Media coverage of South Australia citizens jury

Posted on July 24, 2013 by Yoram Gat

Iain Walker of newDemocracy collected some TV reports about the citizens jury on alcohol related violence in South Australia:

ABC:
cjabc

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Filed under: Applications, Juries, Press, Sortition | 8 Comments »

Eric X. Li: A tale of two political systems

Posted on July 17, 2013 by Yoram Gat

Eric X. Li is not impressed with the electoral system:

Filed under: Elections | 21 Comments »

Michael Donovan: Political Sortition for an Evolving World

Posted on July 11, 2013 by Yoram Gat

Michael Donovan has written his Master’s thesis about sortition:

Abstract
Our Western political systems are straining to prove their legitimacy partly because the internet generation demands both open information and a role in the decision making. Yet, electoral democracy may be incapable of evolving to meet those requirements. This paper looks at sortition, or the selection of decision makers by lottery, to supplement or to replace current representative democracy. Empowering a cross-section of society to make policy decisions would more directly address the interests and concerns of the populace, and would result in an egalitarian and inclusive body, more transparent and resistant to corruption than are current policy makers. Furthermore, diverse assemblies possess greater ability in solving difficult problems and in making accurate forecasts than do the more homogeneous groups that currently comprise governing parties. Consensus building increases this innovative potential. With the proper application of sortition and deliberation, therefore, advancement in the common good can be accelerated.

Keywords: Sortition; consensus building; deliberative democracy; open source software; activism

Filed under: Academia, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Adam Cronkright and Simon Pek: Reconstructing Democracy

Posted on July 8, 2013 by Yoram Gat

recondemo
Adam Cronkright sent the attached document and writes:

Here is a draft that I’ve put together to help explain the work we are doing here in Bolivia, and hopefully in other places in Latin America with time. Would love to get input/feedback from readers of the EqualityByLot blog.

In particular, I would love help with the citations in the section on ancient Athens. I’ve been a long ways from home for the last half a year, so I have no access to my personal computer, my personal library, nor any English public/academic library. So in putting this Overview together, I regularly cited a second/third-hand source (Arthur Robbins Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained: The True Meaning of Democracy), since it was one of the few .pdf’s I could access. But Robbins did not rigorously cite his Athenian history, and I would much prefer to cite primary sources when possible. So any help making that section more academically rigorous would be appreciated.
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Filed under: Applications, Athens, Books, Participation, Sortition | 23 Comments »

Asset or approval voting =?= sortitional selection

Posted on July 8, 2013 by Common Lot Sortitionist

As a result of my video entries to the Looking at Democracy contest, the following message came to my Common Lot website:

I’ve been a proponent of legislative juries for some time. We also promote advanced proportional representation systems.
ScoreVoting.net/Asset.html
ScoreVoting.net/RRV.html

Here was our Looking At Democracy contest entry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=db6Syys2fmE

… I’d like to devote the rest of my life to democracy reform. The legislative jury idea is one I’m quite fond of. Feel free to join our discussion forum and share your thoughts. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/electionscience

Best,
Clay Shentrup
The Center for Election Science

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Filed under: Elections, Juries, Sortition | 32 Comments »

David Halevy: What is true democracy?

Posted on July 5, 2013 by Yoram Gat

David Halevy, a resident of British Columbia, Canada, advocates for replacing elections with sortition in a series of three videos:

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Filed under: Sortition | 3 Comments »

A common man must ask a man of influence for whom he must vote

Posted on June 30, 2013 by Yoram Gat

Lawrence Lessig points to a quote of Patrick Henry at the Virginia Ratifying Convention in which he points at the weakness of the virtue-based justification for elections:

It has been said, by several gentlemen, that the freeness of elections would be promoted by throwing the country into large districts. I contend, sir, that it will have a contrary effect. It will destroy that connection that ought to subsist between the electors and the elected. If your elections be by districts, instead of counties, the people will not be acquainted with the candidates. They must, therefore, be directed in the elections by those who know them. So that, instead of a confidential connection between the electors and the elected, they will be absolutely unacquainted with each other. A common man must ask a man of influence how he is to proceed, and for whom he must vote. The elected, therefore, will be careless of the interest of the electors. Continue reading →

Filed under: Elections, History, Theory | 3 Comments »

Representation in the electoral system

Posted on June 29, 2013 by Yoram Gat

Theoretical considerations show that the electoral system cannot be expected to produce government that represents the values and interests of the general public. The two mechanisms advanced for the idea that the electoral system is representatives – the virtue based mechanism and the rewards based mechanism – both do not withstand scrutiny. The widespread support for the 2011 anti-government protest movement in the West indicates that in many countries the public sentiment is that government is indeed not representative.

In a 2005 paper called “Inequality and democratic responsiveness” Martin Gilens makes an empirical study of representativity:

Abstract By allowing voters to choose among candidates with competing policy orientations and by providing incentives for incumbents to shape policy in the direction the public desires, elections are thought to provide the foundation that links government policy to the preferences of the governed. In this article I examine the extent to which the preference/policy link is biased toward the preferences of high-income Americans.
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Filed under: Academia, Elections | 1 Comment »

Lottery – our cunning little ‘Swiss army knife’?

Posted on June 20, 2013 by Conall Boyle

Randomness – using a lottery – can be a crafty little tool in many ways other than selecting Citizens Juries. How it works depends on human psychology. We know what selection by lottery is meant to do – keep Human Judgement out of it! Or to put it more formally: it is either its ‘sanitizing’ effect (Peter Stone) or the arrationality effect (Olly Dowlen).

But human psychology comes into it as well. Which is more valuable – a gift of 1 Euro or a lottery ticket with a 1 in a 1,000,000 chance of  500,000 Euro?

Easy, say you hyper-rational kleroterians! Take the money.

Not so! The General Public are quite happy to buy tickets every week for such a lottery with an expected loss of 50% of your stake. There’s something about lottery prizes that makes them more valuable than the expected  prize – and can also make a small loss more painful than a large gain. The statistician Jimmy Savage discovered these ‘irrational’ traits of the human mind when developing Decision Theory.
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Filed under: Applications, Distribution by lot | Tagged: | 7 Comments »

Sortition noted by far-right group

Posted on June 20, 2013 by Common Lot Sortitionist

http://www.counter-currents.com/tag/sortition/

Although electoral representation is a discredited system, White Nationalists should not give up on the idea or virtues of democratic representation but should seek alternative ways of achieving this through sortition — the selection of representatives through a randomized process like a national lottery.

The political potential of sortition is virtually unknown in White Nationalist circles. Edgar Steele mentioned it briefly in his book Defensive Racism arguing that juries, which are selected by sortition, should not only decide questions of fact, i.e. whether the accused has broken the law, but also importantly that they also be allowed to rule on the legitimacy of the law in question.[1] This essay goes far beyond Steele’s proposals and argues that sortition should play a decisive role in the political process itself, so much so that bad laws never see the light of day and are killed in their drafting stage.

Filed under: Sortition | 58 Comments »

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