Belgiorno-Nettis: Power to the people, unnamed and unadvertised

Posted on May 12, 2015 by Yoram Gat

Luca Belgiorno-Nettis, founder of the new Democracy Foundation, writes in The Sydney Morning Herald:

[M]odern democracy was born of privilege and nurtured through class conflict. Conceived in partisan contest, initially as kings and barons, then as landed gentry in elections, the disenfranchised became chartists, then socialists, and the ultra-disenfranchised became communists. Even though the claims of the working class and the suffragettes have largely been resolved, the saga continues in a fossilised relic of divisiveness. Modern democracy rejected the Athenian ideal of equality, wherein the poor, as much as the rich, were automatically accorded a place in government.

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Filed under: Athens, Elections, Juries, Press, Sortition | Tagged: , | Leave a comment »

Technology is not the missing ingredient for democracy

Posted on May 9, 2015 by Yoram Gat

An email I sent to the editors of The New Scientist:

To: “letters@newscientist.com”
Subject: Technology is not the missing ingredient for democracy

Dear Editors,

As you write (“A vote for change“, 25 April, 2015), people perceive that “the parties are all the same, the politicians are all the same, they are not like us”. This perception reflects the inherent elitist nature of the electoral process. Within the electoral process people and parties compete for power. Those who manage to win form a select group with those distinct characteristics that allowed them to win: better connections, more wealth, better organizational skills, more ambition, etc. Why would we expect those winners to represent the rest of us?

Since non-representativity is inherent to the electoral process, technology cannot change its nature. Technology may shift power within the system. Those groups that find out how to exploit new technology may be able to gain power at the expense of others who fail to do so. However, the elitist nature of elections will persist. Those new to power will again be a distinctive group with their own particular agenda and interests and will not represent the public at large.

Achieving a democratic system will require a radical change: moving away from our reliance on elections for selection people with power. Representative power can be created by relying on an established scientific method for obtaining representativity: random sampling. When parliament is selected as a random sample of the population then it would truly be “like us” and then it can then be expected to create policy that promotes the interests of the average citizen.

Best regards,

Yoram Gat

Filed under: Action, Elections, Participation, Press, Sortition | 4 Comments »

Should we talk about “mini-publics” instead of sortition?

Posted on April 22, 2015 by davidschecter

I’ve had many conversations with people about sortition over the last several years, and I’ve never been happy with the term “sortition.” However, I’ve never found a satisfactory alternative. I suspect other people on this blog have also struggled with this problem.

I know of four terms, in English, to describe the selection process we’re talking about. Here are the problems I’ve encountered with each one:

Sortition – doesn’t have an immediate association with anything that people know about (for example, it’s not clearly related to the verb “to sort,” or to the noun “sort”). Also, it sounds like the word “sordid.”

Random selection – the people I’ve talked to intuitively dislike the idea of “random” anything (except random sampling in statistics) – let alone anything “random” connected to democracy (although, ironically, they do like random selection of jurors).

Selection by lot – sounds archaic, even Biblical.

Lottery (and related terms like Alex Guerrero’s “lottocracy”) – has negative connotations because it’s associated with gambling, and (in the United States) with educational lotteries (a few lucky families win, most lose).

What would be a better alternative? At the moment, I think it would be helpful to talk about “mini-publics.”
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Filed under: Sortition | Tagged: | 170 Comments »

Public integrity reform Texas 2015

Posted on April 13, 2015 by constitutionalism

At present Texas vests authority for prosecuting cases of official misconduct in the district attorney of one county, now Travis County, which contains the capital city of Austin, and until recently, the additional work was funded by an appropriation by the State Legislature. This is done because the Texas Constitution vests authority for criminal prosecutions in local county and district attorneys. Neither the State Attorney General nor any state-level official has such authority.

Two controversial prosecutions by the Public Integrity Unit in predominantly Democratic Travis County were clearly political and have led to calls for reform. the first was prosecution of U.S. Rep. Tom Delay, essentially for laundering campaign contributions through the National Republic Party. He was convicted in Travis County but the verdict was reversed on appeal. However, it ended his career in the U.S. Congress.

The second case arose after the Travis County District Attorney was arrested, and later convicted, for DWI, and was video recorded acting very badly, trying to throw her weight around. Governor Rick Perry demanded she resign, or else he would veto the next appropriation for the Unit. She refused, and he did. But Travis County kept the Unit going at reduced strength using County funds. It then hired a special prosecutor who obtained an indictment against Perry for making a felonious threat to a public official in threatening to exercise his veto power. As this is being written, that case is still in the Travis County District Court.

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Filed under: Juries, Proposals, Sortition | Tagged: , , , | 2 Comments »

Democratic experimentation meets democratic education in Cochabamba, Bolivia: a case study

Posted on April 4, 2015 by SimonPek

Founded in 2013, Democracy In Practice is a non-profit organization dedicated to democratic innovation, experimentation and capacity-building in an effort to contribute to government that is more inclusive, representative, and effective.

We present a case study which collectively examines the three pilot projects of Democracy In Practice’s student government program which ran February through November of 2014 in three schools in the Cochabamba area of Bolivia. This program involved replacing student elections with lotteries in which government members were randomly-selected to serve a given term before being replaced by a new group of randomly-selected students.

Program Overview

Implemented in three separate schools in the Cochabamba of Bolivia, the Democratic Student Government Program involved a dynamic and multi-faceted reinvention of student government. Most fundamentally, this reinvention involved replacing elected student governments with those that were randomly selected and rotated from within the student population. These governments of rotated, randomly selected students therefore operated continuously as standing decision-making bodies within the schools. Accordingly, the implementation of this program involved not only clear institutional change but also complex normative change, challenging conventional notions of governance as well as the regular practices and routines of both students and teachers. In this way, the projects explored here differ from other participatory governance initiatives that are typically temporary and limited to a particular issue.

Filed under: Applications, education, Elections, schools, Sortition | 2 Comments »

Sortition and the need for Internal Deliberation

Posted on April 1, 2015 by jgarry20151

What should randomly selected citizens actually do when they are deliberating? Should the deliberation occur in their heads or should it be talk-based? This internal-versus-external deliberation question is core to any discussion of the legitimacy of decisions reached by randomly selected citizens. In the attached paper, presented at a conference in Dublin last Friday, we suggest, to put it bluntly, that talking is bad and imagining is good. We further suggest, and operationalise, distinct ways of facilitating imagined deliberation and present tentative experimental findings as to their relative effectiveness. This draft paper is very much a work in progress but we would welcome any thoughts (including robust disagreement).

Imaginative Randomocracy: A General Model of Citizen Decision Making Applied to Northern Ireland (and the UK)

Filed under: Academia, Proposals, Sortition | 23 Comments »

Sortition and Legitimate Coercion

Posted on March 30, 2015 by Ahmed R. Teleb

In an address called “What is Political Science For?” at the 2013 American Political Science Association’s Annual Meeting, APSA President Jane Mansbridge mentioned sortition as one of the new areas being studied for grounding legitimacy. She referenced Fishkin & Ober in her footnote to the statement. The thrust of her talk is that political scientists (democratic theorists especially) should turn their focus away from preventing tyranny and towards creating “legitimate coercion” because the world is facing rather formidable collective action problems that cannot be solved otherwise. Together with Waldron’s “Political Political Theory” article it leads me to believe that there is some movement in the field towards the questions that we often discuss here on Equality by Lot. Below are some excerpts from the full article found here.

This address advances three ideas. First, political science as a discipline has a mandate to help human beings govern themselves. Second, within this mandate we should be focusing, more than we do now, on creating legitimate coercion. In a world of increasing interdependence we now face an almost infinite number of collective action problems created when something we need or want involves a “free-access good.” We need coercion to solve these collective action problems. The best coercion is normatively legitimate coercion. Democratic theory, however, has focused more on preventing tyranny than on how to legitimate coercion. Finally, our discipline has neglected an important source of legitimate coercion: negotiation to agreement. Recognizing the central role of negotiation in politics would shed a different light on our relatively unexamined democratic commitments to transparency in process and contested elections. This analysis is overall both descriptive and aspirational, arguing that helping human beings to govern themselves has been in the DNA of our profession since its inception.

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Filed under: Academia, Sortition, Theory | Tagged: , , , , | 9 Comments »

A 5-minute video lesson about sortition

Posted on March 25, 2015 by Yoram Gat

Melissa Schwartzberg is a professor of Politics at NYU.

Transcription:

What did democracy really mean in Athens? – Melissa Schwartzberg

Hey, congratulations! You just won the lottery. Only the prize isn’t cash or a luxury cruise. It’s a position in your country’s national legislature. And you aren’t the only lucky winner. All of your fellow lawmakers were chosen in the same way.

This might strike you as a strange way to run a government, let alone a democracy. Elections are the epitome of democracy, right? Well, the ancient Athenians, who coined the word, had another view. In fact elections only played a small role in Athenian democracy, with most offices filled by random lottery from a pool of citizen volunteers.
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Filed under: Academia, Athens, Elections, History, Juries, Participation, Sortition | Tagged: , | 13 Comments »

John Garry : Randomocracy in Northern Ireland

Posted on March 23, 2015 by Yoram Gat

John Garry writes in sluggerotoole.com:

There are three crucial ingredients for a high quality democracy: a very large hat, a pen and lots of small bits of paper. Write the name of each citizen in the land on a bit of paper, put all the bits of paper in the hat, close your eyes and pluck out 500 names from the hat. Write to each of the 500 saying:

“Congratulations, you have been picked as one of the 500 people who will run the country for the next five years. Please come along to our Random Parliament and start making decisions about things like welfare reform, flag display and corporation tax rates (maybe). We’ll put you up in a swanky hotel, pay you loads of expenses and square it with your boss. Look forward to seeing you…”

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Sortition: It’s for your own good

Posted on March 7, 2015 by Yoram Gat

Claudia Chwalisz follows up on a recent article.

Chwalisz’s previous article concluded by observing that

the dilemma of how to get elected elites to relinquish their grip on the seats of power remains unresolved.

Chwalisz’s attempt at a resolution follows the lead of David Van Reybrouk. She addresses herself to the ruling class as the responsible concerned advisor who aims to help established actors find their way through troubled seas, meet the gathering hostile forces and to finally emerge maintaining as much of their power as possible.

The new article’s abstract is as follows:

New forms of contact democracy and innovative forums that allow political and economic institutions to deliberate with citizens are important steps in the long-term battle to renew representative democracy for the 21st century. They should not be seen as a threat to formal systems of government but as important add-ons that enrich democracy and give a window into the complexity of governance

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

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