The Guardian has an obituary of Mogens Herman Hansen.
Danish historian who transformed our understanding of the way Athenian democracy functioned
The term democracy emerged in the classical city-state of Athens to denote power exercised by common people, at that point men who were not slaves. From around the sixth century BC, officials were chosen by lot and were subordinate to a citizens’ assembly that made decisions. Writers on this process tended to describe it in theoretical terms. But the Danish historian Mogens Herman Hansen, who has died aged 83 after a short illness, transformed understanding of how Athenian democracy functioned by approaching it empirically, through a series of simple questions.
Hansen established the actual practices of the direct democratic assembly, the nature of the leadership exercised by the distinct classes of orators and generals in the absence of any form of partisan political structures, and the importance of mood and rhetoric on the opinions of the mass assembly.
His second insight was based on the fact that previous interpretations of Athenian democracy had ignored how it had changed as a result of Athens’ defeat in the Peloponnesian war with Sparta and the constitutional reforms that began in 403 BC.
The system had moved from the assembly being sovereign to one that was ruled by the distinction between laws (nomoi) that were permanent, and decisions (psephismata) that had to be made in conformity with the laws, and could be challenged in the courts if they were not. Continue reading →
It turns out that there is a rather interesting yearly report called “Democracy Perception Index” which has been published since 2019. The report is based on opinion surveys conducted in more than 50 countries and in which people are asked about the perceptions of democracy and of the government of the country in which they live.
The report is contains various pieces of information of interest. One of the interesting findings in the 2024 edition is that majorities in Japan, in almost all European countries, and in all American countries with the exception of Mexico, see their governments as serving “a small group of people in my country”. In Asia, in contrast, majorities in most countries (with the notable exception of Iran) see their governments as serving “most people in my country”.
Also interestingly, some light is shed on the way people use the under-defined term “democratic”. The criterion people use for stating that their country is democratic is rather more lax than the question of whether the government serves most people. Since majorities in many countries in Europe and America say that their government is democratic, it seems that quite a few Western and South American people are willing to assert both that their government is democratic and that it serves a small group of people at the same time. In China the situation is the opposite: More people assert that the Chinese government serves most of the people in the country than assert that China is democratic, implying that quite a few of the Chinese see China as undemocratic despite asserting that its government serves most people.
Rather bemusingly, the report uses the terms “democratic”, and “free” as factual labels (as opposed to reflecting perceptions) to refer to the Freedom House classification of countries. This follows the convention of referring to [Western] expert opinions as scientific fact, while delegating people’s perceptions of their governments to mere opinion.
A Gallup poll finds that the inability to afford food is common within Western nations.
Effects of electoralism is a new category of posts is that is devoted to documenting the social and political effects of the elections-based system of government. The aim is to generate a steady stream of up-to-date items that can be easily referred to in order to highlight the fact that the system is inherently anti-democratic. Discussion of the persistent failure of the system to serve those ruled under it is studiously avoided not only by those who overtly promote the status quo but also by many supposed reformers who express concern about people losing confidence in the system, but rarely discuss the underlying causes for this loss of confidence.
Already weakened by the vast impersonal forces at work in the modern world, democratic institutions are now being undermined from within by politicians and their propagandists. The methods now being used to merchandise the political candidate as if he were a deodorant positively guarantee the electorate against ever learning the truth about anything. —Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, 1958, VI.
We vote, indeed we perceive political reality, through the people with whom we are in contact. Most of us are reached by the mass media only in a two-step process, by way of other people’s perceptions and reactions to them. —Hanna F. Pitkin, The Concept of Representation, 1967, p. 223.
… it has also become evident that if one acts ruthlessly …, cleverly organized propaganda can accomplish swift and drastic changes in opinions and attitudes, especially in difficult and critical situations; it can … also instill patently false ideas about actual conditions. — Daniel Boorstin, The Image, 1961.
Regarding one of those Pernicious P’s, Wikipedia says the following [2024-07-01] about the influential author Edward Bernays and his book, Propaganda (1928):
[Bernays] outlined how skilled practitioners could use crowd psychology and psychoanalysis to control them [the masses] in desired ways. Bernays later synthesized many of these ideas in his postwar book, Public Relations (1945), which outlines the science of managing information released to the public by an organization, in a manner most advantageous to the organization.
Among the major handicaps a reformer can encounter is the opposition of the indignant virtuous …. —E.S. Turner, Roads to Ruin: The shocking history of social reform, 1960.
Cristina Lafont’s 2020 book, Democracy Without Shortcuts, unfairly attacks lottocracy as invidiously exclusionary. A false equivalence is asserted between lottocrats’ current “existential” criticism of the political capability of mass publics and misogynists’ past “essentialist” criticism of the political capability of women (and sometimes of other marginalized groups). Lafont writes, for instance:
… The empirical evidence provided to supposedly ‘prove’ women’s ignorance, irrationality, apathy, and irresponsibility, and the arguments put forth to perpetuate their subjection to others in the not too distant past, are remarkably similar to the arguments and evidence currently provided by the ‘voter ignorance’ literature. Continue reading →
The imbecility of men is always inviting the impudence of power. —Emerson, Representative Men, ch. 1.
The incompetence of the masses … furnishes the leaders with a practical and to some extent a moral justification. —Robert Michels, Political Parties, 1915, 111.
The weaker the interest and knowledge of the electorate, the more decisive become the efforts of organized groups in molding opinion. This situation alone implies a tendency toward oligarchy within democracy …. —Herbert Tingsten, The Problem of Democracy, 1965, p. 102.
Democracy is the most difficult of all forms of government, since it requires the widest spread of intelligence, and we forgot to make ourselves intelligent when we made ourselves sovereign. —Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History, 1968, p. 273.
Proxy Electors will be better informed than effectively “imbecilic” mass-voters, because they will be focused on a single responsibility. They will not have a dozen other political issues competing for their attention. They will instead be exposed to opportunities to delve deeply into their sole topical area, such as online lectures by experts, testimony by insiders and whistleblowers, audiobooks by investigative reporters, etc. Much of it should soak in.
The Jury Trust Model: Nationalised Industries Without the Corruption
Presented by Oliver Milne, PhD. – Independent scholar and game designer based in Galway, Ireland. PhD in Philosophy from the University of Galway in 2024.
The control of capital is among the most potent of powers: the power to make or break people’s livelihoods, landscapes, and governments. There are limitless ways this power can be abused, and vast amounts of it can be amassed by its abuser. In this talk, Oliver will propose a novel model of capital ownership, the jury trust, in which allotted juries are entrusted with the stewardship of large firms, and make the case that this model can address the problems inherent to state and private ownership.
Date: Thursday, 27 June · (Friday, 28 June in Asia & Australia)
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. Join the conversation!
Dr. Camila Vergara is a critical legal theorist, historian, and journalist from Chile writing on the relation between inequality and the law, and on alternative institutional solutions to systemic corruption. She is Senior Lecturer at University of Essex Business School, Editor of Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory, Associate Editor of Critical Sociology, and author of Systemic Corruption: Constitutional Ideas for an Anti-Oligarchic Republic (Princeton University Press 2020). In her work on constitutional theory, republicanism, and corruption, she advocates for council democracy and sortition-based plebeian institutions as part of a counterpower structure against oligarchy. In addition to her scholarly work, Dr. Vergara is a global public intellectual and an activist advising and collaborating with grassroots organisations on rights, deliberative democracy, and community-based forms of governance.
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. http://www.INSA.site
Back in 2017, after a minor campaign of harassment, Guardian columnist George Monbiot weighed in on sortition. At the time his verdict was that the idea was nothing short of “a formula for disaster” and instead he offered his readers the usual electoral fixes such as campaign finance reforms, voter education and proportional representation. Well, seven years later, Monbiot has had a significant change of heart:
General elections are a travesty of democracy – let’s give the people a real voice
Our system is designed for the powerful to retain control. Participatory democracy and a lottery vote are just two ways to gain real representation
[G]eneral elections such as the one we now face could be seen as the opposite of democracy. But, as with so many aspects of public life, entirely different concepts have been hopelessly confused. Elections are not democracy and democracy is not elections. Continue reading →
Gina Goldenberg, writing for the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation in the Harvard Kennedy School, has produced a highly purified specimen of the “deliberative democracy” narrative. The article is a useful condensed aggregation of the clichés of the “deliberative democracy” genre, notable for what it does not say more than for what it does. Other than the canned vocabulary, the tropes and the omissions, another noteworthy point is the intimate/inspirational style which focuses on the personalities of supposedly brilliant elite actors on whose insights and initiative our future depends (including professionally-staged pictures, of course).
In the excerpt below, I underline terms and phrases that are typical to the genre. I find it a useful exercise to consider what those terms and phrases mean and what alternative phrasings they were chosen over. Also, to reduce the mental burden on the readers, I elide some of the intimate/inspirational verbiage.
Could deliberative democracy ameliorate democratic backsliding? Two HKS students believe it might.
As concerns for the health of democracy mount, Medha Uniyal and Kartikeya Bhatotia consider one particular “experimental democratic practice” that could increase connectivity between citizens and decision-making processes.
In their PAE [Policy Analysis Exercise], [Medha Uniyal and Kartikeya Bhatotia, students at Harvard Kennedy School (HKS)] responded to the sentiment of global democratic decline by looking for untraditional and innovative mechanisms to increase civic engagement and collect deeper citizen input through deliberative democracies. By concentrating on the deliberative model, Uniyal and Bhatotia hope to address some of the challenges that aggregate democracies face today, like extreme polarization and decreased connectivity. Continue reading →
Gina Goldenberg, writing for the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation in the Harvard Kennedy School, has produced a highly purified specimen of the “deliberative democracy” narrative. The article is a useful condensed aggregation of the clichés of the “deliberative democracy” genre, notable for what it does not say more than for what it does. Other than the canned vocabulary, the tropes and the omissions, another noteworthy point is the intimate/inspirational style which focuses on the personalities of supposedly brilliant elite actors on whose insights and initiative our future depends (including professionally-staged pictures, of course).
Adam Cronkright
Ali
Ahmed R. Teleb
avanderven
avergne
Alex Kovner
azakaras
Brett Hennig
campbellwallace
Simon Threlkeld
Nick Coccoma
codyhipskind
Common Lot Sortitionist
Conall Boyle
constitutionalism
davidschecter
graytmatter
gtridimas
H.J. Hofkirchner
John Burnheim
jgarry20151
Jochen Krattenmacher
johnedwardtaylor
johnhuang865
Jonathan Crock
keithsutherland
Jacob Richter
kkoreilly
lukewhito
SimonPek
Nathan El
Nicholas Gruen
Owen Shaffer
Patrick Chalmers
Paul Gölz
peterstone
Pierre-Etienne Vandamme
pronfeld
Emil
rcaze
richwbrown
Roger Knights
roslynfuller
Pierre-Etienne Vandamme
shaharavin
tbouricius
Ted Wachtel
Joshua Laferriere
theodorestathis
towardsautonomyblog
Wayne Liebman
Yoram Gat
Oliver Milne
Equality by lot 