I posted this on my own Substack at the time of John Burnheim’s memorial — in Nov 2023 and, coming across it looking for something else, it occurred to me that the folks on this blog might be interested in it.
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This post is a transcript of a discussion that has been going on in email over the last few days. I suggested that we continue this on Equality-by-Lot so more people can respond if interested, and so that a public record is produced which can later be referred to. All are invited to continue the discussion in the comments thread.
The discussion was part of a longer thread, but the transcript starts with the following message from Chris Forman:
I’m leaning to the premise that it’s the sum of the daily interactions between people that adds up to the behavior of society writ large. The purpose of lotteries and deliberation is to build connectivity and relationships from which good policy flows.
A simple plan to transform US society is to hold social events with a lottery element in them. I think simply connecting random people in local communities and supporting those connection meetups with well structured events and follow up activities could be a recipe that many many civic organizations could get behind.
Could be a really useful tool for organizations trying to reach broader demographics while training people in the value of lotteries, and building up support for lotteries through direct experiences.
Could transform society.
I replied:
Meeting with random people could be fun (although it could also be tedious). But the notion that mass participation is by itself a path to democracy is unconvincing. It ignores the fact that governance takes structure. Our current non-democratic government is based on structure, and democratic government would also require structure.
Filed under: Deliberation, Participation, Sortition | 134 Comments »
Experiments in oversight-only IVEs (i.e., IVEs that don’t elect legislators) of governmental bodies could start small, at the local level, and work upward, to the county, state, and national levels, if justified by prior success.
Then the power of electing a portion of the legislators under their supervision could be phased in, as experience warrants, and as voters approve, and IVEs would become PEs (Proxy Electorates).
Voters might be glad to delegate the election of certain low-level officeholders, like dogcatchers, sewer commissioners, and comptrollers to Proxy Electorates. Voters know little of their qualifications and characters—and don’t want to know. Let George Do It is their unspoken attitude.
New PE members would be given a crash course on their assigned topic, and on the rules and customs of being a Proxy Elector.
PEs would gather, usually online, at regular intervals (more frequently at high levels) to hear their officeholders—and their critics—speak, and to interrogate them. They would not gather only at election time.
In the intervals between these gatherings, Proxies would have a private cyberspace forum and a Zoom site in which they could converse among themselves about what had occurred at those gatherings.
A Secretariat’s personnel would preside at meetings, take minutes, schedule speakers, maintain a library, do background checks on candidates, provide orientation sessions for newcomers, etc.
Training would include inside-look “documentaries” of the deliberations of good-outcome PEs of the past, to serve as models for how to behave. There should also be documentaries about bad-outcome PEs, as object-lessons in what not to do.
The control of important political knowledge by leaders constitutes, of course, a very basic element in perpetuating power politics. —Robert J. Pranger, The Eclipse of Citizenship, 1968, p. 46.
Filed under: Books, Elections, Proposals | 8 Comments »
A referendum in Ireland on March 8 resulted in a “no” vote for constitutional changes. The rejected proposals were the product of a process involving an allotted citizen assembly. An article by Rory Carroll in the The Guardian offers an illuminating review of the aftermath of the failure of the proposed changes at the polls.
Irish referendum fiasco puts future of lauded citizens’ assemblies in doubt
Debates involving 99 randomly selected people were hailed as a model for the world, but some say faith has been eroded
When Ireland shattered its history of social conservatism by passing a 2015 referendum on same-sex marriage and a 2018 referendum on abortion, progressives credited its citizens’ assembly.
Ninety-nine randomly selected people, who are brought together to debate a specific issue, had weighed evidence from experts and issued policy recommendations that emboldened the political establishment, and voters, to make audacious leaps.
Governments and campaigners around the world hailed Ireland as a model for how to tackle divisive issues and a modern incarnation of the concept of deliberative democracy that dated back to ancient Athens.
Continue reading
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Presented by Wayne Liebman, M.D., American activist, advocate, and strategist for democratic lotteries and deliberation based in California.
Our deliberative ecosystem has a linguistic blind spot. In thinking about lottery based democracy, we often leave strategy off the table. It’s actually the conversation that we should always be having: ABC–Always Be Calculating. What strategy to use depends on the goal, but whatever your goal, thinking strategically will ease the way.
Or dial: (DK) +45 70 71 41 04 PIN: 464 474 557# — More phone numbers: https://tel.meet/bct-xucx-gep?pin=1550818843600
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Fortune tells the story of Marlene Engelhorn who is busy dispensing with €25 million which she inherited.
Engelhorn settled on an idea: Let 50 strangers decide how to give it away.
Those strangers, all of whom live in Engelhorn’s native Austria, will meet for the first time this weekend at a hotel in Salzburg. Dubbed the Guter Rat, or Good Council, they were chosen through a statistical process run by research group Foresight and range in location, age, race, socioeconomic background and other demographic factors chosen in an effort to be representative of the overall Austrian population.
Engelhorn’s goal is not only to give away €25 million, but also to spark conversations on wealth inequality. She’s frustrated that her windfall wasn’t taxed — Austria eliminated its inheritance tax in 2008 — and doesn’t see traditional philanthropy as a good solution because it still gives her too much power.
“I’m just one brain, I’m just one person and so to me, this is a huge relief knowing that the process of redistribution is much more legitimate and thorough and democratic than I could ever do it,” she said in an interview. “Nobody needs another foundation.”
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Continuing what is a bit of a tradition, Evan Tao, a Brown University student, proposes employing sortition to select student government at Brown.
Over the past decade, many countries have held citizens’ assemblies in which citizens are randomly selected to deliberate and make policy recommendations to legislators. Hundreds of these assemblies have been held around the world with great success. An Irish citizens’ assembly’s proposal to legalize abortion was sent to a national referendum; in France, an assembly submitted recommendations on combating climate change to the incumbent government. Citizens’ assemblies can be effective pilot programs, proving to the public that sortition works. Ideally, they will become regularized and eventually hold direct legislative power in local government.
If I’ve convinced you that lotteries are preferable to elections, and you’re wondering what to do about it, we can start right here at Brown. Our student government election process has room for improvement. I don’t know about you, but I only voted for the people who asked me to or who had cute posters, neither of which seem like a good indication of the best future leader. Voter turnout in the class of 2026 first-year elections was only 33.5 percent. And, as we saw with the recent Undergraduate Finance Board budget surplus fiasco, who our student government representatives are matters. Let’s make it an opt-in lottery at Brown—and then take it to the rest of the country.
Filed under: Academia, Press, Proposals | Tagged: Student government | 9 Comments »
Drawing a statistical microcosm out of the mass population, regardless of its abstract attractiveness, isn’t enough to make a Proxy Electorate seem legitimate in the eyes of the populace. Democracy, the populace generally and strongly believes, allows it to express itself by balloting, the outcome of which will never be a microcosm.
The most severe drawback to government lottery … is that it cuts people off from the opportunity to vote for their congressional representatives.… It is this specific citizen endorsement—and not any abstract idea of democratic representation—that gives the government is legitimacy and insures citizen, acceptance of the government decisions. —Malcolm Margolin, in Ernest Callenbach & Michael Phillips, A Citizen Legislature, 1985, p. 74.
Advocates of sortition should therefore somehow incorporate balloting.
If you want to change someone’s mind about a moral or political issue, talk to the elephant [their intuitional “priors”] first. If you ask people to believe something that violates their intuitions, they will devote their efforts to finding an escape hatch—a reason to doubt your argument or conclusion. They will almost always succeed. —Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind, 2012.
Ordinary people don’t want randomly chosen noxious and/or numbskull neighbors making decisions for them. Instead, they wish to elevate persons whom they respect.
It is at least worth considering whether people in electing the kinds of congressional candidates they do have deliberately chosen not to be governed by their barber, their accountant, the unemployed derelict who hangs aound the neighborhood liquor store, or the nice lady who runs the cosmetic counter at Woolworth’s … but because they want to be ruled by people whom they perceive (however, mistakenly) as successful, powerful and capable … often with a background in law. —Malcolm Margolin, in Ernest Callenbach & Michael Phillips, A Citizen Legislature, 1985, p. 77.
Demiocracy will satisfy this yearning to elect “the best man.”
If balloting were finagled away somehow, sortition might not be robust enough to weather political storms. A non-negligible minority might not accept the new system as legitimate in a crisis, leading to disorder and collapse. Only if there is regular “buy-in” to the system—by balloting—will it have strong enough legitimacy.
Filed under: Books, Sortition | 27 Comments »
Iain Walker, executive director of The newDemocracy Foundation, has an opinion piece in The Jerusalem Post. Walker offers Israel and its allies advice about what government they should set up in Gaza (once they tire of killing tens of thousands of its inhabitants).
Gaza needs democracy without elections
Instead of elections, Athenian democracy used a simple random draw among citizens (known as “sortition”).
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu receives regular criticism for failing to share the plan for Gaza after the military role concludes. The lack of an official position on this subject could stem from the fact that all over options are unattractive, and so a new approach is required.
Israel as an occupying force is undesirable, it would draw global criticism and simply push off the problem to a later date.
Equally, traditional electoral democracy is an unworkable option.
With polls reflecting up to 80% support for Hamas among Gaza residents, elections would only allow for some incarnation of Hamas to emerge newly empowered – an untenable situation following its acts of terror targeting civilians.
Continue reading
Filed under: Opinion polling, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 6 Comments »
Democracy is the paradise of which the unscrupulous financier dreams. —Georges Sorel.
Corruption is a heartbreaking problem, because it is so enervating, insidious, invisible, and seemingly intractable. There are regions and nations where it is so pervasive that they are halfway to being “mafia states”—Russia is one example, and Ukraine is (or was) another. The parasitic top dogs siphon off wealth and prosper at the expense of the poor and of the vitality of the economy, which wouldn’t be happening under a true, all-seeing Demiocracy—i.e., if the common man, or Everyman, were really in charge.
Africa is the worst victim. Gaining independence and a one-man, one-vote democracy did not make Africa free and self-governing. That is to say, independence did not usher in true democracy, but only DeMockery. It empowered the Political class and other Pathological P’s, not the common man. Members of the political class, there as everywhere, put their personal interest first, their party’s interest second, and the people’s interest third—a distant third. The kleptocrats prospered and misgoverned, leaving most Africans poor, despite the continent’s natural wealth.
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