On the legitimacy of citizen assemblies

Posted on September 7, 2020 by Pierre-Etienne Vandamme

Dear Kleroterians,

I am currently writing on the legitimacy that grounds sortition-based representation in general, and citizen assemblies in particular. Not the perceived legitimacy of citizen assemblies (whether people actually see them as legitimate or not), but the reasons that we might have to see the decisions of such asssemblies as binding.

I realize that you have thought about this much more than I have. And this is why I would be interested in having your opinion on the three following questions:

  1. What are the potential sources of legitimacy for citizen assemblies, besides political equality, representativeness, impartiality and ordinarity?
  2. Among these different potential sources of legitimacy, which one(s) do you see as the most important?

    3. Finally, because I am expecting many of you to highlight representativeness as the main source of legitimacy, I add a third question:

  3. Would you say that a citizen assembly of 50 to 100 participants, with optional participation, still has some legitimacy? Would your opinion be different with stratified sampling?

Thank you very much for your input! I will make sure to credit the Blog if a publication comes out of this!

Filed under: Sortition | Tagged: , , | 99 Comments »

Consensus in this group

Posted on September 6, 2020 by Owen Shaffer

I would like to identify the ideas held by members of this group that reach the level of consensus. Can I assume that there is a general consensus that sortition is better than elections?

At the other end, there appears to not be consensus that using sortition to replace elections in a legislative body can be accomplished using one sortition-selected body that does it all vs. an agenda-setting sortition-selected body working in conjunction with one or more policy-deciding mini-publics. And there is not consensus about whether a bicameral legislature is effective if one chamber is elected and one is sortition-selected.

What are the ideas in the group that actually reach the level of consensus?

Filed under: Elections, meta, Sortition | 31 Comments »

The Morning Star: An allotted assembly could not address the climate crisis

Posted on September 4, 2020 by Yoram Gat

The British socialist newspaper The Morning Star has published an editorial in which it criticizes XR’s “non-ideological” stance and XR’s demands for an allotted climate assembly. The background for the editorial is a recent tweet by XR:

Just to be clear we are not a socialist movement. We do not trust any single ideology, we trust the people, chosen by sortition (like jury service) to find the best future for us all through a #CitizensAssembly A banner saying ‘socialism or extinction’ does not represent us 🙏🏽🙏 [@XRebellionUK, 4:56 PM · Sep 1, 2020]

This tweet has apparently been issued in response to a photo showing participants in an XR protest carrying the said “socialism or extinction” banner.

The Morning Star editorializes:

The proposal of a citizen’s assembly selected by sortition, frequently made by XR, is linked to its claim to be non-ideological.

But the problem with the assumption that such an assembly could address the climate crisis is the same as that of XR’s whole tweet: it wilfully ignores the central role of the capitalist system in driving climate chaos.

Appeals to parliaments and presidents to “do something” about climate change will fail if they treat such decision-makers as neutral actors rather than instruments of class power.

Filed under: Mass action, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 6 Comments »

Will blames everybody

Posted on September 3, 2020 by Yoram Gat

George Will writes in the Washington Post about the troubles democracy is having. It seems everybody is to blame: the people and their unrealistic expectations of self-rule fed by careless descriptions of democracy, the French revolutionaries and their nationalistic “fraternité”, the former captive nations of the former Eastern Bloc that are illiberal, U.S. universities, new media, right-wing and left-wing extremists, protesters and their assertions that the U.S. was founded upon genocide and slavery, the infantile panic of liberal Democrats, elections themselves that produced a floundering elite.

Aristotle told us (or at least told Harvard political philosopher Harvey Mansfield) that elections are aristocratic and aim to produce the rule of the best. That seems hard to believe. Maybe selection by lot should be considered?

Filed under: Academia, Elections, Press, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Radio Podcast Series “Democracy in Crisis” on Democracy and Sortition

Posted on August 30, 2020 by Ahmed R. Teleb

Last month, with WORT FM in Madison, Wisconsin, I helped organize a three-part radio podcast series “Democracy in Crisis,” that asked what’s wrong with elections and explored alternatives such as assemblies and juries. Thanks very much to those who took part. Additional thanks to Chris Forman, Yoram Gat, Adam Cronkright, Keith Sutherland, and Manuel Arriaga for suggestions and introductions.

We aimed to include differing approaches and points of views in each round-table discussion, and largely succeeded, imho. My own view—that in modern mass politics, characterized by polarization and geographical and intellectual self-sorting, minipublics function as exceptional, pluralistic spaces for the formation of citizenship—was nowhere represented; so, that gives me at least one motive for a follow-up program.

Below are links to the episodes, also found in most podcast applications under the program “8 O’clock Buzz,” published on Aug 27, 28, 29.

Democracy In Crisis, Part 1: What’s Wrong With Elections?
Across the globe, electoral fraud, corruption, disenfranchisement of minorities and the specter of fascism now seem the rule rather than the exception. In 2017, the London-based Economist Democracy Index hit its lowest score ever, including the downgrading of the United States from a “Full Democracy” to a “Flawed Democracy.” Today, we start a three-part series, Democracy in Crisis, which will explore the failures of our current electoral system and perhaps, provide some hope for an alternative model.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Elections, Initiatives, Juries, Participation, Sortition, Theory | Tagged: , , , | 18 Comments »

Wang Shaoguang: Representative and Representational Democracy, Part 3/3

Posted on August 29, 2020 by Yoram Gat

Part one, part two.

Wang’s skeptical evaluation of the Western conception of democracy and of the arguments for elections as a democratic tool are in fact merely a segue to his main topic which is the “Mass Line”. According to Wang, the Mass Line is the basis for decision making by the Chinese system of government. Wang describes the Mass Line as an ongoing process by which decision makers interact with the population in order to become informed and shape public policy. Wang quotes Mao Zedong as follows:

In every aspect of my party’s practical work, if leadership is to be correct it must come from the masses and go to the masses. This is to say, we must collect the views of the masses (disparate and un-systematic views) and, through study, turn them into collective and systematic views, and then we must go back to the masses to disseminate and explain them, turning them into the masses’ own views, enabling the masses to persevere, and to see these views implemented in practice. From the practice of the masses we must conduct examinations to determine whether these views are correct. We then must once again collect the views of the masses, and once again go back to the masses and persevere. This endless cycle will each time be more correct than the last, richer and more vivid than the last. This is the epistemology of Marxism.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Elections, History, Participation, Proposals, Sortition, Theory | 16 Comments »

Sortition in the Executive

Posted on August 28, 2020 by Alex Kovner

Much of the sortition discussion revolves around the legislative branch, but historically, it was often the random selection of magistrates that signaled a true democracy. I would like to start a discussion of how executive officers can be selected by lot in a modern state. This is crucially important, because while the legislature may be the traditional home of sovereignty in a democracy, the executive branch is what most citizens experience as the state.

My first post deals with a structure that I call a coordination hierarchy, which I believe should be the standard way to organize the political layer of the executive branch. In future posts, I will discuss criticisms and challenges to this structure, as well as fleshing out some other requirements to make this system work in practice. My ultimate goal is to describe a way in which the political layer can be populated by a political service: a professional corps of public servants who are responsive to the public through citizen juries, but which operates under a set of constraints that make it look more like the civil service.

Filed under: Proposals, Sortition | 13 Comments »

Leydet: Which conception of political equality do deliberative mini-publics promote?

Posted on August 28, 2020 by paulnollen

A 2016 paper by Dominique Leydet from the department of philosophy at the University of Québec at Montréal:

Which conception of political equality do deliberative mini-publics promote?

My objective in this article is to achieve a clearer understanding of the conception of political equality that informs at least some of these democratic designs in relation to equality of opportunity, but also in relation to agency, both individual and collective.

To do so, I will focus, in the first section, on the methods of participant selection advocated to secure equal presence. According to what principle is participation distributed? If it is according to the equal chance or equal probability principle, rather than equal opportunity, what difference does this make in terms of the underlying conception of political equality? Is ‘equal presence’ conceived strictly in individualist terms or is it related to groups? And, if so, how?

In the second section, I consider the issue of voice. Achieving equality in this context is conceived in terms of equalizing opportunities for influence among participants (Smith 2009: 21-22; Fishkin 2009: 100-101; Fung 2003: 348). I intend to clarify the conditions the designs establish to achieve this objective despite the existence of background inequalities. How is the political agency of participants understood and facilitated in this respect? And what does this say about the underlying conception of political equality?

Filed under: Academia, Sortition, Theory | Leave a comment »

Citizens allotted for drawing electoral districts in Michigan

Posted on August 23, 2020 by Yoram Gat

Back in January it was reported that Michigan has sent out invitations to voters to apply to serve on the Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission. 13 citizens have now been selected to serve on the commission “charged with drawing new district lines for members of the state House and Senate”.

The commission is being assembled as a result of a November 2018 ballot proposal, Proposal 2 which passed with support from 61% of voters. Redistricting was previously handled by the Michigan legislature and approved by the governor, which, Proposal 2 supporters pointed out, allowed politicians to set their own district lines.

Despite the rather limited purview of the commission, it has two important characteristics that set it as an independent source of political power and thus lend it importance. First, the body was constituted through a ballot measure. Thus it was legitimated and mandated directly by the citizens. Second, the body’s function is to supervise, and indeed to limit the power of, the elected officials.

Information about the allotment is available on the state government website. Some of the skews in the applications demographics are quite interesting.

Filed under: Applications, Ballot measures, Elections, Press, Sortition | 10 Comments »

MeRA25 and sortition

Posted on August 12, 2020 by Yoram Gat

MeRA25 is a Greek party headed by former Syriza finance minister Yanis Varoufakis. MeRA25 has recently made two moves pushing sortition forward in the Greek political agenda.

First, in July MeRA25 tabled a bill proposing that senior public servants would be elected by an allotted committee. The bill calls for

Establishment of a new, autonomous General Secretariat for Public Revenue, whose General Secretary will be selected by neither the government nor the lenders. Instead, they will be elected by a Social Committe for Selection of Senior Personnel, 1/3 of which is comprised of parliamentarians, 1/3 by judges selected by sortition and 1/3 by tax professionals – accountants selected by sortition.

Secondly, MeRA25 is selecting its own central committee members with some of them selected by election, some by appointment and some by sortition:

The 1st Central Committee is comprised of the members of the current Extended Political Secretariat, 15 members chosen by sortition amongst all MeRA25 members (who are also DiEM25 members), 2 members from every Administrative Region (excluding Attica) put forward by the Secretary in concert with the Committee for the Organisation of the Congress and Movement Outreach, and 1 member from every electoral district, selected by the members of that district through e-voting.

Filed under: Applications, Elections, Proposals, Sortition | 4 Comments »

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