The death of James M Buchanan, the notorious Public Choice Theory economist has sparked some interesting discussion on ‘Crooked Timber’, my fav. intellectual blog.
I found myself nodding in vigorous agreement with the following
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Filed under: Elections, Sortition, Theory | 23 Comments »
According to Robert Goodin (2008), one problem with a deliberative forum (allotted or otherwise) is that:
conversations, seen as serial processes with dynamic updating, can easily be path dependent. The outcome of the conversation depends upon the sequence of conversational moves, particularly those early in the conversation that set it off down one path rather than some other. (p.114)
A path-dependent process displays the following features:
Unpredictability. Because early events have a large effect and are partly random, many outcomes may be possible. We cannot predict ahead of time which of these possible end‐states will be reached.
Inflexibility. The farther into the process we are, the harder it becomes to shift from one path to another.
Nonergodicity. Accidental events early in a sequence do not cancel out. They cannot be treated (which is to say, ignored) as ‘noise’, because they feed back into future choices. Small events are remembered.
Potential path inefficiency. In the long run, the outcome that becomes locked in may generate lower pay‐offs than a forgone alternative would have. (p.112)
Filed under: Academia, Books, Theory | 66 Comments »
Herodotus reported about a people that had the custom (like many animals living in tribes) to kill a person who is ill. ‘Naturally’, he comments, ‘the unfortunate man protests that nothing is wrong with him but to no avail’. In such a case, a veto-right, the right of one person in a small scale group being able to torpedo a general decision, would be life-saving (for the man). It would even be advantageous to the group in Summum Bonum fashion. In our case, things are different. When 20 shipwrecked people in a lifeboat should agree with a proposal to drill a hole in the boat except one sane person, who means to survive, the existence of a veto right, then, might well save the lot. This example more or less reflects our state of affairs. But there are other reflections possible.
First of all, one wise man in a boat-load of 20 may compare to a ratio of 100 in the 5 billion, or even to 3 in the 1000 governors.
Secondly, the proposal and vote to drill a hole, can easily be made into the opposite proposal ‘not’ to drill such hole. The veto of a sane man for the first, could be compared to the veto of a crank, the one saving lives, the other destroying life. When you veto the ‘not’ drilling, you in fact drill.
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Filed under: Theory | 3 Comments »
The last Paris sortition meeting was devoted to Bernard Manin’s argument that sortition was replaced by preference election on account of the natural right theory of consent. I challenged Manin on this with an argument based on Fishkin’s claim that the decision process of an allotted assembly modelled on a Deliberative Poll would be a proxy for the informed consent of all citizens. During the report presented to the recent Dublin meeting Peter Stone returned to this point by arguing, with Bentham, that the whole social contract theory of consent was just nonsense on stilts.
Peter recently referred me to Hanna Pitkin’s two-part paper on Obligation and Consent. The paper is hard work, but could be boiled down into just two claims:
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Filed under: Academia, Elections, Sortition, Theory | 51 Comments »
Describing what a lottery can contribute to the process of choosing.
Sanitization, Arrationality or should it be called Super-Humanity?
Whatever it is used for, a lottery does something for the process. Sanitizing is Stone’s description; Arrationality is Dowlen’s.
I do not disagree with either definition, but feel that both are a bit lacking.
Sanitization implies a clean-up, removal of contaminating elements, but leaves open the question: Cleansed of what?
Arrationality, besides being a neologism, hence not easily understood, might also even be taken to mean some kind of crazy departure which abandons the only human attribute that truly sets us above the animals – the ability to use our brains to think about things.
So either incomplete or liable to be mis-understood; can I come up with something better?
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Filed under: Distribution by lot, Religion, Theory | 15 Comments »
Watched a TED talk this evening featuring a Stanford Business School Professor. (We’ve never met.) He presented a study suggesting that people might have more difficulty with certain types of tasks if they are presented with a difficult choice in advance than if the choice is made for them–even if the choice is made for them randomly. The argument isn’t completely clear to me, but that’s par for the course for TED. The talk is here–
Baba Shiv: Sometimes it’s good to give up the driver’s seat
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Harvard Law school professors Adriaan Lanni and Adrian Vermeule discuss sortition among other Athenian political mechanisms. They write:
In the ancient Greek world, selection of magistrates by lot was nearly synonymous with democracy. One of the most important functions of the lot in the Athenian democratic structure was to prevent any individual magistrate from amassing too much power and thereby threatening the sovereignty of the popular Assembly. We argue that the lot, taken together with the principles of rotation and collegiality, operated as precautionary measures against individuals gaining too much influence. Continue reading
Filed under: Athens, Elections, History, Sortition, Theory | 2 Comments »
Daniel Baron of the Institute of Sociology, RWTH Aachen University introduces his article, The Power of the Lot: Are People Obliged to Participate in Political Lotteries? as follows:
While empirical research in the field of aleatoric democracy usually focuses on the deliberative outcomes of these procedures (Fishkin & Luskin 1999; Fishkin et al. 2000), theoretical approaches mainly ask whether political lotteries, compared to traditional ways of recruiting political personnel (esp. elections), are just or not (Stone 2007, 2009). Further discussions broach the subjects of political representation, equality or input- and output-legitimacy (Buchstein 2009a). Down to the present day, a key question to ask when focusing the problem of legitimacy of aleatoric democracy has been most widely ignored: whether laypersons chosen by lot should be compelled to participate in the committee where they have gained a seat, or whether sortition should be founded on the principle of voluntariness.
Filed under: Juries, Sortition, Theory | 15 Comments »
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