Australian prime minister proposes “people’s assembly” on climate

Posted on August 6, 2010 by Yoram Gat

The Brisbane Times reports that a “people’s assembly” to investigate climate change is being proposed by the Australian prime minister, Julia Gillard, as part of her re-election platform:

A JULIA Gillard government would create a ”citizens’ assembly” of ”real Australians” to investigate the science of climate change and consequences of emissions trading, under a plan to build a national consensus for a carbon price.

[…]

Few details will be given [in an upcoming speech] about how the citizens’ assembly would operate, other than that an independent authority would select people from the electoral roll using census data. Membership would be optional.

Continue reading →

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

Institutional design power parameters

Posted on August 5, 2010 by Yoram Gat

Not all decision-making bodies are equally powerful. Even when the area of decision making is given, a decision-making body can be designed so as to wield a significant amount of independent power, or so as to be no more than a rubber stamp for decisions made elsewhere.

Here are some design parameters that impact the amount of independent power of a decision-making body:

  1. Most clearly, an advisory body is less powerful than a body whose decisions are binding.
  2. Period of member service: the shorter the service period, the less time members have to study the decision area and make an informed decision, the weaker is the body.
  3. Ad-hoc, or occasionally convened, bodies are more susceptible to manipulation than permanent, or regularly convened, bodies.
  4. Bodies with a mandate which was pre-determined by an outside political agent are less powerful than bodies that can set the political agenda.
  5. Among bodies with a pre-determined agenda, those that can merely select one of several pre-phrased proposed decisions are weaker than those that can write their own decisions.

Athens had allotted bodies of various types.

The Boule was the most powerful allotted body: it was a regularly convened body, in which members served for a year. It made binding decisions on various issues, including setting the political agenda for Assembly.

The Nomothetai were convened regularly and made binding decisions, but could only accept or veto decisions made by the Assembly, and had to make those decisions within a one-day session. Similarly, the Athenian courts made binding decisions within a one-day session but selected from a pre-set menu of decisions: they could acquit or convict and, if convicting,  select the punishment from a set of two options: the punishment suggested by the accuser and the punishment suggested by the defendant.

Modern sortition proposals range from the weak – Dahl’s advisory bodies, Fishkin’s Delibartive Polls and Leib’s Popular Branch – to the strong – Callenbach and Phillips’s Citizens’ Legislature. The former three would keep ultimate decision power in the hands of elected officials (and those political agents that influence them) while the latter would put significant political power in the hands of the allotted representatives.

Perhaps it is not too early to pay attention to such crucial distinctions.

Filed under: Sortition | 9 Comments »

Lottery Film Now on DVD

Posted on July 30, 2010 by peterstone

Mention was made earlier of the new movie “The Lottery,” which deals with charter school lotteries. More on the movie is available here–

http://thelotteryfilm.com/

The film is now available for sale on DVD. Just visit–

http://www.neoflix.com/store/LOT26/

Filed under: Distribution by lot | 1 Comment »

A grave lottery

Posted on July 22, 2010 by Conall Boyle

This is something I’ve never heard of before! Even in death, where you finish up can be a lottery. I suppose it makes sense.

Malden near Boston MA will release 60 new grave-sites firstly to local residents who apply. The winners, who will have to pay $5,710 per grave-site, will be chosen by a lottery.

Details (from a local news-site) are: Continue reading →

Filed under: Distribution by lot | Leave a comment »

Strange Days

Posted on July 22, 2010 by keithsutherland

Went to see The Doors biopic (highly recommended) the other day and was surprised to catch Jim Morrison saying something like “We don’t need an elected president, we need a jury democracy”. As this was the prelude to the notorious Miami concert rant nobody picked up on it as it was overshadowed by the resulting obscenity trial.

Morrison was famously well-read but it was more Rimbaud and Nietzsche than Herodotus. This would suggest that sortition-based ideas might have been circulating in the student radicalism movement at the time of the Vietnam war protests.  Can anyone cast any light on this, and did anyone else catch Morrison’s remark in the movie?

Filed under: Sortition | 3 Comments »

The lottery of Greek democracy

Posted on July 20, 2010 by Yoram Gat

The BBC History Magazine, “Britain’s bestselling history magazine”, has a recent short article called “The lottery of Greek democracy” by Michael C. Scott.

Interestingly, despite its title, the article manages to mention the use of chance solely for nominating juries, avoiding any mention of sortition.

My favourite item in the Epigraphical museum is in fact not an inscription per se, but actually a machine made originally of wood and stone: the kleroterion. A what? A kleroterion was used to ensure absolute randomness in the allocation of particularly important civic positions, in particular the allocation of men to juries that sat in the many Athenian court rooms.

[ Description of the workings of a Kleroterion. ]

This machine was, in essence, just like the lottery machines used in so many national lotteries in countries around the world today. It provided the Athenians with a definitive way of ensuring that the important organs of their system of democracy were not tainted by corruption. This machine, combined with the fact that most juries were 500 people strong, made bribing juries in advance a practical impossibility and helped reassure the citizens of Athens that when a decision was made, it was made on the strength of the arguments alone. The kleroterion is thus a remarkable testament to a remarkable civilization.

Filed under: Athens, History | 7 Comments »

It’s OK for Muslims to use lotteries

Posted on July 17, 2010 by Conall Boyle

That is the clear message from a new paper from Crone & Silverstein ‘THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST AND ISLAM: THE CASE OF LOT-CASTING’ in the Journal of Semitic Studies, 2010, 55(2):423-450.

The abstract includes

It focuses on the practice of using lot-casting to allocate inheritance shares, conquered land, and official functions, and briefly surveys the history of this practice from ancient through Hellenistic to pre-Islamic times in order to examine its Islamic forms as reflected in historical and legal sources. It is argued that the evidence does suggest continuity between the ancient and the Islamic Near East, above all in the first century of the hijra, but also long thereafter, if only at a fairly low level of juristic interest.

You can read the full paper ($25 for non-academics) at http://jss.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/55/2/423 (or go to my website www.conallboyle.com).

We have seen previously a case where the use of a lottery to share out goods has been rejected on religious grounds by Muslims: Lotteries for Cab Licenses.

This paper shows that although limited, lotteries can be found in the Quran (2 examples), and that most of the various strands of the Muslim traditions have accepted the judicial use of lotteries to divide property. (Thanks to Keith Sutherland and Anthony Barnett for drawing our attention to this paper.)

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

Another deliberative polling experiment

Posted on July 6, 2010 by Yoram Gat

Roger Hickey writes in the Huffington Post about a recent deliberative polling experiment:

In Deficit “Town Meetings,” People Reject America Speaks’ Stacked Deck

On Saturday, the group known as America Speaks (funded by Wall Street mogul Peter G. Peterson and two other foundations) brought together several thousand people in meetings in 18 cities. They gave participants misleading background information about the federal deficit and economic options to achieve fiscal “balance” and future prosperity.

Peterson cannot be pleased with the participants’ mainly progressive policy choices, which will be presented on June 30 to the Deficit Commission that Peterson encouraged President Obama to create.

According to America Speaks’ own press release, when a scientifically selected group of participants picked up their electronic voting devices, they overwhelmingly supported proposals to

* Raise tax rates on corporate income and those earning more than $1 million.
* Reduce military spending by 10 to 15 percent,
* Create a carbon tax and a securities-transaction tax.

This pretty progressive set of solutions emerged from the process many feared would be skewed to the solutions of conservative deficit hawks.

America Speaks was certainly not pushing the discussion in a progressive direction. The background materials — and policy options — provided to participants were anything but fair and balanced, as analysis by economist Dean Baker demonstrated.

[…]

On the face of it, this would seem like a case of democracy in action: the people were given a chance to study an issue and they spoke their minds. They did so despite attempts by the organizers to manipulate them by disseminating misleading information and by attempting to limit the set of policy options being discussed.

But in a complex system, the elites have many opportunities to exert power. Peter Hart of the media watchdog group FAIR comments:

Given the media’s general enthusiasm for Peterson’s propaganda on austerity and Social Security, it’s striking how little coverage these town halls have received. But it’s hard not to conclude that the public rejection of the media’s conventional wisdom is the explanation.

Using deliberative polling on a haphazard basis, rather than as a systematic way to form binding public policy, allows the elites to utilize the polls as a way to legitimize their choice of policy, by highlighting a finely selected subset of the poll results, and ignoring the rest.

Filed under: Experiments, Opinion polling, Sortition | 3 Comments »

Delibartive polling experiment

Posted on July 6, 2010 by Yoram Gat

Keith Sutherland’s article Chinese Democracy: ‘scientific, democratic and legal’ enthusiastically introduces James Fishkin et al.’s paper Deliberative Democracy in an Unlikely Place: Deliberative Polling in China. My own, less enthusiastic, opinion is in the comments to Keith’s article.

Filed under: Experiments, Sortition | 4 Comments »

More sortition advocacy by Marxists

Posted on July 3, 2010 by Yoram Gat

Paul Cockshott writes:

In a modern oligarchy like France, Britain or the USA, what Aristotle called the magistracy is elected. In these elections those with education and money have a huge advantage. The election process is expensive – there are the costs of advertising and campaigning. Historically, in Europe at least, workers’ parties have been able to partly get round this by collecting dues from hundreds of thousands or millions of members. But when standing candidates they usually face the hostility of the privately owned mass media, which is hard to offset.

They are also under pressure to present candidates who are far from being “of indigent circumstances and mechanical employments”. Their first generation of leaders may be of that sort: Ramsay MacDonald or Lula. But later they attempt to present candidates who are educated and polished: Obamas and Blairs. In consequence the elected representatives of popular parties tend to be from higher classes than their supporters. They tend, in consequence, to be markedly cautious in implementing the full rigour of a socialist programme when in office.

Democratic selection by lot suffers none of these disadvantages. It guarantees that the assembly will be dominated by the working classes. It guarantees that the assembly will be balanced in terms of sex, age, ethnic origin, etc. As such it would constitute the most favourable possible grounds for achieving a majority for socialism.

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

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