More from Pluchino et al.

Posted on March 16, 2011 by Yoram Gat

A new article by Pluchino et al. is linked to in a recent edit to the Wikipedia entry for sortition (possibly by Pluchino himself):

Accidental Politicians: How Randomly Selected Legislators Can Improve Parliament Efficiency

by A. Pluchino, C. Garofalo, A. Rapisarda, S. Spagano, M. Caserta

We study a prototypical model of a Parliament with two Parties or two Political Coalitions and we show how the introduction of a variable percentage of randomly selected independent legislators can increase the global efficiency of a Legislature, in terms of both number of laws passed and average social welfare obtained. We also analytically find an “efficiency golden rule” which allows to fix the optimal number of legislators to be selected at random after that regular elections have established the relative proportion of the two Parties or Coalitions. These results are in line with both the ancient Greek democratic system and the recent discovery that the adoption of random strategies can improve the efficiency of hierarchical organizations.

Filed under: Sortition | 19 Comments »

Equality by Lot

Posted on February 27, 2011 by keithsutherland

Over the last two decades a number of books and journal articles have advocated the integration of sortition into constitutional practice (as opposed to the purely advisory role of Deliberative Polling and citizen juries on electoral reform). With the noted exception of Callenbach and Phillips’ Citizen Legislature all of the proposals have been subject to powerful criticisms by Yoram Gat, the moderator of this blog. Gat has been remarkably consistent in his criticisms, his prime objection being that the proposals are insufficiently radical as, by retaining a statutory role for the plural institutions of liberal democracy, they fail to adhere in full to the principles of Athenian-style sortive democracy – i.e. equality by lot.

What Gat has failed to do to date, however, is to provide us with a detailed and comprehensive constitutional programme of his own, nor pointed us towards any material that he has published elsewhere, so as a result his own proposals have not been subject to comparable scrutiny. Having corresponded with him at considerable length – offline as well as on this blog – he has been admirably consistent with his views, making it possible to reconstruct such a model from our exchanges alone, and I have been alarmed at how illiberal the model has turned out to be. If the man that I construct in this post turns out to be only made of straw, then I apologise in advance and look forward to Yoram’s corrections in the commentary section, but I’m entirely confident that his personal commitment to equality will ensure that he will not seek to exercise his moderator powers by suppressing this post.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Sortition | 36 Comments »

Paul Cockshott: Ideas of Leadership and Democracy

Posted on February 18, 2011 by Yoram Gat

Paul Cockshott is offering the Greek political structure as an alternative to the Roman model:

When the American revolutionaries were trying to establish their state – and that is the stable form of bourgeois state that has survived – they looked at historical models. And there were two models available for them, there was Rome and Athens. They had to choose between these, and it is actually no accident that they chose Rome, that the United States constitution is largely based on the Roman ideas of constitution – it’s a republic, it’s not a democracy. It was constructed as a state by slaveholders who saw what had been the most stable slaveholder state in the past: Rome. And they modeled their state on that.

But there’s another model, and that’s the Athenian model of direct democracy, and the Greeks, over a period of hundreds of years, developed mechanisms to prevent aristocratic domination of the state. Continue reading →

Filed under: Athens, Elections, History, Sortition, Theory | 60 Comments »

Random Selection as an Obligation of Citizenship

Posted on February 17, 2011 by Yoram Gat

William K. Dustin introduces his book and website:

I am the author of a book entitled Toward an Ethic of Citizenship: Creating a Culture of Democracy for the 21st Century which was published in 1999. After completing the book, I created a website, www.ethicofcitizenship.com, to promote the book and the idea of random selection. Until very recently I was unaware of any other websites advocating the same idea. As a result of an email I received on a totally different topic, I discovered The Common Lot website which then led me to the Equality by Lot site.

The idea for the book arose out of a little known political scandal, known as “phonegate”, that occurred in Minnesota in the early 1990’s in which a number of legislators were found to have been abusing their phone privileges. The hubris of the legislature in response to the discovery of this abuse not only made me rather angry, but, since I had been called for jury duty the year before, gave me the idea that service in the legislature ought to be a duty of citizenship like jury duty. Continue reading →

Filed under: Proposals, Sortition | 14 Comments »

Inshallah

Posted on February 15, 2011 by keithsutherland

Our ongoing debate on Egypt got me thinking about the connection (or lack of it) between sortition and religion. Fustel de Coulanges’ 1864 account, that lot was the revelation of divine will, was discredited by Headlam in 1891 and nobody has sought to revive it. Similarly, as Conall Boyle points out in his edition of Gataker, lotteries were only acceptable in the Judaeo-Christian tradition in so far as they didn’t involve claims about divine revelation.

On the other hand Oliver Dowlen argues that the disappearance of lot may well be connected with religious factors, as sortition appears to have been a victim of the Reformation:

There are many reasons why the process of selecting nominators by lot might have been lost in the transition from Venice to the New World. . . The drawing of the lottery was very much a public process, witnessed by the whole community or reggimento. To the puritan settlers this could have seemed a very foreign, bizarre public ritual which smacked of superstition – even Catholicism. The secret ballot, on the other hand, conformed to the Protestant ideal that the private individual should be alone in his judgement and answerable only to God. (Dowlen, Political Potential of Sortition, p.163)

The question that I’m leading up to – and it’s no more than that – is would sortition-based politics be more acceptable to Muslim sensibilities than (Western) electoral politics, and might this possibly account for the failure of electoral democracy in the Arab world?

Continue reading →

Filed under: Distribution by lot, History, Proposals, Sortition | 21 Comments »

For Egypt, Are Elections the Way Forward?

Posted on February 14, 2011 by Yoram Gat

Sa’ada Abu Bakr wrote the following essay.

The people of Egypt are standing at an historic crossroad. But to hear other people tell it, Egyptians are travelling down the highway to democracy. They’ve been stalled for decades but now their engines are revving and they are all but on their way to western style democracy. First stop: free and fair elections.

To all those who died and sacrificed, it would be a disservice to commence this trip without fully examining the destination and any and all alternatives. Required reading before you embark on this journey is Animal Farm by George Orwell. Moral: If new people are put into any version of the same system, no matter how reformed, you will eventually end up with the same results. The problems may be to a lesser degree, more benign, but you will not have the freedom for which people died.

As an American who dabbled in local politics, consider this my postcard from Destination: Democracy. I don’t wish you were here. Sure, I have a vote; I have a voice, but it is not heard. If you have a voice which you can’t use, are you in a worse position than one who can use their voice, unheard? What is the difference?

Continue reading →

Filed under: Proposals, Sortition | 19 Comments »

Public Opinion vs. Sortition

Posted on February 11, 2011 by peterstone

There’s been some recent discussion here of the possibility that a randomly-selected decision-making body (an Allotted Chamber, or AC) might disagree with the people it represents because the former is well-informed and has thought things through carefully but the latter has not. James Fishkin discusses a movie that illustrates this possibility well–

http://www.one-country.com/061magictown.html

Thought this might be useful for the discussion.

Filed under: Sortition | 37 Comments »

Michael Phillips

Posted on February 10, 2011 by peterstone

In his recent posting, David Grant noted an early mention of sortition by Michael Phillips in CoEvolution Quarterly, which I think is now defunct. I found that the article is online at

http://www.wholeearth.com/issue/2026/article/201/new.age.doctrine.is.out.to.lunch.on.three.issues

It doesn’t do more than mention the idea of randomly selecting legislators, but I thought it worth noting here. (Phillips of course went on the coauthor with Ernest Callenbach the book A Citizen Legislature, which Imprint Academic reprinted in 2008.)

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Let the Reviewing Begin!

Posted on February 10, 2011 by peterstone

The book Sortition: Theory and Practice (edited by Gil Delannoi and Oliver Dowlen, Imprint Academic, 2010)–an anthology of papers from a Kleroterian conference held in Paris in 2008–has been reviewed for the first time (to the best of my knowledge–anyone know of other reviews?). The review, by Alan Lockard, appears in Public Choice. (The print version has not yet appeared–it’s on the journal’s website as an “online first” article.) Here’s the link–

http://www.springerlink.com/content/4753631985174603/

The review is generally favorable to the collection. It discusses each paper in the collection, and thus only has space for about a paragraph on each paper. The review is particularly impressed by Antoine Vergne’s detailed review of the sortition-related literature. It engages most substantively with Gil Delannoi’s lead paper in the collection. And it provides a fair and accurate summary of my own paper, though it does not comment upon it at all (perhaps because it is the last paper in the volume). All in all, a pretty nice review.

Filed under: Sortition | 3 Comments »

Found It!

Posted on February 6, 2011 by peterstone

I am obliged to confess that I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.

-William F. Buckley, Jr., Rumbles Left and Right: A Book about Troublesome People and Ideas (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1963), p. 134.

I know this quote has been mentioned here before, but this is the first time I’ve ever had in my hand an actual primary source by Buckley for it. Thanks to Ralph Keyes’ The Quote Verifier (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2006) for directing me to it.

Filed under: Sortition | 7 Comments »

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