I’ve done an interview for the BBC Radio show “The Inquiry.” The episode is now online under the title “What’s the Point of Lotteries?” You can find it here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p046z7fg
Most of the first half is concerned with lotteries as a form of gambling, but my interview (which starts at 17:23, in part 4) focuses upon the social and political uses of lotteries. I don’t think it came off half-bad.
Filed under: Academia, Press, schools, Sortition, Theory | 3 Comments »
This was published on Open Democracy last week: The Irish Citizens’ Assembly on abortion: democratisation or dodging responsibility?
I find it very exciting, that the Irish government is returning for their second assembly using sortition – this time without politicians. Although we’ll have to wait and see what they do with the results.
It’s due to start next month.
Filed under: Applications, Juries, Sortition | 1 Comment »
Patrick Chalmers and I are offering our conversation regarding Brexit and related issues.
Filed under: Ballot measures, Elections, Press | Tagged: Democracy talk, video | 3 Comments »
Joshua Laferriere is graduating in December from Cal State University Dominguez Hills (Business Analytics). He is a hobbyist in philosophy and classical history with a focus on the Greeks but covering most Mediterranean civilizations. He has a basic understanding of voting systems (ironically). He has arrived at an independent conclusion that allotment is the best form of expression of the “will of the people” (the idea coming from statistics first, Greece second). He has done some work in the field of information systems and follows US politics closely.
There are a lot of pro’s to Election by Lot. For sure it beats elective democracy. It draws its representatives from the pool of people, effectively doing away with partisan politics and lobbyists.
Obviously we have issues like Socrates being executed. So we have a potential for the mob rule being easily swayed this way and that. We have the Sophist movement which was spearheaded by Protagoras who believed rhetoric was the key to success in life, because it allowed one to sway public opinion.
Plato was rebelling against Athenian Democracy with his work the Republic, some of it directed at the very issues the Sophists were manipulating. What is interesting is the Demagogue was something that benefited from the ideas of Sophistry (sway public opinion with fancy arguments, but not necessarily arguments that are for the betterment of the people) in a system that didn’t even have elections. Where as today there is more ripe for abuse by sophistry than in Athens where the rhetoric abuse was just kept within the voting on issues itself.
The Peloponnesian war ended before the Republic was written (by at least 20 years) and Athenian Democracy was in decline. After the fall to Sparta, the 30 tyrants were instated. Athens had reclaimed their democracy from the 30 tyrants (miraculously), and shortly after condemned Socrates to Plato’s dismay. Socrates had rubbed this democracy the wrong way with his constant inquiries (probably because of his gadfly status, but also his penchant for questioning the established norm, which certainly would have rubbed the 30 tyrants the wrong way). This may have been a backlash against old Athenian inquiry and questioning the norms during the Athenian Empire’s expansive golden age. This new reduced Athens probably wanted a scapegoat for their past ways, to set an example against those who try to push the envelope of accepted norms.
Continue reading
Filed under: Athens, Sortition | 2 Comments »
The American Political Science Association’s annual meeting ran Sept 1-4th. Several happenings there indicate that sortition is now in the (political science) public eye.
On day 1, during a panel called “A good year for deliberative theory, 20 years later” Jane Mansbridge mentioned selection by lot several times, adding that the public needs more education on the concepts of representative samples and minipublics.
On day 2, during a panel on majoritarianism, Jeremy Waldron (I am told) raised a copy of Van Reybrouck’s Against Elections and mockingly shook it.
On the closing morning of the convention, a roundtable titled “Lotteries and the Transformation of Democratic Theory” included Alex Guerrero, Hélène Landemore, Claudio Lopez-Guerra, Peter Stone, Arash Abizadeh, Alex Kirshner, and Emilee Chapman. In the audience was Jim Fishkin (who made a long intervention, mentioning an allotted legislature he was asked to design for Mongolia, as well as Deliberative Polls in several other countries–Ghana, Japan, China–then quickly exited), myself and several others.
In addition, several panels throughout the convention involved political psychologist, scientist or theorists addressing minipublics, assessing deliberation, etc. Using the online agenda allows you to search the panels by keyword, if you’re interested in the specifics.
During the roundtable, Peter used the word “sortinista” to mean someone who thinks ONLY a pure lottocracy would be a true democracy. Is this how you understand it? I think of a sortinista as an advocate of SOME use of sortition in a democratic process, perhaps at some key stage of decision-making.
Filed under: Academia, Deliberation, Sortition | 6 Comments »
If Brexit proved anything, it proved that what Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels say in Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government is true. People do not vote after careful consideration of facts and options, they vote to affirm their membership of various social groups and express agreement with the opinions of those groups, which may have little or nothing to do with the issue at hand being voted upon.
As David Van Reybrouck expressed so eloquently in his article, Why elections are bad for democracy (an extract from his book Against Elections) there is something very wrong with voting and elections and there is a much better way to do democracy: select a representative random sample of ordinary people, provide them with balanced information, and let them deliberate together to find out not what people do think, but what they would think, if given the time and information together with a good deliberative process.
From 11am to 4pm on September 24th, in Cambridge at the Six Bells Pub, a group of volunteers will meet to kick-off the process of bringing Van Reybrouck’s brainchild – a G1000 – to the UK for the first time. The dream is to bring a randomly selected group of 1000 residents together for one day in early 2017, to deliberate and decide together what is best for Cambridge.
But we need your help to make it a reality. We need people to donate their time and their energy to help organise such an event. We will need fundraisers, social media ambassadors, technicians, volunteers, cooks and a whole host of other help. Can you be one of these people? If so please join us, get in touch or come along to the G1000 Kick-off in Cambridge on September 24th.
[This post is from the Sortition Foundation blog: http://www.sortitionfoundation.org/g1000_kick_off_in_the_uk_cambridge_september_24th]
Filed under: Action, Applications, Deliberation, Experiments, Initiatives, Sortition | Tagged: citizen deliberation, David Van Reybrouck, G1000, sortition | 8 Comments »
This draft, not-for-citation paper by Daniela Cammack (forthcoming in Declinism, Central European University Press), argues that the 4th Century was actually the high point of Athenian democracy and culture:
The incomparable Mogens Hansen has done more than anyone to refocus attention on fourth century Athens (particularly 355-22), arguing convincingly not only that the democracy in the age of Demosthenes differed significantly from that of Pericles but also that the vastly richer philosophical, oratorical and epigraphical sources of the fourth century should make it the centre of gravity of histories of the period.
Unfortunately Hansen views the change from assembly- to sortition-based legislative decision making as ‘a move from the “radical” democracy of the fifth century to a more “moderate” (later “modified”) system in the fourth’. According to Cammack this is anachronistic:
This is exactly what a subject of a modern constitutional democracy would expect. The judiciary, in such systems, is indeed meant to limit what “the people” (or their representatives) can do to themselves. But it is not clear that the relationship between Athenian judges and assemblygoers should be understood in these terms. In particular, we cannot assume that late fifth-century Athenians regarded their courts as a less democratic forum than the assembly, since in both cases, among other things, decisions were made by ordinary citizens voting en masse. Indeed, I will argue that judicial panels may have been regarded as a significantly more reliable vehicle of the rule of the dêmos, conceived as the collective common people as distinct from those who took leading political roles. From this perspective, far from moderating democracy, the reforms of the late fifth century seem designed to render it more extreme.
Filed under: Academia, Athens, History, Juries, Sortition | 1 Comment »
Harald K. calls attention to an interview with Charly Pache, a Swiss political activist, in the Pirate Times. Pache is one of the founders of the group “Génération Nomination” which aims to introduce sortition to the Swiss government. In the interview he makes an explicit proposal: replace elections with sortition as the mechanism for selecting the Swiss legislature.
Excerpt:
Pirate Times: What is “Generation Nomination” initiative?
Charly Pache: Generation Nomination is a Swiss based movement that wants to empower every citizen to be an active element of democracy, by introducing a system called ‘sortition’ in which members of the legislative are no more elected but randomly selected among all citizens, hence to give equal chances to all to be a player in the political decisions, no matter how rich or connected the citizen is. We are active on local, regional and national levels, with good connection with direct democracy NGO’s, academics and activists around the world.
Pirate Times: When did it start and what are its aims?
Charly Pache: We launched Generation Nomination publicly in 2015 after two years of preparation. The European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) does not ensure the right to democracy but barely to ‘free elections’, what in fact shrinks the exercise of democracy to only elections… this is a very poor definition, as democracy is a lot more than ‘elections’: it’s about participation of all citizen, debating, informing, building political competences among the population. Furthermore, elections are of aristocratic nature, not of democratic essence. We want to broaden the ECHR with the right to democracy.
Filed under: Ballot measures, Elections, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 3 Comments »
In a 2007 interview, Bernard Manin explains to Hélène Landemore his theory of the principle of distinction (my translation):
[E]lites play in effect an important role in a representative government. This is so because elections necessariliy select individuals who possess uncommon characteristics which are positively valued by the voters. A candidate who is not distinguished by certain traits that are judged favorably cannot win an electoral competition. That said, the electoral method does not determine which specific distinguishing characteristics positive judgment are those which would get candidates elected. These characteristics are determined by the preferences of the voters, that is, by ordinary citizens. The voters choose the distinguishing qualities which they want to find in their representatives. The qualities could consist of a number of things, including an exceptional ability to express and disseminate a certain political opinion. Even in this case, we are still dealing with elites, in the sense these people who are exceptionally capable of defending an opinion possess a talent that most of the people who share the opinion do not. This is the meaning I attach to the term “elites”.
Manin’s claim that the distinguishing characteristics of the elected must be valued positively by the voters, or else they would not be able to win the elections, is empirically refuted by the case of the 2016 presidential elections in the US. In this case, both candidates are disliked by a plurality of the voters, have negative favorability numbers and have a majority of their “supporters” state that they are voting against their opponents rather than for them.
Filed under: Academia, Elections, Press, Theory | 2 Comments »
Filed under: Elections, Press, Sortition | Tagged: image | 6 Comments »
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Equality by lot 