Equality by lot

Not all decision-making bodies are equally powerful. Even when the area of decision making is given, a decision-making body can be designed so as to wield a significant amount of independent power, or so as to be no more than a rubber stamp for decisions made elsewhere.

Here are some design parameters that impact the amount of independent power of a decision-making body:

1. Most clearly, an advisory body is less powerful than a body whose decisions are binding.
2. Period of member service: the shorter the service period, the less time members have to study the decision area and make an informed decision, the weaker is the body.
3. Ad-hoc, or occasionally convened, bodies are more susceptible to manipulation than permanent, or regularly convened, bodies.
4. Bodies with a mandate which was pre-determined by an outside political agent are less powerful than bodies that can set the political agenda.
5. Among bodies with a pre-determined agenda, those that can merely select one of several pre-phrased proposed decisions are weaker than those that can write their own decisions.

Athens had allotted bodies of various types.

The Boule was the most powerful allotted body: it was a regularly convened body, in which members served for a year. It made binding decisions on various issues, including setting the political agenda for Assembly.

The Nomothetai were convened regularly and made binding decisions, but could only accept or veto decisions made by the Assembly, and had to make those decisions within a one-day session. Similarly, the Athenian courts made binding decisions within a one-day session but selected from a pre-set menu of decisions: they could acquit or convict and, if convicting,  select the punishment from a set of two options: the punishment suggested by the accuser and the punishment suggested by the defendant.

Modern sortition proposals range from the weak – Dahl’s advisory bodies, Fishkin’s Delibartive Polls and Leib’s Popular Branch – to the strong – Callenbach and Phillips’s Citizens’ Legislature. The former three would keep ultimate decision power in the hands of elected officials (and those political agents that influence them) while the latter would put significant political power in the hands of the allotted representatives.

Perhaps it is not too early to pay attention to such crucial distinctions.

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Went to see The Doors biopic (highly recommended) the other day and was surprised to catch Jim Morrison saying something like “We don’t need an elected president, we need a jury democracy”. As this was the prelude to the notorious Miami concert rant nobody picked up on it as it was overshadowed by the resulting obscenity trial.

Morrison was famously well-read but it was more Rimbaud and Nietzsche than Herodotus. This would suggest that sortition-based ideas might have been circulating in the student radicalism movement at the time of the Vietnam war protests.  Can anyone cast any light on this, and did anyone else catch Morrison’s remark in the movie?

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I found a blog that advocates the random selection of judges (from a pool of qualified candidates) and an increase of jury powers. There’s not much defense offered for the proposals–it’s just a list of ideas. Some of these ideas would fit well, I believe, in a “demarchy” or other polity type that relies more extensively on sortition. Some of them seem completely unrelated to random selection, however; instead, they seem simply to be libertarian contrivances to hamstring the government’s ability to act. (Libertarians like to require unanimity before government agent’s can act in ways that influence people’s property, because they know unanimity is almost impossible to obtain in such matters. They also like to pretend that the U.S. Constitution is so transparent in its meaning that all we have to do is attend to the “original meaning” of the words.)

The blog posting can be found at…

http://constitutionalism.blogspot.com/2010/06/judicial-reforms-needed.html

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I just learned about this book–

http://uthreee.blogspot.com/2010/06/martin-j-bailey-constitution-for-future.html

http://www.amazon.com/Constitution-Future-Country-Martin-Bailey/dp/0333719093/ref=reg_hu-wl_item-added

Has anyone read it? It sounds like it devotes quality time to a lot of ideas besides sortition, including some of the favorite pet projects of public choice theorists.

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The political scientist Joseph Colomer has published several entries in Sage’s new International Encyclopedia of Political Science, including one on “Election by Lot.” Check it out here— 

http://works.bepress.com/josep_colomer/29/

The article lists some interesting uses of sortition, including some examples from Spain and Latin America with which I was completely unfamiliar. I intend to write to him and ask him for further information about them. 

Colomer does make two arguments about which I have questions. First, he suggests that sortition makes sense “in setting in which an assembly of members or a representative council makes decisions by broad consensus or unanimity.” But I don’t see why this should be the case. Athenian juries decided by majority rule. Second, he suggests that “procedures of rotation by turns of high public offices” will “a priori and in the long term, produce the same effect of random selection as lotteries.” I sincerely doubt that this is true. For one thing, Colomer assumes that sortition always accompanies short terms of office without reappointment. There’s no reason “a priori” why this should be the case. A comparison of the respective merits of sortition-plus-short-terms and rotation-plus-short-terms is just not the same as a comparison of sortition per se and rotation per se. Second, sortition can do things that rotation cannot. Rotation is predictable, whereas sortition (if done with a short enough lead time) is not. This can be good or bad. Predictability makes it possible to bribe or threaten future officeholders, but it also allows officeholders to prepare for their jobs in advance. I discuss the topic in some detail in chapter 5 of my forthcoming book.

On an unrelated note–if you happen to be an Irish lottery enthusiast, then you’re in luck. I’ll be giving a talk at Trinity College Dublin in a few weeks. Drop me a line if you want to know more.

Filed under: Sortition | 5 Comments »