Promotion by Lot

Posted on October 29, 2010 by peterstone

Haven’t had a chance to read the study described here yet…

Study: Most Efficient Organizations Grab Random Employees, Promote Them

…but it does deal with a fascinating problem. If you promote the best people, the argument goes, you will keep promoting people to tougher and tougher jobs until they no longer excel at them. The result will be an organization full of people stuck in positions for which they’re not particularly qualified. So says the Peter Principle, for which I can claim no credit. I’d be curious of the details as to how exactly the argument works, but the implications are striking. If you randomized the process of putting people into more difficult positions, it would seem odd to call it “promoting” them anymore. The latter term seems inherently related to merit or desert. It would then seem better just to say that the more difficult jobs (i.e., jobs requiring higher levels of competence) are reassigned by lot. (Should this happen periodically? Good question, but one I cannot answer until I actually get around to reading the study.)

Filed under: Distribution by lot | 5 Comments »

Citizens’ assembly in Ireland recommended

Posted on October 27, 2010 by Yoram Gat

Harald Korneliussen points out the following development:

Oireachtas [the Irish parliament, -YG] Joint Committee on the Constitution recommends significant changes to the implementation of the PR-STV Electoral System in this country

The Oireachtas Joint Committee on the Constitution, in a report on the electoral system published today, recommends substantial changes to the operation of the PR-STV electoral system in Ireland which it considers would significantly improve its functioning.

It presents 29 recommendations for improving the system. Areas identified where improvements are required include: the level of women’s representation; the voting age; the filling of casual vacancies; the transfer of surplus votes; ease of access to the ballot on election day; the number of seats that are contested in each constituency; the manner in which constituency boundaries are drawn; the filling of casual vacancies in Dáil Éireann; and the proportionality of vote share to seat share.

The Committee underlines the importance of legitimacy in any electoral reform process and recommends that citizens should be given every opportunity to play a part in choosing the system by which they elect their representatives.

It proposes the establishment of a Citizens’ Assembly to examine the electoral system in Ireland, and, if it deems that reform is necessary, to propose change.

Filed under: Initiatives | 26 Comments »

Support for sortition from death row

Posted on October 17, 2010 by Yoram Gat

Mumia Abu-Jamal read C. L. R. James and made a recording advocating sortition:

Filed under: Athens, History, Sortition | 1 Comment »

“Representation and Randomness,” Part One

Posted on October 9, 2010 by peterstone

I finally got around to reading “Representation and Randomness,” a collection of papers that appeared in the most recent issue of the journal Constellations (volume 17, number 3, September 2010). One paper in that collection, by Alex Zakaras, has already gotten some attention here, but I thought it worth adding some comments on the entire collection.

Philip Pettit’s “Representation, Responsive and Indicative” distinguishes (obviously) between responsive and indicative representation. A responsive representative does what I want because I can direct the representative to do what I want. An indicative representative does what I want because the representative is chosen in such a way that the representative does what I would have done were I present. In Pettit’s words, “In responsive representation, the fact that I am of a certain mind offers reason for expecting that my deputy will be of the same mind…In indicative representation things are exactly the other way around. The fact that my proxy is of a certain mind offers reason for expecting that I will be of the same mind…” (p. 427). Sortition can select indicative representatives, whereas election is supposed to select responsive representatives. But both are legitimate forms of representation, and we might find appropriate uses for each of them.

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Filed under: Sortition | 48 Comments »

Lottery and Legislative Powers: A Reply to Yoram Gat

Posted on October 1, 2010 by azakaras

In his recent blog post, “The Elected Legislator’s Burden,” Yoram Gat challenges one of the arguments of my essay, “Lot and Democratic Representation.”  In that essay, I argue that the U.S. Senate (along with state Senates) should be abolished and replaced with a citizens’ chamber, with its members chosen by lottery. In short, I propose that we preserve bicameral legislatures, but with one chamber filled through election and the other by lot. I argue, however, that the citizens’ chamber should have fewer powers and responsibilities than the elective chamber. It should have the power to veto any legislation ratified by the elective chamber; it should also have the power to draw district boundaries for the elective chamber and to compel a floor vote in that chamber on any legislation introduced there.

            Gat challenges my reluctance to grant the citizens’ chamber “full parliamentary powers – to set its own agenda, initiate legislation and draft its own legislative proposals.”  He suggests that citizens chosen by lottery are capable of wielding these powers responsibly—or, at least, that there is every reason to expect that they will do so as responsibly as elected legislators. He lays out several arguments in support of this claim, and I will consider each in turn.

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Filed under: Elections, Proposals, Sortition, Theory | 17 Comments »

Roger D. Hodge: “Speak, Money”

Posted on September 30, 2010 by Yoram Gat

The October issue of Harper’s Magazine has an excerpt from Roger D. Hodge’s upcoming book, The Mendacity of Hope: Barack Obama and the Betrayal of American Liberalism. [Copy of the excerpt is here.]

Hodge seems to have read John P. McCormick’s paper “Contain the Wealthy and Patrol the Magistrates: Restoring Elite Accountability to Popular Government“. He writes:

In an ideal system of public campaign financing, in which all political speech has been equalized by law, in which political advertising is banned and persuasion stripped of its commercial aspect—the corporate businessman and the millionaire (not to mention the billionaire) would still stand taller than the common citizen. In fact, as the political theorist John P. McCormick has argued, the wealthy are likely to dominate any political regime that chooses its magistrates and lawmakers solely by means of election.

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

The elected legislator’s burden

Posted on September 24, 2010 by Yoram Gat

In his recent article “Lot and Democratic Representation”, Alex Zakaras proposes introducing a sortition-based element into the US government. His proposal is similar to the one made by Anthony Barnett and Peter Carty in the UK (The Athenian Option). The new body proposed, with its veto power over legislation and term of service of one year, would wield moderate power – it lies somewhere on the spectrum between a full-fledged parliamentary body, as proposed by Cellenbach and Phillips, and the weak ad-hoc policy juries of James Fishkin and Ethan Leib.

Zakaras emphasizes the democratic advantages of sortition over elections – primarily equality in the representation of interests. He challenges opponents of sortition (quoting Robert Paul Wolff) to reflect on what their opposition “reveals about their real attitude toward democracy”. It is natural, then, to turn the tables and challenge Zakaras as to what his reluctance to grant the allotted body full parliamentary powers – to set its own agenda, initiate legislation and draft its own legislative proposals – reveals about his own attitude toward democracy.

In one brief passage Zakaras explains that the reason for “not burdening” the allotted body with the tasks of initiating and writing legislation is that its members would lack the expertise of career politicians and “would have virtually no experience assessing the likely consequences of different policy alternatives.”

Quite a few unexamined – and, in fact, unlikely – assumptions are packed into this brief argument. Each of the several counter-arguments below is, by itself, in my mind, enough to counter the reasoning given, or, at least, grounds for a thorough examination of its logic.

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Filed under: Elections, Proposals, Sortition | 6 Comments »

Yet another kleroterion reference in mass media

Posted on September 22, 2010 by Yoram Gat

This is becoming so commonplace that it may be time to launch a “sortition media index” instead of having separate posts. But, for now, here is another mass media reference to sortition, this time from the Arizona Daily Star. The two-paragraph pro and con analysis is pretty perceptive, I think:

to heck with voting

History magazine had a recent piece about an ancient Greek machine that was an early forerunner to the lottery system.

A kleroterion ensured absolute randomness in picking men to sit on juries and to perform other civic duties.

Presumably, a council of 500 would serve for precisely one term, ferreting out the answers to sticky problems.

Huh. A lottery instead of elections. Less posturing for the next race could spell less gridlock. There could be less likelihood of ingrained corruption. There might be a greater cross-section of the community instead of picks made by a fraction of voting-age people.

There could be downsides, too. Less institutional memory might strengthen the role of lobbyists or tempt those seated to reinvent the wheel every year.

The reference to History magazine is apparently with regard to an item which Google Alerts caught back in July.

Filed under: Athens, Elections, History, Sortition | Leave a comment »

Bert Olivier reads Joe Klein

Posted on September 17, 2010 by Yoram Gat

Bert Olivier, Professor of Philosophy at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, read Joe Klein’s recent post supporting Deliberative Polling®, and found it interesting.

Following up on Klein’s suggestion regarding the kleroterion, that opportunities for “deliberative democracy” be created on a larger scale along this avenue, could lead in the direction of greater democratic participation in the Arendtian sense of “action”. Such a process could only be salutary for democracy, as long as it is not restricted to matters economical, but expanded to include really tough political issues as well — starting at a local level, and then slowly broadening it to regional and national levels. Perhaps this way the meaning of “democracy” could be recuperated.

Filed under: Athens, Experiments, Initiatives, Sortition | 2 Comments »

Another movie about school lotteries!

Posted on September 12, 2010 by Conall Boyle

First we had the movie by Madeleine Sackler The Lottery. Now along comes another one

 Waiting for “Superman,” in theaters this fall, offers the best evidence to date that charter schools are no longer a reform sought by conservatives alone: the film was directed by Davis Guggenheim of An Inconvenient Truth fame.

 You can read more about this movie (including a trailer which includes an actual lottery draw!) at

 http://www.firstshowing.net/2010/05/08/watch-this-davis-guggenheims-waiting-for-superman-trailer/

 I found out about this from reading an article about New York charter schools by Marcus A. Winters (a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute ) called ‘The Life-Changing Lottery’ in City Journal

 http://www.city-journal.org/2010/20_3_democracy-prep.html

(Winters accepts uncritically the pro-charter research by economist Caroline Hoxby of Stanford U. Others doubt the efficacy of charters, notably Steven Levitt of Chicago and ‘Freakonomics’ fame. Both rely on the ‘natural scientific experiment thrown up by lottery choosing. Details in my new book ‘Lotteries for Education’)

Filed under: Distribution by lot, Experiments, schools | 5 Comments »

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