I dont know if this is a good idea. There is already corruption in my country from the fact that after someone leaves offfice in the senate they know they can land a cushy consultant or talking...
I dont know if this is a good idea.
There is already corruption in my country from the fact that after someone leaves offfice in the senate they know they can land a cushy consultant or talking head job if they "play ball", so to speak.
If you take some random dude and make them one of the deciding votes, theyre going to have the same incentives of knowing they are in a temporary position, and if they do what powerful interests want they will be rewarded in some way.
Theres also this:
Ordinary people are capable of high-quality deliberation, especially when deliberative processes are well-arranged: when they include the provision of balanced information, expert testimony, and oversight by a facilitator.
I dont think I intepret that so charitably. It seems like a big problem that the procedure proposed requires you to have a team of experts to prep the voters and present them with a curated selection of information. To me, when I hear that all these experimental groups are able to unanimously decide on these potentially contentious issues, that says to me that randomly selected groups are suceptible to influence.
What youve done is just shift the power somewhere else and then divert attention away from that. If we do this random selection system, you dont have to worry about who your representatives are, allegedly. But you DO have to worry about this panel of experts who is going to be priming the representstives. Its just adding an extra layer of obfuscation, so you dont think much about the scientists.
But this is just a p-hacking exercise, isnt it? If the observation is that groups of people can reliably make decisions when primed with presentstion of relevant data, and there seems to be consistency in how those decisions go when you have well organized deliberation with experts and facilitators, then you can just do some test runs with other randomly selected groups and try out different presentations till you find the version that gets you the result you want.
So to deal with that, you need to have a good selection process to make sure that the experts and facilitators are not pushing their own biases onto the randomly selected voters. How do you do that? Scientists are not so above it all that you can just trust them more than politicians. Theres a Harvard professor named Francesca Gino who recently got in trouble for alleged plagiarism and data manipulation. She used her position to cheat and bolster her own career, and it succeeded to the point that shes a dean at Harvard. So how do you avoid picking experts who end up being charlatans?
The cushy job is premised on them having access to the halls of power after they retire so they can continue to exercise influence. It’s a bit of a sinecure, but not just a sinecure. It’s possible...
There is already corruption in my country from the fact that after someone leaves offfice in the senate they know they can land a cushy consultant or talking head job if they "play ball", so to speak.
The cushy job is premised on them having access to the halls of power after they retire so they can continue to exercise influence. It’s a bit of a sinecure, but not just a sinecure. It’s possible that if you just have a rotating rando in the slot there isn’t much benefit to paying them after their role in things is done.
But the argument against this, which you hint at, is the same as the argument against term limits on congresspeople. Legislation is complex work that requires specialized knowledge, skills, and personal contacts and influence. If your duly elected legislators don’t have that knowledge and skills, the lobbyists who aren’t elected by anyone but plutocrats will be the only ones with the tenure and expertise to fill the gap, set the agenda, and execute on long-term plans.
There are certainly some things that could benefit from a lottery system. That is how we select juries in the US, for example. I can see convening a lottery selected council to cast votes on issues where you can’t really trust elected representatives to make an unbiased decision though. Like, if congressional districts were drawn by a randomly selected group of citizens you’d solve gerrymandering.
Sure, corruption is a problem with both sortition and election. With both, assembly participants can take bribes either during or after service. Sortition unfortunately doesn't fix this particular...
There is already corruption in my country from the fact that after someone leaves offfice in the senate they know they can land a cushy consultant or talking head job if they "play ball", so to speak.
Sure, corruption is a problem with both sortition and election. With both, assembly participants can take bribes either during or after service. Sortition unfortunately doesn't fix this particular problem. So if you're going to be comparing systems of government, neither sortition nor election has a clear advantage here.
There are some smaller advantages though. Businesses typically seek politicians as employees for their lobbying prowess and political competence. Politicians form intimate relationships with bureaucrats and other elected officers, as these officers may serve for many years or decades at a time. Politicians therefore make excellent lobbyists.
However in sortition, everyone serves finite terms of at most 0-4 years. That means the relationships formed will never be as solid as in an elected regime. You'll never be able to call up your legislative buddies 5 years from your service. You might have relationships with bureaucrats but they'll also never be as solid as ones formed by elected politicians.
Sortition-selected jurors are inferior employees with inferior lobbying skills and inferior connections compared to an elite elected politician. Elected politicians by the nature of the job must become very good at making social connections and marketing and sales. Therefore companies get much less bang-for-buck for hiring jurors compared to politicians.
In sortition this job offer is therefore a much less compelling bribe. You can still be fired at any time, moreover if a juror has already voted in your company's favor, you have no obligation to return the favor. A secret ballot at the final decision might also make verification of quid-pro-quo difficult for the business.
Like jury duty but assembly duty. I like the premise, but would want to know more. Especially how the experts are picked for the learning phase and who is this facilitator. Both of those...
Like jury duty but assembly duty.
I like the premise, but would want to know more. Especially how the experts are picked for the learning phase and who is this facilitator. Both of those selections seem to carry quite the outsized influence on the outcome.
The referenced paper is paywalled and has only been cited once.
Mirrors for their sources: 1 - The crisis of democracy and the science of deliberation 2 - Against Elections: The Lottocratic Alternative 3 - America in One Room (site had moved URLs since being...
Shown to resolve? Not "show promising signs of being able to resolve? Like, someone tried it and it has SOLVED climate change? Democracy has not failed. democracy has been hijacked by unlimited...
There is a new democratic method that is shown to: [...] Resolve the most controversial of political topics, including climate change, abortion, gay marriage, illegal immigration, and election reform.
Shown to resolve? Not "show promising signs of being able to resolve? Like, someone tried it and it has SOLVED climate change?
The common narrative of today is that democracy has failed. People are stupid and make stupid decisions, both in their daily lives and at the ballot box. These dumb people voted for Trump, or they voted for Biden, and therefore they cannot be trusted. Therefore, it’s time to get rid of democracy!
Democracy has not failed. democracy has been hijacked by unlimited money to influence media and narrative. It's being suppressed by bullshit like gerrymandering and voter suppression. It's being mocked by Supreme Court decisions. And the average person by the biggest percentage isn't voting for Biden or Trump: they're staying home voting for nobody because they're too busy not starving, or they're too demoralized by corruption and broken promises, or they're reading the room correctly that none of these candidates actually give a hoot. Democracy, when properly implemented and properly safeguarded, still works.
simple premise. If you give normal people time, money, resources, and expertise, they are capable of making informed decisions, and they are capable of deliberating with one another to construct better decisions.
"If you wish to make apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe" -- apparently, if you want electoral reforms you just first create a utopia. If normal people had time, money, resources and expertise, we wouldn't need government at all whatsoever.
In the Irish context, Citizens' Assemblies were explicitly used to solve the abortion and gay marriage issue. The Citizens' Assembly overwhelmingly voted to support abortion and gay marriage...
? Like, someone tried it and it has SOLVED climate change?
In the Irish context, Citizens' Assemblies were explicitly used to solve the abortion and gay marriage issue. The Citizens' Assembly overwhelmingly voted to support abortion and gay marriage whilst the politicians were too scared to legislate on it. This ultimately led to a referendum and Constitutional Amendment where normal citizens had to drive through the change.
In the Irish context, the citizens have also been far more aggressive in tackling climate change compared to their elected counterparts. Of course because Citizens' Assemblies only have power to render recommendations, these recommendations were safely ignored by their legislature. The legislature instead settled on government mandated carbon targets rather than explicit policies such as carbon and meat taxes as recommended by citizens.
This is sort of important, because Ireland has one of the most advanced democracies in the world. Ireland uses a sophisticated ranked choice voting algorithm called "Single Transferable Vote" to elect their politicians. Even with the best technology, politicians turn out to be unrepresentative in terms of core issues such as abortion and climate change.
democracy has been hijacked by unlimited money to influence media and narrative.
I'll go ahead and claim that elections are intrinsically hijacked by money and media. Elections and money go hand-in-hand since the dawn of democracy 2000 years ago. Elected regimes by their nature select the most popular of us. The most popular can only be created through mass media. Because we live in jurisdictions of millions, it is impossible for us to personally know the popular. We rely on mass media to tell us who is popular. Popularity can only be achieved by putting in time, effort, and money into becoming popular. Normal, regular citizens will never be popular.
Imagine we banned all campaign donations tomorrow. The only people who have a shot in running in this world are the already popular or already have the wealth to run a campaign. Rich and famous celebrities who can pivot their fame and wealth into office.
Imagine the world where election campaigns are funded solely by the government proportionate to previous year's results. Now we have a world that empowers the status quo politicians against any upstarts. Political connections and insider trading are what get you power.
if you want electoral reforms you just first create a utopia. If normal people had time, money, resources and expertise, we wouldn't need government at all whatsoever.
The point of sortition is to facilitates this. Sortition gives ordinary people power - time, money, and resources - through lottery. In sortition, you pay people to participate for long periods of time. This is logistically feasible because we don't have to pay the entire public, we just need to pay a small sample.
Sortition is therefore a far, far more practical way to achieve an informed deliberative body compared to the typical liberal progressive belief that we need more, more, more education to solve our election woes.
All these problems you list were things that happened in a democracy, mostly by the people elected. It's not like these were authoritarian rules that were handed down. A sign that democracy...
Democracy has not failed. democracy has been hijacked by unlimited money to influence media and narrative. It's being suppressed by bullshit like gerrymandering and voter suppression.
All these problems you list were things that happened in a democracy, mostly by the people elected. It's not like these were authoritarian rules that were handed down. A sign that democracy failed. No reason to throw the baby out wirh the bathwater, but reevaluating need for elections is a worthwhile endeavor.
The #1 thing that democracy by lot solves is the elimination of the entire campaigning cycle. The House in the USA is particularly plagued by it, needing to start the next election cycle almost the moment they're sworn in.
Having it as a well-paid position, with a decent perpetual pension afterwards, and a robust accountability system and you've got a recipie for success.
And given a healthy quantity of churn, it'll be harder for would-be-corruptors to avoid accidentally trying to bribe the wrong person. It's much easier to corrupt somebody in perpetual need of more funding.
Perhaps I'll agree with you that currently, democracy has been under attack and is weakened, using the rules allowed within a democracy. But any system can be weakened using the rules allowed...
Perhaps I'll agree with you that currently, democracy has been under attack and is weakened, using the rules allowed within a democracy. But any system can be weakened using the rules allowed within itself, or getting away with methods outside of the rules until they're rewritten as part of the rules.
For your last point on corruption, I would say it will be even easier to be corrupt: you're not going to be in office for long, and you will likely never be in office again. Why wouldn't you take that once in a life time bribe? And with a merry go around of "politicians", how will they ever find the time to prosecute you among hundreds?
I don't think I am on board with random selection from the general population. I would support random selection from a large prequalified pool. Particularly for things like judges and other...
I don't think I am on board with random selection from the general population. I would support random selection from a large prequalified pool. Particularly for things like judges and other experts. With a high pay, retirement and strong prohibitions on payments and opportunities after the fact. Changing the election to an in the wild primary and ranked choice voting would shift elections. I would ban all campaign funding raises and publicly fund campaigns after an open primary for the top three candidates.
Although replacing the president with an executive committee with a crisis leader selected by random I think would improve the situation. Use of random selection from a prequalified pool could prove helpful.
I'm not opposed to meritocracy, but I think any meritocracy must be constructed from below rather than above. In my opinion the best device to construct a meritocracy is a Citizens' Assembly....
I'm not opposed to meritocracy, but I think any meritocracy must be constructed from below rather than above.
In my opinion the best device to construct a meritocracy is a Citizens' Assembly.
Select citizens by lot to form a Citizens' Assembly
Give these citizens the task of hiring bureaucrats, advisors, and executive officers.
Give these citizens the time and compensation and full powers of a deliberative body.
With the powers of a full deliberative body, citizens can now interview dozens, hundreds of applicants. Citizens can solicit and read resumes. Citizens can go through a full, typical job candidate interview process. Citizens can hire staff to aid in hiring more staff. Then after hiring, citizens can go through a full job performance review.
In sortition, the meritocracy is therefore reconstructed through a deliberative interviewing and job search process instead of an election process. No more campaign circus and need for mass marketing. The cacophony of the political campaign is replaced with a typical resumes, interviews, and job performance review. In my opinion that's a superior way to form a meritocracy.
Hiring and firing staff is one of the core jobs of any legislature or Parliament. That is why constructing a bureaucracy and therefore meritocracy is one of the jobs that any sortition-based legislature would also carry out.
In the process you propose, some entity still needs to go through the difficult job of establishing "pre-qualification". With my principle that meritocracy should be established from below than above, I'll claim that a Citizens' Assembly is the best kind of organization to do this job.
I don't have much to add here other than, I have long held that the skill set needed to be elected is considerably different from, and probably negatively correlated with, the skill set needed to...
I don't have much to add here other than, I have long held that the skill set needed to be elected is considerably different from, and probably negatively correlated with, the skill set needed to represent and govern. What you propose neatly side-steps that problem. I like it.
Do you think most citizens can adequately evaluate someone's skills? Do you think the average person could adequately vet someone in Cyber-Security versus someone posing? How about say a licensed...
Do you think most citizens can adequately evaluate someone's skills? Do you think the average person could adequately vet someone in Cyber-Security versus someone posing? How about say a licensed doctor being able to hire a virologist or clinical trial expert? As someone who has worked on clinical trials, most doctors do not know how to run one or how to hire people for it. No, I can't do it either. I see many people get basic things wrong in fields they work in. Random people do not have the analytical skills or deliberation skills to pull this off. Random experts from their field is hedge against corruption and pushing a specific agenda. Kind of like a hedge against judge shopping here in the US. Or why they want to control who appoints a judge here. If they have to keep a pool large enough and then have people randomly chosen from this pool it can help blunt ideological shifts. Where I work, you don't know who the Quality checker is going to be and it helps in reducing "friendly decisions". I would like to see this along with some other things for judges. (US centric)
What exactly are you comparing to? We have about three choices. We can trust ignorant voters to make the hiring decisions through elections. We can trust a benevolent dictator or hierarchy. Or we...
What exactly are you comparing to? We have about three choices. We can trust ignorant voters to make the hiring decisions through elections. We can trust a benevolent dictator or hierarchy. Or we can trust a deliberative assembly.
If you think democracy is a good thing, IMO a deliberative Citizens assembly is a far superior hiring procedure than an election. Do you disagree? Do you think elections competently hire the best personnel?
First task-oriented citizen's panel would be to figure out education system improvements so you don't have this problem in 2 decades. The whole point of democracy is that it's everyone. Otherwise...
I don't think I am on board with random selection from the general population.
First task-oriented citizen's panel would be to figure out education system improvements so you don't have this problem in 2 decades.
The whole point of democracy is that it's everyone. Otherwise we might as well revert back to genetic aristocracy.
After having worked with a large group of educated and diverse people. I have come to realize that a lack of education isn't the actual issue depending on the population. I am speaking from a US...
In the process you propose, some entity still needs to go through the difficult job of establishing "pre-qualification". With my principle that meritocracy should be established from below than above, I'll claim that a Citizens' Assembly is the best kind of organization to do this job.
After having worked with a large group of educated and diverse people. I have come to realize that a lack of education isn't the actual issue depending on the population. I am speaking from a US perspective. Everyone I work with has an above average education level. Even the cleaning crew. Many do not have the capacity to think even slightly outside of their area. A significant portion can not adjust their view points based upon contravening evidence. Being deliberative takes skills and is not always learnable but the average person. Not everyone is able to fathom second and third order effects of their actions. I do favor mandatory voting and regular "feeling polls". I use the term feeling is many people often misattribute their difficulties to the wrong source. This often hinders debate and problem resolution. People not already trained in an area really have no business debating a proper course of action in that field. I watched this too much as some healthcare workers decided to pontificate on the pandemic. Being a Nurse or even a Doctor does not mean you have the skills to develop a clinical trial or execute one. They often know more medical knowledge than the average person, but they really should not be weighing in on vaccine safety or efficacy. Too many weigh in without actual research just to have something to say.
The whole point of democracy is that it's everyone. Otherwise we might as well revert back to genetic aristocracy.
There are middle grounds between genetic aristocracy and pure democracy. This highlights my point on randomly selecting from the general population.
Here's the thing: Juries work. 12 random people coming to agreement can generally pick the correct outcome in a civil or criminal proceeding, with no formal training on law and precedent. They...
Here's the thing: Juries work. 12 random people coming to agreement can generally pick the correct outcome in a civil or criminal proceeding, with no formal training on law and precedent. They have no obligation to follow the laws as they are written.
(this is actually for @chocobean, my replies blurred together) There are many tools to out and prevent corruption, transparency being a big one. Punishing organizations that bribe is easier than punishing the one that accepted it, and tracing jobs and money has never been easier.
Saying "some people aren't qualified to lead" is a tiny, short hop from "some people aren't qualified to vote." And there's a sordid history I don't have time to dig into.
Sorry but this is BS. How do you evaluate what the "correct outcome" is? There are certainly plenty of cases in which the innocent are found guilty by juries -- the US has a wrongful conviction...
12 random people coming to agreement can generally pick the correct outcome in a civil or criminal proceeding, with no formal training on law and precedent
Sorry but this is BS. How do you evaluate what the "correct outcome" is? There are certainly plenty of cases in which the innocent are found guilty by juries -- the US has a wrongful conviction rate of 4-6% overall according to studies. Is 1 in 20 a good enough number for "generally"?
Furthermore, our system is set up so that they don't have to make any findings about law and precedent -- juries are to find the answers to factual questions and the law and precedent are handled by a judge. If juries had to make decisions that actually relied on them interpreting the law, it would be wildly different and completely overwhelming to jurors even in the best case scenario.
That 4-6% is inclusive of judges as well. That's why we have appeals processes. Here's a study that looks at optimal jury sizes. It also links to this study, which studies the accuracy of juries...
That 4-6% is inclusive of judges as well. That's why we have appeals processes.
Relaxing the unanimity requirement in favor of a less demanding majority rule yields better results in terms of accuracy of verdicts than a reduction in jury size. Relaxing unanimity increases accuracy at a faster rate than the corresponding change obtainable with a reduction in jury size.
It also links to this study, which studies the accuracy of juries more, and their findings could be distilled to 'Juries are more likely than judges to let a guilty person go free and less likely than judges to convict an innocent person.'
Put those two together, and you have the foundation of democracy....relaxing unamity and increasing decisionmaking pool leads to better results.
Rule by lot opens this wider. Rather than having ~500 people essentially making all the procedural votes, it becomes possible to have very large (1000+) dedicated focus groups for 1-12 week durations for individual topics.
Will they get it wrong sometimes? Of course. Will they get it more-wrong than our existing cadre of political dynasties? I'm doubtful. And since it would be a brand new group when it comes time to re-evaluate, there's a lower chance things will remain wrong in perpetuity.
It's kind of a stepping stone to what the internet enables: Full participatory direct democracy.
I'm not going to litigate my qualms with rule by lot as I think other people are doing a much better job expressing the same problems I have with it elsewhere in this topic, but I would like to...
I'm not going to litigate my qualms with rule by lot as I think other people are doing a much better job expressing the same problems I have with it elsewhere in this topic, but I would like to correct you -- that 4-6% is of the US prison population. There is not, as far as I'm aware, a circumstance in which a person will be ruled guilty or innocent in a criminal matter by a judge directly. The alternatives, at least in all circumstances I'm aware of, are a jury trial or a plea deal. A judge ofc will be involved in either, because that's how the courts work, but they don't unilaterally decide either matter.
My point was less to be against juries (which, unlike rule by lot, I am in favor of because of the exact pattern you describe in your comment) and more to point out inaccuracies in your description of how "juries get it right with no expertise in the law" when the system is deliberately engineered such that they do not decide parts of the case that require expertise in the law.
That's a bench trial and they do exist. They're actually more likely to acquire statistically (though that could be based on which defendants request jury trials.) Right to a jury trial is much...
That's a bench trial and they do exist. They're actually more likely to acquire statistically (though that could be based on which defendants request jury trials.) Right to a jury trial is much like a right to a speedy trial, not always invoked. (Or perhaps it's more correct to say it can be waived?) It's about 10-15 percent of criminal cases per the data I could find.
I was not under the impression that bench trials were that common for criminal cases! I'm familiar with them for civil matters but my understanding was that the principle obstacle to most...
I was not under the impression that bench trials were that common for criminal cases! I'm familiar with them for civil matters but my understanding was that the principle obstacle to most defendants getting a jury trial was pressure to agree to a plea deal (due to the mentioned "speedy trial" issue). If they are indeed more common for criminal cases than I thought then I stand corrected.
There's a paper by Marc Galanter from 2004 titled "The Vanishing Trial: An Examination of Trials and Related Matters in Federal and State Courts" (DOI 10.1111/j.1740-1461.2004.00014.x) which among...
There's a paper by Marc Galanter from 2004 titled "The Vanishing Trial: An Examination of Trials and Related Matters in Federal and State Courts" (DOI 10.1111/j.1740-1461.2004.00014.x) which among other things collected some of this data, if I understand it correctly.
Table 7: Criminal Trials in Courts of General Jurisdiction in 22 States (and District of Columbia and Puerto Rico), 1976–2002
Note: The general jurisdiction courts of the following states are included in the yearly data: Alaska, Arizona, California, Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Hawaii, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico, South Dakota, Texas, Vermont, and Virginia.
For 2002, the latest year the paper has data from, it was 39.1% jury trials and 60.9% bench trials. The ratio has remained fairly stable from the start of the dataset (1976).
Even so, bench trials are far less common than jury trials in the federal system: In fiscal 2018, only 12% of defendants who went to trial had their cases decided by a judge, while 88% had their cases decided by a jury.
So, summarizing, mixing stats from different years, and rounding to integers:
Thank you, I didn't have the spoons to get into the research deeply - and I saw a wild mix of numbers in the search results so I appreciate the clarity!
Thank you, I didn't have the spoons to get into the research deeply - and I saw a wild mix of numbers in the search results so I appreciate the clarity!
I dont know if this is a good idea.
There is already corruption in my country from the fact that after someone leaves offfice in the senate they know they can land a cushy consultant or talking head job if they "play ball", so to speak.
If you take some random dude and make them one of the deciding votes, theyre going to have the same incentives of knowing they are in a temporary position, and if they do what powerful interests want they will be rewarded in some way.
Theres also this:
I dont think I intepret that so charitably. It seems like a big problem that the procedure proposed requires you to have a team of experts to prep the voters and present them with a curated selection of information. To me, when I hear that all these experimental groups are able to unanimously decide on these potentially contentious issues, that says to me that randomly selected groups are suceptible to influence.
What youve done is just shift the power somewhere else and then divert attention away from that. If we do this random selection system, you dont have to worry about who your representatives are, allegedly. But you DO have to worry about this panel of experts who is going to be priming the representstives. Its just adding an extra layer of obfuscation, so you dont think much about the scientists.
But this is just a p-hacking exercise, isnt it? If the observation is that groups of people can reliably make decisions when primed with presentstion of relevant data, and there seems to be consistency in how those decisions go when you have well organized deliberation with experts and facilitators, then you can just do some test runs with other randomly selected groups and try out different presentations till you find the version that gets you the result you want.
So to deal with that, you need to have a good selection process to make sure that the experts and facilitators are not pushing their own biases onto the randomly selected voters. How do you do that? Scientists are not so above it all that you can just trust them more than politicians. Theres a Harvard professor named Francesca Gino who recently got in trouble for alleged plagiarism and data manipulation. She used her position to cheat and bolster her own career, and it succeeded to the point that shes a dean at Harvard. So how do you avoid picking experts who end up being charlatans?
The cushy job is premised on them having access to the halls of power after they retire so they can continue to exercise influence. It’s a bit of a sinecure, but not just a sinecure. It’s possible that if you just have a rotating rando in the slot there isn’t much benefit to paying them after their role in things is done.
But the argument against this, which you hint at, is the same as the argument against term limits on congresspeople. Legislation is complex work that requires specialized knowledge, skills, and personal contacts and influence. If your duly elected legislators don’t have that knowledge and skills, the lobbyists who aren’t elected by anyone but plutocrats will be the only ones with the tenure and expertise to fill the gap, set the agenda, and execute on long-term plans.
There are certainly some things that could benefit from a lottery system. That is how we select juries in the US, for example. I can see convening a lottery selected council to cast votes on issues where you can’t really trust elected representatives to make an unbiased decision though. Like, if congressional districts were drawn by a randomly selected group of citizens you’d solve gerrymandering.
Sure, corruption is a problem with both sortition and election. With both, assembly participants can take bribes either during or after service. Sortition unfortunately doesn't fix this particular problem. So if you're going to be comparing systems of government, neither sortition nor election has a clear advantage here.
There are some smaller advantages though. Businesses typically seek politicians as employees for their lobbying prowess and political competence. Politicians form intimate relationships with bureaucrats and other elected officers, as these officers may serve for many years or decades at a time. Politicians therefore make excellent lobbyists.
However in sortition, everyone serves finite terms of at most 0-4 years. That means the relationships formed will never be as solid as in an elected regime. You'll never be able to call up your legislative buddies 5 years from your service. You might have relationships with bureaucrats but they'll also never be as solid as ones formed by elected politicians.
Sortition-selected jurors are inferior employees with inferior lobbying skills and inferior connections compared to an elite elected politician. Elected politicians by the nature of the job must become very good at making social connections and marketing and sales. Therefore companies get much less bang-for-buck for hiring jurors compared to politicians.
In sortition this job offer is therefore a much less compelling bribe. You can still be fired at any time, moreover if a juror has already voted in your company's favor, you have no obligation to return the favor. A secret ballot at the final decision might also make verification of quid-pro-quo difficult for the business.
Like jury duty but assembly duty.
I like the premise, but would want to know more. Especially how the experts are picked for the learning phase and who is this facilitator. Both of those selections seem to carry quite the outsized influence on the outcome.
The referenced paper is paywalled and has only been cited once.
Mirrors for their sources:
1 - The crisis of democracy and the science of deliberation
2 - Against Elections: The Lottocratic Alternative
3 - America in One Room (site had moved URLs since being cited)
4 - Legislature by Lot: Transformative Designs for Deliberative Governance
5 - Representation, Bicameralism, Political Equality, and Sortition (Couldn't find)
6 - Democracy through multi-body sortition: Athenian lessons for the modern day
If you wish to break a paywall there is something called scihub.
Shown to resolve? Not "show promising signs of being able to resolve? Like, someone tried it and it has SOLVED climate change?
Democracy has not failed. democracy has been hijacked by unlimited money to influence media and narrative. It's being suppressed by bullshit like gerrymandering and voter suppression. It's being mocked by Supreme Court decisions. And the average person by the biggest percentage isn't voting for Biden or Trump: they're staying home voting for nobody because they're too busy not starving, or they're too demoralized by corruption and broken promises, or they're reading the room correctly that none of these candidates actually give a hoot. Democracy, when properly implemented and properly safeguarded, still works.
"If you wish to make apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe" -- apparently, if you want electoral reforms you just first create a utopia. If normal people had time, money, resources and expertise, we wouldn't need government at all whatsoever.
In the Irish context, Citizens' Assemblies were explicitly used to solve the abortion and gay marriage issue. The Citizens' Assembly overwhelmingly voted to support abortion and gay marriage whilst the politicians were too scared to legislate on it. This ultimately led to a referendum and Constitutional Amendment where normal citizens had to drive through the change.
In the Irish context, the citizens have also been far more aggressive in tackling climate change compared to their elected counterparts. Of course because Citizens' Assemblies only have power to render recommendations, these recommendations were safely ignored by their legislature. The legislature instead settled on government mandated carbon targets rather than explicit policies such as carbon and meat taxes as recommended by citizens.
This is sort of important, because Ireland has one of the most advanced democracies in the world. Ireland uses a sophisticated ranked choice voting algorithm called "Single Transferable Vote" to elect their politicians. Even with the best technology, politicians turn out to be unrepresentative in terms of core issues such as abortion and climate change.
I'll go ahead and claim that elections are intrinsically hijacked by money and media. Elections and money go hand-in-hand since the dawn of democracy 2000 years ago. Elected regimes by their nature select the most popular of us. The most popular can only be created through mass media. Because we live in jurisdictions of millions, it is impossible for us to personally know the popular. We rely on mass media to tell us who is popular. Popularity can only be achieved by putting in time, effort, and money into becoming popular. Normal, regular citizens will never be popular.
Imagine we banned all campaign donations tomorrow. The only people who have a shot in running in this world are the already popular or already have the wealth to run a campaign. Rich and famous celebrities who can pivot their fame and wealth into office.
Imagine the world where election campaigns are funded solely by the government proportionate to previous year's results. Now we have a world that empowers the status quo politicians against any upstarts. Political connections and insider trading are what get you power.
The point of sortition is to facilitates this. Sortition gives ordinary people power - time, money, and resources - through lottery. In sortition, you pay people to participate for long periods of time. This is logistically feasible because we don't have to pay the entire public, we just need to pay a small sample.
Sortition is therefore a far, far more practical way to achieve an informed deliberative body compared to the typical liberal progressive belief that we need more, more, more education to solve our election woes.
All these problems you list were things that happened in a democracy, mostly by the people elected. It's not like these were authoritarian rules that were handed down. A sign that democracy failed. No reason to throw the baby out wirh the bathwater, but reevaluating need for elections is a worthwhile endeavor.
The #1 thing that democracy by lot solves is the elimination of the entire campaigning cycle. The House in the USA is particularly plagued by it, needing to start the next election cycle almost the moment they're sworn in.
Having it as a well-paid position, with a decent perpetual pension afterwards, and a robust accountability system and you've got a recipie for success.
And given a healthy quantity of churn, it'll be harder for would-be-corruptors to avoid accidentally trying to bribe the wrong person. It's much easier to corrupt somebody in perpetual need of more funding.
Perhaps I'll agree with you that currently, democracy has been under attack and is weakened, using the rules allowed within a democracy. But any system can be weakened using the rules allowed within itself, or getting away with methods outside of the rules until they're rewritten as part of the rules.
For your last point on corruption, I would say it will be even easier to be corrupt: you're not going to be in office for long, and you will likely never be in office again. Why wouldn't you take that once in a life time bribe? And with a merry go around of "politicians", how will they ever find the time to prosecute you among hundreds?
I don't think I am on board with random selection from the general population. I would support random selection from a large prequalified pool. Particularly for things like judges and other experts. With a high pay, retirement and strong prohibitions on payments and opportunities after the fact. Changing the election to an in the wild primary and ranked choice voting would shift elections. I would ban all campaign funding raises and publicly fund campaigns after an open primary for the top three candidates.
Although replacing the president with an executive committee with a crisis leader selected by random I think would improve the situation. Use of random selection from a prequalified pool could prove helpful.
I'm not opposed to meritocracy, but I think any meritocracy must be constructed from below rather than above.
In my opinion the best device to construct a meritocracy is a Citizens' Assembly.
With the powers of a full deliberative body, citizens can now interview dozens, hundreds of applicants. Citizens can solicit and read resumes. Citizens can go through a full, typical job candidate interview process. Citizens can hire staff to aid in hiring more staff. Then after hiring, citizens can go through a full job performance review.
In sortition, the meritocracy is therefore reconstructed through a deliberative interviewing and job search process instead of an election process. No more campaign circus and need for mass marketing. The cacophony of the political campaign is replaced with a typical resumes, interviews, and job performance review. In my opinion that's a superior way to form a meritocracy.
Hiring and firing staff is one of the core jobs of any legislature or Parliament. That is why constructing a bureaucracy and therefore meritocracy is one of the jobs that any sortition-based legislature would also carry out.
In the process you propose, some entity still needs to go through the difficult job of establishing "pre-qualification". With my principle that meritocracy should be established from below than above, I'll claim that a Citizens' Assembly is the best kind of organization to do this job.
I don't have much to add here other than, I have long held that the skill set needed to be elected is considerably different from, and probably negatively correlated with, the skill set needed to represent and govern. What you propose neatly side-steps that problem. I like it.
Do you think most citizens can adequately evaluate someone's skills? Do you think the average person could adequately vet someone in Cyber-Security versus someone posing? How about say a licensed doctor being able to hire a virologist or clinical trial expert? As someone who has worked on clinical trials, most doctors do not know how to run one or how to hire people for it. No, I can't do it either. I see many people get basic things wrong in fields they work in. Random people do not have the analytical skills or deliberation skills to pull this off. Random experts from their field is hedge against corruption and pushing a specific agenda. Kind of like a hedge against judge shopping here in the US. Or why they want to control who appoints a judge here. If they have to keep a pool large enough and then have people randomly chosen from this pool it can help blunt ideological shifts. Where I work, you don't know who the Quality checker is going to be and it helps in reducing "friendly decisions". I would like to see this along with some other things for judges. (US centric)
What exactly are you comparing to? We have about three choices. We can trust ignorant voters to make the hiring decisions through elections. We can trust a benevolent dictator or hierarchy. Or we can trust a deliberative assembly.
If you think democracy is a good thing, IMO a deliberative Citizens assembly is a far superior hiring procedure than an election. Do you disagree? Do you think elections competently hire the best personnel?
First task-oriented citizen's panel would be to figure out education system improvements so you don't have this problem in 2 decades.
The whole point of democracy is that it's everyone. Otherwise we might as well revert back to genetic aristocracy.
After having worked with a large group of educated and diverse people. I have come to realize that a lack of education isn't the actual issue depending on the population. I am speaking from a US perspective. Everyone I work with has an above average education level. Even the cleaning crew. Many do not have the capacity to think even slightly outside of their area. A significant portion can not adjust their view points based upon contravening evidence. Being deliberative takes skills and is not always learnable but the average person. Not everyone is able to fathom second and third order effects of their actions. I do favor mandatory voting and regular "feeling polls". I use the term feeling is many people often misattribute their difficulties to the wrong source. This often hinders debate and problem resolution. People not already trained in an area really have no business debating a proper course of action in that field. I watched this too much as some healthcare workers decided to pontificate on the pandemic. Being a Nurse or even a Doctor does not mean you have the skills to develop a clinical trial or execute one. They often know more medical knowledge than the average person, but they really should not be weighing in on vaccine safety or efficacy. Too many weigh in without actual research just to have something to say.
There are middle grounds between genetic aristocracy and pure democracy. This highlights my point on randomly selecting from the general population.
Here's the thing: Juries work. 12 random people coming to agreement can generally pick the correct outcome in a civil or criminal proceeding, with no formal training on law and precedent. They have no obligation to follow the laws as they are written.
(this is actually for @chocobean, my replies blurred together) There are many tools to out and prevent corruption, transparency being a big one. Punishing organizations that bribe is easier than punishing the one that accepted it, and tracing jobs and money has never been easier.
Saying "some people aren't qualified to lead" is a tiny, short hop from "some people aren't qualified to vote." And there's a sordid history I don't have time to dig into.
Sorry but this is BS. How do you evaluate what the "correct outcome" is? There are certainly plenty of cases in which the innocent are found guilty by juries -- the US has a wrongful conviction rate of 4-6% overall according to studies. Is 1 in 20 a good enough number for "generally"?
Furthermore, our system is set up so that they don't have to make any findings about law and precedent -- juries are to find the answers to factual questions and the law and precedent are handled by a judge. If juries had to make decisions that actually relied on them interpreting the law, it would be wildly different and completely overwhelming to jurors even in the best case scenario.
That 4-6% is inclusive of judges as well. That's why we have appeals processes.
Here's a study that looks at optimal jury sizes.
It also links to this study, which studies the accuracy of juries more, and their findings could be distilled to 'Juries are more likely than judges to let a guilty person go free and less likely than judges to convict an innocent person.'
Put those two together, and you have the foundation of democracy....relaxing unamity and increasing decisionmaking pool leads to better results.
Rule by lot opens this wider. Rather than having ~500 people essentially making all the procedural votes, it becomes possible to have very large (1000+) dedicated focus groups for 1-12 week durations for individual topics.
Will they get it wrong sometimes? Of course. Will they get it more-wrong than our existing cadre of political dynasties? I'm doubtful. And since it would be a brand new group when it comes time to re-evaluate, there's a lower chance things will remain wrong in perpetuity.
It's kind of a stepping stone to what the internet enables: Full participatory direct democracy.
I'm not going to litigate my qualms with rule by lot as I think other people are doing a much better job expressing the same problems I have with it elsewhere in this topic, but I would like to correct you -- that 4-6% is of the US prison population. There is not, as far as I'm aware, a circumstance in which a person will be ruled guilty or innocent in a criminal matter by a judge directly. The alternatives, at least in all circumstances I'm aware of, are a jury trial or a plea deal. A judge ofc will be involved in either, because that's how the courts work, but they don't unilaterally decide either matter.
My point was less to be against juries (which, unlike rule by lot, I am in favor of because of the exact pattern you describe in your comment) and more to point out inaccuracies in your description of how "juries get it right with no expertise in the law" when the system is deliberately engineered such that they do not decide parts of the case that require expertise in the law.
That's a bench trial and they do exist. They're actually more likely to acquire statistically (though that could be based on which defendants request jury trials.) Right to a jury trial is much like a right to a speedy trial, not always invoked. (Or perhaps it's more correct to say it can be waived?) It's about 10-15 percent of criminal cases per the data I could find.
I was not under the impression that bench trials were that common for criminal cases! I'm familiar with them for civil matters but my understanding was that the principle obstacle to most defendants getting a jury trial was pressure to agree to a plea deal (due to the mentioned "speedy trial" issue). If they are indeed more common for criminal cases than I thought then I stand corrected.
It's a stat that's annoyingly hard to search for but it seems more common in federal court? Maybe?
There's a paper by Marc Galanter from 2004 titled "The Vanishing Trial: An Examination of Trials and Related Matters in Federal and State Courts" (DOI 10.1111/j.1740-1461.2004.00014.x) which among other things collected some of this data, if I understand it correctly.
For 2002, the latest year the paper has data from, it was 39.1% jury trials and 60.9% bench trials. The ratio has remained fairly stable from the start of the dataset (1976).
For federal trials, pew research reports
So, summarizing, mixing stats from different years, and rounding to integers:
Thank you, I didn't have the spoons to get into the research deeply - and I saw a wild mix of numbers in the search results so I appreciate the clarity!
I do find it slightly funny that we call sortition a "new" method of voting when it was one of the governance methods of ancient Athenian democracy.