Jurriaan Kamp: Juries can save America’s eroding democracy

Posted on November 8, 2014 by Yoram Gat

Jurriaan Kamp writes in the Huffington Post:

America proudly sees herself as the leader of the democratic world. Democracy is on the rise around the globe. Forty years ago, think tank Freedom House published its first annual report ranking the world based on democratic freedoms. A mere 40 countries had free elections. Back then, Spain and Portugal were military dictatorships. Today, Freedom House counts 87 nations as “free countries,” a doubling in less than four decades. An additional 60 countries are “partly free,” leaving 48 countries still labeled “not free.”

Good news. However over the same forty years America’s own democracy has been eroded. First politics became a terrible money game with candidates having to spend ridiculous amounts of money to get elected based on sound bite simplifications of all important issues. And ultimately that money game has ended in a stalemate on Capitol Hill where two parties now only agree on one strict rule: If they want “yes” we will certainly and clearly say “no” — no matter the arguments.

Somewhere at the core of the idea of democracy is the notion that the people — or their representatives — get together for a dialogue out of which insight and vision may emerge. Continue reading →

Filed under: Juries, Opinion polling, Participation, Press, Sortition | Tagged: , | 2 Comments »

A short sortition debate

Posted on November 7, 2014 by Yoram Gat

A short online discussion of sortition yields familiar arguments:

[S]ortition is a form of government based upon the drawing of officials by lottery. It was used in Ancient Greece and is rarely used now. To me, it seems a lot less corruptible than a regular democracy, it seems to me that it represents the people better, by literally selecting by random, rather than certain people picking certain people because he looks cool or “my dad met him”.

If you do it with a large enough pool of people it should represent the larger public well. It works with polling science I dont see why it wouldnt work there.

Most people are incompetent at their chosen profession. Why should we assume that if they are selected randomly they will behave anymore rationally than they do in other areas of their life?

Continue reading →

Filed under: Elections, Opinion polling, Sortition | 9 Comments »

Two sortition papers published in Systems Thinking World Journal

Posted on November 7, 2014 by davidschecter

Terry Bouricius and I have published two papers about sortition in an online publication called the Systems Thinking World journal. The first paper (published last year) is about Terry’s model of lawmaking by multiple bodies of randomly selected citizens. The second one (published today) is about a sortition-based model we developed together for accountability of the executive branch. I think both papers would interest people on this blog, and we would welcome comments.

Here are the abstracts of the two papers:

An Idealized Design for the Legislative Branch of Government

This paper presents an idealized design for a legislative system. The concept of idealized design is explained. The paper critiques two critical (and often taken for granted) features of the legislative branches of most contemporary democratic governments: legislators are chosen by election, and the same bodies perform all legislative and meta-legislative functions, for all laws. Seven problems with these two features are described. A new model of lawmaking is proposed, based on three concepts from ancient Athenian democracy — random selection, dividing legislative functions among multiple bodies, and the use of temporary bodies (like contemporary juries) for final decision making. The benefits of the model are laid out, and likely objections are addressed.

An Idealized Design for Government, Part 2: Executive Branch Accountability

In this paper, the authors continue to build on their proposed model for incorporating randomly selected citizens into the decision-making processes of government. The first article presented a case for the benefits of random selection; proposed a lawmaking process that replaces elected, all-purpose legislatures with multiple, limited-function bodies composed of randomly selected citizens; and identified possible objections to the model (see An Idealized Design for the Legislative Branch of Government, http://stwj.systemswiki.org/?p=1407). In the current article, the authors extend the model to the executive branch, discussing how redesigning the executive branch could improve accountability to the legislature and to the people. The potential for current executive branch designs to negatively affect performance and accountability is used to propose a new model that reduces the power of the executive branch, increases accountability, and has the potential to reduce corruption. The benefits of the model are outlined, and possible objections are addressed.

Filed under: Press, Proposals, Sortition | Comments Off on Two sortition papers published in Systems Thinking World Journal

Tim Dunlop: What if voting actually hampers democratic governance?

Posted on November 3, 2014 by Yoram Gat

Tim Dunlop has been reading David van Reybrouk:

A ‘lottery’ electoral system could break our malaise

Perhaps it’s time to overhaul our voting system and instigate a form of “lottery” whereby our MPs are elected on the basis of random sampling. It may not be perfect, but neither is our current system, writes Tim Dunlop.

The basic logic of voting is that it is the method by which we determine the will of the people. Free elections are therefore understood to be the cornerstone – the defining characteristic – of democratic governance.

No vote, no democracy is just about a truism.

But what if that’s wrong? What if voting actually hampers democratic governance and is leading to undemocratic outcomes?

What if all the stuff we complain about in regard to our politicians – that they are unrepresentative, that they are out of touch, that they are in the pocket of various vested interests, that all they are really interested in is getting re-elected – what if all those problems are actually a by-product of voting itself?

In fact, Dunlop does a better job of presenting the idea of sortition than van Reybrouk himself. van Raybrouk never quite manages to point out what is wrong with elections. He spins a convoluted story in which elections were supposedly once democratic but are now no longer sufficiently so. This story may provide van Reybrouk with some sort of cover for his anti-electoralist heresy, but it makes his point incoherent. Dunlop, on the other hand, drops this supposedly historical argument and his introductory paragraphs above make the argument for sortition clearly and succinctly.

Filed under: Elections, Press, Sortition | 11 Comments »

Madness! – South Dakota opts for a water lottery

Posted on November 1, 2014 by Conall Boyle

The South Dakota state Water Board has to determine when existing groundwater sources are ‘fully appropriated’ (used to the limit e.g. by farmers for irrigation). Applications for fully appropriated aquifers are accepted during a 30-day time period.  Applications are placed in a lottery drawing system. The winners will then be announced. This is the first time for this procedure; South Dakota is the first (US) state to allocate water resources by lottery.

Comment: Another bizarre example of valuable state assets being gifted to profit-seeking enterprises.

The water in South Dakota, it has been established, belongs to the people. It should be a source of revenue for them. Gifting it to businesses deprives the good folks of SD some relief from taxation. But it gets worse: distributing allocations by lottery means that the precious water may not be used for the most productive use.

By definition, valuable goods distributed by lottery are given away below the price that would balance supply and demand. We accept this for college places because society demands that educational opportunity should not depend solely on ability to pay. But giving away publicly-owned assets to business enterprises for free or by lottery is economic illiteracy.

This is not the only example of such naiveté that can be found in the arch-capitalist US of A: oil-drilling licences, radio-spectra, hunting permits, rafting permits, student accommodation are all given away by lottery! Wake up you citizens of America! Reclaim what is yours! Stop the corporate free-loading! Stop the lotteries for public assets!

Source for this story: http://www.argusleader.com/story/opinion/readers/2014/10/20/voice-south-dakota-water-lottery/17595461/

Filed under: Applications, Distribution by lot | 13 Comments »

How did Van Reybrouck know about lottocracy?

Posted on November 1, 2014 by avanderven

On Sunday, September 29th 2013 in a Dutch TV series named Buitenhof the word Lottocracy (Dutch: lottocracy), although casually, for the first time was used in public in Holland. There was an interview with David Van Reybrouck about his new book ‘Against elections’. Great, that the idea of ​​Lottocracy was mentioned for the first time in the Dutch media. The broadcast can be viewed by clicking below:

http://www.uitzendinggemist.nl/afleveringen/1368517

However, van Reybrouck did not mention in the program nor in his book, that the idea of ​​lottocracy has already been discussed extensively in the book ‘The World Solution for World Problems’, especially in the chapter ‘A Concept for Government’. The book was already published in 1988. The book is available as an electronic book at:

http://www.picarta.nl/

The book can also be read directly on Internet at the address:

http://www.socsci.kun.nl/~advdv/leonbook/leonbook.html
Continue reading →

Filed under: Books, Elections, Sortition | Leave a comment »

Elect leaders by lottery suggests David Van Reybrouck

Posted on October 30, 2014 by keithsutherland

The Soapbox feature on BBC2 Daily Politics was today (29/10/2014) handed to Dutch historian David Van Reybrouck.

Electing leaders via a lottery may be a crazy idea, but it is being carried out now in parts of Europe, says a Belgian author and academic. David Van Reybrouck said with trust in politicians at a record low, and party memberships and the number of voters falling, it could be an idea to renew interest in politics again. He said lotteries have been a longer-standing tool of democracy than elections, which he claims could be an “obstacle to democracy”, and only been around for 200 years.

Full version with Q&A starting at 01:16:45. Truncated YouTube version.

Filed under: Press, Sortition | 14 Comments »

The rich or the powerful?

Posted on October 24, 2014 by keithsutherland

There has been a lot of debate on this blog recently as to whether or not political outcomes are unduly influenced by the rich; in this post I want to consider the influence of other nondemocratic agents – activists, civil society pressure groups, non-corporate lobbyists and academics in the social sciences and humanities. The reason for the inclusion of the last category is because most political leaders are educated in these disciplines – unlike, say, in China, it’s hard to identify political leaders who studied the natural sciences or engineering – so academics in these fields will have had a powerful influence in their formative years. There are more Oxford PPE (politics, philosophy and economics) graduates in the House of Commons than Old Etonians (35 to 20) and 50% of ministers and 28 percent of MPs were educated at Oxbridge, the vast majority in the above-mentioned subjects. Jeremy Waldron, in his inaugural lecture for his (Oxford) chair of social and political theory argued against the focus of the PPE syllabus on the ’57 varieties of luck egalitarianism’ as opposed to ‘political’ issues like representation, sovereignty and the rule of law, and it’s the resulting influence of the equality lobby that I want to address in this post. Some of the material is anecdotal, and some evidence of partisan influences in the formulation of a UN convention on disabilities equality.

The primary school in my village (pop. c.300) has recently constructed, at considerable expense, a ‘sensory room’ to meet the needs of one part-time disabled pupil. (Bear in mind this is happening at a time when local authority budgets are squeezed to the extent that rural residents are being told that they will need to grit their own roads this winter (and pay for the materials) as the council does not have the funds.) This is the result of government policy that insists that the disabled must be fully integrated in regular society, and has closed down most of the special schools that accommodated the specific needs of disabled children. Speaking to two parents of disabled children (one Aspergers and one cerebral palsy), they both volunteered that this politically-motivated policy has been disastrous for their children because, unlike their peers in special schools, their everyday growing-up experience provided a constant reminder of their neediness.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Initiatives, meta | Tagged: , , , , | 9 Comments »

English translation of part of David Van Reybrouck’s book Against Elections

Posted on October 24, 2014 by tbouricius

A section of Belgian author David Van Reybrouck’s sortition book, Against Elections has been translated into English and posted online:

Representative democracy is in crisis. Low voter turnout, abstention, falling party membership, and the phenomenal rise of populist parties – these are the symptoms of Democratic Fatigue Syndrome. Considering democratic innovation from classical Athens to present day, it becomes apparent that our democratic institutions haven’t been updated since the late 18th century. How to renew the centralised, hierarchical party system to reflect the horizontal power relationships of the hyper-connected, interactive society of the 21st century? A bi-representative system, combining elections with the democratic principle of sortition, or drawing of lots, could steer democracy into smoother waters.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Books, Elections, Press, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Two items by Equality-by-Lot regulars

Posted on October 23, 2014 by Yoram Gat

Arthur D. Robbins:

To quote Sean O’Casey, “Th’ whole worl’s in a terrible state o’ chassis.” Why is it that way? Does it have to be that way? What can be done to set it straight? These are the questions the intellectual should be asking.

There are many factors creating the “state o’ chassis.” Most of them can be traced to a combination of action and inaction on the part of government. Government promotes the exploitation of fossil fuels. It favors the private car over public transportation. It diverts to war critical resources that could be used to develop alternative sources of energy. All of these policies are humankind’s contribution to global warming. These policies can be reversed, but not without transforming government. And I am afraid yet another election will not do the job.

Currently, there is considerable discussion and some experimentation exploring the possibilities of using sortition as a means of restructuring government. In ancient Athens, sortition was used as a means of selecting magistrates. We could substitute sortition for elections as a means of selecting our representatives and senators.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Action, Elections, Press, Sortition | 5 Comments »

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