Henry George’s analysis of electoralism, with a side note on sortition

Posted on February 22, 2025 by Yoram Gat

From Book X, Chapter IV of Progress and Poverty (1879) by Henry George:

Where there is anything like an equal distribution of wealth—that is to say, where there is general patriotism, virtue, and intelligence—the more democratic the government the better it will be; but where there is gross inequality in the distribution of wealth, the more democratic the government the worse it will be; for, while rotten democracy may not in itself be worse than rotten autocracy, its effects upon national character will be worse. To give the suffrage to tramps, to paupers, to men to whom the chance to labor is a boon, to men who must beg, or steal, or starve, is to invoke destruction. To put political power in the hands of men embittered and degraded by poverty is to tie firebrands to foxes and turn them loose amid the standing corn; it is to put out the eyes of a Samson and to twine his arms around the pillars of national life.

Even the accidents of hereditary succession or of selection by lot, the plan of some of the ancient republics, may sometimes place the wise and just in power; but in a corrupt democracy the tendency is always to give power to the worst. Honesty and patriotism are weighted, and unscrupulousness commands success. The best gravitate to the bottom, the worst float to the top, and the vile will only be ousted by the viler. While as national character must gradually assimilate to the qualities that win power, and consequently respect, that demoralization of opinion goes on which in the long panorama of history we may see over and over again transmuting races of freemen into races of slaves.

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

International Network of Sortition Advocates Presents

Posted on February 17, 2025 by richwbrown

Sortition in Businesses and Organisations

A How-to Guide

In his previous presentation, Ben Redhead, explored how sortition can revolutionize organisations and empower individuals in decision-making processes.  Join Ben, once again, for an interactive deeper dive into the topic that welcomes your specific questions on how to integrate sortition in your own business or organisation.

About the Speaker: We’re honoured to again feature Ben Redhead as our facilitator. As an Associate at Sortition Foundation and Co-Founder of INSA, Ben brings to the table a rich tapestry of experience. His journey as a strategy consultant, facilitator, and project manager has afforded him a unique perspective on the transformative power of sortition. Recently, he launched his own organisation, SORTED, an initiative that aims to merge innovations in democracy and organisational development. Ben’s insights aren’t just limited to offline platforms; he passionately shares his expertise and observations through his blog, also named “SORTED.”

Date: Wednesday, 5 March 2025

Time: 6:00 – 7:00 PM UTC [19:00-20:00 Europe/Copenhagen]

Location: Online – Registration on Eventbrite

FREE – Reserve your spot now!

INSA is a volunteer organisation aimed at connecting pro-sortition academics, advocates, and activists around the world, to share resources & tactics and advance the theoretical understanding and practice of sortition. 

www.INSA.site

You are also invited to join our Discord server at

https://discord.gg/6sgnrphp6w

Filed under: meeting, Organizing, Sortition | Leave a comment »

The French School of Athens builds a kleroterion

Posted on February 8, 2025 by Yoram Gat

Kathimerini reports about a project of the French School of Athens involving building a full size marble reconstruction of an Athenian kleroterion:

It is made of marble and weighs about 300 kilos. It is 1.20 meters tall, but on its wooden base it’s the height of a tall adult. And while it looks like an inscribed column, if you get close up, you’ll find that it has many rows of slots in a vertical and horizontal arrangement. What are they for? To receive wooden tiles with the names of citizens who, through a special process, will be selected for public office, or not, at least until their luck is tested again.

It is a faithful copy of an ancient kleroterion, a randomization device similar to the one that the Athenians of the 5th and especially the 4th century BC used to select citizens to be lawmakers, state officials and jury members.

“The best method of democratic selection was to draw lots,” archaeologist and historian Veronique Chankowski, director of the French School of Athens, who coordinated the construction and study of the ancient lottery device, tells Kathimerini. “A person was selected not because they belonged to a specific family or social network, nor because they were rich. This machine chose them.”

Filed under: Academia, Athens, Press, Sortition | 2 Comments »

Making Sortition Accountable

Posted on February 6, 2025 by johnhuang865

The typical sortition advocate looks at the theory of electoral accountable and state, well, electoral accountability is so bad it might as well not even be there. But that doesn’t let sortition off the hook. Even if electoral accountability is terrible, that doesn’t mean that lottocratic accountability is good.

Imagine a particularly corrupt society. Random selection rotates the citizens in. These citizens understand what lottery gives them, and they use their power to pay themselves exhorbitant salaries. Or they take bribes from patrons wishing to change legislation.

Even with multi-body sortition, given sufficient coordination between the multiple bodies, all participants could conspire to be corrupt and reward themselves across every panel and assembly.

Of course this is true with elections. Elected officials occasionally conspire to reward themselves across various checked and balanced institutions. If these elected officials are sufficiently discrete, then the voters are none the wiser and cannot apply appropriate electoral feedback.

I imagine a very coarse button that voters could press to hold lottocrats accountable, a sort of nuclear option similar to the practice of banishment.

Every year, voters could have an opportunity to punish a runaway lottocracy.

A referendum shall be held every year and ask, “Should the lottocrats be punished?”

  1. Should the lottocrats serving right now be punished?
  2. Should the lottocrats that served 1 year ago be punished?
  3. Should the lottocrats that served 2 years ago be punished?
  4. Should the lottocrats that served 3 years ago be punished?
  5. Should the lottocrats that served 4 years ago be punished?
Continue reading →

Filed under: Proposals, Sortition | 10 Comments »

Ordinary people vs. explanations

Posted on February 1, 2025 by Yoram Gat

Responding to a recent discussion regarding Roger Hallam and Extinction Rebelion, commenters emphasized the need to distance “ourselves” from such extremists, potentially “manipulated by malign actors”. An X post from December had this to say:

“Ordinary people selected at random” aka sortition is explicitly against the idea that explanations can discern between better and worse policies. It’s nuts!

Filed under: Mass action, Sortition | 2 Comments »

The New Republic: There’s little doubt that sortition beats election hands down

Posted on January 29, 2025 by Yoram Gat

Roger Hallam, “a co-founder and strategic mastermind of the civil resistance groups Extinction Rebellion (often called XR) and Just Stop Oil”, and who is also serving “five years in prison for ‘conspiracy to cause a public nuisance'” is the protagonist of a supportive article in The New Republic. The article makes a very sympathetic presentation of Hallam’s anti-electoral and pro-sortition ideas:

Hallam calls our current moment a “pre-revolutionary period.” Such eras have arisen throughout history—if never on such a grand scale—and they unfold according to a distinct logic. One of the first casualties is moderation. “The center does not hold,” Hallam said. “You saw this before the Nazis, you saw it before the Bolsheviks, and you’re seeing it at the moment in slow motion in Western democracies.” It’s easy to miss the signs, because “the center still has institutional power,” he added. “In other words, like it’s a zombie space. It’s dead, but it hasn’t yet been pushed over by the new.”

Under such conditions, wrenching paradigm shifts are inevitable. The only question, Hallam suggested, is whether we submit to authoritarianism, as many Americans seem all too eager to do, or embrace a genuinely pro-social revolutionary alternative. While it would have been comforting to hit the snooze button with four more years of Biden-style liberalism—a sound approach in simpler times—when survival hangs in the balance, there are distinct advantages to being awake.

The centerpiece of Hallam’s plan is a radical reinvention of democracy aimed at turning elections into a historical relic. Continue reading →

Filed under: Athens, Elections, History, Press, Sortition | 14 Comments »

Elections and Sortition: two systems, two destinies, two ways to do politics

Posted on January 26, 2025 by Nicholas Gruen

In the pretty likely event of a hung parliament after the next Australian election, the cross-bench becomes kingmaker. I’m hoping — and expecting — the crossbench to seek greater use of citizen assemblies in governing Australia. But what comes next is crucial.

Some think it would be great if a citizen assembly was held on an important issue — or two or three. Allegra Spender proposes one on tax. Others want one on housing. It would be nice to see them go ahead. But I’m sceptical they can achieve a lot.

First, on their own, citizen assemblies can be useful in lots of circumstances, but I’d say they’re most successful where they solve problems for politicians.

Ireland has become the pin-up boy for citizen assemblies

They’ve probably acquired a higher visibility in Ireland than anywhere else. And two of them have gone very well — allowing same-sex marriage and the repeal of anti-abortion provisions of the constitution. That’s because both solved problems for the politicians.

Irish citizen assemblies haven’t done noticeably better than elsewhere on the other occasions where they typically created problems for the politicians. In these circumstances, if politicians can’t ignore the citizen assembly on account of the profile it’s acquired, they cherry-pick its recommendations.

More importantly, whether or not the politicians accept their recommendations, the citizen assemblies usually contemplated are temporary and, as such, don’t aspire to leave any institutional trace. They also rehearse existing relationships in which we the people propose and the Government disposes.

I’ve gone to some lengths to propose an alternative, A standing citizen assembly effectively operating as a third house. (There’s something similar in the German-speaking part of Belgium). It is not more ‘radical’ than existing suggestions. It establishes an institution with exactly as much formal power as the other citizen assemblies just discussed. None.

The idea that it is more radical comes from what I call its greater ‘imaginative vigour’. Without proposing any change in formal power structures, it follows through on the idea that a different logic needs to enter the system.

I don’t see a citizen assembly as a tricky new ‘hack’. Nor is it that important to me that it seems more democratic. That’s a good thing, but, as we’ve seen in Iraq and Afghanistan and as the ancient Athenians discovered during the Peloponnesian War, more democratic structures don’t always arrive at better decisions.

The more I’ve thought about representation by sampling as opposed to representation by election, the more deeply I’ve appreciated their differences.

By their nature, elections separate the governed from those who govern. That’s why Aristotle called selection by lot ‘democratic’ and elections aristocratic or oligarchic. Montesquieu and America’s founding fathers agreed.

Electoral systems are also intrinsically competitive. And the competition for votes rewards performativity, manipulation and dissimulation.

That plunges electoral democracy into deep pathologies.

Continue reading →

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Sortition Advocated in the Windsor Star

Posted on January 20, 2025 by peterstone

The Windsor Star just published an editorial by James Winter, a professor emeritus at the University of Windsor, advocating the replacement of federal elections with sortition. The reasons given are diverse, from the cost of elections to the disproportionity resulting from “first-past-the-post” elections to the self-serving nature of politicians. I am unaware of anything previously written by James Winter on this subject, but perhaps others know more.

Filed under: Academia, Athens, Press, Proposals, Sortition | Leave a comment »

Citizens’ Assemblies in the Ukraine

Posted on January 20, 2025 by peterstone

In November 2024, two municipalities in the Ukraine held citizens’ assemblies to deal with local issues.

Over six days of deliberations, Assembly members, representing a socio-demographic cross-section of the community, worked alongside Council of Europe experts and facilitators to develop actionable recommendations for local governments. These focused on creating urban spaces for social interaction and improving household waste management. The municipal authorities of Zvyahel and Slavutych have expressed their commitment to considering the proposed recommendations.

Filed under: Applications, Sortition | Leave a comment »

Online Service Platform to Use Randomly-Selected Juries

Posted on January 20, 2025 by peterstone

The online service platform AnyService will now be using juries to arbitrate disputes involving service providers and consumers on its platform. The juries will be randomly selected from users with experience in the relevant area (e.g., experience with plumbing services for a dispute involving plumbing).

A painter was hired through the platform to paint a house. The client alleges that the painter failed to meet the agreed terms, while the painter argues otherwise. On all existing platforms, this issue would be resolved by customer service, but not on the AnyService platform.

Here, everything is resolved by a jury. The jury is made up of other platform users. The disputing parties do not know who the jurors are, and vice versa, making this system completely impartial and, as many claim, the safest in the world.

Filed under: Applications, Juries, Press, Sortition | Leave a comment »

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