The Enfranchisement Lottery – a commentary

Posted on December 18, 2010 by keithsutherland

I assume that everyone has by now read Claudio López-Guerra’s excellent paper. It was circulated on Conall Boyle’s email list and is available from the author: claudio.lopezguerra@cide.edu. The paper compares the enfranchisement lottery with universal suffrage and concludes that, although the former is clearly an improvement from an epistemic point of view (ensuring that voters are properly informed), universal suffrage wins on account of being more conducive to political stability. I would like to make the alternative case – the epistemic benefits come out on top because political stability is ensured by factors other than the ‘perceived fairness’ of universal suffrage.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Distribution by lot, Elections, Proposals, Sortition | 9 Comments »

Claudio López-Guerra: “The enfranchisement lottery”

Posted on December 13, 2010 by Yoram Gat

Claudio López-Guerra, an assistant professor at the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics (CIDE) in Mexico City, has a new paper, “The enfranchisement lottery“, part of an upcoming book on the right to vote.

Abstract:

This article compares the ‘enfranchisement lottery’, a novel method for allocating the right to vote, with universal suffrage. The comparison is conducted exclusively on the basis of the expected consequences of the two systems. Each scheme seems to have a relative advantage. On the one hand, the enfranchisement lottery would create a better informed electorate and thus improve the quality of electoral outcomes. On the other hand, universal suffrage is more likely to ensure that elections are seen to be fair, which is important for political stability. This article concludes that, on balance, universal suffrage is prima facie superior to the enfranchisement lottery. Yet the analysis shows that the instrumental case for the ‘one person, one vote’ principle is less conclusive than democratic theorists usually suppose.

Keywords: voting rights, mini-publics, citizen juries, deliberation, democracy, lotteries

Filed under: Elections, Sortition, Theory | 7 Comments »

The delegation game

Posted on December 3, 2010 by Yoram Gat

Randomization is a standard solution in problems of game theory. In this context, randomization is used to baffle an adversary, who would be able to counter any deterministic strategy (assuming that that strategy was known to her) more effectively than she would be able to counter a randomized strategy. Thus, randomization is a maximin strategy: it guarantees the randomizer the best possible worst-case outcome. Sortition – a randomized strategy for selecting political delegates – can be advocated on similar grounds.

In a standard conception of the problem of selecting delegates, the people can assess the quality of any possible delegate set. They do so and then choose the delegation that maximizes that quality. Thus, in this conception, delegation is a maximization problem.

An alternative conception is one where the quality of potential delegations is difficult to assess. In such a situation, selecting a delegation requires some way to handle the uncertainty. Continue reading →

Filed under: Sortition, Theory | 21 Comments »

“We need to scrap elections and have lotteries to select officeholders”

Posted on December 3, 2010 by Yoram Gat

A recent discussion on DemocraticUnderground.com:

Face it, virtually no one can get elected without prostituting themselves out to big business or the rich. The Citizens United case made it impossible to ever elect an honest, competent person who will represent the people. What we need is a lottery system that selects people at random, say from their social security numbers.

Filed under: Sortition | 5 Comments »

Matt Kosko invokes Aristotle

Posted on November 24, 2010 by Yoram Gat

Matt Kosko, a student at the University of Pittsburgh, writes a letter to the students’ newspaper, The Pitt News:

To the Editor,

Election season is upon us, and the gatekeepers of respectable opinion at The Pitt News are once again insisting on the “crucial” importance of the SGB election (of course, every election is claimed to be “crucial” by those who fetishize representative government). But if I may, I’d like to dispute the idea that elections have anything to do with students “exercis[ing] their democratic power,” as the editors insist.

All the way back to Aristotle, it used to be understood that elections are a mark of aristocracy, where a few of the “best” people are selected to rule over the undifferentiated masses; free elections in representative systems produce governments that are in fact highly unrepresentative of the population at large in terms of race or class. In contrast, selection by lot is a principle of democracy as in the ancient Greek democracies, where officials were chosen randomly from the population. If we want to make our student government democratic, we would do well to abolish the elected SGB and replace it with a body chosen by lot among the student population.

This body would have no legislative power, just the power to enforce decisions ratified by a majority of students.

Filed under: Athens, History, Sortition | 4 Comments »

Fran Barlow proposes a system of government

Posted on November 22, 2010 by Yoram Gat

[This article was originally posted as a comment by Fran Barlow.]

For me the key question of representative governance turns on the legitimacy question. In what senses, if at all, is the exercise of executive power a bona fide expression of the attempt to meet all of the legitimate and contested claims of the community the sovereign ostensibly serves?

To qualify in this way, it seems to me that the legislature, in its composition, must be and be seen to be rather like the population as a whole in its composition. All of us are far more inclined to suppose that people who are socially like us are more likely to resist doing things we’d fundamentally object to and to be predisposed to serving the interests we see as valuable. That the legislature is like the populace as a whole isn’t a guarantee against them acting recklessly or like tyrants, but it makes it less likely.

On the other hand, we surely know that large sections of the populace aren’t highly informed about policy, even in a big picture sense. This is one of the contextual factors that subverts good policy because career politicians can exploit this ignorance (or complain that it constrains them) to do things that amount to very poor policy. In my view, sortition (or any proposed system of governance) should foster inclusivity and empowerment. We ought to want a better informed and more engaged citizenry. My outline below aims at ensuring that over time, the pool of people who are engaged with policy and have the skills to analyse and develop good policy grows.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Elections, Proposals, Sortition | 11 Comments »

“Representation and Randomness,” Part Three

Posted on November 16, 2010 by peterstone

(See parts one and two in Peter Stone’s review.)

The third paper in the Constellations symposium is “Lot and Democratic Representation: A Modest Proposal,” by Alex Zakaras. This paper has already received some attention here, and so I shall try and approach it from a somewhat different angle.

Zakaras’ “modest proposal” calls for the replacement of national- and state-level senates with randomly-selected legislative bodies. These “citizen legislatures” would not be responsible for drafting legislation. Rather, they would be responsible for approving or vetoing legislation proposed by the second, elected legislative body. They could also compel their elective counterparts to hold floor votes on legislation that is stuck in committee or otherwise stalled. And they would be solely responsible for drawing and redrawing legislative district boundaries (p. 457-458). I particularly like the latter idea. It seems to me that many of the most egregious failings of modern legislatures stem from the fact that they almost invariably get to write their own rules, and enforce those rules upon themselves. That works about as well as most self-policing—it’s better than nothing, but sometimes not by much. I would see redistricting, as well as the creation and enforcement of codes of legislative ethics, as tasks particularly well-suited for a randomly-selected group of ordinary citizens.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Sortition | 9 Comments »

Law in Action

Posted on November 11, 2010 by keithsutherland

The armchair constitution-building on this forum has been, for the most part, abstract and speculative, so I’d like to bring it down to earth with a specific case-study. The recession in the UK has been serious and the consensus amongst economists is that any enduring recovery will be export-driven, as the home market is still highly indebted. In the last two years the domestic market in China has grown rapidly and most countries are now targeting their exports in that direction (the UK currently accounts for only 1% of Chinese imports). But China has an appalling human rights record, leading some to say that the UK should have a similar policy to China as with South Africa in the apartheid regime. Thus we have a classical political dilemma, so let’s explore possible outcomes in the light of three constitutional models:

Continue reading →

Filed under: Proposals, Sortition | 56 Comments »

“Representation and Randomness,” Part Two

Posted on November 11, 2010 by peterstone

After a long hiatus, I’d like to return to commenting on Constellations’ recent symposium on “Representation and Randomness.” (See part one of this review.) To take up where I left off…

Hubertus Buchstein entitled his contribution to the symposium “Reviving Randomness for Political Rationality: Elements of a Theory of Aleatory Democracy.” In this contribution, Buchstein promises to “show that incorporating the factor of chance might…be of interest for contemporary democracies in terms of reform policy and how it could be achieved in practice.” In doing so, he attempts an ambitious array of tasks. The paper begins by “listing five potential functions of the lottery in the realm of politics” (p. 436). It then briefly considers the reintroduction of lotteries to modern politics via the American jury. (Two small historical quibbles: while it is true, as Buchstein says, that U.S. law has required random jury selection only since 1968, the practice was used at various times since the early days of the Republic. Also, the random selection of American military conscripts predates the Vietnam War. It was used in World War II, for example.) Then it addresses some theoretical problems raised in contemporary democratic theory (primarily by Habermas). Then it examines various recent small-scale projects involving randomly-selected citizens (notably James Fishkin’s deliberative opinion polls). Then it considers how random selection might address the problems of contemporary democratic theory that were raised earlier. It concludes with a few additional reform proposals involving random selection that might be worthy of further consideration.

Continue reading →

Filed under: History, Sortition, Theory | 2 Comments »

Compulsory Voting

Posted on November 5, 2010 by peterstone

The latest issue of the British Journal of Political Science features an article by Annabelle Lever on compulsory voting. See–

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayFulltext?type=1&fid=7908207&jid=JPS&volumeId=40&issueId=04&aid=7908205

Lever notes that (pp. 902-903),

Most proponents of compulsory voting believe that voters should have the option to vote for ‘none of the above’, although none of them ever discuss what should happen if that option turns out to have the largest share of the vote in an election, or is sufficient to turn it into the major ‘opposition’ party.

Lever may wish to consider the proposal by Filimon Peonidis made at

http://www.uclouvain.be/cps/ucl/doc/etes/documents/Peonidis.AllottedMPs.pdf

In effect, Peonidis proposes that 1) people be permitted to vote “none of the above” and that 2) if “none of the above” wins any legislative seats, those seats be allocated randomly among the eligible population. In effect, those voting for “none of the above” are voting against the candidates offered and for candidate selection via sortition.

Filed under: Elections, Proposals, Sortition | 1 Comment »

« Previous Page — Next Page »