Populism and Kleristocracy

Posted on January 25, 2016 by keithsutherland

A recent exchange on this forum included the following claims:

TA: The early Populists have been much misunderstood and caricatured, including by Hofstadter. If “populist” is to be defined non-arbitrarily, its meaning is a leader whose policy positions for the most part agree with those of the vast majority of the population. Bernie Sanders is a populist, Trump is not.

TB: I’ve been a personal friend and political ally of Sanders for over 40 years, and I agree that the “populist” label fits Sanders based on the historic use of the term dating back to the People’s Party. However, I think the term has been so over-used (and misused) by the mass media that it isn’t particularly useful any more. Any independent-minded politician, whether a leftist charismatic visionary, a demagogue, or proto-fascist is assigned the label.

According to Cas Mudde, most people use populism as a Kampfbegriff (battle cry) to defame a political opponent. The term is in fact just as applicable to politicians and political parties on the left and the right, Trump and Sanders, Front National and Podemos. In an article for Open Democracy Mudde claims that

populism is best defined as a thin-centered ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ and ‘the corrupt elite’, and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté general (general will) of the people.

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Filed under: Academia, Theory | 19 Comments »

The representativity of a random sample: the need for mandatory participation

Posted on January 19, 2016 by keithsutherland

The unexpected Conservative majority in the 2015 UK general election has led to considerable agonising in the polling industry. Why were the polls — which consistently predicted a hung parliament, or even a Labour victory — so wrong? A polling industry enquiry has come to some interim conclusions, here paraphrased by the BBC political editor, Laura Kuennsberg:

Pollsters didn’t ask enough of the right people how they planned to vote. Proportionately they asked too many likely Labour voters, and not enough likely Conservatives.

Nobody is suggesting that this bias was intentional — it was the accidental by-product of the polling methodology which, rather than drawing a random sample and then knocking on doors (the gold standard, but very expensive), relied heavily on telephone and online surveys. The problem with phone surveys, according to Martin Boon from ICM, is that out of 30,000 random numbers only around generally 2,000 agree to participate. This sample is anything but representative:

Adam Drummond, from Opinium, suggested that the people who agreed to be interviewed were so politically enthusiastic that the would even vote in elections for the European Parliament. . . This seems like a Groucho Marx problem — people answering the phone and agreeing to answer questions about their political opinions automatically means that they are too politically engaged to be representative.

Online polling is even worse:

Online polls are answered by a database of volunteers who have signed up to be on a panel and who the company knows a lot about. When the company is commissioned to do a poll it can be sure that the people it is asking have the same features as the whole population in — for example, the proportion of men and women, or the age profile or income distribution.

However what stratified sampling does not do is to control for the level of political engagement, so

The online polls came out with much the same inaccuracies as the phone ones. Does people’s willingness to be on a panel automatically make them unrepresentative?

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Filed under: Elections, Opinion polling | 62 Comments »

The difficulty of insuring accurate randomness

Posted on January 19, 2016 by Common Lot Sortitionist

This article points to the problem of how to produce true representation in juries.

Dearbhail McDonald: The verdict is in – our jury selection process is a farce

Juries are meant to be representative of society as a whole. However, they are anything but, writes Dearbhail McDonald

Trial by jury is one of the last remaining sacred cows in the criminal justice system.

Born by accident to replace trial by ordeal and duelling, amongst other dispute resolution techniques, the random selection of 12 peers is still prized as the only anchor by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.

Lord Devlin, the celebrated British judge whose father was from Co Tyrone, famously described jury trial as the lamp that shows that freedom lives.

Here’s the salient point:

For the most part, trial by a jury of one’s peers is as unquestioned as it is innate.

But our current system of selecting juries makes a mockery of jury trial as a bulwark against State power and other anomalies.

To fulfil their constitutional mandate, juries (which only featured women from as late as 1976) are meant to be representative and jurors drawn from a complete cross-section of the community.

They are anything but.

In practice, the burden of jury duty is disproportionately borne by Dubliners; the young, the old and retired, the unemployed, civil servants or those who can manage to undertake the difficult task. The recent empanelling of a 15-strong jury … brought home to me the challenges of achieving the “constitutional completeness” of the representative jury.

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Filed under: Elections, Juries, Press | 3 Comments »

Democratic Innovation on Postwaves

Posted on January 15, 2016 by Yoram Gat

postwaves

Adam Cronkright writes:

This is Adam Cronkright, cofounder of Democracy In Practice, an organization that has been experimenting with random selection of representatives in student governments in Bolivia for the past two years. Independently from Democracy In Practice, I’m putting out a call for contributors and readers of Equality by Lot to participate in and help beta test a new online platform that randomly distributes decision-making/moderating power and responsibility among its users.

I’ve been doing some beta testing for a website called Postwaves. The site is inspired by the Wisdom of Crowds (popularized by James Surowiechi) and uses sortition to share moderator responsibilities evenly among all the members of a forum. That is, each post gets randomly and anonymously sent out to a small portion of forum users who vote independently and anonymously on whether the post is relevant to the large group (NOT on whether or not they agree with the post). If it receives a certain threshold (say 50% of those randomly asked to assess it find that it is relevant) it get’s made public on the forum. So in essence, they are testing a sortition-based, scalable way for online groups to moderate themselves horizontally. The idea is to more effectively filter out noise (i.e. irrelevant content) and allow the best content to be most visible regardless of who posted it (celebrity vs. normal person) or whether the first person(s) that read it gave it a thumbs up or a thumbs down (which can have a disproportionate effect on the opinions of those that follow).
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Filed under: Action, Applications, Sortition | 4 Comments »

The Paradox of Democratic Selection: Is Sortition Better than Voting?

Posted on January 6, 2016 by keithsutherland

A draft book chapter by Anthoula Malkopoulou:

Sortition, or the selection of political officers by lot, has its antecedent in the direct democratic tradition of ancient Athens. Its transfer into a modern context of representative democracy poses rightful scepticism not only about the practical difficulties, but more so about the theoretical inconsistencies that arise. Modern systems of political representation are based on the aristocratic idea of ‘government by the best’, who are to be selected through a competitive call for candidates (Manin 1997). Sortition, on the other hand, replaces this aristocratic criterion of competition and evaluative election with the democratic mechanics of direct and equal distribution of political office by chance. Hence, the very expression ‘democratic (s)election’ includes a paradoxical contradiction in terms, between the democratic concept of equal access to public office and the aristocratic idea of government by the (s)elected best.

My aim in this chapter is to shed some light into this contradiction by critically discussing the benefits and pitfalls of using sortition today, comparing it throughout the chapter with voting and the general effects of electoral representation. More specifically, my arguments are divided in four sections. I begin by addressing the reasons that drive klerotarians away from electoral representation (1). Next, I consider alternative modes of political ‘outsourcing’, such as the inclusion of civil society actors or the use of quotas (2). I continue by discussing the democratic legitimacy of sortition by dividing the subject in two questions: (a) political equality and (b) political participation (3). Last, I focus on the type of political representation that the lot produces, viewed from the perspectives of descriptiveness, authorization and accountability (4). In conclusion, I suggest that lotteries may offer valuable improvement to current practices of democratic selection, but only if special measures are taken to compensate for the limitations they entail.

Full text (uncorrected draft: not for citation).

Filed under: Academia, Athens, Ballot measures, Books, Elections, Participation, Sortition, Theory | 26 Comments »

Sortition Introduction for 21st Century Democracy Conference in Alexandria, Egypt

Posted on January 1, 2016 by tbouricius

The Way Forward – by Terry Bouricius

This is the original full draft of an introductory presentation intended to prepare participants of the 21st Century Democracy conference hosted by the Library of Alexandria for the subsequent day’s sessions largely focused on sortition. Due to earlier panels running overtime, this full speech was never presented, and only a few key points were made in an introduction the next day. Note that some underlining and ALL CAPS appear as emphasis aids for reading the speech aloud.

Discussions about the problems of democracy tend to focus on the problems of the elections.

A fundamental point that needs to be understood is that elections are not the same thing as democracy, and are at best one tool for approaching the democratic ideal. Clearly, a system of free and fair elections is a vast improvement over a dictatorship or one-party state. But the ideal of democracy goes far deeper.

The democratic ideal can be summed up as government of, by and for the people. But modern democracies all have government BY a political class that is distinctly different than the people (mostly male, older, wealthier, better educated, etc.)… and whether that government is truly FOR the people is always a matter of debate.

John Adams, one of the founders of the United States wrote in 1776 that a legislature “should be in miniature an exact portrait of the people at large. It should think, feel, reason and act like them.”

The ideal of democracy is that the government should make the same decisions that the people as a whole would make IF they could all have the time, motivation, information, attention, expert advice, access to conflicting points of view, fact-checking of faulty assumptions, and good facilitation. Obviously it is impossible to have all of the people do this on even one issue, let alone the vast number of public policy decisions made every year. But we know exactly how to achieve this ideal by combining the principles of scientific sampling to select a statistically accurate representative mini-public, with good decision-making procedures. The random selection of public officials like this is known as “sortition.”

This would be government BY the ordinary people, rather than by a political class with only the CONSENT of the people.
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Filed under: Academia, Sortition | Tagged: | 14 Comments »

Sortition and 21st Century Democracy

Posted on December 30, 2015 by davidschecter

Sortition and 21st Century Democracy

David Schecter’s presentation at the “Democracy for the 21st Century” conference, Library of Alexandria, Egypt, December 11, 2015

This conference began with a quote from John Kennedy – “the great enemy of truth is not the lie, but the myth.” I believe that the great enemy of truth about democracy is the myth that there is only one democratic way to choose representatives — through elections.

As Dr. Ismail Serageldin suggested, we have been confusing one means of choosing — elections — with democracy itself. And as Dr. George Ishak said, “In the 21st century, we should find new ways to select representatives.” Sortition is one of those ways. Actually, it is not a new way, it’s a very old way. It was used more than elections in ancient Athens, and people wrote about it here in Alexandria 2,000 years ago.

My colleagues, Terrill Bouricius and Oliver Dowlen, have described specific proposals for incorporating sortition into political system design. I would to talk about a whole set of proposals, and a menu of options.

I have been researching proposals like these, and I have also co-authored one. I have found 18 such proposals so far, and I have had the pleasure of corresponding with the authors. They come from Australia, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, South Africa, the U.K., and the U.S. Together, they represent many new possibilities for democracy.

My talk will have three parts. First, I am going to review the rationale for the use of sortition and “mini-publics” – that is, representative samples of the public. I am also going to respond to some common objections to this idea. Second, I am going to describe a menu of options for incorporating mini-publics into political systems. Third, I am going to pose some important questions that have not yet been addressed within these proposals.
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Filed under: Academia, Sortition | Tagged: | 7 Comments »

Dr. Ron Prestage thanks Congress

Posted on December 29, 2015 by Yoram Gat

Forbes reports:

On Friday, Congress repealed the country-of-origin-labeling rule (COOL) on beef and pork after the World Trade Organization (WTO) imposed $1 billion in retaliatory import tariffs against United States if the rule was not overturned.

90% of those surveyed in 2013 favored country-of-origin-labeling for fresh meat sold in stores.

Dr. Ron Prestage, president of the National Pork Producer’s Council, released a statement expressing gratitude to Congress for repealing COOL. “I know tariffs on U.S. pork would have been devastating to me and other pork producers,” he said.

Filed under: Elections, Opinion polling, Press | 41 Comments »

2015 review – statistics

Posted on December 28, 2015 by Yoram Gat

Below are some statistics about the sixth year of Equality-by-Lot. Comparable numbers for last year can be found here.

2015 Page views Posts Comments
Jan 2,648 15 256
Feb 3,453 10 284
Mar 3,168 8 169
Apr 2,497 7 137
May 2,947 13 124
June 2,593 5 137
July 1,933 5 72
Aug 1,966 5 94
Sept 2,592 11 136
Oct 2,455 10 189
Nov 2,109 12 185
Dec (to 28th) 1,671 6 109
Total 30,032 107 1,891

Note that page views do not include visits by logged-in contributors – the wordpress system does not count those visits.

Posts were made by 15 authors during 2015. (There were, of course, many other authors quoted and linked to.)

There are currently 223 email and WordPress followers of this blog. In addition there are 137 Twitter followers (@Klerotarian) and 67 Facebook followers.

Searching for “distribution by lot” (with quotes) using Google returns Equality-by-Lot as the 3rd result (out of “about 16,900 results”). Searching for “sortition” returns Equality-by-Lot as the 3rd result (out of “about 62,200 results”).

Happy holidays and happy new year to Equality-by-Lot readers, commenters and posters. Keep up the good fight for democracy!

Filed under: Distribution by lot, meta, Sortition | 2 Comments »

2015 review – sortition-related events

Posted on December 24, 2015 by Yoram Gat

This is a review of notable sortition-related events of the year 2015.

Brett Hennig wrote to mention citizens’ assembly pilots and the Irish constitutional assembly which led to the marriage equality vote.

In my mind the two most notable sortition-related events of 2015 were:

  • In Mexico, the Morena party allotted of some of its congressional candidates among the party rank-and-file. This was covered on Equality-by-Lot here (English version), here and here.
  • Leading Belgian politicians from various parties proposed changing the selection method of the Belgian upper house to sortition. This is the most high-profile proposal of its kind of the modern age.

Continuing the trend of previous years, those developments happened in the non-English speaking world. However, they are a reflection of a wide-spread disillusionment with elections – a sentiment that is as common in the English-speaking world as it is outside of it.

In the US this sentiment found an electoral outlet in the surprise strength of the campaigns of two presidential candidates which are perceived as being outside of the electoral establishment – Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. This fact was observed in a relatively well-noticed academic paper in Science journal by Fisman and Markovits about the way class affects policy choices. The authors drew from their work some conclusions that come close to an indictment of the electoral method.

Filed under: Academia, Elections, Experiments, House of Lords, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 15 Comments »

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