An allotted European People’s Assembly

Posted on November 1, 2023 by Yoram Gat

Joe Mathews writes in The San Francisco Chronicle about an allotted European People’s Assembly.

How government by lottery could save our democracy

Recently, I spent a long afternoon on a dusty and rocky Athens hill called the Pnyx for the first meeting of a novel assembly inspired by the past.

If its members can establish their [new People’s Assembly] in the governance of Europe, it might change everything we think we know about democracy.

“Citizens of Athens, citizens of the world,” declared Kalypso Nicolaidis, a Franco-Greek scholar who helps lead the assembly and is chair in global affairs at the European University’s School of Transnational Governance, “we would like to invite you to change yourselves.”

Around the world, democracy is seen as a system in which the public, through elections, chooses its representatives. But the People’s Assembly wouldn’t consist of elected politicians. Instead, it would be composed of everyday people, chosen by lottery processes that ensure that the body is a demographic mirror of the people it represents.

These wouldn’t be just the people of one city or one province or even one nation. The People’s Assembly would be a transnational body, with members selected by lottery to represent all of Europe. There’s no body like that on Earth.

But what truly sets apart the idea — and what would make it revolutionary — is its permanence.
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Filed under: Academia, Athens, Press, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Stratification for newbies

Posted on October 28, 2023 by Owen Shaffer

Can you suggest a source that explains why stratification is important, is not mathematical, and is suitable for someone new to the movement?

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Sortition in Tunisia

Posted on October 28, 2023 by Yoram Gat

Jeune Afrique discusses the mechanism for selecting the members of a newly created second chamber of the Tunisian parliament. There are various details that are not quite clear to me, but the mechanism apparently involves sortition and the creation of arbitrary districts combining interior and coastal areas, an idea which echos the reforms of Cleisthenes.

In Tunisia, a new system, new electoral districting

Announced at the end of September, the new partitioning includes new areas and districts whose representatives will seat at the second chamber of Parliament, created in May 2022. But the logic of the repartitioning, including that of the geography, is perplexing.

Decree 589 of September 21st, 2023 is significant: it sets a configuration which corresponds to the old idea of connecting interior regions with coastal ones.

[These districts will be used] to create the National Council of Regions and Districts, the second chamber of Parliament.

The 72 representatives of the Council will be appointed using a complex method which involves voting and sortition, with each stage structuring the different levels of regional representation.

Filed under: Applications, Elections, Press, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Sortition proposal in the Indian ThePrint

Posted on October 22, 2023 by Yoram Gat

A reader of the Indian political news website ThePrint contributes a sortition proposal.

The case for Sortition to replace elections

For most democrats electing politicians is the essential feature to prevent a free society from becoming a dictatorship.

Questions are raised about the legitimacy of [elections-based] systems! Politicians have little in common with the people they govern. Parliaments around the world are filled with crooks, criminals, frauds, imposters, illiterates or incompetent, uninformed, immature, lazy or questionable people. Rent-seeking or the perks of the office seem more on their mind than fulfilling duties of their office or campaign-promises. Elections create the illusion of choice, a circus masquerading as exercise of democracy.

Sortition presents an elegant solution. It was first implemented in the democracy of ancient Athens. Instead of electing Parliamentarians / Alders, Members of those bodies are randomly selected from a pool of suitable applicants. It has been a widely debated alternative to elections to pry politicians from the hands of all powerful Party-Presidents without them falling prey to deep-pocketed donors.
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Filed under: Elections, History, Press, Sortition | 1 Comment »

A quarter of US voters ready for exploring “alternative forms of government”

Posted on October 19, 2023 by Yoram Gat

A recent poll has found that about 27% of U.S. registered voters support the following statement:

Democracy is no longer a viable system, and America should explore alternative forms of government to ensure stability and progress.

Filed under: Elections, Opinion polling | 1 Comment »

Consumerocracy to better the conditions of the free market

Posted on October 19, 2023 by theodorestathis

In previous articles, I have presented the reasons that do not allow today’s supposedly democratic regimes to stop the frantic course of unfair and provocative distribution of the wealth produced. In the series of those articles I also presented a peaceful way, through which non-democratic regimes can be transformed into democratic ones, whose existence is essential for a market to function free. These ideas are found in greater details in my book entitled A Therapy for Dying Democracies, published by Dorrance Publishing Co., which aim at braking the course of corrupt capitalism and thus gradually freeing the free market from the chains with which it has been enslaved over time.

An important intervention in many areas of business’ activity is, in my steadfast opinion, the use of a special type of public company, by which it is possible to transform the market, controlled by speculators and monopolies, into a free one. The specificity of this company is due to the fact that it must satisfy certain prerequisites, which derive from a fundamental axiomatic principle of democracy that recognizes equal state or power status to each citizen.

On the basis of this principle of democracy, what could be the case in the field of consumption? But of course the obvious one which I call: consumerocracy, similar in meaning to democracy, where consumers in the field of consumption have equal power status, regardless of the volume of purchases made by each consumer. That is, the same low prices of goods and equal opportunities for all, something that unfair competition does not provide.

To deal with profiteering, the special type of company is used, which intervenes in ways that allow the instrument-tool of consumerocracy to give its customers-consumers the notorious equal state status. One way, in which the company achieves this for its clients, is the full return of its net profits to its customers-consumers, provided that the initial capital invested for the establishment of this special type of company remains at market value constant.

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Filed under: Books, Proposals, Sortition | 1 Comment »

London borough to hold a citizens assembly to scrutinize the police

Posted on October 15, 2023 by Yoram Gat

Stories in the Waltham Forest Echo and the Evening Standard.

Waltham Forest announces citizens assembly to scrutinise Met Police

The assembly, the first of its kind in the country, comes as Waltham Forest has the lowest trust in the Metropolitan Police out of any London borough

A citizens’ assembly scrutinising police officers in Waltham Forest will be held in the Spring.

The move has been described by Waltham Forest Council as the first time a local authority in the UK has held such an assembly.

The goal of the assembly will be to hear local people’s views on how policing can better reflect Baroness Casey’s report on the Metropolitan Police. The March report found the police to be “institutionally racist, sexist, homophobic”.

The council says the assembly makeup will aim to reflect the population of Waltham Forest in terms of age, gender, ethnicity, whether or not they have a disability, and where in the borough they live.
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Filed under: Applications, Press, Sortition | Tagged: | 4 Comments »

The American Democrat by James Fenimore Cooper

Posted on October 11, 2023 by Yoram Gat

It turns out that the American author James Fenimore Cooper (1789 – 1851), primarily known today for the novel The Last of the Mohicans, wrote in 1835 a book of political theory titled The American Democrat. The book is a rather interesting document of the political views of the “democratic” elite of his time, which are remarkably similar to the views of the “republican”, explicitly anti-democratic, elite of a generation or two before – i.e., of the American founders.

Underneath the similarity, it is clear that there are now new concerns. While the founders expended most of their efforts optimizing and justifying “checks and balances” and considered their sentiment against the rule of the mob as an easy case to make, Cooper is concerned with dispelling any misapprehensions about the equality of men – indicating that democratic ideology is gaining political power in the early 19th century. Cooper explains to his readers that if men were really thought to be equals elections would be replaced with sortition:

The absolute moral and physical equality that are inferred by the maxim, that “one man is as good as another,” would at once do away with the elections, since a lottery would be both simpler, easier and cheaper than the present mode of selecting representatives. Men, in such a case, would draw lots for office, as they are now drawn for juries. Choice supposes a preference, and preference inequality of merit, or of fitness. (p. 79)

Filed under: Books, Elections, History, Sortition, Theory | 2 Comments »

The Keys to Democracy by Maurice Pope

Posted on October 7, 2023 by Yoram Gat

Maurice Pope’s book The Keys to Democracy is the third book ever written advocating the use of sortition as a major component of a modern government. (The two earlier ones being Ernest Callenbach and Michael Phillips’s A Citizen Legislature and John Burnheim’s Is Democracy Possible?, both first published in 1985. Pope, who seems to have started writing at about the same time, was apparently unaware of either.) The great strengths of Pope’s writing are his independence of thought and his evident sincerity. Coming early into the field, and being a classicist rather than a political scientist, Pope was clearly breaking new ground, following his own logical train of thought. He was thus free from the burden of formulaically making connections to prior writings and from the petty-political considerations of self-promotion. This unique situation made a thoroughgoing impact on the book as a whole.

Authors of works about sortition (including Pope) generally share the ostensible aim of achieving some measure of democratization of society. But while this general aim is broadly shared, the consensus ends there because the detailed aims and the proposed mechanisms for achieving them vary widely. At the conservative end, the problem with the existing system is conceived as some sort of sclerosis. The main symptom of the problem is fatigue, or a lack of confidence. Sortition-based institutions are then seen as a way to infuse the system with new blood or new vigor, rejuvenating a system that is essentially sound but has for various reasons, that generally remain vague, fallen into a bad state. Associated with this view of things are generally quite modest proposals – advisory bodies that “help” current decision makers make more informed decisions. Even those more informed decisions are perhaps less important than the mere fact that allotted citizens are widely recognized as having had a part in the process. Indeed, what exactly the problems are with the current outcomes of the process and what are the expected improvements in terms of policy is usually not specified. In fact, sometimes the entire point is to have the allotted citizens themselves become more informed rather than making any changes in decision making. Writings in this vein tend to be heavy with references to the canon of “deliberative democracy” and light on the idea that democracy is a regime of political equality.
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Filed under: Academia, Athens, Books, Elections, Fiction, History, Juries, Participation, Press, Sortition | 10 Comments »

The way to democracy: democratically operating political parties

Posted on October 6, 2023 by theodorestathis

Sortition as a concept and as a method of selecting members of a deliberative group has been in the headlines for some time now and the most important gain the followers of sortition have gotten from it it is that more people now know about its purpose and of its use, especially as being a potential alternative to election for selecting members of a board of an organization or of other institutional bodies, as is the case of legislative assemblies for local, regional and national level.

The purpose of its use up to now, as far as I know, has been to bring into the deliberations of existing governmental legislative assemblies more democracy. This remains to be seen, for this new approach has first to be accepted by the present systems of government, which are based on their main futures on those of republicanism, which at the same time are being called democracies, even though they do not have any connection to democracy. Unless some of the followers of sortition have it as part of their revolutionary program through which they plan to get to power, even though revolutions have been abandoned even by the Marxists, since the time of Hitler’s lesson on how to grab power with only just through elections.

It is though about time to give more attention to the peaceful ways, which can lead to power without any revolutions and without methods creating abnormal conditions in the present republican systems of government, for the purpose of democracy is not to divide but to unite the people. That is what my approach, presented by articles and comments in this blog and in a more expanded way in my book with the title: A Therapy for Dying Democracies intends to do. In my view this approach has several advantages over other approaches on matters concerning the quality of representation and the method of materializing peacefully the objective, which is to have at last democracy at work.

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