Call for 2020 review input

Posted on December 12, 2020 by Yoram Gat

This is the yearly call for input for the year’s end review. As in previous years, I would like to have a post or two summarizing the ongoings here at Equality-by-Lot and notable sortition-related events over the passing year. Any input about what should be included is welcome – either through comments below or via email. You are invited to refresh your memory about the events of the passing year by browsing Equality-by-Lot’s archives.

For previous years’ summaries see: 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010.

Filed under: Distribution by lot, meta, Sortition | Leave a comment »

Sortition in Government Series

Posted on December 10, 2020 by Owen Shaffer

Terry Bouricius will be leading a series of presentations on applying sortition to government at the next several monthly meetings of Democracy Without Elections, formerly the United States Chapter of the Sortition Foundation. The next monthly meeting will be held online on Tuesday 15 December at 9pm Eastern, 6 Pacific (US time). Terry’s topic is “Underlying legitimacy of election vs. sortition,” and further described as…

“Both election and sortition claim to be representative forms of democracy, but they have very different historic roots and very different bases for legitimacy. The different methods are likely to deliver very different policy outcomes as well. Law making using sortition dates back thousands of years, and is recently undergoing a resurgence.”

The meeting includes reports from Interest Groups and from our new Board of Directors. Contact Owen for access to the meeting.

Future online meeting presentations in this series will include discussions on

  • Why elections are a bad tool for running a democracy
  • Sortition representation and accountability
  • Why having one chamber elected and one chamber by sortition is problematic
  • How to organize law-making with sortition
  • Aspects of Sortition: impartiality, anti-corruption, representativeness, diversity benefits
  • Sortition role in the executive branch
  • Transition strategies to sortition democracy

Filed under: Action, Sortition | Tagged: | 8 Comments »

Stakeholders! Empowerment! Holacritic! Nodes! Doughnut Economics! Flatpack Democracy! Sortition! Curation!

Posted on December 9, 2020 by Yoram Gat

The Brixton Buzz is “Brixton’s biggest and most comprehensive news , features and listings site”. It has “long rallied against the divisive, exclusive and downright incomprehensible jargon that self-elected community representatives The Brixton Project have been spouting recently”. It turns out that “sortition” is part of this bombastic jargon.

Some excerpts from the Brixton Buzz article:

The Brixton Project – the ‘community group’ who intentionally exclude most of their audience

The Brixton Project promises:

Stakeholders! Empowerment! Holacritic! Nodes! Doughnut Economics! Flatpack Democracy! Sortition! Curation! All resulting in: Inclusive and Cohesive Community Agency!​

The Brixton Project has been at pains to underline its commitment to inclusiveness across all the people of Brixton.

But – according to the Fleischer-Kincaid grade index, a widely accepted measure of comprehensibility – BP’s prose requires graduate-level comprehension, and is intelligible to only about 30% of the general public.

BP’s prose is a trifecta of gobbledegook: a turgid pseudo-intellectual blend of civic bureaucratese, cultural studies academic jargon and architectural-theoretic gibberish, which is pretty intimidating for anyone with limited or average English proficiency.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Press, Sortition | Leave a comment »

Democracy Without Elections Board Selected by Lottery

Posted on December 3, 2020 by Yoram Gat

A news release by Democracy Without Elections.

Directors for national board selected by lottery

The advocacy group “Democracy Without Elections” has decided to practice what it preaches and select its entire Board of Directors by lottery. Using a lottery, Democracy Without Elections (www.DemocracyWithoutElections.org) is able to form a diverse board and include input from less active members. The new Board, with Directors from across the country, will meet online later this month.

Democracy Without Elections is a grassroots member-driven organization that promotes better decision-making across all levels of government and in organizations ranging from Boards of Directors to student government. The use of democratic lotteries to select the decision-makers coupled with deliberation as the process to make the decisions are the hallmark of the group.

The organization specifically advocates for democratic lotteries to be used to select members in legislative bodies like Congress. The group also supports making fundamental changes in the way those bodies operate: replacing lobbyists, coalitions and partisan politics with deliberation.

Democracy Without Elections is a proponent of citizens’ assemblies as well. Citizens’ Assemblies are lottery-selected deliberative groups which make recommendations to legislative bodies. Each citizens’ assembly is tasked with one challenging issue like abortion or a specific ballot initiative.

The organization has members from Alaska to Florida and from New England to California. We welcome new members who can join us at www.DemocracyWithoutElections.org. We hold monthly online meetings that include relevant guest speakers and reports from Interest Groups.

Filed under: Applications, Organizing, Sortition | 3 Comments »

Ostfeld: The Case for Sortition in America

Posted on November 30, 2020 by Yoram Gat

Jacob Ostfeld makes a radical, uncompromising argument for sortition in the Harvard Political Review. Some excerpts:

The political realities of 2020 have laid bare that these flaws are structural to American democracy itself and have existed since its founding. Our system is not broken; it is functioning exactly as was intended. The system was always built around undemocratic institutions. The Electoral College, which allowed President Trump to be elected despite losing the popular vote, was created to protect the interests of slaveholding aristocrats in the South. Members of Congress are able to sustain decades-long careers in Congress despite consistently low approval ratings because of millions of dollars in lawful donations from Wall Street firms — donations which were made legal in the first place by a 5-4 decision from the nine lifetime-appointed justices on the Supreme Court. None of the undemocratic systems governing us today are subversions of the Constitution. On the contrary, they are all perfectly legal.

How, then, do we save American democracy? Sortition.

In simplest terms, sortition means appointment by lottery. In America, sortition would mean replacing Congress with assemblies made up of randomly chosen American citizens; elected representatives are entirely eliminated. Almost every responsibility of the legislative branch is delegated to a randomly subset of the population. Laws are written, discussed, and passed by ordinary people. Federal judges are interviewed and confirmed by ordinary people.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Elections, Press, Sortition | 2 Comments »

The New Flemish Alliance does not want to see democracy turning into a “lottocracy”

Posted on November 27, 2020 by Yoram Gat

A translation of an article from the Belgian La Libre.

Government reform: The New Flemish Alliance does not want to see democracy turning into a “lottocracy”
November 25, 2020

The government reform undertaken by the De Croo government cannot be a pretext for turning parliamentary democracy into a sortition-based system, warned on Wednesday the head of the N-VA (The New Flemish Alliance) in the Chamber of Representatives, Peter De Roover, during a discussion in the Constitution Committee on the presentation regarding political directions by the ministers for institutional reforms.

The new government drew up for the upcoming year a “platform of dialog” regarding the future of the Belgian federalism along the lines of that which is planned regarding the future of Europe. A “large scale consultation involving citizens, in particular young citizens, as well as civil society, universities, experts, and local authorities” will be undertaken, indicated the document by ministers David Clarinval and Annelies Verlinden.

The way in which citizens would be involved in the process raised questions among the nationalist opposition which asked whether the Vivaldi Coalition is going to resort to sortition, a method which was promoted over the last few years by some intellectuals. “I have more confidence in a body that was elected by the citizens than in a panel of allotted citizens”, emphasized De Roover who would not like to see democracy replaced by a “lottocracy”.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Press, Proposals, Sortition | 10 Comments »

The French Citizen Climate Convention: a provisional analysis

Posted on November 25, 2020 by Yoram Gat

It has been about 5 months since the French Citizen Climate Convention has published its proposals, and with acrimony setting in about the de-facto shelving of much of its work, various conclusions are being drawn about the CCC process. As usual, the conclusions almost invariably confirm the existing notions of the analyst. My analysis is no different in this sense: it seems to me that to a large extent each party to the process has played its expected role and thus the outcomes are quite predictable. I will highlight however two points that have been established empirically that should not have been taken for granted regarding how things would turn out.

Here are points about the CCC process that in my opinion are worth noting:

1. The process was launched as a government response to the Gilets Jaunes, a mass movement whose agenda was not just anti-government but also anti-electoralist. A popular initiative process (Referendum d’initiative citoyenne, or RIC) and to a lesser extent sortition were a major part of the discourse of the Gilets Jaunes. The rise of the Gilets Jaunes movement was triggered by what the government presented as environmentalist policy – increasing the gas tax. Thus having a non-electoralist process for generating environmental policy proposals was a direct capitulation to GJ demands. This origin of the body as a direct, stop-gap response to mass protest is very different from the origins of other allotted bodies, such as the Irish constitutional conventions. Such bodies, even if they were in some way a response to public disaffection with the status quo, were constituted in a much more carefully controlled manner by established power.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Applications, Elections, Mass action, Opinion polling, Press, Sortition | 6 Comments »

Carolan: Ireland’s Constitutional Convention: Behind the hype about citizen-led constitutional change

Posted on November 23, 2020 by Yoram Gat

A 2015 paper by Eoin Carolan, Professor and Director of the Centre for Constitutional Studies at University College Dublin, takes a skeptical look at the conventional claims around Ireland’s Constitutional Convention which led to the legalization of same-sex marriage. (Note that later there was also a different allotted body constituted in 2016 which was called a “Citizens’ Assembly” and which led to the legalization of abortion.)

The article suffers from the standard pro-status-quo bias of showing no recognition of the urgency of the need to address the problems with the existing system. As usual, recognition of problems with the established system is phrased in terms of “public perception”, “disenchantment”, “disillusionment” and a “crisis of confidence”, rather than in terms of the facts of ongoing consistent systemic atrocious policy. Thus, while the paper rightly subjects the Convention process to a series of critical examinations, it seems to assume that the status quo is a legitimate default alternative. That said, I find that the article asks good questions, makes good observations and is generally very useful.

Abstract

Ireland’s Constitutional Convention is one of a number of recent examples of ordinary citizens becoming involved in constitution-making processes. These participatory experiments are often praised by democratic scholars. That has been the case with the Convention, which has already been cited as an example for any future process of constitutional change in Britain. This article argues that the Irish experience has been oversold. The process in fact suffered from a number of serious limitations that undermine its claims to either representative or deliberative legitimacy. The approach taken to its composition, agenda, expert advice and evidence was problematic in several respects: opaque, apparently ad hoc and with inadequate attention to the risks of bias and manipulation by elite actors. The Irish experience provides a warning about how the symbolic value of the ordinary citizen can be exploited for political purposes.

Filed under: Academia, Applications, Initiatives, Sortition | 16 Comments »

Partitioned Sortition: Ensuring Proportional Representation despite Random Selection

Posted on November 19, 2020 by Yoram Gat

This post was withdrawn at the request of the author. You can still read the post on the author’s blog.

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

Extinction Rebellion claims the Scottish Citizens’ Assembly on the climate is rigged

Posted on November 15, 2020 by Yoram Gat

The Scottish Citizens’ Assembly on the Climate Emergency is an allotted body created by the 2019 Climate Act that is mandated to answer the question “How should Scotland change to tackle the climate emergency in a fair and effective way?”.

The Extinction Rebellion organization was part of the process of setting up this body and its procedures. It has now quit the process claiming that the process has been rigged. “Rather than enabling a full spectrum of opinions to be heard, so people can come to their own conclusions, and make their own assessment of the value of current policy and targets, business as usual has been allowed to creep in and then take over.”

In an op-ed written by Extinction Rebellion members, they explain that civil servants have control over the design of the proceedings and those civil servants are happy with the status quo. In terms of how the rigging is done, they say:

Deliberations won’t be allowed to start until people have fully understood the difference between adaptation and mitigation responses, and the different government policy frameworks at a national and international level.

Those of us who have been talking about climate in different communities for years know very well this background understanding is not only not necessary – there’s a huge risk of disengagement from the very people we need to hear from.

People need to understand enough of the science, especially in terms of real-world impacts, but then need to judge for themselves the effectiveness or otherwise of our response so far: have the powerful’s many fine words led to any changes on the ground?

Filed under: Applications, Press, Sortition | Tagged: | 40 Comments »

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