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 »
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 »
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’)
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Filed under: Distribution by lot, Experiments, schools | 5 Comments »
Posted on September 12, 2010 by Yoram Gat
‘Dissident writer and independent scholar’ Stephen James Kerr writes Against Proportional Representation:
The result of such a radical constitutional change [i.e., a switch to sortition based representation] would be a complete transformation of the relationships between citizens and their representatives.
Citizens chosen for office by sortition would not be chosen for office by anything other than chance. They would therefore not “represent” a voter or a constituent in the way that persons elected to office can claim to represent others by virtue of their being chosen by the votes of citizens. Likewise, no representative chosen by lot would have a basis to exclude or ignore a certain section of the citizenry “because they’ll never vote for me.” Representatives would merely be statistically representative of the community from which they come, as they would be selected out of that community. Hence the relationship between representative and constituency would be fundamentally different under a sortition system from the current system of relations. The representative would remain an indivisible part of the whole.
Between the representative and the other citizens there would be no faithless promises to be made, no manipulative relationship to be established. Holding political office would be like performing volunteer work in the community, with nothing to be gained privately thereby. This is supposed to be the essence of civics in western liberal states, but the domination of politics by private interests has perverted it into a laughable cartoon. Nobody in western liberal states takes the ideal of “public service” seriously any longer. Politics is merely self-advancement wearing public drag.
The use of sortition would prevent the ambitious and self-seeking from gaining control over our institutions for purposes against the public interest. Nothing could be gained, and there would be no institutional framework to allow the self-seeking to take over our institutions for their own ends. Statistically, MPs would be representative of the whole society, just as a random sample used for polling purposes is judged to be today. Lawyers could go back to practicing law in the courts. Business people could go back to minding their own business.
Filed under: Elections, History, Sortition | 16 Comments »
Posted on September 7, 2010 by peterstone
Michael Phillips, who coauthored with Ernest Callenbach the book A Citizen Legislature (2nd ed., Imprint Academic, 2008), recently posted on his blog about selection by lot. (In A Citizen Legislature, he and Callenbach propose the selection of the U.S. House of Representatives by lot.) The posting can be found at
http://phillips.blogs.com/goc/2010/09/random-in-politics.html?cid=6a00d834515c6d69e2013486af5914970c
The posting provides some useful context regarding the book. I had thought that Phillips might no longer endorse the ideas in the book, and so it is interesting to see that he does.
I do, however, sincerely hope that the opening line is meant to be tongue-in-cheek:
“I know that among the many many contributions to human thought for which I will get credit long after I die, the use of random selection for political bodies will be one for which I will get credit.”
Filed under: Sortition | 2 Comments »
Posted on September 6, 2010 by Yoram Gat
The September issue of the journal Constellations contains four articles under the heading “Representation and Randomness”. The articles are:
- Representation, Responsive and Indicative by Philip Pettit
- Reviving Randomness for Political Rationality: Elements of a Theory of Aleatory Democracy by Hubertus Buchstein
- Lot and Democratic Representation: A Modest Proposal by Alex Zakaras
- Random Selection, Republican Self-Government, and Deliberative Democracy by Yves Sintomer
Filed under: History, Sortition, Theory | 2 Comments »
Posted on September 3, 2010 by Conall Boyle
School place lottery ‘did not improve access for poor’
A controversial lottery system for secondary school places has failed in one of its key aims – to give poorer children equal access to top schools, academics say.
(according to a BBC news item today http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-11162313)
A paper, “The early impact of Brighton and Hove’s school admission reforms” from CMPO Bristol, is being publicised as showing that the lottery has failed in its aim of reducing social segregation. You can read the full version of this paper at www.bristol.ac.uk/cmpo/publications/papers/2010/wp244.pdf.
The lottery is innocent! As researchers around the world have found, give parents the choice, and some (mostly middle-class) will eagerly seek out the ‘best’ schools. The others, the poor, the huddled masses will prefer their local schools (or more likely, be pestered by their kids to go to the local school with their mates.
It is ‘choice’ not lottery that does this. Lots more about this in my book, Lotteries for Education!
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Filed under: Distribution by lot, schools | 3 Comments »
Posted on September 3, 2010 by Yoram Gat
Joe Klein, Time columnist and “living incarnation of American ‘conventional wisdom’“, proposes to replace Obama’s budget commission with a Fishkin Deliberative Poll. Klein sees the DP as
a magical contraption that could take the process of making tough decisions in a democracy, shake it up, dramatize it and make it both credible and conclusive[,]
and concludes with an odd mixture of platitudes and populism:
I’ll bet the kleroterion would produce results bolder and more credible than anything Obama’s commission will recommend. “People are tired of the elites telling them what to do,” says Fishkin. Perhaps it’s time to turn that process upside down.
(It is not quite clear, however, how Klein’s proposal allows the people to tell the elites what to do, given that he is proposing advisory powers only.)
Filed under: Athens, History, Sortition | 11 Comments »
Posted on August 28, 2010 by Yoram Gat
The Irish Times carries a piece by Paul Gillespie about Citizen Assemblies and Fishkin’s Deliberative Polling: More power to the people may help politics.
The Jackson Sun, from Jackson Tennessee, carries a letter from Richard Ward which is worth quoting in its entirety:
There are other ways to elect politicians
A recent letter to the editor headline read, “It’s up to voters to fix America.” The letter was dandy, but if that succulent headline be true, then America shall never be “fixed.” Voting is the “adultified” version of the patently adolescent popularity contest. That’s all elections are. It is precisely what has gotten us to where American is today. Refusal to abandon proven failures is a definition of insanity.
Voting is not the only way to choose politicians. Voting is not even the most democratic way of choosing representatives who are for the people. Setting aside spelling bees, beauty pageants, boxing matches and other such non-logical possibilities, election-by-lot becomes the supremely democratic system of electing an open candidate in every election instead of by an anonymous, secret-ballot voter.
Too chancy? So say those who automatically discount the factor of divine intervention. Under a political lottery system — the Golden-Age Greeks called it sortition — any string of presidents, congressmen and/or judges would represent a cross-section of the whole population instead of the assemblage of ego-maniacal popularity freaks who are answerable only to their respective popularizers reigning over propaganda central USA. And election-by-lots is biblical, too.
Filed under: Sortition | 60 Comments »
Posted on August 24, 2010 by Yoram Gat
Lotteries for Education: Origins, experiences, lessons by Conall Boyle is now available from Amazon or directly from the publishers, Imprint Academic.
The Blurb reads:
Lotteries are widely used to decide places at schools, colleges and universities. Conall Boyle explores many examples to find out why. The emotional turmoil that the use of ballots can cause to students and parents alike is graphically described. But lottery selection teaches lessons too; now we can find proper answers to controversial questions like “Does choice work?” This book will be of interest to parents, pupils and teachers as well as educational administrators. Any student applying for admission onto a university course should learn about the amazing weighted lottery for entry to medical schools in the Netherlands. There is a better way: it’s a lottery!
Filed under: Distribution by lot | 1 Comment »
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