The puppet show of modern accountability: How allotment could help

Posted on July 11, 2023 by Nicholas Gruen

The more I’ve thought about sortition or as I call it “representation by sampling” the more profound I find the ways it differs from representation by election. The latter is inherently competitive and performative and both these things tend to undermine the bona fides of people’s contribution to discussion. They minimise rewards for listening and maximise the rewards for assertive speech.

Performance, especially performance before those with greater power saturates our daily lives. Hence the following passage from an anonymous local government bureaucrat.

I spent 10 years of my life writing. I wrote neighbourhood plans, partnership strategies, the Local Area Agreement, stretch targets, the Sustainable Community Strategy, sub-regional infrastructure plans, funding bids, monitoring documents, the Council Plan and service plans.

I have a confession to make. Much of it was made up. It was fudged, spun, copied and pasted, cobbled together and attractively formatted. I told lies in themes, lies in groups, lies in pairs, strategic lies, operational lies, cross-cutting lies. I wrote hundreds of pages of nonsense. Some of it was my own, but most of it was collated from my colleagues across the organisation and brought together into a single document.

Why did I do it? …[B]ecause it was my job.

The Greek political principle of parrhēsia is directed specifically against this kind of tendency — in our language it is the taking of risk to speak truth to power. But it is a distinctly modern form of speech — in which the warrant for its truthfulness (whether scientific or political) is not its persuasiveness to others, but it’s truthfulness to the speaker — it is the speaking of one’s own truth, and that truth is demonstrated by the speaker’s heedlessness of the consequences of his truth-telling.

In any event, in the discussion recorded above I argue the scope for sortition to help us escape from this trap. The audio file is also available here.

Filed under: Athens, Elections, Sortition | 2 Comments »

Where does the legitimacy of citizen conventions come from?

Posted on July 10, 2023 by Yoram Gat

Clément Viktorovitch for France Info, April 2023 [Original in French].

Where does the legitimacy of citizen conventions come from?

In France we have already had two citizen conventions: the first in 2020, dealing with the climate, the second very recently, dealing with end-of-life issues. But where does legitimacy of such institutions come from? Why should we trust 150 allotted citizens?

This question is fundamental: citizen conventions are being established, in France and abroad, as a component of representative democracies. Let’s quickly recall the procedure: draw at random several dozens, or even hundreds of individuals, who then meet regularly, for several months, until they formulate their recommendations on the question with which they are dealing. This is what we would like to clarify. Why should we accept that a handful of citizens, selected by chance, would be vested with the power to influence the decisions on subjects that concern all, without us being able to say a word about it, whereas we already have our elected bodies?
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Filed under: Elections, Press, Sortition | 4 Comments »

A poll finds a plurality of Britons support an allotted House of Lords

Posted on June 29, 2023 by Yoram Gat

A story in the Byline Times.

The Idea to Overhaul the House of Lords that Politicians Aren’t Talking About

YouGov polling suggests strong potential support across the board for a very different chamber to replace the House of Lords

Josiah Mortimer
28 June 2023

There is significant public support for overhauling the House of Lords in a way that is almost never discussed in political debate, according to a newly published poll.

YouGov, commissioned by the Sortition Foundation – a social enterprise which campaigns for greater use of citizens’ assemblies – has shed some new light on public opinion regarding Lords reform.

Typically, the debate is about moving to an elected second chamber – for instance, using a proportional voting system to more fairly reflect how the public vote than under the Commons’ winner-takes-all ‘First Past the Post’ system. Others suggest an ‘indirectly’ elected house, whereby council leaders or regional mayors would fill a new Senate of the Nations and Regions.

The latter idea stems largely out of fears of a directly-elected second chamber simply replicating the House of Commons, or ‘worse’ in their eyes, having more legitimacy and therefore power over MPs.

But the Sortition poll adds another option for the first time: replacing the Lords with a permanent citizens’ assembly made up of ordinary people, reflective of the UK population.

Out of the options presented for the future of the Lords, this was the most popular with 23% of public support. The idea came top among all major party supporters (bar Liberal Democrats, who marginally prefer an elected second chamber).
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Filed under: House of Lords, Opinion polling, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Psychologizing the electoralist phenomenon

Posted on June 24, 2023 by Yoram Gat

Steve Taylor, a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Leeds Beckett University wrote a piece in The Conversation offering his explanation for trouble with the electorlist system. Taylor writes:

The ancient Greeks practised direct democracy. It literally was “people power”. And they took measures specifically to ensure that ruthless, narcissistic people were unable to dominate politics.

Recent political events show that we have a great deal to learn from the Athenians. Arguably, a key problem in modern times is that we aren’t stringent enough about the people we allow to become politicians.

There’s a great deal of research showing that people with negative personality traits, such as narcissism, ruthlessness, amorality or a lack of empathy and conscience, are attracted to high-status roles, including politics.

In a representative democracy, therefore, the people who put themselves forward as representatives include a sizeable proportion of people with disordered personalities – people who crave power because of their malevolent traits.
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Filed under: Academia, Athens, Elections, History, Press, Sortition, Theory | 25 Comments »

Wallonia: A first citizen commission to discuss democracy

Posted on June 16, 2023 by Yoram Gat

An article by Eric Deffet published in Belgian Le Soir on June 14th, 2023.

The Walloon parliament has approved the creation of a first deliberative commission with a mix of allotted citizens and elected officials. Creating a mirror-in-mirror situation, this commission will discuss… the creation of a permanent commission to serve alongside the legislature.

Several years after Brussels, Wallonia is getting ready to launch its own experimentation with a first deliberative commission mixing elected officials and allotted citizens. The legal framework has long existed and the green light for a real life test has been given on Wednesday in the assembly. It responds to demands for citizen participation and transparency following the revelations on the dysfunction of the regional parliament. The participants will be drawn from the National Register: 30 citizens and as many additional fill-ins, who will have to represent the Walloon population.
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Filed under: Applications, Elections, Press, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Peter Jones: The lost art of persuasion

Posted on June 9, 2023 by Yoram Gat

In his column “Ancient and Modern” published in the Spectator Australia, Peter Jones warns his readers against the “Maoist re-education” of the young, generated by the “cancellation” tactics wielded by those “urging gender changes on children who rather feel like it”. In the process, Jones gives his readers a sketch of the Athenian system, including its reliance on sortition, presenting it as a model of good government, where policy was decided based on debate, persuasion and “peaceful agreement”, rather than the outrageous tactics he decries.

Despite mentioning selection by lot, Jones ignores the role of the allotted Council in Athenian politics. When talking about “the all-powerful Assembly” Jones does not consider the question of whether this Assembly in reality provided an arena where isegoria was more than a formality. It also remains unclear whether Jones advocates for the radical change that would be required in order to turn the Western political system into something that is more akin to the Athenian system and providing “more political control over tyrants and oligarchs”. His focus on activists causing an “uproar and silently glueing [themselves] to tarmac” may indicate that leaving those aside we are already living in a system which embodies the ideals of democracy. An off-handed comment about the “rights” of free speech being “rescindable” may also provide a hint regarding Jones’s mindset.

What would ancient Greeks have made of the current protests relating to the oil industry and identity reassignment? Very little indeed.

The Greek invention of democracy (‘people power’) emerged in the late 6th century bc after strong popular demand for more political control over tyrants and oligarchs. The result was a system in which all male citizens over 18 debated and determined all political questions in the regular Assemblies. Most official posts were held, usually for one year, by citizens who presented themselves for selection by lot (voting was considered meritocratic, not democratic), with serious consequences for failure.
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Filed under: Athens, Elections, History, Press, Sortition | 10 Comments »

Fung and Lessig: How AI Could Take Over Elections

Posted on June 8, 2023 by Owen Shaffer

An article in Scientific American by Archon Fung and Lawrence Lessig presents a parallel approach to my research on democracy and artificial intelligence. Citizens’ assemblies are a good way to fix this, by solving emotionally charged issues prior to an election. Even better, nested assemblies could replace much of the election process.

Sen. Josh Hawley asked OpenAI CEO Sam Altman this question in a May 16, 2023, U.S. Senate hearing on artificial intelligence. Altman replied that he was indeed concerned that some people might use language models to manipulate, persuade and engage in one-on-one interactions with voters.

Here’s the scenario Altman might have envisioned/had in mind: Imagine that soon, political technologists develop a machine called Clogger – a political campaign in a black box. Clogger relentlessly pursues just one objective: to maximize the chances that its candidate – the campaign that buys the services of Clogger Inc. – prevails in an election.

As a political scientist and a legal scholar who study the intersection of technology and democracy, we believe that something like Clogger could use automation to dramatically increase the scale and potentially the effectiveness of behavior manipulation and microtargeting techniques that political campaigns have used since the early 2000s. Just as advertisers use your browsing and social media history to individually target commercial and political ads now, Clogger would pay attention to you – and hundreds of millions of other voters – individually.

Filed under: Academia, Elections, Press, Sortition | 9 Comments »

Malkin on Greek allotment

Posted on June 3, 2023 by Yoram Gat

Irad Malkin is a prominent Israeli classicist. He has already been mentioned twice on Equality by Lot, when in 2013 and 2014 he penned op-ed pieces advocating for the use of sortition as a tool of democracy. It seems that lottery and its role in Ancient Greek society has become Malkin’s main focus of research over the last few years. The product of this research is a forthcoming book called “Greeks Drawing Lots: from Egalitarianism to Democracy”.

A first taste of Malkin’s research is already available in the form of a chapter in a book published last year edited by Sofia Greaves and Andrew Wallace-Hadrill and titled “Rome and the Colonial City: Rethinking the Grid”. The chapter written by Malkin is called “Reflections on egalitarianism and the foundation of Greek poleis“. It opens as follows:

When Greeks founded new settlements, they were facing the question of how to distribute plots of land to individual settlers. The main reason individuals joined a new foundation was to get such a plot of land (klêros), regardless of other reasons for colonisation. Back home, two brothers would need to share a klêros through partible inheritance by lot. However, if one brother stayed and another left for a new settlement abroad, both would have ended up, each, with a viable klêros. In and of itself, a klêros provides a basis for livelihood and a mutually recognised share of political and military power within the community. Practices of Greek colonisation are parallel to the Greek practice of ‘partible inheritance by lot’, since the same general principles and structures apply to both when it comes to land distribution: equality before the chance of the lottery, and, when possible, equality (sometimes equitability) of the size of the klêros.

From this we learn, if I understand correctly, that (like the English word “lot”?!) the word “klêros”, as in the randomizing machine “klêroterion”, meant in the first place a piece of fertile land, and the use of this word for randomization is derived from the custom of using the lottery for the distribution of such lands.

Malkin’s main thesis appears to be that the lottery was an embodiment of an egalitarian ideology. This ideology was especially influential in newly established colonies was in competition with oligarchization trends in more established settlements. It is this ideology that eventually, over the course of hundreds of years, developed into the Greek democracy.
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Filed under: Academia, Books, Distribution by lot, History, Press, Sortition | 3 Comments »

Martin Wolf: Citizens’ juries can help fix democracy

Posted on May 29, 2023 by Yoram Gat

Sortition has found a fairly prominent advocate in the Financial Times‘s Martin Wolf. Wolf was introduced to the idea by Nicholas Gruen and is highly influenced by him. Wolf has written a book offering sortition as a solution to “ailing Western polities”. His prominent position and impeccable institutional credentials make him possibly the most prominent promoter of sortition in the Anglophone world.

Wolf is now repeating his argument in an article in the Financial Times. In particular he is implying that the “failure” of Brexit would not have happened if the decision whether to leave or remain were made by an allotted body. But Wolf goes farther and proposes a permanent allotted chamber with not insignificant powers.

“Brexit has failed.” This is now the view of Nigel Farage, the man who arguably bears more responsibility for the UK’s decision to leave the EU than anybody else. He is right, not because the Tories messed it up, as he thinks, but because it was bound to go wrong. The question is why the country made this mistake. The answer is that our democratic processes do not work very well. Adding referendums to elections does not solve the problem. But adding citizens’ assemblies might.

In my book, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, I follow the Australian economist Nicholas Gruen in arguing for the addition of citizens’ assemblies or citizens’ juries. These would insert an important element of ancient Greek democracy into the parliamentary tradition.
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Filed under: Books, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 12 Comments »

Engines of oligarchy: me and Hugh Pope on the Keys to Democracy

Posted on May 28, 2023 by Nicholas Gruen

One of my favourite discussions so far with journalist, scholar and gentleman Hugh Pope. As readers of this site will know, Hugh has just brought to publication The Keys to Democracy: Sortition as a Model for Citizen Power, a book written by his father in 1990. But being well ahead of its time, the book was unpublishable. It pursued Aristotle’s point that elections installed a governing class and were therefore oligarchic. The institution that democracy represented the people was selection by lot as embodied today in legal juries. And it has a delicious fondness for G. K. Chesterton’s idea that, like a hostess, “democracy is bringing the shy people out”. You’ll also see me learning profound new things — like the fact that one of the things democracy is about is how you change your mind.

If you’d rather just listen to the audio file, it’s here.

Filed under: Books, Sortition | 13 Comments »

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