A post by Dylan Vargas. Dylan Vargas is a Master’s Student at American University studying International Affairs Policy and Analysis. In his studies he focuses on the interplay between good governance and human rights. He has worked extensively in the Democracy space, including work in four electoral campaigns and two years with the League of Women Voters of the United States advocating for Democracy Reform. This post was written as part of a Human Rights course Vargas is taking at AU.
A Constitutional Imperative to Implement a Citizen’s Assembly Model within US Governance
Outline: The core argument of the post is that the United States should implement a Citizen’s Assembly Model to achieve a more representative and responsive form of governance, as promised by the U.S. Constitution. Current democratic mechanisms are failing to adequately reflect the diverse population they serve, leading to widespread mistrust in government institutions. The implementation of a Citizen’s Assembly — a body made up of randomly selected citizens reflecting the demographic makeup of the country — would ensure that the voices and perspectives of ordinary Americans are better represented in policy-making. This argument addresses Equality by Lot’s debates surrounding political representation, democratic legitimacy, and the crisis of public trust in government. It focuses on the US Constitution, founding documents, US polling/stats, and conversations around democratic and repressive government political theory.
The Council of Europe, “the continent’s leading human rights organisation”, announces:
A historic milestone for deliberative democracy: Ukraine’s first-ever Citizens’ Assembly successfully launched
Kyiv, Ukraine 8 October 2024
The first weekend of Ukraine’s inaugural Citizens’ Assembly, supported by the Council of Europe, successfully concluded in Zvyahel. This historic event, the first-ever Citizens’ Assembly held under wartime conditions, marks a significant step in advancing deliberative democracy in Ukraine. The CA was organised by Zvyahel City Council with the expert, methodological and financial support of the Council of Europe project «Strengthening democratic resilience through civic participation during the war and in the post-war context in Ukraine». Continue reading →
INSA is a volunteer organisation aimed at connecting pro-sortition academics, advocates, and activists around the world, to share resources and tactics and advance the theoretical understanding of sortition. www.INSA.site
Patrick Deneen is a professor of political science at Notre Dame university. He is a fairly prominent public intellectual in US politics, popular especially among the Republican elite. His 2018 book, Why Liberalism Failed, drew quite a bit of attention.
A piece by Deneen has recently been published by the Notre Dame magazine. It is a surprisingly, even impressively, good. The heavy punches just keep coming. Here are some excerpts.
Democracy and Its Discontents
The claim that our democracy is imperiled should rightly strike fear in the souls of citizens, but it ought also to give pause to any student of politics. During most of the four decades I have studied and written about democracy, political scientists, and especially political theorists such as myself, would begin not with a claim about the relative health of democracy, but rather with a seemingly simple question: What is democracy?
Yet according to a dominant narrative among today’s academics, public intellectuals, media personalities and even many citizens, it is largely assumed that we know what democracy is. Continue reading →
Novara Media is British media organization which publishes videos on YouTube. On August 31st it published a video in which the presenters mocked a certain UK MP. In the context of lamenting the supposed stupidity of that MP, one of the presenters, Aaron Bastani, suggested appointing the entire House of Commons by lot. Bastani seemed fairly well informed about the topic, mentioning the term sortition and the use of the mechanism in Athens.
The argument about sortition generating a more competent body is somewhat unusual since it is conventionally claimed that sortition generates a more representative but less competent body.
The video had over 17,000 views and over 200 comments, but none of the comments as far as I could see picked up on the topic.
I mean you’d be better off, you’d honestly be better off, just the first person you see on the street or in the pub and saying “Look, you’re going to be an MP for a constituency”, they will be better than Esther McVey.
By the way, that’s something I really believe. If you randomly chose individuals and you made them MPs and then they had to form parties and alliances over a period of time, I genuinely believe they would do a better job than than the House of Commons. I know people are going to get upset with me. That’s not anti-politics left populism. It’s called sortition. It used to be the basis of Athenian democracy. I’m saying that it would be superior, with women involved and no slave class. I do genuinely believe it would give us better MPs than the caliber we have right now.
One of the most common criticisms against sortition is that there is no accountability, whereas election allegedly does have an accountability mechanism. What is the appropriate rebuttal to this criticism? I have tried to answer this poorly in a blog post here. I make up a matrix of hypothetical, idealized scenarios and assess elections vs sortition. I find that elections only achieve accountability contingent on high voter competence. When voter incompetence is assumed, I find that sortition will lead to better outcomes.
In other words, I find that sortition only makes sense in worlds where we do not have competent voters. Moreover, I find that sortition fails in worlds populated by solely Machiavellian personalities (maybe you could call these people homo economicus).
Voter incompetence is manifested as the inability of voters to control and create representative political parties. And their inability to wrest electoral power away from elites. Or their incompetence in participating in the right political primaries or the right elections. Or their inability to effectively compete against wealthy special interests. The public lacks the capacity to win the electoral contests.
A 2022 talk by Prof. Matheson Russell from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, makes the standard case for sortition. Such presentations emphasize amiablity and “empirical findings” at the expense of political power and scientific rigor.
A timeless phenomenon, observed everywhere, is that fewer and fewer citizens believe, and rightly so, that their participation in public affairs can change the existing unjust and miserable type of regime. This is confirmed by the turnout, which falls continuously from election to election. Exactly what it takes for the various saviors to germinate, and this is exactly what is happening nowadays, that will protect us from our many ills. Unfortunately, the Hitler regime, a product of Weimar “democracy”, reminds fewer and fewer people of the evils that lie ahead.
INSA is a volunteer organisation aimed at connecting pro-sortition academics, advocates, and activists around the world, to share resources and tactics and advance the theoretical understanding of sortition. www.INSA.site
Reddit user “totalialogika” wrote the text below in the Reddit r/PoliticalScience forum. The commenters on that forum dismissed the text with various versions of “Sir, this is a political science sub. Please go rant somewhere else”. This raises the question of what makes a certain text a piece of “political science” as opposed to “a rant”. Is it merely that the style needs to conform to certain customs, or is there more to it than that?
Sortition might be the only way
We need to rely on Jury Duty rule to eliminate corrupt and sociopathic politicians, especially those who make a career out of their rhetoric.
And for those who claim “expertise” and “experts” are the only thing that can rule. It is expertise to pervert the rule of law and to promote special interests and experts versed in hollow promises and empty talk meant to address emotional and not rational responses from the denizens.
The degeneration of today’s political system in America is the symptom of how inadequate is an archaic system setup by a few million settlers at the 18th Century for the interests of a patriarchal racist and male dominated country, and now inadequate to serve the need of a 350 million people strong superpower. There were of course attempts at putting lipstick on the pig i.e Civil Rights reforms and more access for minorities and women, but those are as ineffectual and “for show”. Continue reading →
The Council of Europe, “
Patrick Deneen is a professor of political science at Notre Dame university. He is a fairly prominent public intellectual in US politics, popular especially among the Republican elite. His 2018 book, Why Liberalism Failed, drew quite a bit of attention.
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