Dikastic Thorubos

Posted on January 13, 2022 by keithsutherland

All the other powers are naturally in a man’s own control, but the power of speaking is blocked if there is opposition from the audience. Hear him as a scoundrel, bribe-taker, and as one who will say absolutely nothing true. (Dem. 19-340)

Cited in V. Bers, ‘Dikastic Thorubos’ in Crux: Essays Presented to G.E.M. de Ste. Croix, ed. P.A. Cartledge and F.D. Harvey (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 1985)

Recent outbursts of mud-slinging on this forum have implications for the design of sortition-based assemblies, especially if isegoria (equal speech) is the norm. This is the guiding principle of deliberative democracy, as it was in the Athenian democracy (unlike Sparta). However in both the ancient and modern cases only a tiny number of participants exercised the ho boulomenos (anyone who wishes) principle. It took some cojones to address the Athenian assembly and unpopular speakers were shouted down by the other participants (as we saw in the quote from Demosthenes). Whilst such prophylactics can work in direct democracies, large modern states resort to the exchange of insults between political parties, each one hoping to increase its share of the vote in elections. Jaw-jaw is certainly better than war-war, hence the fact that the illocutionary factions in the House of Commons are separated by two swords’ lengths.

The mud-slinging on this forum appears to be primarily between two “camps” — in the one corner Alex Kovner and Keith Sutherland and in the other Yoram Gat and Liam Jones. As Alex recently commented, the two groups appear to be “on different planets”, impervious to the (Habermasian) exchange of reasons.

There is no good reason to believe that a sortition-based assembly would be any different — especially if participation is voluntary, as this would attract those who like the sound of their own voice, which may or may not map to the voices of those in the target population that the randomly-selected group is intended to “describe”. This would suggest that ho boulomenos can do little to support the isegoria rights of the vast majority of citizens who fail to be included in the sortition.

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Filed under: Academia, Athens, Deliberation, Juries, Sortition, Theory | 12 Comments »

What If We Made Democracy… More Democratic?

Posted on January 6, 2022 by Ahmed R. Teleb

In These Times Editors on 4 Jan.:

When politicians seem increasingly out of touch with the average person, perhaps the average person should make decisions instead.

sor•ti•tion

noun

  1. the appointment of political positions by lottery, rather than election

Aren’t elections kind of what ​“make” democracy, though?

Not according to the ancient Athenians. In fact, these early democrats worried elections would inevitably favor the wealthy and powerful sound familiar? The city-state functioned instead by having citizens randomly selected annually to serve in public office, with duties ranging from monitoring public finances to deciding foreign policy and participating as one (of 6000) jurors on the People’s Court. Women and enslaved people, among others, were excluded, so Athens might not be the best example of a full-fledged democracy; still, they had a point about elections. In the United States, wealthy donors have more impact on policy than public opinion, and Congress is far whiter, richer, older and more male than the overall population.

You can read the rest of this short editorial here.

Filed under: Athens, Elections, History, Press, Sortition | Tagged: , | 3 Comments »

Democracy in Crisis: Lessons from Ancient Athens

Posted on January 5, 2022 by keithsutherland

The book Democracy in Crisis by Professor Jeff Miller will be published on January 6th 2022.

The storming of the US Capitol building in January 2021 focused attention on the multiple threats facing contemporary liberal democracies. Beyond the immediate problem of Covid-19, the past two decades saw political polarization, a dramatic rise in inequality, global warming and other environmental threats, as well as the growth of dangerous cultural and political divisions. Western liberal democracies find themselves in the midst of what political theorists call a legitimation crisis: major portions of the population lack confidence in the ability of governments to address our most pressing problems. This distrust in government and traditional political parties opened the door to populist leaders and a rising tide of authoritarianism.

Liberal democracies face major structural and normative challenges in the near future that require us to look beyond the traditional set of solutions available. Democracy in Crisis points back to the world’s first democratic government, Ancient Athens, to see what made that political arrangement durable and resistant to both internal and external threats. The argument focuses on several distinctive Athenian institutions and practices, and considers how we might reimagine them in the modern world. The book addresses questions of civic ideology and institutions, with extended treatment of two distinctive Athenian institutions, ostracism and sortition.

The launch event is at the annual conference of the Association for Political Thought, St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, but has moved online as a result of the Omicron surge. Details below:

Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Athens, Books, History, Sortition, Theory | 26 Comments »

Austria’s Climate Citizen Council: Broken from the Get-go

Posted on January 4, 2022 by H.J. Hofkirchner

Suspicious decisions and coincidences surround the preparations for Austria’s planned “Klimabürger*innenrat” (Climate Citizen Council) hosted by Austria’s Ministry for Climate Protection, Environment and Energy. Worrisome information emerged regarding the award of the organiser’s role and the choice of scientific experts.

Some background: Austria’s Ministry for Climate Protection, Environment and Energy is headed by Leonore Gewessler, a Green Party nominee within Austria’s coalition government of conservative ÖVP (People’s Party) and environmentalist minority partner “Die Gruenen” (Green Party). Their business lobbying sub-branch is called “Gruene Wirtschaft” (“Green Economy”) with its offices located at Seidengasse 25, in Vienna’s 7th “bobo” district.

As an aside, Austria now has the third Chancellor in quick succession since the 2019 elections due to a scandal surrounding fake citizen surveys which boosted the first Chancellor’s political ascent. SMS conversations revealed that a powerful boulevard newspaper was “incentivised” with government funds under the influence of said Chancellor to publish these fake surveys prominently. This matter is currently under investigation by Austria’s Anti-Corruption Agency. My readers will know that easily manipulated and biassed traditional surveys capture the Madness of Masses instead of Wisdom of Crowds, thus acting as a clandestine cause of corruption and many democratic ills in Austria (and other countries with a political party system).

With this background in mind: Gewessler answer to a parliamentary inquiry (the protocol is here) about the preparations to the “Klimabürger*innenrat” (Climate Citizen Council) stated that bids for independent organisation and moderation of the Klimarat were accepted throughout the EU and its 27 countries. Strangely, the Minister received only one single application by a consortium of three partners, PlanSinn GmbH, PulsWerk GmbH, and ÖGUT. PulsWerk is located at ​​Seidengasse 13. What a coincidence! Just six houses up in the same street as Gruene Wirtschaft. PlanSinn is – surprise! – also located in Vienna’s 7th district, in Zollergasse, a five minute walk from Gruene Wirtschaft. According to the Minister’s response, this single consortium’s offer luckily fulfilled all her quality criteria exactly and was thus awarded the contract.

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Filed under: Applications, Elections, Juries, Opinion polling, Sortition | Tagged: , , , , | 79 Comments »

Mock Citizens’ Assembly

Posted on December 31, 2021 by Owen Shaffer

Want to experience a Citizens’ Assembly from the inside? Democracy Without Elections has teamed with Healthy Democracy and the Building a New Reality Foundation to put you in the middle of one!

Healthy Democracy will run a Mock Citizens’ Assembly that will be very close to the real thing. You can experience every part of a Citizens’ Assembly except that there would be no democratic lottery (sortition) to choose participants, a final report would not be written and the experience will be more compressed. There is no lottery as folks are self-selected because they want to experience a Citizens’ Assembly from the inside.

A Citizens’ Assembly must have an issue to settle, and ours will identify the best direction for our movement. Assuming only one direction could be supported at this time, should we focus on

  • using citizens’ assemblies to make recommendations to elected bodies, or
  • replacing legislators with citizens chosen by lottery

The cost for this experience is set at 3 self-selected levels: US$49, $89, $119. Pay what you can afford. If $49 is too much, contact us and we will work something out. Precocious 13 – 18 year olds are free with a paying adult.

Wonder what it would be like to be a facilitator at a Citizens’ Assembly (CA)? You can try it out as well! While it does not prepare you to be a professional facilitator, a special training session will happen prior to the Mock CA. A facilitator focuses on the meeting process and how the group is working, but does not contribute to the actual discussion. Participants in that training session will serve as novice facilitators during the Mock CA. Depending on the numbers, you would be a facilitator at times and a participant in the Mock CA. The cost for both the facilitator training and the Mock CA is, again, at 3 self-selected levels: US$99, $179, $229.

It all starts in February, and will be on Zoom on these dates:

  • February 19 (facilitator ‘training’)
  • February 26 and March 5 (Mock CA)

The times for each Saturday session are are set to include interested people in Europe, Africa, and across North and South America. All times are pegged to the United States Pacific Standard Time, so please verify the time in your own area.

  • Hawaii time: 7 – 9am, 10 – 12pm
  • Pacific US time: 9 – 11am, 12 – 2pm
  • Eastern US time: 12 – 2pm, 3 – 5pm
  • United Kingdom, Portugal, Ghana: 5 – 7pm, 8 – 10pm
  • Central Europe, Tunisia: 6 – 8pm, 9 – 11pm

There are limited spaces; click here to sign up! Contact me if you have questions.

Owen Shaffer

01shaffer@gmail.com

Democracy Without Elections

Democracy Without Elections is a U.S. 501(c)3 registered nonprofit organization.

Filed under: Action, Experiments, Sortition | Tagged: , , | 2 Comments »

Short refutations of common arguments for sortition (part 3)

Posted on December 25, 2021 by Yoram Gat

Part 1 Part 2.

The arguments below make a case for sortition that is based on a general, rather vague sense of a need for change.

6. Elections are an 18th century technology. We need to modernize democracy by adopting new, modern ideas and institutions. Sortition is one such new idea and is enabled by new technologies.

This argument is obviously false factually. Sortition was practiced in Athens some 2,500 years ago. Drawing lots could easily have been implemented at the end of the 18th century instead or in addition to tallying votes. Furthermore, this perpetuates the standard distortion of the historical record regarding the ideology and the objectives of the creators of the Western system. Elections were not an 18th century democratic technology, but rather an age old oligarchical mechanism. They were deliberately adopted in the 18th century for this reason. Thus there is no democracy to be modernized. There is an elections-based oligarchy that needs to be replaced by a sortition-based democracy.

7. Democratic fatigue: voters have grown tired of the elections. New institutions we need to be introduced in order to revitalize democracy.

A prominent spokesman of this argument is David Van Reybrouck:

Countless western societies are currently afflicted by what we might call “democratic fatigue syndrome”. Symptoms may include referendum fever, declining party membership, and low voter turnout. Or government impotence and political paralysis – under relentless media scrutiny, widespread public distrust, and populist upheavals.

But democratic fatigue syndrome is not so much caused by the people, the politicians or the parties – it is caused by the procedure. Democracy is not the problem. Voting is the problem.

Van Reybrouck explains that “the fundamental cause of democratic fatigue syndrome lies in the fact that we have all become electoral fundamentalists, venerating elections but despising the people who are elected”. This is a wholly unsatisfactory “fundamental cause”. Why are elections producing such poor despised officials? Why and when have we “become electoral fundamentalists”? What was the situation before that?

As an argument for sortition this is also rather weak. Why sortition rather than any other alternative to elections? Maybe elections can be fixed? If they used to work in the past, maybe they can be made to work again? Maybe we can have sortition together with elections? And/or together with many other new institutions? How do we know which institutions can be expected to work? If “relentless media scrutiny” is a problem, why would sortition fare any better than elections?
Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Elections, Proposals, Sortition, Theory | 9 Comments »

Neutralizing Self-Selection Bias in Sampling for Sortition

Posted on December 23, 2021 by keithsutherland

Bailey Flanigan, Paul Gölz, Anupam Gupta, and Ariel Procaccia, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (2020). https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.10498

Yoram recently drew our attention to this sortition paper which was highly ranked by the Google search engine. It’s interesting to see that engineers and computer scientists take the problem of self-selection bias more seriously than political theorists and sortition activists.

Abstract: Sortition is a political system in which decisions are made by panels of randomly selected citizens. The process for selecting a sortition panel is traditionally thought of as uniform sampling without replacement, which has strong fairness properties. In practice, however, sampling without replacement is not possible since only a fraction of agents is willing to participate in a panel when invited, and different demographic groups participate at different rates. In order to still produce panels whose composition resembles that of the population, we develop a sampling algorithm that restores close-to-equal representation probabilities for all agents while satisfying meaningful demographic quotas. As part of its input, our algorithm requires probabilities indicating how likely each volunteer in the pool was to participate. Since these participation probabilities are not directly observable, we show how to learn them, and demonstrate our approach using data on a real sortition panel combined with information on the general population in the form of publicly available survey data.

Citing statistics from the Sortition Foundation:

typically, only between 2 and 5% of citizens are willing to participate in the panel when contacted. Moreover, those who do participate exhibit self-selection bias, i.e., they are not representative of the population, but rather skew toward certain groups with certain features.

To address these issues, sortition practitioners introduce additional steps into the sampling process.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Applications, Sortition, Theory | 2 Comments »

2021 review – statistics

Posted on December 21, 2021 by Yoram Gat

Below are some statistics about the 12th year of Equality-by-Lot. Comparable numbers for last year can be found here.

2021 Page views Posts Comments
Jan 2,684 13 182
Feb 3,105 15 117
Mar 3,253 11 131
Apr 3,096 9 118
May 3,303 14 34
June 2,806 11 70
July 2,408 7 76
Aug 2,506 6 41
Sept 2,314 11 93
Oct 2,400 8 102
Nov 2,388 10 136
Dec (to 21st) 2,133 10 92
Total 32,396 125 1,192

Note that page views do not include visits by logged-in contributors – the wordpress system does not count those visits.

Posts were made by 20 authors during 2021. (There were, of course, many other authors quoted and linked to.)

This blog currently has 152 email followers, 334 WordPress followers and 499 Twitter followers (@Klerotarian).

Searching for “distribution by lot” (with quotes) using Google returns Equality-by-Lot as the 2nd result (out of “about 330,000 results”). Continuing the demotion trend which has begun last year, Equality-by-Lot is now on the 10th page of results when searching for “sortition” using the Google search engine (out of “about 285,000 results”). This demotion may explain the significant decline in the total number of views in 2021 relative to 2020.

Happy holidays and a happy new year to Equality-by-Lot readers, commenters and posters. Keep up the good fight for democracy!

Filed under: Distribution by lot, meta, Sortition | 4 Comments »

Guides and standards of good practice for allotted assemblies in politics

Posted on December 20, 2021 by paulnollen

As the use of allotted assemblies (also called juries, or similar terms) in politics grows by the year, so does the number of guides and standards of good practice for those bodies. It seems therefore necessary to provide an evaluation tool for this kind of publication.

In this post I list relevant publications. Future posts will be devoted to the development of the evaluation tool. No doubt this will be a challenge. Then we will be able to evaluate the each of the publications in subsequent posts.

  1. The Alliance for a Diverse Democracy, Dr. Antoine Vergne: Citizens’ Participation Using Sortition: A practical guide to using random selection to guarantee diverse democratic participation.
  2. newDemocracy and the UN Democracy Fund: Enabling National Initiatives to Take Democracy Beyond Elections.
  3. ‘meer democratie’ (Belgium), Paul Nollen: Code of Good Practice for allotted mini-publics involved with legislation.
  4. Sortition Foundation: How to run a citizens’ assembly.
  5. Marcin Gerwin: Citizens Assemblies: Guide to democracy that works.
  6. Extinction Rebellion: The Extinction Rebellion Guide to Citizens Assemblies.
  7. Innovation in Democracy Programme (UK): How to run a
    citizens’ assembly    : A handbook for local authorities based on the Innovation in Democracy Programme.
  8. Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD) and The newDemocracy Foundation: An introduction to deliberative democracy for members of parliament.
  9. OECD: Innovative Citizen Participation and New Democratic Institutions.
  10. Sciences Citoyennes: La convention de citoyens (French), The Citizens Convention (English).

Filed under: Academia, Proposals, Sortition | 3 Comments »

Sortition in 2021

Posted on December 18, 2021 by Yoram Gat

Equality-by-Lot’s traditional yearly review post.

The most significant piece of sortition-related news of the year was, in my view, the findings of an opinion poll run in four Western European countries – the UK, France, Italy and Germany – regarding the place of sortition in government. The survey found that 27%-30% among those asked support using allotted bodies to systematically complement the work of parliament.

As always, sortition has been most prominent in 2021 in the Francophone world. Early in the year, Macron’s administration in France formed an allotted panel monitoring the Coronavirus vaccination campaign. Not much has been heard of it since. The utilization of allotment by the Macron administration has become frequent enough to merit condemnation as well as ridicule. Sortition’s political presence is such that it draws regular criticism from elite writers, but also some support. The journal Raisons politiques devoted a large part of an issue to sortition. In Switzerland, a proposal to select judges by lot among qualified candidates failed at the polls.

However, sortition had some presence elsewhere as well in 2021. An allotted assembly was convened as part of the COP26 UN climate change conference. In Bosnia and Herzegovina a citizen assembly was called to express its opinion on constitutional and electoral questions. Scotland’s Citizen Assembly published its report. One of the recommendations in the report was to use allotted bodies to scrutinize government proposals and parliamentary bills. An allotted assembly about the climate was discussed in Austria as well. Ireland held a citizens’ assembly on gender equality. Washington state allotted a climate assembly. In the wake of the protests following the murder of George Floyd, allotted police oversight commissions were discussed in California. A CS course at Harvard dealt with sortition and an algorithm for quota sampling from unrepresentative volunteers made it into Nature.

The Japanese journal Law and Philosophy devoted an issue to “Just Lotteries”. Hélène Landemore, Yale political science professor and author of the book Open Democracy, has promoted sortition in an interview in The Nation magazine and in an article in Foreign Policy magazine. The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College held a conference about sortition.

Sortition was proposed as a way to create a governing body for the Internet, as tool to counter the allure of the Chinese system, as a way to save the UK and to stop popular but “undemocratic or illiberal” leaders from getting elected, and as a way to appoint public servants. A paper discussed sortition with a focus on India. In Massachusetts a letter to the newspaper introduced its readers to the idea of allotted citizen assemblies. A new book asserted that sortition is the only way to achieve a demcoratic system, while an article claimed that sortition is unable to address the biggest problem of the existing system, citizen apathy.

Filed under: Academia, Applications, Elections, Opinion polling, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 5 Comments »

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