Luca Belgiorno-Nettis, founder of newDemocracy, endorses Alex Zakaras’s allotted “Citizens’ Senate” in his TEDxSydney talk:
My take on this proposal and exchange with Zakaras are here: The elected legislator’s burden, Lottery and Legislative Powers: A Reply to Yoram Gat, and Limiting the allotted chamber’s powers – a foundational argument.
Filed under: Academia, Athens, Proposals, Sortition | 1 Comment »
These two articles about the salaries, or lack thereof, offered to state legislators make me wonder about two aspects of any prospective sortitioned legislature.
The first is the question of how to attract and sustain participation, particularly regarding financial support.
The second, consequentially, is whether or not citizens should be required to actively submit their names to the pool for sortition. [“Not required” would be, then, as juries are chosen. “Required” would require registration…and possibly, further, a basic competence test — a la driver’s licences.]
Granted, both topics have been previously discussed in this blog. But I recall there is no agreement about either.
http://www.alamogordonews.com/opinion/ci_22656513/n-m-s-citizen-legislature-is-an-oxymoron
http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2013/feb/27/where-do-nevadas-legislators-rank-nationally-salar/
Filed under: Press, Sortition | 4 Comments »
Louis Laurent, a Belgian MP, is calling for the use of sortition in order to achieve “true representation” (machine translation with my touch-ups):
Louis Laurent demands the dissolution of “all political parties” responsible, according to him, for the current poor governance, corruption and cronyism at all levels of government.
Laurent demands the creation of a “citizen” parliament assembled by sortition, in order to guarantee true representation.
Filed under: Elections, Press, Sortition | 2 Comments »
Tomas Mancebo wrote to point out an article in a Chilean alternative publication, El Ciudadano, advocating sortition.
Mauricio Vergara writes (machine translation with my touch-ups):
The Greeks discovered the blunder of representative democracy and it took them 800 years to eliminate the oligarchy and institute a distinct democratic design.
The solution was the creation of a large assembly, where members are selected by lot, yes! … A raffle, where those citizens who meet certain requirements have equal opportunity to be selected and to influence the country’s policies as representatives.
Filed under: Athens, Press, Sortition | 3 Comments »
Martin Wilding Davies, formerly of the Newid Party (which advocated rule by sortition in Wales) has a new website that may be of interest.
http://www.ordinarypeople.org.uk
Filed under: Sortition | 19 Comments »
The primary negative effect of the electoral system is the obverse of its ostensible function. This effect is what Bernard Manin called “the principle of distinction” – the delegation of political power to people whose situation and outlook is significantly different from those of the population at large. As a result of this difference, the political elite serves interests that are different from, and often antithetical to, those of the average voter.
However, the electoral system is often presented by academic advocates and by electoral activists and politicians as providing a value to society above and beyond its function for selecting government officials. It supposedly encourages meaningful popular participation in government through voting, informed discussion, organized activism in electoral campaigns and awareness of the importance of compromise and coalition building. In fact, the electoral system encourages none of those patterns – on the contrary: it is antithetical to them. This is due to several characteristics of the electoral system that are not consequences of the principle of distinction.
Filed under: Academia, Elections, Participation, Sortition | 45 Comments »
There’s apparently a fictional newspaper online called the Mammalian Daily, which purports to cover the lives of a bunch of animals living in a zoo. Apparently, the animal leaders of the zoo are selected by sortition. See…
It is, however, a stratified sample by category of animal. We don’t want a ruling body dominated by amphibians, after all.
Filed under: Fiction, Sortition | 3 Comments »
Short article by Stephen Kinsella, a lecturer in economics at University of Limerick, on Ireland’s democracy deficit. I am always happy to hear the word “sortition” discussed. I’m amazed by how many people–even academics, even political scientists, even scholars studying democracy–are not familiar with the term.
The process of selecting officials in ancient Greece was called sortition. All citizens – men of course – were eligible for elected office. Effectively, the citizens drew lots for ministries (the one with the shortest straw probably became minister for health).
Continue reading
Filed under: Academia, Athens, Press, Sortition | 4 Comments »
The death of James M Buchanan, the notorious Public Choice Theory economist has sparked some interesting discussion on ‘Crooked Timber’, my fav. intellectual blog.
I found myself nodding in vigorous agreement with the following
Continue reading
Filed under: Elections, Sortition, Theory | 23 Comments »
Abstract: The contrast between ancient Greek democracy as direct rule by the people, and modern democracy as indirect rule by elected representatives is in need of modification (Hansen, 2013). (Lane, 2012) has characterized Aristotle’s ideal democracy as ‘proto-Schumpeterian’ and (Hansen, 1999) has described the 4th-century Athenian development of randomly-selected legislative courts as a conservative reaction against the direct rule of the assembly. In a new paper (Hansen, 2013) outlines the change of democratic emphasis over three centuries in Athens: elective (sixth century), direct (fifth century), and sortive, viz. selection by lot (fourth century).
(Manin, 1997) has suggested that modern representative government has also evolved over three stages: parliamentary democracy, party democracy and finally ‘audience’ democracy, in which politicians appeal directly to the public in a similar manner to stage actors (and where the audience writes the script in real time). In audience democracy, as with direct democracy, political parties are superfluous. In this paper I argue that both the classical (direct) and modern (audience) models of democracy are inherently unstable and suggest that modern democracy may well parallel ancient democracy in evolving to a ‘sortive’ stage, where citizen juries, selected by lot, play a key role in the determination of legislative outcomes, and the role of political parties is limited to innovation and advocacy.
This is the abstract for my paper for the Political Studies Association annual conference, The Party’s Over (March 2013). I’d greatly appreciate any feedback, full text available here.
Filed under: Academia, Athens, History, Sortition | 18 Comments »
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Equality by lot 