Citizens Jury on alcohol related violence in South Australia

Posted on June 18, 2013 by Yoram Gat

news.com.au reports:

A “CITIZENS’ jury” will deliberate on Adelaide’s future and deliver their verdict to the State Government.

Forty randomly selected South Australians will consider how to make the city both vibrant and safe and their recommendations will go to Parliament.

Premier Jay Weatherill will outsource this latest incarnation of “debate and decide” to a not-for-profit organisation, the newDemocracy Foundation. It boasts the support of a range of luminaries and former politicians and is dedicated to finding a “better system” of government.

It will invite about 20,000 randomly selected people to apply, then use an algorithm to find 40 people who are broadly representative of the community.
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Filed under: Applications, Juries, Press, Sortition | 13 Comments »

Louis offers sortition to the Belgian parliament

Posted on June 15, 2013 by Yoram Gat

A commenter draws attention to a recent speech by Belgian MP Laurent Louis:

According to the description on the YouTube page, Louis is presenting a proposal based on the ideas of Etienne Chouard which is laid out in detail here: http://www.lachambre.be/FLWB/PDF/53/2860/53K2860001.pdf.

An automatic translation of the introduction of the proposal (with my touch-ups) is as follows:

A motion for a resolution on the revision of the electoral system and the establishment of the draw members of the Federal Parliament of the Kingdom of Belgium

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Introduction

The Kingdom of Belgium has gone through its history, a plurality of policies by landscapes from the bipartisan confrontation (1830-1893) to extreme multiparty (1965-present), all with a common point, the election. Belgium claims, like all Western countries which have adopted the same system, to be a representative democracy. Representative democracy is a “system in which elected representatives by the people develop and pass legislation.” This system, highly controversial for many years, does not give the people the opportunity to express itself and to pass laws (as in a direct democracy), but has “the great disadvantage of vesting the decision making power, not in the people themselves as the idea of ​​democracy suggests, but in representatives elected by the people and governments designated indirectly, not to mention even more indirect selection of public agencies and other institutions.”
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Filed under: Proposals, Sortition | 6 Comments »

Nicholas Gruen: Establish special-purpose ‘democratic’ elites

Posted on June 12, 2013 by Yoram Gat

Nicholas Gruen, CEO of Lateral Economics, Chairman of the Australian Centre for Social Innovation, an entrepreneur involved in a number of internet startups, wants to use sortition to “cut through the weaknesses of ‘vox pop democracy'”:

It turns out that it’s in the opposition’s interest to oppose government policy even where most informed people think the government is right, perhaps even where most of the people think it’s right. Whereupon the process of undermining community sentiment begins apace. On abstract and complex subjects, lots of effort can be expended emphasising uncertainties, nursing resentments, breaking the law to obtain emails and then using them to smear scientists’ motivations etc. Who cares that careful investigation showed that these emails didn’t illustrate what they were taken to illustrate? By then the caravan has moved on.

Other areas where there’s been strong consensus based around expert opinion which have then been exploited by oppositions include tax reform of virtually every hue from the mining tax to CGT, FBT and GST reform.
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Filed under: Elections, Juries, Sortition | 10 Comments »

Sortition in The Nation, fleetingly

Posted on June 8, 2013 by Yoram Gat

A review of David Graeber‘s book, The Democracy Project, in The Nation makes a brief mention of his offer of sortition. The Nation‘s verdict: “That sounds nice, but it’s far easier said than done.”

For many who were attracted by slogans like “banks got bailed out, we got sold out,” the fetishization of process seemed like bait and switch. Horizontal decision making at general assemblies and small groups could go on for hours. Far from being democratic, the time-consuming process discriminated against people with jobs, those who had to take care of children or sick people, those with health problems of their own and those unfamiliar with anarchist culture and jargon, among others. Just as is the case with liberal structures, horizontalism encourages democracy in some contexts and dampens it in others.
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Filed under: Press, Sortition | 4 Comments »

“Tennessee’s GOP Governor Rejects Medicaid Expansion, Leaves Residents To ‘Health Care Lottery’”

Posted on June 7, 2013 by peterstone

“Tennessee’s GOP Governor Rejects Medicaid Expansion, Leaves Residents To ‘Health Care Lottery’”

Gov. Bill Haslam (R-TN) announced on Wednesday that he will not pursue Obamacare’s optional expansion of the Medicaid program, which would extend health coverage to an additional 140,000 uninsured Tennesseans […].

[…]

Since there are a significant number of low-income Tennessee residents whose annual incomes put them above the cut-off for TennCare coverage, but whose expensive medical bills make them unable to afford to purchase private insurance on their own, the state holds a “health care lottery” twice a year to allow those residents to call in for a special application for TennCare. The phone lines are flooded, and many people are unable to get through. Many of those people would be eligible to gain public health insurance coverage under the Medicaid expansion, and would no longer have to desperately dial a state number in the hopes of winning an elusive lottery to access the care they need.

Not the most edifying use of a lottery–a bit like cannibalizing someone by lottery because you’re feeling too lazy to go to the supermarket.

Filed under: Distribution by lot, Press | Tagged: , , | Leave a comment »

Machiavelli and the principle of distinction

Posted on June 3, 2013 by Yoram Gat

In chapter XLVII of his Discourses, Machiavelli tells two stories:

The Roman People having become annoyed with the Consular name, and wanting to be able either to choose as Consuls men of the Plebs, or to limit their authority, the Nobility in order not to discredit the Consular authority by either change, took the middle course, and were content that four Tribunes with Consular power be created, who could come from the Plebs as well as from the Nobles. The Plebs were content with this, as it seemed to them to destroy the Consulship and give them a part in the highest ranks. From this a notable case arose, that when it came to the creation of these Tribunes, and they could have selected all Plebs, the Roman people chose all Nobles. Continue reading →

Filed under: Athens, Elections, History, Theory | 12 Comments »

Poletecracy

Posted on June 2, 2013 by Yoram Gat

Post by Jon Roland.

A political or management system can be characterized by the kind of people it elevates to positions of authority. A number of terms have been proposed by cynics, such as plutocracy, rule by the rich, kleptocracy, rule by thieves, or kakistocracy, rule by the worst. But from this writer’s experience with the most influential legislators, bureaucrats, judges, and corporate executives, the finding is that what attribute is most important to the success of most of them is the ability to sell and make connections with other people. In Greek a salesman is a πωλητής, or poletes. This suggests a word, poletecracy.

In a few cases technical skills help enable someone to rise to power, but most people in high positions are not experts in anything but campaigning and dealmaking. Most are politicians (πολιτικοί) first and foremost. If they acquire any expertise, it is usually after being on a job for a while, not while they are climbing. Their personal assets are favors earned and paid, and being able to have other influential people take their phone calls.
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Filed under: Athens, History, Sortition | 7 Comments »

Spectator call for nomothetai to decide Britain’s membership of the EU

Posted on May 30, 2013 by keithsutherland

Sir: Peter Jones (25 May) is right to draw an unfavourable comparison between ancient and modern democracy, but he is focusing on the wrong institution. The Athenian council was merely the secretariat for the general assembly, and the legislation passed by the assembly was often as erratic as modern referenda. After the restoration of democracy in 403 bc, legislation was entrusted to nomothetai — large randomly selected juries that, unlike modern parliamentarians, were obliged to listen to the arguments of well-informed advocates for and against the proposed law before deciding the outcome by secret vote

If David Cameron wants the people do decide. . .

read on: http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/letters/8921081/letters-285/

This proposal, written in response to André Sauzeau’s proposal for minimal reforms, was submitted as an article (see below) and originally accepted for publication by the Spectator, but ended up cut down into a short letter. The Spectator website has a comments section, so suggest we use that as an opportunity to kick-start the conversation on sortition there, rather than commenting on this forum.

Full article:

Put the EU on Trial

By Keith Sutherland

The answer to Britain’s EU problem is not a public referendum, it’s an adversarial judicial inquiry in front of a large citizen jury, selected by lot

The success of UKIP in the recent elections has led to unprecedented soul searching within the political class in general and the Conservative Party in particular, with no fewer than three former cabinet ministers arguing that Britain should leave the EU. David Cameron has committed the party to a referendum on EU membership, but the public often just use referenda as an excuse to put two fingers up to the government. There is an urgent need to find a more reliable mechanism to allow the people to make a well-informed decision on what is arguably the most important issue in contemporary politics.
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Filed under: Action, Athens, Juries, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 11 Comments »

David Graeber: “The democratic way of choosing officials, if you had to do it, was lottery.”

Posted on May 28, 2013 by Yoram Gat

David Graeber is an

American anthropologist, political activist and author. He is currently reader in social anthropology at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and was formerly an associate professor of anthropology at Yale University. David is a member of the labour union Industrial Workers of the World, and has played a role in events such as the 2002 New York protests against the World Economic Forum. His most recent book is Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011)

He is also described as

a man of many talents. A longtime activist, a professor of anthropology at the University of London, and a prolific author, David also helped found the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011. He even coined the phrase “We are the 99%.”

Graeber is not impressed with the electoral system:
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Filed under: Academia, History, Press, Sortition | 8 Comments »

Sebastián Linares: El sorteo de cargos públicos: un método para mejorar la democracia

Posted on May 26, 2013 by Yoram Gat

Sebastián Linares writes in Con Distintos Acentos (Google Translate with my touch-ups):

Lottery for public office: a method to improve democracy

The concept of democracy has been associated, in different historical periods, with two very different methods for selection of public officials and accountability: the popular election of representatives and sortition (drawing names at random). In the last two hundred years democratic theory has assumed that the only democratic method to choose public officials is the election of representatives by popular vote. However, from its origins in Athens (435 BC) until well into the nineteenth century, the concept of “democracy” used to refer to the use of sortition for the selection of public officials (Manin 1997).

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Filed under: History, Press, Sortition | Leave a comment »

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