Equality by lot

I’ve been thinking recently that one promising venue for experimenting with sortition might be popular movements such as Occupy here in the US, or the indignados in Spain. These are venues where people are unusually open to learning about, and even trying, new ways to organize society. Also, from what I know of here in San Francisco, the Occupy folks are trying to make most of their decisions in large “general assemblies,” which is very cumbersome, so I suspect that some of them would be very interested in ideas like sortition.

Does anybody here know of examples of sortition being used in popular movements, or have ideas about how it could work?

Also, does anyone know of a contemporary, technologically-assisted, affordable, user-friendly equivalent to the kleroterion that could be used in popular movements? I’m imagining something analogous to big meetings I’ve seen where all the attendees have hand-held devices that enable them to vote and then have the votes instantly tallied on a computer. I imagine that having a technology like that might make an experiment with sortition more desirable and feasible.

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I am new to this forum, and new to the study of sortition. I’m fascinated by the ideas and debates presented here, somewhat overwhelmed, and trying to formulate an organizing framework that can help me – and hopefully others – make sense of it all.

I’ve read with great interest the recent debates about Keith and Terry’s ideas in “Athenian Democracy Reincarnate,” and the recent exchange between Yoram and Alex about election vs. sortition. Rather than plunging into the debates, I’ve been asking myself “what are the basic questions that must be answered in order to design a democratic legislative system; what are the answers that people are presenting here; and what are the main points of agreement and disagreement?”

So far I can think of four highest-level questions for designing a legislative system:

1. What criteria should define a “democratic” (and “good”) legislative system?
2. What are the essential activities of the legislative process?
3. What actors should carry out each activity, playing what roles?
4. What processes should be used for each activity?

(Note: this is assuming a given structure of political units, and that’s a huge design issue in itself, but beyond my scope here)

I’m not going to start with criteria, because I’m afraid that the resulting discussion wouldn’t be useful. Instead, in this post I’m going to start with activities, then (hopefully) actors and roles in my next post, then processes, and then criteria.

Continue reading →

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On many occasions I have argued that the representativity of political assemblies constituted ‘descriptively’ (i.e. by statistical sampling) only applies at the collective level, and that this requires members of such an assembly being limited in their function (in contrast to the mandate of elected members). This argument has failed to persuade some participants in this forum, so this post makes the point in a rather stark manner, in the hope that it will challenge my opponents to refute it or else accept it – ‘ to put up or shut up’ – as opposed to merely ignoring it. I’m puzzled as to the continuing necessity to labour this point, as its veracity derives from the meaning of the word ‘statistical’, nevertheless I will seek to hammer the nail in one more time.

Statistical sampling via random selection is widely used for proportionate opinion polling, but the problem with using random selection for relatively complicated issues like political representation (as opposed to preferences over different brands of washing powder) is that such surveys are inevitably of ‘raw’ (unconsidered) opinion. Nevertheless the representativity of the proportional sampling techniques used is hard to deny, hence James Fishkin’s attempt to seek to establish a ‘deliberative’ assembly using random sampling techniques, which combines representativity with informed deliberation in order to represent the ‘considered judgment’ of the whole population. However this requirement leads Fishkin to advocate a very thin form of the deliberative ideal, in which members effectively listen to balanced pro–anti arguments and then decide the outcome via secret ballot, as opposed to the rich active deliberation preferred by Habermasian deliberative theorists. Why should this be?
Continue reading →

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A 1984 draft paper (that apparently never made it to publication) by Theodore C. Bergstrom and Hal R. Varian is called Government by Jury. Its abstract is as follows:

We consider a simple model of social choice where the voters find it costly to determine their true preferences. Since the influence of an individual voter decreases as the group size increases, each individual finds it optimal to invest less time in contemplating his values in larger groups than in smaller groups. This suggests that a desirable social choice mechanism might be to randomly choose a relatively small group of electors to make social decisions, since they would then have more incentive think carefully about the issues. We investigate this idea of “government by jury” in a simple mathematical model and establish some of its properties.

Unfortunately, the paper makes the rather radical assumption that the interests of all the members of the group are identical, except for the fact that each is trying to minimize the personal effort put into reaching a well informed decision. Thus, according to this model, each person would rather have someone else make all policy decisions for them, provided the decision-maker has somehow been motivated to study the policy problems. This assumption limits the scope of the model drastically and makes any results irrelevant to most political situations.

Nevertheless, the paper is interesting for being perhaps the first formalization of a sortition-based government situation, and provides a possible starting point for richer models.

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I have created an advertising campaign on Google with the following ad:

Clicking on the ad currently takes you to the home page of this blog, but it would probably be better if the target was an “introduction to sortition” page. Such a page can be created and added to the tabs at the top of the blog (next to the “Home”, “About the Kleroterians”, “Contributors” and “Literature” tabs).

If anyone is interested in collaborating on creating such a page (possibly something along these lines), please let me know. Comments on the text of the ad are also welcome.

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