It's an interesting idea, but it fundamentally assumes that legislating is something that is easy to learn quickly for the average citizen. Wouldn't this sort of lottery system dramatically...
It's an interesting idea, but it fundamentally assumes that legislating is something that is easy to learn quickly for the average citizen. Wouldn't this sort of lottery system dramatically increase the power of special interest lobbyists or even permanent staff more generally?
This might be a better argument for keeping some elected representatives than the argument I made in a separate post. If you have elected representatives with the power to propose legislation and...
This might be a better argument for keeping some elected representatives than the argument I made in a separate post.
If you have elected representatives with the power to propose legislation and then lottery based parliament with only the power to approve or reject proposals. Then arguably you'd still have more democratic control over what gets passed as well as having the option to elect people with strong skills in drafting appropriate legislation.
This idea reminds me of the proposition system in California. For those who are unaware, legislation can be put directly to voters in CA with support from the CA legislature or with sufficient...
This idea reminds me of the proposition system in California. For those who are unaware, legislation can be put directly to voters in CA with support from the CA legislature or with sufficient signatures of support. Which seems like it has strong parallels to the "elected representatives write legislation and randoms vote on it" idea. Given my impression of how well informed CA population is on these things, I'm not convinced this really solves the issue. I think it's a good place to start, but you'd need to augment it with a healthy dose of education for the voters and then you have the issue of "who picks the educators" and "who decides what they teach".
Unsurprisingly, this is a tricky problem to solve.
In the short term, possibly. However, a key point is made in the more in this other new post... People can be educated. Under a system of lottery representation, you have a system where it becomes...
In the short term, possibly. However, a key point is made in the more in this other new post...
People can be educated. Under a system of lottery representation, you have a system where it becomes as valuable to teach civics to kids as it is to teach reading, math, and science.
If we were to drop the system in place today? Yea probably would have problems. But it would also iron out as people learn that there should be a baseline of civic competence the way there is a baseline reading and math in education.
Yeah I wouldn't do lottery for everything, but there are interesting ideas here. We do lotteries for jury duty, for example. Legislation is legitimately hard to do, but you don't have to go all...
Yeah I wouldn't do lottery for everything, but there are interesting ideas here. We do lotteries for jury duty, for example. Legislation is legitimately hard to do, but you don't have to go all in. You can have a handful of legislative seats reserved for lottery winners, for instance. You can have a "college" of lottery winners whose main job is to do up/down plebiscite votes on legislation as a way of creating counter-majoritarian friction without the gridlock we see from our (American) system's supermajority requirements. Or you can put them in charge of legislative priority/agenda setting to set what the legislators have to focus on in each session.
Where I think the real issue comes in is qualifications. I don't know how big your council will have to be to mitigate against capture of any individual session by fringey cranks. But the more validation checks you build in the more it starts to look like republican electoralism or even suppression/marginalization of certain voices.
Almost everything in this article strikes a chord with me. All of the problems mentioned are ones that need to be deal with and I agree that our democracy is hopelessly (and maybe irrevocably)...
Almost everything in this article strikes a chord with me. All of the problems mentioned are ones that need to be deal with and I agree that our democracy is hopelessly (and maybe irrevocably) broken, I don't know that sortation isn the answer.
I see the upsides (the government is much more representative of the people), the downsides are too numerous for me to get behind it. I work in a very public facing job and I honestly wouldn't want any random assortment of people to be able to make consequential decisions. To quote George Carlin, "Think of how stupid the average person is and realize that half of them are stupider than that."
I think we need radical reforms to our election system that severely limits lobbying and corporate interests in politics. Things like super PACs and other massive money pits need to go as well. We need more transparency at every step of the process.
In response to this discontent, reformers have proposed a slew of solutions. Some want to expand the House of Representatives, abolish the Electoral College, or eliminate the Senate. Others demand enhanced voting rights, the end of gerrymandering, stricter campaign finance laws, more political parties, or multi-member districts and ranked-choice voting. The Athenians would take a different view. The problem, they would point out, lies in elections themselves. We can make all the tweaks we want, but as long as we employ voting to choose representatives, we will continue to wind up with a political economy controlled by wealthy elites. Modern liberal governments are not democracies; they are oligarchies in disguise, overwhelmingly following the policy preferences of the rich. (The middle class happens to agree with them on most issues.)
Again, I agree with the premise, just not the solution. We absolutely need a way to weed out the elites from politics, but I don't know that sending a bunch of random people in to run things is the way. My gut feeling is that they would just get corrupted very quickly.
As an aside, many people don't even understand the basics of how the government in the U.S.A. works at a local, state or federal level.
Example: a common refrain from candidates for local government is "spend more money to fix the roads! Just take it from something else like parks or code enforcement!" Much of the money that the government gets is put into very specific buckets that limit how and when they can be spent. A lot of this complexity is lost on regular people. It's not as simple as just moving money around.
So I’ve been thinking about this on and off for years, ever since I first listened to Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History episode about it, The Powerball Revolution. It’s very much worth...
So I’ve been thinking about this on and off for years, ever since I first listened to Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History episode about it, The Powerball Revolution. It’s very much worth listening to if (a) you can tolerate Gladwell and (b) you want to learn about some activists that are in favor of this method of government selection and how they’re trying to build support for it.
I agree with a lot of the folks that have commented here about the idea so far. I think there are two huge challenges that this method faces:
Above the municipal level, being a politician is often a full time job. Actually, even at the municipal level, for large enough municipalities. How do you ensure that the people you force to leave their job with no notice are able to return to those jobs when their term is up? How do you ensure that the change in compensation isn’t so severe that moving in and out of government is a remotely rational choice?
People by and large do not know how to run large bureaucracies. Not because they’re dumb; because it’s hard! Running massive organizations serving huge numbers of humans means making decisions that are often unintuitive. How do we provide people with the experience needed to know when to make those decisions?
I have some thoughts about these, and I’m curious to hear what others think, too.
This is, I think, the harder problem to solve, even if it seems less problematic at first glance. If people actually do see serving terms in government the way they see jury duty now, either they’ll simply skip out (yikes) or push for and enact reform. And, worst of all, the people affected most negatively by this would be lower and median income people. So what are the options? Honestly I’m not totally sure; I mostly have some ideas for mitigation tactics. One tactic would be to choose the next officials some amount of time in advance, like a year, so that they have time to work with their employer and figure out a plan for when they leave and return. Another would be to make the pay grades for even municipal government fairly high, though I think this introduces weird issues in lower income areas, and makes wealthy people more likely to seek secondary compensation, likely from sources similar to the current flavor of lobbying and corruption we’re trying to mitigate with this plane in the first place.
The second issue I have a more concrete idea about: limit the pools at each level. Municipal government roles are open to everyone in the municipality; state roles are only open to people who have previously served in municipal roles, etc etc. Anyone who’s served a term without, I dunno, violating the constitution is viable for the next level. This also provides a replacement strategy for the current system; start at the municipal level (which also where I think this system could have a huge impact), and gradually move up in levels of hierarchy.
I think sortition has the opposite problem that you describe. A legislative sortition body has the financial powers of the state - including the ability to compensate themselves. The worry isn't...
I think sortition has the opposite problem that you describe. A legislative sortition body has the financial powers of the state - including the ability to compensate themselves. The worry isn't that those in service would be financially harmed. It's the opposite. The worry is that those in service would exploit the system to financially benefit themselves. Which is why a sortition system would need a system of checks and balances to keep jurors in check.
I'd also prefer to keep service voluntary with high compensation as the carrot. Therefore the wealthy have incentive not to serve except for the greater good whilst the lower class have every incentive to serve.
So for things such as loss of employment, that can be easily remedied by legislation. Generous unemployment benefits and severance package. The law could even be used to force/incentivize employers to rehire jurors.
The sortition body would assuredly be motivated to provide such benefits.
Moreover I don't think sortition is well suited to small municipal governments where there may be less than a dozen elected officials. Sortition depends on the large of law numbers to draw large numbers of people and thereby benefit from the diversity and wisdom of crowds. A small government cannot afford such a large sampling.
I think some version of this could work, but I'm not sure how it could get off the ground. This sort of thing needs to be tinkered with on a local level before it gets used more widely. The...
I think some version of this could work, but I'm not sure how it could get off the ground.
This sort of thing needs to be tinkered with on a local level before it gets used more widely. The problem is, not many people are interested in local politics or have the time for it. It would be like a jury summons.
Suppose you pick some ordinary people and then they can nominate someone else if they want? I guess that has problems too.
The Venetian Republic had a really wild way of picking the Doge:
Whenever the time came to elect a new doge of Venice, an official went to pray in St. Mark’s Basilica, grabbed the first boy he could find in the piazza, and took him back to the ducal palace. The boy’s job was to draw lots to choose an electoral college from the members of Venice’s grand families, which was the first step in a performance that has been called tortuous, ridiculous, and profound. Here is how it went, more or less unchanged, for five hundred years, from 1268 until the end of the Venetian Republic.
Thirty electors were chosen by lot, and then a second lottery reduced them to nine, who nominated forty candidates in all, each of whom had to be approved by at least seven electors in order to pass to the next stage. The forty were pruned by lot to twelve, who nominated a total of twenty-five, who needed at least nine nominations each. The twenty-five were culled to nine, who picked an electoral college of forty-five, each with at least seven nominations. The forty-five became eleven, who chose a final college of forty-one. Each member proposed one candidate, all of whom were discussed and, if necessary, examined in person, whereupon each elector cast a vote for every candidate of whom he approved. The candidate with the most approvals was the winner, provided he had been endorsed by at least twenty-five of the forty-one.
I think that's too pessimistic. There are states that do things like instant runoffs and jungle primaries. California has referendums. There's a fair amount of variation at the state and local level.
I think that's too pessimistic. There are states that do things like instant runoffs and jungle primaries. California has referendums. There's a fair amount of variation at the state and local level.
Okay, local level kiddy pool politics it could be implemented, but the article implied it could scale to the national level, and there's a big old constitution in the way of that. Even if that...
Okay, local level kiddy pool politics it could be implemented, but the article implied it could scale to the national level, and there's a big old constitution in the way of that. Even if that wasn't an issue, everyone who would have to vote in favor of that would be voting to fire themselves from their jobs and let their constituents do their jobs, which is a big ask for people who have built their whole careers and life around representing the populace and scratching the right backs.
Well, the Constitution is basically frozen, sure. States do get a lot of say in how members of Congress get elected, and also in choosing members of the electoral college. So there may be some...
Well, the Constitution is basically frozen, sure. States do get a lot of say in how members of Congress get elected, and also in choosing members of the electoral college. So there may be some wiggle room there.
Picking members of the electoral college at random might be pretty interesting.
Always a fan of maximum chaos, but random electors would be like all the horror stories of jurors working on controversial cases, except it happens every four years on the regular and the fate of...
Always a fan of maximum chaos, but random electors would be like all the horror stories of jurors working on controversial cases, except it happens every four years on the regular and the fate of the country is at stake each time. Don't think it's a good idea.
Juries are chaotic because they are idiotically designed. Juries operate oftentimes via unanimous rule, meaning a single juror could throw the trial into disarray. Juries use a terrible sample...
Juries are chaotic because they are idiotically designed. Juries operate oftentimes via unanimous rule, meaning a single juror could throw the trial into disarray. Juries use a terrible sample size that guarantees high variation from one sample to another.
A randomly selected legislature uses a scientific sample 1 to 2 orders magnitude greater in size - 100 to 1000 jurors. Moroever legislatures typically operate via majority rule, which tends towards the median preference of the sample. These sample sizes will produce a far more stable political preference distribution.
Random sampling is the ideal way to achieve proportional representation. The sample will nearly perfectly match the distribution of American in terms of political party affiliation. It will also better match gender, class, race, ethnic, and every conceivable category you can imagine.
In other words the median political preference from one sample to another is going to be roughly invariant, especially when statisticians can optimize the sample size to minimize deviation.
It's chaos to rely on a single coin toss. It's not chaotic when you flip that coin 1000 times and find the results to be about 50/50 heads/tails.
Jury duty is a kind of involuntary servitude that can cause real hardship, which is why judges accept financial and all sort of other excuses. That makes it less representative than it might...
Jury duty is a kind of involuntary servitude that can cause real hardship, which is why judges accept financial and all sort of other excuses. That makes it less representative than it might otherwise be.
Also, they are different tasks. Juries are expected to weigh evidence, not interpret laws. Legislatures write laws. (Or really, their staffs do.) If it's a temporary job then I think people would end up being unduly influenced by their staff and whatever experts (lobbyists) get to talk to them. Compare with how much influence prosecutors have with a grand jury.
I think something in the general vicinity of this idea might work; perhaps a jury chosen by sortition gets to veto bills or something? But with referendums, who writes the referendums matters, voting yes or no is all we get to do, and that doesn't seem to result in well-written referendums.
The real reason juries are a hardship is because we don't pay enough for them. Make juries pay $200/hr and people won't try to dodge them. Do the same for representatives. Pay enough that damn...
The real reason juries are a hardship is because we don't pay enough for them.
Make juries pay $200/hr and people won't try to dodge them. Do the same for representatives. Pay enough that damn near everyone wants the temporary (as in a few years) boost of being a representative.
Hypothetical system:
Lottery every 4 years. New person has 1 month to wrap up existing employment. Free housing provided for representatives in needed location. They do a 11 month side-by-side with existing rep for the transition. This should solve a lot of the 'how' problems, and give an idea of what staff needs to be replaced.
Rinse and repeat. This gives a 4 year cycle with 0 campaigning and two years of full auditability.... a lot harder to ingrain corrupt staff. Perhaps have an additional bonus for whistle-blowing.
In my opinion a lottery in addition to an elected parliament would help alleviate some downsides. While a random lottery is inherently fair, it is random. That means there will be times when the...
In my opinion a lottery in addition to an elected parliament would help alleviate some downsides. While a random lottery is inherently fair, it is random. That means there will be times when the representatives will skew heavily in some political inclinations. In the extreme case there will be some year(s) where, by random chance, the representatives will be mainly misogynistic racists (or worse). Having an elected parliament/chamber would act as a counter balance.
I'm not sure this is true. Surprisingly small sample sizes can be accurate to a high degree and that number drops, relatively, as you go into hundreds of thousands or millions of people (I'm not...
I'm not sure this is true. Surprisingly small sample sizes can be accurate to a high degree and that number drops, relatively, as you go into hundreds of thousands or millions of people (I'm not sure about the exact numbers involved but here's a calculator you could experiment with, I believe you'd end up in the low 100s for pretty much any population).
The problem with surveys is mostly that there is a bias in the pool of people reached (i.e. people who answer landline telephones) but in the theoretical scenario of making this an official selection, that bias could be avoided as literally anyone could be picked.
I suppose this depends on how confident you want to be in that the group is representative and how much it matters when you deviate from that. If you want a higher degree of representativeness...
I suppose this depends on how confident you want to be in that the group is representative and how much it matters when you deviate from that. If you want a higher degree of representativeness then you'd need a larger sample size right?
But, I am probably overestimating the impact of "bad" sampling. You might be off from true representation, but you'd probably not be far off.
This is a mathy argument but no, not necessarily! The sample size needed grows significantly until a population of around 50,000 but from there on it doesn't really matter for accuracy if you...
If you want a higher degree of representativeness then you'd need a larger sample size right?
This is a mathy argument but no, not necessarily! The sample size needed grows significantly until a population of around 50,000 but from there on it doesn't really matter for accuracy if you sample from 500,000 or 5,000,000 or 500,000,000 people. In the formula to calculate it, the population size would be in a denominator of a factor that is added to 1, so it goes towards zero as it grows thus becoming irrelevant at high population sizes.
It's not intuitive but the problem is almost entirely how good the randomization is. If truly anyone has an equal chance of being picked at random. That's a big if. But if you assume that is the case, you only need like 385 people to represent the entire US population for a 95% confidence level. There's a margin of error, but I assume it's less than with elected politicians.
It is complicated math, though, and reality tends to be messy. For example, I don't know how this changes for issues only affecting a small percentage of people and how you would implement the necessary safeguards to keep this from being abused or broken. Still, I don't think there's a disadvantage to an election system in terms of representation.
The reason we can't have this neat idea in a real-world scenario probably has to do with psychology than raw math.
Out of curiosity does this work similarly if you add more variables, e.g you want to pick people (normally distributed) based on: A) around geographic population density B) age of the population...
Out of curiosity does this work similarly if you add more variables, e.g you want to pick people (normally distributed) based on:
A) around geographic population density
B) age of the population
C) gender
D) frenological measurement of the skull :P
I can imagine that if you care about normal distribution along multiple axis that it becomes more complicated. I can also imagine that it ends up working out fine by just sampling randomly from the general population. The latter would also be much easier to explain to people...
I have no idea how this works with complications like that. I don't think sampling for anything like that would improve results, you want to represent the general population.
I have no idea how this works with complications like that. I don't think sampling for anything like that would improve results, you want to represent the general population.
I really like the idea, and i have heard of it years ago. i think something that gets missed in our discussion here is, that such a system would move (a lot of) power away from the now mostly very...
I really like the idea, and i have heard of it years ago.
i think something that gets missed in our discussion here is, that such a system would move (a lot of) power away from the now mostly very amateurish representatives to the professional administration.
its a problem that as such already exists in most democracies (especially in not fully professionalised ones) but would be made worse by this system.
do i think its a bad idea b.c. of that? no
do i think it can be mitigated? maybe
everything has its pros and cons and i think it might work (better) in places that already have a lot of direct political power by the population and as such a better education/understanding of and about political desicionmaking
I’ve been advocating for this since i read about it in a r a wilson book 20 years ago. Glad to see some elites weighing in, my suggestions are usually met by folks shuffling away as quickly as...
I’ve been advocating for this since i read about it in a r a wilson book 20 years ago. Glad to see some elites weighing in, my suggestions are usually met by folks shuffling away as quickly as they can…
I always thought that government could be be run interestingly if one could outsource legislative powers to a Git instance where laws can be pulled, altered and forks suggested and merged in by...
I always thought that government could be be run interestingly if one could outsource legislative powers to a Git instance where laws can be pulled, altered and forks suggested and merged in by vote, and I guess this would be a logical extension of this idea.
Seems like the major issue would be how to factor in bribes, how to vet people (if you do), and if you are able to opt out, and would that cause a bias for people who are drawn to the power of it?
I think a major point that nobody here touched on yet is this one: Democracy is quite literally "rule by the common people," or in modern terms "rule by the poor." Elections are popularity...
I think a major point that nobody here touched on yet is this one:
Why lotteries and not voting? The Athenians weren’t fools; they learned through bitter trials that elections are tools of elites. Having seen the Athenian experiment himself, Aristotle noted as much. “The appointment of magistrates by lot is democratical,” he observes in Politics, “and the election is oligarchical.” Lotteries go straight to everyday people and bring them into power; they circumvent the designs of aristocrats, resist corruption, and don’t favor one group of citizens over another.
Democracy is quite literally "rule by the common people," or in modern terms "rule by the poor." Elections are popularity contests for the elite. Wisdom of the crowds is not a silver bullet, but I doubt that it is worse than the status quo of ingrained elites.
It's an interesting idea, but it fundamentally assumes that legislating is something that is easy to learn quickly for the average citizen. Wouldn't this sort of lottery system dramatically increase the power of special interest lobbyists or even permanent staff more generally?
This might be a better argument for keeping some elected representatives than the argument I made in a separate post.
If you have elected representatives with the power to propose legislation and then lottery based parliament with only the power to approve or reject proposals. Then arguably you'd still have more democratic control over what gets passed as well as having the option to elect people with strong skills in drafting appropriate legislation.
This idea reminds me of the proposition system in California. For those who are unaware, legislation can be put directly to voters in CA with support from the CA legislature or with sufficient signatures of support. Which seems like it has strong parallels to the "elected representatives write legislation and randoms vote on it" idea. Given my impression of how well informed CA population is on these things, I'm not convinced this really solves the issue. I think it's a good place to start, but you'd need to augment it with a healthy dose of education for the voters and then you have the issue of "who picks the educators" and "who decides what they teach".
Unsurprisingly, this is a tricky problem to solve.
In the short term, possibly. However, a key point is made in the more in this other new post...
People can be educated. Under a system of lottery representation, you have a system where it becomes as valuable to teach civics to kids as it is to teach reading, math, and science.
If we were to drop the system in place today? Yea probably would have problems. But it would also iron out as people learn that there should be a baseline of civic competence the way there is a baseline reading and math in education.
Yeah I wouldn't do lottery for everything, but there are interesting ideas here. We do lotteries for jury duty, for example. Legislation is legitimately hard to do, but you don't have to go all in. You can have a handful of legislative seats reserved for lottery winners, for instance. You can have a "college" of lottery winners whose main job is to do up/down plebiscite votes on legislation as a way of creating counter-majoritarian friction without the gridlock we see from our (American) system's supermajority requirements. Or you can put them in charge of legislative priority/agenda setting to set what the legislators have to focus on in each session.
Where I think the real issue comes in is qualifications. I don't know how big your council will have to be to mitigate against capture of any individual session by fringey cranks. But the more validation checks you build in the more it starts to look like republican electoralism or even suppression/marginalization of certain voices.
Almost everything in this article strikes a chord with me. All of the problems mentioned are ones that need to be deal with and I agree that our democracy is hopelessly (and maybe irrevocably) broken, I don't know that sortation isn the answer.
I see the upsides (the government is much more representative of the people), the downsides are too numerous for me to get behind it. I work in a very public facing job and I honestly wouldn't want any random assortment of people to be able to make consequential decisions. To quote George Carlin, "Think of how stupid the average person is and realize that half of them are stupider than that."
I think we need radical reforms to our election system that severely limits lobbying and corporate interests in politics. Things like super PACs and other massive money pits need to go as well. We need more transparency at every step of the process.
Again, I agree with the premise, just not the solution. We absolutely need a way to weed out the elites from politics, but I don't know that sending a bunch of random people in to run things is the way. My gut feeling is that they would just get corrupted very quickly.
As an aside, many people don't even understand the basics of how the government in the U.S.A. works at a local, state or federal level.
Example: a common refrain from candidates for local government is "spend more money to fix the roads! Just take it from something else like parks or code enforcement!" Much of the money that the government gets is put into very specific buckets that limit how and when they can be spent. A lot of this complexity is lost on regular people. It's not as simple as just moving money around.
So I’ve been thinking about this on and off for years, ever since I first listened to Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History episode about it, The Powerball Revolution. It’s very much worth listening to if (a) you can tolerate Gladwell and (b) you want to learn about some activists that are in favor of this method of government selection and how they’re trying to build support for it.
I agree with a lot of the folks that have commented here about the idea so far. I think there are two huge challenges that this method faces:
I have some thoughts about these, and I’m curious to hear what others think, too.
I think sortition has the opposite problem that you describe. A legislative sortition body has the financial powers of the state - including the ability to compensate themselves. The worry isn't that those in service would be financially harmed. It's the opposite. The worry is that those in service would exploit the system to financially benefit themselves. Which is why a sortition system would need a system of checks and balances to keep jurors in check.
I'd also prefer to keep service voluntary with high compensation as the carrot. Therefore the wealthy have incentive not to serve except for the greater good whilst the lower class have every incentive to serve.
So for things such as loss of employment, that can be easily remedied by legislation. Generous unemployment benefits and severance package. The law could even be used to force/incentivize employers to rehire jurors.
The sortition body would assuredly be motivated to provide such benefits.
Moreover I don't think sortition is well suited to small municipal governments where there may be less than a dozen elected officials. Sortition depends on the large of law numbers to draw large numbers of people and thereby benefit from the diversity and wisdom of crowds. A small government cannot afford such a large sampling.
I think some version of this could work, but I'm not sure how it could get off the ground.
This sort of thing needs to be tinkered with on a local level before it gets used more widely. The problem is, not many people are interested in local politics or have the time for it. It would be like a jury summons.
Suppose you pick some ordinary people and then they can nominate someone else if they want? I guess that has problems too.
The Venetian Republic had a really wild way of picking the Doge:
There's also the issue that those who currently have power in our systems would probably not be willing to give it up for a "neat idea."
I think that's too pessimistic. There are states that do things like instant runoffs and jungle primaries. California has referendums. There's a fair amount of variation at the state and local level.
Okay, local level kiddy pool politics it could be implemented, but the article implied it could scale to the national level, and there's a big old constitution in the way of that. Even if that wasn't an issue, everyone who would have to vote in favor of that would be voting to fire themselves from their jobs and let their constituents do their jobs, which is a big ask for people who have built their whole careers and life around representing the populace and scratching the right backs.
Well, the Constitution is basically frozen, sure. States do get a lot of say in how members of Congress get elected, and also in choosing members of the electoral college. So there may be some wiggle room there.
Picking members of the electoral college at random might be pretty interesting.
Always a fan of maximum chaos, but random electors would be like all the horror stories of jurors working on controversial cases, except it happens every four years on the regular and the fate of the country is at stake each time. Don't think it's a good idea.
Juries are chaotic because they are idiotically designed. Juries operate oftentimes via unanimous rule, meaning a single juror could throw the trial into disarray. Juries use a terrible sample size that guarantees high variation from one sample to another.
A randomly selected legislature uses a scientific sample 1 to 2 orders magnitude greater in size - 100 to 1000 jurors. Moroever legislatures typically operate via majority rule, which tends towards the median preference of the sample. These sample sizes will produce a far more stable political preference distribution.
Random sampling is the ideal way to achieve proportional representation. The sample will nearly perfectly match the distribution of American in terms of political party affiliation. It will also better match gender, class, race, ethnic, and every conceivable category you can imagine.
In other words the median political preference from one sample to another is going to be roughly invariant, especially when statisticians can optimize the sample size to minimize deviation.
It's chaos to rely on a single coin toss. It's not chaotic when you flip that coin 1000 times and find the results to be about 50/50 heads/tails.
I think this is a feature. Being a representative should be more like a chore that you're obligated to do then a career.
Jury duty is a kind of involuntary servitude that can cause real hardship, which is why judges accept financial and all sort of other excuses. That makes it less representative than it might otherwise be.
Also, they are different tasks. Juries are expected to weigh evidence, not interpret laws. Legislatures write laws. (Or really, their staffs do.) If it's a temporary job then I think people would end up being unduly influenced by their staff and whatever experts (lobbyists) get to talk to them. Compare with how much influence prosecutors have with a grand jury.
I think something in the general vicinity of this idea might work; perhaps a jury chosen by sortition gets to veto bills or something? But with referendums, who writes the referendums matters, voting yes or no is all we get to do, and that doesn't seem to result in well-written referendums.
The real reason juries are a hardship is because we don't pay enough for them.
Make juries pay $200/hr and people won't try to dodge them. Do the same for representatives. Pay enough that damn near everyone wants the temporary (as in a few years) boost of being a representative.
Hypothetical system:
Lottery every 4 years. New person has 1 month to wrap up existing employment. Free housing provided for representatives in needed location. They do a 11 month side-by-side with existing rep for the transition. This should solve a lot of the 'how' problems, and give an idea of what staff needs to be replaced.
Rinse and repeat. This gives a 4 year cycle with 0 campaigning and two years of full auditability.... a lot harder to ingrain corrupt staff. Perhaps have an additional bonus for whistle-blowing.
In my opinion a lottery in addition to an elected parliament would help alleviate some downsides. While a random lottery is inherently fair, it is random. That means there will be times when the representatives will skew heavily in some political inclinations. In the extreme case there will be some year(s) where, by random chance, the representatives will be mainly misogynistic racists (or worse). Having an elected parliament/chamber would act as a counter balance.
I'm not sure this is true. Surprisingly small sample sizes can be accurate to a high degree and that number drops, relatively, as you go into hundreds of thousands or millions of people (I'm not sure about the exact numbers involved but here's a calculator you could experiment with, I believe you'd end up in the low 100s for pretty much any population).
The problem with surveys is mostly that there is a bias in the pool of people reached (i.e. people who answer landline telephones) but in the theoretical scenario of making this an official selection, that bias could be avoided as literally anyone could be picked.
I suppose this depends on how confident you want to be in that the group is representative and how much it matters when you deviate from that. If you want a higher degree of representativeness then you'd need a larger sample size right?
But, I am probably overestimating the impact of "bad" sampling. You might be off from true representation, but you'd probably not be far off.
This is a mathy argument but no, not necessarily! The sample size needed grows significantly until a population of around 50,000 but from there on it doesn't really matter for accuracy if you sample from 500,000 or 5,000,000 or 500,000,000 people. In the formula to calculate it, the population size would be in a denominator of a factor that is added to 1, so it goes towards zero as it grows thus becoming irrelevant at high population sizes.
It's not intuitive but the problem is almost entirely how good the randomization is. If truly anyone has an equal chance of being picked at random. That's a big if. But if you assume that is the case, you only need like 385 people to represent the entire US population for a 95% confidence level. There's a margin of error, but I assume it's less than with elected politicians.
It is complicated math, though, and reality tends to be messy. For example, I don't know how this changes for issues only affecting a small percentage of people and how you would implement the necessary safeguards to keep this from being abused or broken. Still, I don't think there's a disadvantage to an election system in terms of representation.
The reason we can't have this neat idea in a real-world scenario probably has to do with psychology than raw math.
Out of curiosity does this work similarly if you add more variables, e.g you want to pick people (normally distributed) based on:
A) around geographic population density
B) age of the population
C) gender
D) frenological measurement of the skull :P
I can imagine that if you care about normal distribution along multiple axis that it becomes more complicated. I can also imagine that it ends up working out fine by just sampling randomly from the general population. The latter would also be much easier to explain to people...
I have no idea how this works with complications like that. I don't think sampling for anything like that would improve results, you want to represent the general population.
I really like the idea, and i have heard of it years ago.
i think something that gets missed in our discussion here is, that such a system would move (a lot of) power away from the now mostly very amateurish representatives to the professional administration.
its a problem that as such already exists in most democracies (especially in not fully professionalised ones) but would be made worse by this system.
do i think its a bad idea b.c. of that? no
do i think it can be mitigated? maybe
everything has its pros and cons and i think it might work (better) in places that already have a lot of direct political power by the population and as such a better education/understanding of and about political desicionmaking
I’ve been advocating for this since i read about it in a r a wilson book 20 years ago. Glad to see some elites weighing in, my suggestions are usually met by folks shuffling away as quickly as they can…
I always thought that government could be be run interestingly if one could outsource legislative powers to a Git instance where laws can be pulled, altered and forks suggested and merged in by vote, and I guess this would be a logical extension of this idea.
Seems like the major issue would be how to factor in bribes, how to vet people (if you do), and if you are able to opt out, and would that cause a bias for people who are drawn to the power of it?
I think a major point that nobody here touched on yet is this one:
Democracy is quite literally "rule by the common people," or in modern terms "rule by the poor." Elections are popularity contests for the elite. Wisdom of the crowds is not a silver bullet, but I doubt that it is worse than the status quo of ingrained elites.