Tiago Peixoto wrote about a video regarding the British Columbia Citizen’s Assembly:
It turns out that the video is one of the finalists of something called the 2011 Reinhard Mohn Prize given out by the Bertelsmann Foundation under the title “Vitalizing Democracy“. Other submissions to the prize may also be of interest.
Filed under: Elections, Initiatives | 1 Comment »
William K. Dustin introduces his book and website:
I am the author of a book entitled Toward an Ethic of Citizenship: Creating a Culture of Democracy for the 21st Century which was published in 1999. After completing the book, I created a website, www.ethicofcitizenship.com, to promote the book and the idea of random selection. Until very recently I was unaware of any other websites advocating the same idea. As a result of an email I received on a totally different topic, I discovered The Common Lot website which then led me to the Equality by Lot site.
The idea for the book arose out of a little known political scandal, known as “phonegate”, that occurred in Minnesota in the early 1990’s in which a number of legislators were found to have been abusing their phone privileges. The hubris of the legislature in response to the discovery of this abuse not only made me rather angry, but, since I had been called for jury duty the year before, gave me the idea that service in the legislature ought to be a duty of citizenship like jury duty. Continue reading
Filed under: Proposals, Sortition | 14 Comments »
Our ongoing debate on Egypt got me thinking about the connection (or lack of it) between sortition and religion. Fustel de Coulanges’ 1864 account, that lot was the revelation of divine will, was discredited by Headlam in 1891 and nobody has sought to revive it. Similarly, as Conall Boyle points out in his edition of Gataker, lotteries were only acceptable in the Judaeo-Christian tradition in so far as they didn’t involve claims about divine revelation.
On the other hand Oliver Dowlen argues that the disappearance of lot may well be connected with religious factors, as sortition appears to have been a victim of the Reformation:
There are many reasons why the process of selecting nominators by lot might have been lost in the transition from Venice to the New World. . . The drawing of the lottery was very much a public process, witnessed by the whole community or reggimento. To the puritan settlers this could have seemed a very foreign, bizarre public ritual which smacked of superstition – even Catholicism. The secret ballot, on the other hand, conformed to the Protestant ideal that the private individual should be alone in his judgement and answerable only to God. (Dowlen, Political Potential of Sortition, p.163)
The question that I’m leading up to – and it’s no more than that – is would sortition-based politics be more acceptable to Muslim sensibilities than (Western) electoral politics, and might this possibly account for the failure of electoral democracy in the Arab world?
Filed under: Distribution by lot, History, Proposals, Sortition | 21 Comments »
Sa’ada Abu Bakr wrote the following essay.
The people of Egypt are standing at an historic crossroad. But to hear other people tell it, Egyptians are travelling down the highway to democracy. They’ve been stalled for decades but now their engines are revving and they are all but on their way to western style democracy. First stop: free and fair elections.
To all those who died and sacrificed, it would be a disservice to commence this trip without fully examining the destination and any and all alternatives. Required reading before you embark on this journey is Animal Farm by George Orwell. Moral: If new people are put into any version of the same system, no matter how reformed, you will eventually end up with the same results. The problems may be to a lesser degree, more benign, but you will not have the freedom for which people died.
As an American who dabbled in local politics, consider this my postcard from Destination: Democracy. I don’t wish you were here. Sure, I have a vote; I have a voice, but it is not heard. If you have a voice which you can’t use, are you in a worse position than one who can use their voice, unheard? What is the difference?
Filed under: Proposals, Sortition | 19 Comments »
There’s been some recent discussion here of the possibility that a randomly-selected decision-making body (an Allotted Chamber, or AC) might disagree with the people it represents because the former is well-informed and has thought things through carefully but the latter has not. James Fishkin discusses a movie that illustrates this possibility well–
http://www.one-country.com/061magictown.html
Thought this might be useful for the discussion.
Filed under: Sortition | 37 Comments »
In his recent posting, David Grant noted an early mention of sortition by Michael Phillips in CoEvolution Quarterly, which I think is now defunct. I found that the article is online at
http://www.wholeearth.com/issue/2026/article/201/new.age.doctrine.is.out.to.lunch.on.three.issues
It doesn’t do more than mention the idea of randomly selecting legislators, but I thought it worth noting here. (Phillips of course went on the coauthor with Ernest Callenbach the book A Citizen Legislature, which Imprint Academic reprinted in 2008.)
Filed under: Sortition | Leave a comment »
The book Sortition: Theory and Practice (edited by Gil Delannoi and Oliver Dowlen, Imprint Academic, 2010)–an anthology of papers from a Kleroterian conference held in Paris in 2008–has been reviewed for the first time (to the best of my knowledge–anyone know of other reviews?). The review, by Alan Lockard, appears in Public Choice. (The print version has not yet appeared–it’s on the journal’s website as an “online first” article.) Here’s the link–
http://www.springerlink.com/content/4753631985174603/
The review is generally favorable to the collection. It discusses each paper in the collection, and thus only has space for about a paragraph on each paper. The review is particularly impressed by Antoine Vergne’s detailed review of the sortition-related literature. It engages most substantively with Gil Delannoi’s lead paper in the collection. And it provides a fair and accurate summary of my own paper, though it does not comment upon it at all (perhaps because it is the last paper in the volume). All in all, a pretty nice review.
Filed under: Sortition | 3 Comments »
I am obliged to confess that I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.
-William F. Buckley, Jr., Rumbles Left and Right: A Book about Troublesome People and Ideas (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1963), p. 134.
I know this quote has been mentioned here before, but this is the first time I’ve ever had in my hand an actual primary source by Buckley for it. Thanks to Ralph Keyes’ The Quote Verifier (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2006) for directing me to it.
Filed under: Sortition | 7 Comments »
Greg requested an outline of my structural proposals for the introduction of sortition, so here goes. It’s a talk I gave recently to the University of Brighton Philosophy Society. The focus is the UK parliament, but the principles are more general.
It’s become a commonplace that our political arrangements are in bad shape. Party leaders know we’ve twigged that there is no connection between manifesto commitments and actual policies, yet for some reason we don’t call their bluff – those of us who still turn out to vote give politicians the benefit of the doubt by maintaining that polite fiction called democracy. Party membership has declined catastrophically since the middle of the last century – parties now do little more than reflect what focus groups say we want, rather than continuing to stand for a particular manner of thinking, or specific socio-economic interests. So what is the point of the party?
The argument that I want to put forward this evening is that tinkering around with the electoral system by introducing AV or proportional representation is just re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. What is needed is clear thinking, we need to bring to bear the tools of the philosopher via:
Filed under: Distribution by lot, Elections, Initiatives, Proposals | 51 Comments »
With the imminent arrival (?) of elective democracy in Egypt and other Arab countries, those who claim that
For better or for worse the immediate future, politically speaking, (by which I mean, the next 30 or 40 years) belongs to the parliamentary democracies
(which is more of less what Fukuyama predicted as ‘The End of History’). You can read more about this, and the extended and interesting range of comments it provoked at Crooked Timber (an excellent blog btw)
http://crookedtimber.org/2011/02/01/fukuyama-f-yeah/comment-page-2/#comment-346164
No mention of what might come after elections, only that elections were somehow the end point of history. So I added a comment as follows: Continue reading
Filed under: Athens, Elections, Sortition | 2 Comments »
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Equality by lot 