking conference committees with its elected counterpart.
1b. By allowing the mass public to veto, by referendum, objectionable minipublic measures. Or by requiring their endorsement, by referendums, by the public.
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Filed under: Academia, Books, Participation, Proposals, Sortition | 24 Comments »
Your interview with our MP was welcome and he emerged as a sincere and decent man.
I wish him the best, but guarantee that after five years of government, the main issues we have today will have barely been touched.
There will be several reasons for this but an important one is that our democracy is not fit for purpose – for starters, far more of us didn’t vote for Mr Alexander’s winning party than did.
That means his party has the underwhelming support of a minority of the citizens.
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Sortition and Socialism
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. http://www.INSA.site
You are invited to join our Discord server at https://discord.gg/6sgnrphp6w
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Equality by lot 