It argues that it would be better and more democratic to randomly sample parliament instead of voting. It also describes how a transition could look like and how mixed systems could work.
The biggest issue I see is that such a system would need a very strong and well-designed bureaucracy and very well educated and moral public servants. You would have a state run by technocrats, who prepare options for decisions that the randomly drawn parliament would need to make. These technocrats could get all-powerful quickly.
The idea of neutral impartial helpful technocrats guiding them sounds wonderful but I'm not sure it would play out like that.
Would you like banking regulations set by bankers?
Honestly I'm not sure it'd be all that different. I mean, ask a random pedestrian on the street if they know what lobbying is, and they likely have at least some minimal clue. That means it's already a "cultural factor."
What would change is the way lobbying works, since it'd no longer work in a way where a long-term rapport is established between a politician and a bunch of lobbyists...
You do need professional legislators who understand law enough to write it, but lawyers have a warped viewpoint that needs to be counterbalanced by the voice of the people.
You would probably want to either change that or else select both by lot, but with a high bar for eligibility in the senatorial lot (e.g., either passing some nontrivial civics exam or something or rolling back the 17th amendment).
Some of the technocrats could also be picked from professional bodies using sortition, just enough to stir things up.
Yeah, that's a feature, not a bug. You want the average education level to be such that random people can govern reasonably well... Which is GREAT at the societal level.
The last time that was possible was something like 100-200 years ago, before specialisation became so important.
I don’t know anything of note about pharmaceuticals or civil engineering, rhetoric or national security, trade or industry. But I think it’s a safe bet that 90% of the people on Hacker News knows far more about computers than the average UK politician.
If everyone in a nation has to learn politics well enough to govern, nobody would have time to learn anything else. The only measure by which I can even judge politicians is their character, their honesty, their morals — and I do recognise the problems with even those as my measure.
Elected politicians spend most of their time raising money and the remainder stoking culture war bullshit. The system mostly runs itself.
I'd like to expore the idea some more, seems really interesting.
Edit: adding some more details:
Yet for every Washington or Adams, there is a Thomas Jefferson — a president who was such a bad public speaker that he declined to deliver a State of the Union address to Congress, instead beginning a century-long tradition of sending congressional members a letter...
https://www.pbs.org/speak/seatosea/standardamerican/presiden...
Everyone can decide on their own whether they want to vote or not, and only those that do not vote run the "risk" (or reward) of possibly being randomly chosen for parliament duty. If 65% of people vote, 65% of parliament is elected members, the other 35% is randomly choosen from non-voters.
And you fix voting fatigue as a freebie.
GHW Bush was uncharismatic but won and also was ineffective at much. I mean, what did he do effectively?
Come to think of it, at least back to Carter, VPs seem to be quite uncharismatic. Ford on the other hand was more charismatic than Nixon.
Saddam Hussein was deep in debt and heading for an appointment with the IMF. Much of that debt was owed to Kuwait and he figured that annexing Kuwait would clean up his books from the Iran-Iraq war. He told the U.S. Ambassador that much; she said nothing in reply, went home to inform the Pentagon. Saddam took that as a "yes".
Bush put together a large coalition, established a lot of legitimacy, and ultimately won the war, and sent the troops home to a ticker tape parade.
Bush ended the "Vietnam Syndrome", completing the rebuilding of the military. CNN didn't show you the four days of nonstop ground combat that traumatized veterans who experienced the same mental health symptoms as Vietnam vets.
(You might think Bush and the CIA are evil, but up to this point, his team GOT THINGS DONE)
Saddam Hussein tried to blow the ex-president up when he was visiting Saudi Arabia. He took it very personally and so did his son -- that's why GW Bush was in such a hurry to attack Iraq after the Sept 11 attacks.
That war was a mistake to begin with, but in retrospect the Bush crew make big mistakes in the "nation building" phase - Don Rumsfeld for instance would be compared favorably to Robert McNamara except that he went along with Gulf War II.
"Of Clement Attlee, however, I was an admirer. He was a serious man and a patriot. Quite contrary to the general tendency of politicians in the 1990s, he was all substance and no show"
He lied his way into two extremely expensive and unwinnable wars, both of which are effectively still on-going after almost 20 years. That required charisma. His legacy is north, south, west, and east of Tikrit.
Meritocacy: If office/role requires specific competencies, then the canditate is either required to have appropriate credentials/experience or in some cases at least has to pass a test/exam.
This is not a joke, I think there are many decisions that should be driven by experts. One obvious one would be military officials as mentioned by Wikipedia. But where are the engineers, scientists and craftsmen in politics? Hidden away as consultants mostly?
Gov officials should be tested, according to their role, before even being considered for a role. Incompetence is dangerous and neither election nor sortition can select against it.
Election: I think there is a lot of merit in election. Being able to talk well, having confidence and being popular are all positive factors that can be very important. It's just that it becomes a farce/show too quickly and the whole election process is expensive.
Maybe there is a better way, by electing a larger pool P > N where N is the office seats, one could find a sweet spot where many people need to know, like you and find you suitable.
Sortition: Now we weeded out the incompetent and the people nobody likes. At this point it would likely be more efficient and fairer to do a random selection.
It is important that this would be the last step in any number of steps for selection.
It's a problem of information access, advertising, and news media that changes an electoral process from a meritocracy selected by the electorate into a popularity contest.
Without those factors, there's no reason that an informed, rational populace would select an unsuitable candidate. They'd use their information about the candidates to select the most meritorious option.
Instead, popularity and advertising have surprisingly become more important than suitability and merit. It's not obvious that this must happen, and I think some regulation, process improvement, and innovation in this area could change the electoral process into a more reasonable one.
In this scenario the President would be directly accountable to the House and would be required to answer to them. The House would have the right to investigate and replace the President at any time for any reason, which should keep them honest and focused on the job.
It was also obviously intended to empower the state as a critical entity to a federation, but all of this cements the fact that there is no perfect voting system and all come with hosts of disadvantages and representation flaws.
"Perfect is the enemy of good", as the saying goes, so let me propose a thought experiment. What if the US kept its electoral college, but each state was required to allocate its electors in proportion to the relative vote share of the parties within that state (as closely as mathematically possible)? Of course this would require a constitutional amendment (or a hack like the NPVIC) but it's interesting to consider how this would change voting patterns, campaigns, results, and the other metrics by which a voting system is judged.
The big difference is probably that a proponent of elections believes that the masses have a better idea of who is suited for that job than random selection, and proponents of sortion disagree.
The only reasonable voting system known to date is preferential / Condorcet voting. It's successfully applied e.g. by the Debian project.
Today, sortition is commonly used to select prospective jurors in common law-based legal systems and is sometimes used in forming citizen groups with political advisory power (citizens' juries or citizens' assemblies).
People reading this are likely familiar with the use of sortition in jury selection. What is probably the single most well know thing about sitting on a jury?
It sucks. It's somehow boring and stressful at the same time, and the pay is very much token. Therefore, most people try to get out of it, with varying degrees of success. People have gone as far as not registering to vote in order to avoid jury duty. This is specifically why voter rolls are not used for that in many places.
The corollary to this is that juries aren't actually a random sample: people getting out of jury duty obviously causes selection effects. If the sample is not random, you lose a lot of the theoretical advantages of sortition. Unless we take strong steps to make sitting in a legislative body not suck, I see no reason it would be any better there.
And the more uncomfortable you make it not to opt-out, the more you'll select for people who've figured out a strategy to benefit from all that power despite the lack of officially sanctioned perks.
(Also: see on other thread about using sortition for the non-voter part of an electoral system.)
It would also prevent anyone accumulating years of political experience before assuming office, though, which seems like a serious drawback.
There are a few court districs where the big IP fights in technology are being fought. In those districts, there is tons of lobbying by tech companies to make create a positive image of them in the local community's mind.
https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/why-south-korea-s-samsung-built-t...
If more power is given to sortition, companies will do more of those kinds of things. In fact, I think that a component of the big-name-college-favoring GAFAM selection practice is due to them wanting to bribe upper-class America. If one of your family members works at one of those companies, you have a much different opinion on them.
Probably a lot easier to regulate than election spending, but still game-able.
I don't know, I think they're pretty different. The main point of sortition, the way I see it, is to pick a small subset of people to focus on a problem. You can't ask "everyone" to focus on every issue, it's way too much work. No one would be able to do anything else. Reducing the set of deciders to a manageable size, while being statistically representative of the whole, is the whole appeal.
Once upon a time, the US Constitution made a point of saying that Congress must meet at least once a year, whether they have business or not. Because it seemed, at that time, entirely plausible that they might not have that much work to do.
If you got 500 people randomly selected, could they even decide anything?
It has a very performant track record. It is not organised as your typical parliament, and has a lot of structure to make this work, such as organising in groups which mostly bridge elections.
Of course, these are mostly seasoned politicians. But I reckon a similar structure would work for a sortition based parliament.
Of course the question remains whether decision by unqualified majority is a good thing.
- arrange for the electorate to be formed into groups of 100..200 however they wish.
- each group elects a candidate
- representatives are selected from the candidates by sortition.
This has two beneficial features over pure sortition:
- The electorate has the opportunity to weed out unsuitables
- Learning is still possible (if some rep is manifestly unsuitable, the lectorate can resolve to select no-one like that in the future)
(Allowing groups in the range 100..200 makes it simpler to form the groups, because once a list reaches the upper bound it can split into two, allowing everyone to just join the group they like rather than the last % having to scramble for a place).
Electors are picked randomly for every election. Lets say 50 for every house seat. They are sequestered like a jury for several days. They listen to every candidate, they (may) deliberate in private, they vote, until they have choice. Then they are dismissed. The chosen candidate holds the seat for three years and votes to choose a head of government.
The advantage is that there are no campaigns, less money involved, less 30 second ads, electors are given the time to focus on every candidate.
All you're really doing is barring the vast majority of the population from political participation and ensuring close races are determined by lottery rather than actual popularity and differential turnout, which [absent effective voter suppression] is a strictly worse method.
Being chosen after sortition was not a fun thing, it was a heavy burden to bare. Representatives were held accountable for their decisions. Their private life basically became public to ensure that they would not be bought by "lobbys".
A lot of people are usually taken aback by sortition because they think the goal is to randomly pick a dictator. They are still representatives, and with not a lot of power actually. The people in Athens were still voting their laws directly.
I suppose it may also have the effect of reducing incentive to compromise, as well as the obvious effect of opening the door to fringe candidates.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_ballot
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...
... Above all, chance makes its selection without any recourse to reasons. This quality is perhaps its greatest advantage, though of course it comes at a price. Peter Stone, a political theorist at Trinity College, Dublin, and the author of The Luck of the Draw: The Role of Lotteries in Decision Making (2011), has made a career of studying the conditions under which such reasonless-ness can be, well, reasonable.
‘What lotteries are very good for is for keeping bad reasons out of decisions,’ Stone told me. ‘Lotteries guarantee that when you are choosing at random, there will be no reasons at all for one option rather than another being selected.’ He calls this the sanitising effect of lotteries – they eliminate all reasons from a decision, scrubbing away any kind of unwanted influence. As Stone acknowledges, randomness eliminates good reasons from the running as well as bad ones. He doesn’t advocate using chance indiscriminately. ‘But, sometimes,’ he argues, ‘the danger of bad reasons is bigger than the loss of the possibility of good reasons.’ ...
https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-can-t-choose-wisely-choose-ran...
https://constitution.org/elec/venetian_selection_system.html
This gives the best of both worlds of electoral districts and popular voting: Everyone is locally represented but the national representation is neatly distributed over ideologies instead of having just two parties.
As the most import benefit, it completely removes the incentive for strategic voting.
"For the first time, a panel representative of the diversity of French citizens, will be directly involved in the preparation of the law."
