Allocating speaking spots on mass media

Posted on July 16, 2014 by Yoram Gat

FAIR’s survey of cable news discussion programs reveals predictable demographic biases:

A survey of major cable news discussion programs shows a stunning lack of diversity among the guests.

FAIR surveyed five weeks of broadcasts of the interview/discussion segments on several leading one-hour cable shows: CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360° and OutFront With Erin Burnett, All In With Chris Hayes and the Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC, and Fox News Channel’s O’Reilly Factor and Hannity.

[…]

Male guests widely outnumbered women on every show (730 to 285), making up 72 percent of the guest lists. Just 5 percent (46) of cable news guests were women of color. […] Women of color (about 18 percent of the US public) were strikingly underrepresented on most shows […] Non-Latino white men, on the other hand, were overrepresented on every show.

But, of course, the bias is not only gender- and race-based:

The largest category of guests were other members of the media: 55 percent of the guests were either journalists (400) or pundits (159). Current and former government officials were the next largest category, accounting for almost 10 percent of guests (107). There were 37 military guests (current and former), 35 representatives of think tanks and 32 academics. Other prominent guest categories were lawyers (21) and business representatives (17).

Such biases give certain groups in the population disproportional voice in politics, meaning they are undemocratic. The way to achieve proper representation is to allot speaking spots on mass media, giving each person the same chance of getting their worldview represented.

Filed under: Distribution by lot, Press | 1 Comment »

The Median Voter Rules — OK?

Posted on July 16, 2014 by keithsutherland

Cabinet reshuffle montage: ministers in Downing Street
David Cameron used his reshuffle to promote a number of women – and to sack Michael Gove

Francis Elliott, Michael Savage and Laura Pitel, The Times, July 16 2014:

Michael Gove was removed as education secretary after David Cameron’s election guru warned about his “toxic” polling. Mr Gove paid the price as the prime minister reshaped his cabinet into an election-fighting unit, more than doubling the number of women in a top team that he claimed “reflects modern Britain”. . . [P]olling showing that more than half of voters thought the education secretary was doing a bad job fatally undermined him. Insiders say that Lynton Crosby, the Tories’ election strategist, led a powerful coalition inside No 10 calling for Mr Gove to be removed.

Michael Gove was the architect of the government’s ‘free schools’ policy, which was intended to encourage state-maintained schools to aspire to the values and achievements of independent (fee-paying) schools. This was certainly not a policy designed to appeal to the ‘rich and powerful’ (who can afford the fees of independent schools) as it increases the competition for places in top universities. The toppling of Gove is, ironically, a victory for the rich and powerful, but it was instituted by the need to pander to the preferences of the median voter. The commitment of the government to free schools was ideological, as opposed to reflecting the interests of the ruling elite, and the overturning of it was in response to the perceived [i.e. short-term] interests of the median voter. The main reason that Gove appeared unpopular with parents in Crosby’s focus groups, was his insistence on rigorous examination standards and the attempt to return to a traditional (ie academically challenging) core curriculum. David Cameron and the vast majority of the cabinet supported Gove’s strategy but he was sacrificed for purely electoral purposes (another factor being the need to reduce the alienation of teachers and other public-sector workers).
Continue reading →

Filed under: education, Elections, Opinion polling, Press, schools | 4 Comments »

Michael Schulson: How to choose?

Posted on July 15, 2014 by peterstone

A few weeks back, I was interviewed for an article in Aeon Magazine. That article, entitled “How to Choose? When Your Reasons Are Worse than Useless, Sometimes the Most Rational Choice Is a Random Stab in the Dark,” has now appeared online.

Some interesting sources cited in it (and not just my book…).

Filed under: Applications, Distribution by lot, education, Juries, Press, schools, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Dixon: Why Elections Still Matter, Except When They Don’t

Posted on July 8, 2014 by Yoram Gat

An excerpt from an article by long time political activist Bruce A. Dixon:

Can electoral campaigns morph into social movements?

The short answer is no. We have to avoid and actively argue against the delusion that electoral campaigns build social movements. They don’t. I used to believe that under some circumstances they could. But I’ve seen twenty or more campaigns close up, in many of which some or the key participants hoped to morph into permanent bottom-up organizations capable of running themselves and holding candidates accountable. For reasons that require a book chapter to explain, it almost never works. I think I’ve seen it happen, sort of, once in my entire political life.

Electoral campaigns have been the graveyard of social movements, not once, but many, many times.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Elections | Tagged: , , | 31 Comments »

On trial: How juries reach their verdicts

Posted on July 7, 2014 by keithsutherland

The Sunday Times:


The film Twelve Angry Men depicts jurors changing their mind during deliberation (Kobal Collection)

A UNIQUE judicial experiment in which 12 separate juries watched the same trial and came up with different verdicts has led to new calls for an investigation of the jury system.

In the mock trial Alan Johnson, the former Labour home secretary, played the role of an armed robber who stole £68,000 from a betting shop after threatening the staff with a shotgun. Vincent Regan, a film actor, played the role of a firearms expert.

The judge Michael Mettyear, the recorder of Hull and East Riding, who sits on the sentencing guidelines panel, came up with the idea for the experiment and real barristers presented the case. The juries were each put together by the 12 foremen, who were invited to take part by the judge.

“I thought it would be interesting to see if a number of juries listening to the same facts and evidence would come to different conclusions,” Mettyear said.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Juries, Press | 6 Comments »

Donald McCabe: Choose House by Lot

Posted on July 3, 2014 by Yoram Gat

An item from the Vergne bibliography:

Choose House by Lot

Published by The New York Times: March 15, 1991

To the Editor:

In “Expanded Congress Would Help Women” (letter, Feb. 24), Prof. Wilma Rule suggests a complicated scheme for the selection of members of the House of Representatives so that women and minorities may be fairly represented. As I understand the methods she recommends, however, there is no guarantee of any such effect. In any case, she ignores a simple means of choosing Representatives that would have the desirable results she wants, as well as others.

If members of the House were chosen by lot, instead of being elected (with still only one member for each district), the laws of statistics would assure that every part of our population would be represented very nearly proportionally. In addition, veto power over legislation would belong to a body that was not composed of professional politicians, who would have no interest in being re-elected and would therefore be subject to limited influence.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Athens, Elections, History, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 1 Comment »

The Vergne lotteries literature database

Posted on July 1, 2014 by Yoram Gat

Antoine Vergne has shared his database of lotteries related literature. The database currently contain 365 items touching on a variety of topics related to distribution-by-lot and sortition, covering theory, practice, history and advocacy, and ranging in time from antiquity to the present.

For those who are interested to access the list, it is available in bibliographical format and as a report.

The database is managed as a Zotero library. Readers who wish to help manage and extend the database are invited to leave contact information below or to email me (the address is here).

Filed under: Academia, Books, Distribution by lot, History, Juries, meta, Press, Proposals, Sortition | Tagged: | 5 Comments »

“Academic Choice Theory” in Political Science?

Posted on June 30, 2014 by Ahmed R. Teleb

There is a rather brilliant satire on the Naked Capitalism blog about how the incentives (positive feedback loops) create a systemic bias among economists to expound theories that support the status quo or the biggest wallets. Sortition and rotation of economists is suggested as a remedy.

What kinds of proposals could help to minimize value destruction by academic economists? You are quite right that from the point of view of the public this issue looms large. Even in most Western democracies, more than half of the total GDP is allocated according to principles promoted by agents subject to Academic Choice dynamics, i.e. economists. One simple remedy to the large negative externalities generated through their academic entrepreneurship could be to shrink the size of the sector of academic economists.

Another approach is indicated by the game theoretic insight that winning strategies in competitive games usually involve a random element. Following this principle, ever since antiquity trials have been decided by juries who are chosen by lot. We should therefore strongly consider periodically repopulating economics departments with people selected at random.

I wonder how many political scientists see a kind of “academic choice theory” in operation in the profession?

Filed under: Academia, Sortition, Theory | Tagged: , , | 1 Comment »

How Athenians Managed the Political Unaccountability of Citizens

Posted on June 29, 2014 by keithsutherland

Recent discussions on this blog have focused on the need for ongoing political accountability in any sortition-based political system, so I thought this article by Farid Abdel-Nour and Brad L. Cook in the current issue of History of Political Thought would be of interest:

Abstract: The political unaccountability of ordinary citizens in classical Athens was originally raised as a challenge by ancient critics of democracy. In tension with that criticism, the authors argue that attention to the above challenge is consistent with a defence of Athenian democratic politics. In fact, ordinary citizens’ function in the Assembly and courts implicitly included the burden of justifying their own political decisions to an imagined authority, as if they could be brought to account. By means of practices that encouraged this self-scrutiny, Athenians marked the challenge of citizens’ political unaccountability as an unavoidable but manageable aspect of their democracy.

The authors argue that ‘one type of practice placed citizens’s political decisions under the external gaze of other citizens, another placed them under the gaze of the gods, and yet another placed them under the gaze of an internal imagined audience’ (p. 445).
Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Athens, History, Sortition | 37 Comments »

I pester George Monbiot once more

Posted on June 19, 2014 by Yoram Gat

About a year ago I wrote to George Monbiot about sortition. At the risk of becoming a nuisance, I have just written to him again:

Again, sortition

Dear George,

Having just read your article “An Ounce of Hope is Worth a Ton of Despair”, I feel compelled to write to you again about a subject I have written to you about before: sortition.

As you may remember, sortition is the democratic alternative to elections. Instead of choosing decision makers by voting – which inevitably leads to having decisions made by members of an ambitious and well resourced elite – why not select decisions makers as a statistical sample of the population? Why not put some of those people who “consistently hold concern for others, tolerance, kindness and thinking for themselves to be more important than wealth, image and power” in a position where they can set policy instead of forcing them to choose between members of a self-serving elite?
Continue reading →

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

« Previous Page — Next Page »