Quality of representation through sortition is assured using appropriate prerequisites

Posted on September 14, 2023 by theodorestathis

In my article Democracy through sortition I mentioned that sortition is a tool and not an end in itself. That means for sortition to work it needs to be subject to certain constrains. This condition is neglected by many followers of sortition and that creates a problem, at least in when trying to make a political system to operate democratically. One such problem is created, concerning quality of representation in a legislative body, like a parliament, when sortition neglects to take into consideration the use of prerequisites.

Sortition was used in the first democracy in ancient Athens, in order to select, from teams of volunteers, 500 parliamentarians for a term of one year, 50 from each of the 10 districts with equal population. The prerequisites for one to be selected through sortition as a member of parliament in a district were: He had to be a Greek, a member of a district, 30 years of age and older among others. The question may arise as to whether these prerequisites were sufficient in order for the representation to be, concerning its quality, sufficiently appropriate. The operation of that parliament started around 509 B.C. and for more than half a century the parliamentarians, while working all year around, were not paid for their services. So the members of a district that were working for a living, even if they wanted to be among those in the teams of volunteers, it was, objectively, not possible and there were many of them. Another difficulty for the citizens to participate was the distance to Athens from the place they lived, which to many of them was a major obstacle. In any case the fact is that, even in the first democracy, prerequisites were used!

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Filed under: Athens, History, Sortition | 14 Comments »

Through Sortition to democracy

Posted on September 11, 2023 by theodorestathis

Sortition is a tool and not an end in itself. For that matter democracy, a super tool, is not an end in itself either. What is an end in itself is the welfare of all, not of the few, nor of the many, but for all people in a community, in a region, in a nation, in the planet. This can only be achieved if the well-known axiomatic principles of democracy can be satisfied. Having this always in our mind we will avoid into falling into a dogmatic trap, into which Adam Smith and his followers or Marx and his followers fell.

The introduction of sortition with constraints to politics was done by the ancient Greeks in Athens, around 509 B.C., for the purpose of serving the first democratic system of government instituted by Klisthenis. That first experiment of democracy was partially successful, mainly because sortition was used to select political officers. What prevented it from succeeding in all of its objectives were the workings of the citizens’ assembly.

The objective of using sortition in politics is to obtain assemblies of political officers that will be free from any dependence, especially the type of dependence that is a result of collusion or corruption. On the basis that the tool of election, always, produces collusion and corruption, if we really are for democracy, the option is one that of sortition with appropriate constraints. The use of constraints is necessary in order for the process to be completed successfully and thus for those noble objectives of democracy to become a reality. The constraints come in the form of prerequisites which have to be satisfied by those who will be allotted for the assembly.

Today in most of the countries of the planet political parties is the basis of all political activities. So, if we want to make a peaceful transition from today’s so called democracies to real democracies, we have to start with what we have. The first job we all have to do is obtain, eventually, political parties that will be freed from all the types of cliques that dance with collusion and corruption, so as to operate democratically. This can be achieved by using an appropriate sortition process, instead of elections, for selecting the members of all the party organs. This constitutes a major step towards democracy, which will bring more people to party activities which now stay out of them because of the operations of the cliques. A development of this type will further enhance the quality of representation, which will be also reflected in assemblies like parliaments and city hall councils. Changes of this sort in party operations need no constitutional changes for them to proceed. Political parties may not like this idea, but they may be forced to follow once new parties start appearing with these new democratic face. More details on this can be found in my book A Therapy for Dying Democracies, published by Dorrance Publishing Co., USA.

Filed under: Books, Sortition | 7 Comments »

International Network of Sortition Advocates

Posted on September 10, 2023 by richwbrown

INSA Online Summit

The State of Deliberative Democracy in the World

Sunday, September 24, 2023

– Monday, September 25th in Australia – 

19:00 GMT, 20:00 Europe, 21:00 Israel, 14:00 EST (2:00 PM), 6:00 AEDT

JOIN US for an informal summit about the status of sortition events and activities in countries around the world. Western nations will be highlighted in this initial 1-hour summit. 

Australia – Spain – Denmark – United Kingdom – Austria – France – USA

– INSA is actively recruiting members from non-Western nations for future presentations –

Attend the Summit on Discord

https://discord.com/invite/6sgnrphp6w

Filed under: meeting, Sortition | 2 Comments »

The deliberative cure

Posted on September 9, 2023 by Yoram Gat

In an article in The Boston Globe, James Fishkin and Larry Diamond recount the story, a rather familiar and standard one, of how the participants in a deliberative body became “depolarized” and more democratic.

When our nationally representative sample of 600 (selected by NORC at the University of Chicago) deliberated for a weekend about these issues, Republicans often moved significantly toward initially Democrat positions and Democrats sometimes moved just as substantially toward initially Republican positions. The changes were all consonant with basic democratic values, such as that everyone’s vote should count and that our elections need to be administered in a nonpartisan way.

The novelty of Fishkin and Diamond’s latest deliberative workshop is that it was done on the cheap. The participants met online, saving travel and real-estate costs as well as reducing the commitment required of the participants, and where previously moderators had to be hired, moderation was now taken care of by AI magic:
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Filed under: Academia, Applications, Deliberation, Elections, Participation, Press, Sortition | 7 Comments »

Sortition can do it all

Posted on August 27, 2023 by Nathan El

This post is a rebuttal to the conclusion of Keith Sutherland’s 2013 paper “What sortition can and cannot do”, whereby sortition is deemed inappropriate for the “advocacy role” of representative legislature owing to alleged improper representation.

Since posters here address each other with their first names and especially since I will likely be chatting with him soon, I will refer to Keith Sutherland as Keith despite having never chatted with him yet and despite that going against the convention of referring to scholars one is discussing by their last names.

I have seen that there is a long standing feud of sorts between Keith and Yoram, and I find it appropriate to mention this here given that what seems to be at the origin of the conflict is precisely largely their differing views on the extent to which sortition should pervade the selection of policymakers compounded by a more general disagreement on political ideology according to a fairly standard left-right antagonism. I have no dog in this fight nor a particular affinity to either’s position whether on sortition or on political ideology more generally as far as I can tell, appearing to hold an intermediate position in both respects. As such though I am posting on Yoram’s site against Keith, this should not be construed as an attack by “team Yoram” against “team Keith”, as further evidenced by the fact that I had never communicated with Yoram until a few days ago when a renewed focus on sortition led me to make a few comments on his site. I imagine that Keith has heard all my arguments here before, and that most others have too, but since I couldn’t find a similar post on the topic I figured it would at least be useful to have a post dedicated to it. I am presuming that readers are familiar with the paper and the concepts it discusses and so I am not reintroducing them here.

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Filed under: Academia, Elections, Sortition, Theory | 50 Comments »

Adam Grant endorses randomly selected officials

Posted on August 22, 2023 by Nicholas Gruen

In an excruciating piece in the NYT (unpaywalled version), business guru Adam Grant endorses sortition, but in a risible form in which one randomly selects officials, rather than has a body of randomly selected people. This is all based on a psych experiment that showed that leaders chosen at random do better than those chosen by the group apparently.

Eliminate voting, and candidates with dark triad traits would be less likely than they are now to rise to the top. Of course, there’s also a risk that a lottery would deprive us of the chance to select a leader with distinctive skills. At this point, that’s a risk I’m willing to take. As lucky as America was to have Lincoln at the helm, it’s more important to limit our exposure to bad character than to roll the dice on the hopes of finding the best.

Besides, if Lincoln were alive now, it’s hard to imagine that he’d even put his top hat in the ring.  … A lottery would give a fair shot to people who aren’t tall enough or male enough to win. It would also open the door to people who aren’t connected or wealthy enough to run. Our broken campaign finance system lets the rich and powerful buy their way into races while preventing people without money or influence from getting on the ballot. They’re probably better candidates: Research suggests that on average, people who grow up in low-income families tend to be more effective leaders and less likely to cheat — they’re less prone to narcissism and entitlement.
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Filed under: Academia, Elections, Experiments, Press, Sortition | 15 Comments »

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences recommends citizen assemblies

Posted on August 19, 2023 by Yoram Gat

In 2020 the American Academy of Arts and Sciences published the report of its Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship.

The report is a useful example of how the liberal U.S. establishment views the state of the political system and for the kind of ideas it generates for institutional reforms. A set of self-appointed reformers, highly credentialed by the establishment, functions as the tribunes of the people. The report is ostensibly based on “listening sessions” held with various groups in the U.S., but of course the entire exercise is controlled from beginning to end by elite actors and it is completely up to the commission members to select the makeup of the groups “listened to” and to channel their “input” into the a set of recommendations. In fact, regarding the makeup of the groups in the “listening sessions”, the report specifically asserts that “[t]he intent of this strategy was not to collect a statistically representative sample, but to cast a wide net and surface the personal experiences, frustrations, and acts of engagement of a diverse array of Americans”.

The Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship was established in the spring of 2018 at the initiative of then Academy President Jonathan Fanton and Stephen D. Bechtel, Jr., Chair of the S. D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation. Mr. Bechtel challenged the Academy to consider what it means to be a good citizen in the twenty-first century, and to ask how all of us might obtain the values, knowledge, and skills to become still better citizens. Since 1780, projects that work to bolster American citizens’ understanding of and engagement with the institutions of their government have been a hallmark of the Academy’s work.

The background for the commission’s work is a grim picture of disintegration of social cohesion and distrust in institutions. As is standard practice, the real-world causes of this situation are left unclear. Abstract economic issues like inequality and mobility are mentioned, and it is asserted (citing Gilens and Page) that “[c]ongressional priorities, studies have shown, now align with the preferences of the most affluent”. However, real-life, specific outcomes of those “congressional priorities”, such as food insecurity, lack of medical care, indebtedness, declining life spans, or incarceration rates are not discussed.
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Filed under: Academia, Applications, Elections, Opinion polling, Proposals, Sortition | 2 Comments »

Under sortition, no matter what your cause is, you have no lever to force the government to act

Posted on August 4, 2023 by Yoram Gat

Adam Lee writes a polemic for sortition in OnlySky, a website billing itself as being “dedicated to protecting America’s secular democracy through reality-based journalism, storytelling, and commentary”. Lee covers standard ground – Athens using sortition and rejecting elections, the statistical representativity of allotted bodies, the unrepresentativity of elected bodies, Ireland’s use of sortition. (One thing that I have not heard before is that Ireland will soon have another constitutional referendum for adopting or rejecting a proposal by the allotted constitutional convention, this time for deleting Article 41.2 of the Irish constitution which is concerned with making sure mothers do not neglect “their duties at the home”.)

Lee offers two potential problems with a sortition-based system. The first is the statistical possibility of unrepresentative samples:

What if we choose 100 representatives by lot and get 75 QAnon-believing evangelicals? A legislature that’s far out of the mainstream could wreak tremendous harm or radically reshape society in disastrous ways.

The other is problem is that

even if [the system is] representative, it wouldn’t necessarily be responsive. People mounting a campaign on issues that matter to them is one of the safety valves of democracy. If there’s a problem that the government is ignoring—anything from potholed streets to rampant gun violence to unpopular wars—someone can, and probably will, run for office on a platform of fixing it.

Under sortition, that’s impossible. No matter what your cause is, you have no lever to force the government to act. You have to sit back and hope that someone who shares your views gets chosen on the next go-round.

Lee concludes:

Despite these problems, I can see real potential for sortition—if not as the sole basis for government, then maybe as a component of it. What if, instead of a House and a Senate, we had one democratically elected chamber and one made up of citizens chosen by lot?

Filed under: Athens, Elections, History, Press, Sortition | 29 Comments »

Rancière: The scandal of sortition

Posted on July 29, 2023 by Yoram Gat

The second chapter of Jacques Rancière’s Hatred of Democracy (2005), “Politics, or the Lost Shepherd”, contains a fairly long discussion of sortition and its relation to democracy. The following paragraph is from page 41 of the English translation:

The scandal [of sortition] is simply the following: among the titles for governing there is one that breaks the chain, a title that refutes itself: the [Plato’s] seventh title is the absence of title. Such is the most profound trouble signified by the word democracy. It’s not a question here of a great howling animal, a proud ass, or an individual pursuing pleasure for his or her own sake. Rather is it clearly apparent that these images are ways of concealing the heart of the problem. Democracy is not the whim of children, slaves, or animals. It is the whim of a god, that of chance, which is of such a nature that it is ruined as a principle of legitimacy. Democratic excess does not have anything to do with a supposed consumptive madness. It is simply the dissolving of any standard by which nature could give its law to communitarian artifice via the relations of authority that structure the social body. The scandal lies in the disjoining of entitlements to govern from any analogy to those that order social relations, from any analogy between human convention and the order of nature. It is the scandal of a superiority based on no other title than the very absence of superiority.

This is somewhat reminiscent of the “blind break” argument for sortition (by eliminating all reasons for selection, bad reasons are eliminated as well). Later on, for example, Rancière emphasizes the fact that when using sortition seeking power is not a prerequisite to attaining it. But the tone here is quite different. The emphasis is on rejecting traditional or “natural” reasons, reasons that dominate social relations throughout, reasons that justify the elevated status of established elites. It is the rejection of those traditional reasons that scandalizes those elites, as well as many among the masses who have internalized the justness or naturalness of those “distinctions”.

Filed under: Academia, Athens, Books, Sortition, Theory | 9 Comments »

Rangoni, Bedock, and Talukder: MPs’ discourses on deliberative mini-publics

Posted on July 15, 2023 by Yoram Gat

A 2021 paper in Acta Politica by Sacha Rangoni, Camille Bedock, David Talukder analyzes interviews made with French-speaking Belgian politicians on the subject of policy making citizen bodies (which they call Deliberative Minipublics, or DMPs). A large majority among the interviewees is in favor of consultative citizen bodies, either allotted or self-selected, a minority is in favor of bodies with binding decision making powers, and a small minority (all men, it turns out) is against both.

More competent thus more legitimate? MPs’ discourses on deliberative mini-publics

Abstract: MPs face a dilemma when it comes to deliberative mini-publics (DMPs): in a context of distrust they may see it as an opportunity to re-legitimize themselves and solve complex policy issues. But it could also challenge the quasi-monopoly they used to have on political decisions and undermine the role of the Parliament and the primacy of elections. The article is founded on 91 face-to-face interviews with French-speaking Belgian MPs sitting in federal or regional parliaments. First, we describe the profile of supporters of DMPs. We then identify three ideal-typical discourses: the power-sharing discourse, the consultative discourse, and the elitist discourse. The contribution of this article is twofold. First, it analyzes the argumentative frames used by MPs to assess deliberative mini-publics using a large number of interviews. Second, it demonstrates that their discourses depend on their evaluation of ordinary citizens’ competence to participate and on their resulting vision of representation. Political actors mainly perceive DMPs as power-sharing instruments that would alter their elected position and the legitimacy of the election.

Table 2 in the paper summarizes the positions associated with the three types discourse regarding allotted bodies:
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Filed under: Academia, Elections, Sortition | 1 Comment »

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