Sortition | Equality by lot

Saillans

Posted on March 8, 2018 by rcaze

Let’s do some sightseeing and go to Saillans. A small village in a South of France tried something unusual, and I belong to a collective in Paris wanting to reproduce their experiment. A member sent a bunch of links to videos about Saillans.

Two images to help locating Saillans. Romain Cazé CC-BY

Saillans’ town hall uses sortition massively. 12 randomly selected citizen control the elected official (check 5:00 of this video). They also use random selection to build action groups on specific topics, like designing the city’s urban plan. The experiment demonstrates how we can use chance to enhance citizen involvement. They demonstrate at least two points: (1) Citizens can perform executive functions, and (2) Citizens can be used to control the executive power.

Of course, some locals speak against this method and for them things were better before. And some mayors around look on Saillans with a judgemental eye. They argue that people should not decide on topics unknown to them. We can answer this argument in two ways: people can become experts through action, and certain mayors didn’t have any prior training before their elections.

But the easiest criticism of this experiment is about its scale (Saillans’ population is around 1,200 inhabitants). Hey, we need to start somewhere and better start at the smallest scale possible. I like the bottom-up approach and believe that a revolution should be done one step at a time. The town hall has worked this way for four years now. A story to be continued…

Thank you for reading! Write below, if you want to add information about Saillans or why you agree or disagree.

This post was originally published on http://www.stochocratie.org.

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

New “sortition around the globe” map

Posted on March 7, 2018 by Brett Hennig

The Sortition Foundation has launched its new “sortition around the globe” map – we know there are many examples missing (those that we do know about will slowly be added). If you want to help just get in touch!

And a reminder about Sortition Foundation events happening in London this weekend:

Sortition Foundation AGM, 8pm Saturday 10th March: contact us for details.
“Back to the Future for a Real Democracy” discussion at Conway Hall, 11am Sunday 11th March. Tickets now available.

Filed under: Applications, Experiments, Initiatives, Juries, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Democracy between sortition and elections

Posted on March 6, 2018 by Yoram Gat

A debate titled “Democracy between sortition and elections” is planned to take place in Namur, Belgium later this month.

In a context where dissatisfaction with the political system is widely shared, the selection of members of legislative assemblies via sortition seems promising in the sense that it allows exchange of citizens’ opinions outside of any framework of careerist political interest. Presentations by Sébastien Laoureux (professor at the Philosophy and Letters department of the University of Namur) and by Philippe Mahoux (surgeon and honorary senator) will be the opportunity to evaluate the link between democracy and elections before exploring new avenues which current democracy can take.

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

Back to the Future for a Real Democracy – London sortition talk

Posted on February 27, 2018 by Brett Hennig

20180311-Democracy-Sortition How can we fix our broken democracies? What lessons can we learn from the past and what bold new democratic experiments are happening right now? At Thinking on Sunday on March 11 at Conway Hall, and together with London Futurists and GlobalNet21, Brett Hennig, author of The End of Politicians: Time for a Real Democracy, will take you back in time through history before jumping back to the future to show how a real democracy of, by and for the people could work. Tickets are now available at http://buytickets.at/conwayhallethicalsociety/138492

Filed under: Experiments, History, Sortition | Tagged: Democracy talk | 1 Comment »

Richard Askwith: People Power

Posted on February 23, 2018 by Yoram Gat

Richard Askwith, a former executive editor of The Independent, has a new book out:

People Power: If we want to defend our democracy we must expel the Lords and replace them with the people

In his new book, ‘People Power’, Richard Askwith makes the case for abolishing the House of Lords and replacing it with a citizens chamber of 400 people to bridge the gap between ‘us’ and ‘them’

[…]

Here’s how [to reform Parliament]. We start in the obvious place, at the least democratic, southern end of the Palace of Westminster. We expel the occupants. And we give the House of Lords to the people.

We cannot put everyone in the chamber; nor can we sensibly put everything to referendum. What we could do, though, is create a People’s Chamber, whose 400 members, randomly conscripted from the electoral roll as jurors, would be a small, representative sample of the population as a whole.

The details are negotiable. Here’s one hypothetical version. Everyone eligible to vote is also eligible for selection by lot to serve in the chamber for a fixed term of, say, four years. Service is compulsory, well-paid and prestigious. The People’s Peers can wear ermine and, if they want, use titles; the financial rewards are comparable to a sizeable lottery win.
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Filed under: Books, House of Lords, Press, Sortition | 170 Comments »

Bouniol: The idea of a Citizens Chamber gains ground

Posted on February 20, 2018 by Yoram Gat

Béatrice Bouniol has been showing some interest in sortition in her stories at La Croix. Last November, on the occasion of the publishing of a new book on the subject of “The Citizens Assembly of the Future”, Bouniol had the following story.

The idea of a Citizens Chamber gains ground

During COP 23, the Foundation for Nature and Man calls on France to make a democratic innovation by establishing a Citizen Assembly for the Future. Facing a crisis of representation, a citizens’ third chamber, an idea which has been discussed for about twenty years, gains ground.

On July 3rd, 2017, speaking in front of Congress, Emmanuel Macron proposed the transformation of the Social and Environmental Economy Council (CESE) into a Chamber of the Future, “a forum of our Republic” aimed at becoming “the crossroad of public deliberation”. Dominique Bourg, president of the scientific council of the Foundation for Nature and Man – created by Nicolas Hulot – having advocated the creation of such a chamber since 2011, was thus pleased at the proposal, but expressed his worry on the pages of La Croix that it could be a mere “rebranding – certainly necessary but far below what is desired.” The programmatic essay that appears today under his direction (Inventing the 21st Century Democracy: The Citizen Assembly of the Future. [Inventer la démocratie du XXIe siècle. L’Assemblée citoyenne du futur, Les Liens qui libèrent/Fondation pour la Nature et l’homme, 2017]) aims therefore to remind the President of the Republic of the conditions required for creating a Citizen Assembly for the Future.

The hall of the Social and Environmental Economy Council, at Iena Square, Paris.

In order to go beyond a feel-good formula, the establishment of a third parliament chamber must rest on an effort of democratic creativity, required by an unprecedented situation. At the age of the anthropocene (a new geological period defined by the impact of humans on their environment), reported by a group of researchers, it is necessary to systematically take into consideration of the impact of laws on the long term, that is, of their influence on the large scale physical and biological evolution of the planet.
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Filed under: Press, Proposals, Sortition | 5 Comments »

Sortition in the Bulletin of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics

Posted on February 16, 2018 by Yoram Gat

The Bulletin of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics has published a column of mine that deals with the historical and theoretical connections between democracy and statistical sampling:

Democracy and statistical sampling

For about 2,500 years, statistical sampling was closely linked with democracy. “Selection by lot is natural to democracy, as that by choice [i.e., elections] is to aristocracy,” asserted Aristotle in the 4th century BC, following his own first-hand experience at Athens and the conventional wisdom of his time. Montesquieu concurred in the first half of the 18th century. It was only in the last 200 years, as democracy displaced aristocracy as the legitimate organizing principle of politics, that sortition—the delegation of power by statistical sampling—had to be air-brushed out of history and political science. […]

As part of the attempt to dismiss sampling as a political device it is sometimes claimed today that its use in Athens was motivated by the superstition that randomization allowed the gods to make the selection. However, the historical record indicates that the main motivation behind the practice was the law of large numbers. It was expected that sortition would produce a group that would mirror the population in important respects. This was often stated as an expectation of resemblance between the population and the sample in terms of wealth and social status (i.e., that most members would be poor commoners) but it was taken for granted that these characteristics would be correlated with certain interests and beliefs.

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Filed under: Academia, Athens, Elections, History, Press, Sortition | 35 Comments »

When is a democratic innovation not a democratic innovation? The populist challenge in Australia

Posted on February 13, 2018 by paulnollen

An interesting article by Lucy Parry about the Australia mini-publics in participedia:

Outside the room: the populist challenge

Remember those NIMBYs and SIFs that mini-publics aim to exclude through random selection? Their exclusion rests on the assumption that the quality and outcome of deliberation is better without those insistent voices. The aim is that through a process of deliberation, people will become ‘more public-spirited, more tolerant, more knowledgeable, more attentive to the interests of others, and more probing of their own interests’ (Warren 1992, p8). Producing deliberated public opinion involves weeding out weak and poorly informed arguments. Again, this is all very well if you are inside the room. If you’re outside the room, you may very well object.

And let’s face it, those objectionable voices are not going away. As Ben Moffit points out, ‘Populism, once seen as a fringe phenomenon relegated to another era or only certain parts of the world, is now a mainstay of contemporary politics across the globe’. The voices that a Citizens’ Jury wants to keep out of the room now have the room surrounded. If we continue down the mini-publics road, the very thing that allegedly legitimises mini-publics will also be its downfall. The assumptions underpinning random selection are that it is representative of the wider community; and that it facilitates better quality deliberation by bringing together everyday citizens rather than insistent voices. Whether these things are accurate or not is a moot point – what actually matters is how they are perceived by broader publics. It is sad but possibly true that for those outside the room, what goes on inside the room doesn’t matter. And I suspect that the argument that a Jury is representative and very well informed is simply not going to cut it.

Mini-publics rely on information presented by experts; populism rejects the knowledge of experts. With all the will and most independently-recruited-and-facilitated process in the world – people may just not trust it.

This is in line with the criteria for the use of sortition in politics I proposed a while ago and especially with our Two Chamber proposal (page 9):

The presentations of the experts and groups of interests have to be public in case of legislative juries, in order to provide both public information and control. This also has to ensure that ‘informed citizens’ share the same view as the citizens’ jury. That way, we avoid that decisions taken by the citizens’ jury differ from what the people think, in case they had the chance to express their view in a referendum.)

Filed under: Proposals, Sortition | 16 Comments »

Shallit: The Sortition Solution

Posted on February 7, 2018 by Yoram Gat

Mathematician and professor of computer science Jeffrey Shallit has a post on his blog in which he advocates for sortition. Some excerpts:

The US political system is clearly broken. … Proportional representation is often proposed as a solution to some of these problems. … But this doesn’t resolve the corruption and tribalism problems…

My solution is exotic but simple: sortition, or random representation. Of course, it’s not original with me: we use sortition today to form juries. But I would like to extend it to all legislative bodies.

Here is a brief outline of how it would work. Legislators would be chosen uniformly and randomly from a universal, publicly-available list; perhaps a list of all registered voters.

In each election period (say 2-5 years), a random fraction of all representatives would be completely replaced, perhaps 25-50%. This would allow some institutional memory and expertise to be retained, while insuring that incumbents do not have enough time to build up fiefdoms that lead to corruption.

Sortition could be phased in gradually. For the first 10 years, sortition could be combined with a traditional electoral system, in some proportion that starts small and eventually completely replaces the traditional electoral system. This would increase public confidence in the change, as well as avoiding the problem of a “freshman class” that would be completely without experience.
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Filed under: Academia, Proposals, Sortition | 21 Comments »

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