Archive of Chapters

One option I am considering is cutting out these parts to cut out 37,000 words:

1. the bulk of the history parts (Ancient Greece, the founding of American and French republics, the history of juries, etc.) =15,000 words [Chapter 6 and the first half of Chapter 7]... leaving only a brief summary about history.

2. the details in the discussion about why commonly proposed election reforms won't work = 10,000 words [Chapter 4]

3. the limits of proportional representation reform = 2,500 words [Chapter 5]

4. the limits of participatory reforms (like referendums) = 4,000 words [Chapter 10]

5. the non-governmental uses of sortition (such as in co-ops, unions and schools) = 7,000 words [Chapter 15]

Each of these subjects would still be addressed, but very briefly. This would produce a book that is much more focused on the inherent failings of the current competitive electoral system (in terms of fundamental political psychology and lack of representativeness), and why sortition would work better.

You can use the "Comment" button below to submit any suggestions.

Leave a comment

Share

This book has primarily focused on the law-making side of government. But we must also consider the effects of maintaining elections for the executive branch of government. A severe weakening of sortition's benefits within the legislative branch could also occur if elections were maintained for the executive branch. There would be a severe risk of charismatic elected executives dominating a sortition legislature even more than they might an elected one. Elected politicians in a legislative chamber, with typically elevated egos and concerns about preserving their own power, might jealously seek to defend the prerogatives of the legislative branch and resist a would-be authoritarian executive. This, of course, is not assured, as legislators frequently decide it is strategically beneficial to align with strongman chief executives. Elected legislatures frequently give up powers to a chief executive (e.g., the unconstitutional war making powers of US presidents). 

This risk would be even more pronounced with an allotted legislature. A popularly elected charismatic chief executive with a penchant for self-aggrandizement would have the opportunity to accentuate the “principle of distinction” to claim a popular mandate resulting from the election, while belittling the unelected and unimposing members of the randomly selected legislative branch. A group of randomly selected ordinary citizens lacks the personal investment and political capital necessary to defend the limited prerogatives of a body they will soon leave anyway.

Candidates for executive office have an overwhelming incentive to portray themselves as leaders, which encompasses policy advocacy. But if the chief executive leads on policy, this can short-circuit a deliberative sortition process, by encouraging mini-public members to prejudge policy decisions – favoring those advocated by their preferred executive candidate. This can either promote tokenism through followership, or if resisted, put the mini-public in opposition to the executive, leading to delegitimation efforts.

Thus, an optimal sortition democracy should establish mini-publics charged with recruiting and hiring a chief executive, who would have an administrative rather than policymaking role (akin to the city manager function advanced by the early 20th century Progressive Movement). Rather than evaluating self-selected or party nominated candidates, I would suggest a full-spectrum recruitment process to find a person fully willing to serve, but who would not proactively seek the position. I concur with the witticism of Douglas Adams, in his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy, that “those people who must [sic] want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.” On a regular basis, a new mini-public would be called to evaluate the executive's performance and have the power to remove him or her. To avoid the motivation to remove a good executive just to choose a particular person as a replacement, the mini-public with removal authority would not be the same one charged with hiring a replacement.

Other reforms to the executive would also be desirable. Some sortition advocates have proposed that the executive be multiple – for example, three individuals – with distinct areas of responsibility, but with significant decisions needing at least two of the three concurring. Multiple executives have been used historically. Some US states (Pennsylvania, Maine, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Virginia, Massachusetts, and Vermont) have had an executive council, with more or less power. In most cases this body worked alongside a separately elected governor, but in Pennsylvania the executive council elected a president and vice president for one year terms from among their own members. Revolutionary France also established a five-member executive Directory, followed by a three-member executive Consulate (ending with a lone emperor — Napoleon). Multiple executive schemes are not a good fit for elections, but might work much better with sortition and an administrative, rather than policy (leadership) role. 

In summary, the model of the all-purpose legislative chamber is not a good fit for sortition lawmaking. A hybrid bicameral system, with one chamber elected and one selected by lot, is a faulty transition strategy. The supposed benefits of retaining elections are illusory, but their harmful effects on a complementary sortition body would be all too real. Most crucially, if the two chambers disagreed on a law, the elected representatives would have the motive and skills to delegitimize the sortition chamber.

Instead, I contend that sortition works best when a system separates different legislative functions and assigns them to bodies optimally designed for each task, with new bodies formed for each new issue. Though generally relying on sortition, this design would also broaden participation through self-selected Interest Panels open to any and all citizens for the purpose of drafting proposals and arguments as raw material for mini-publics to consider.

Peeling away issue areas and transferring them one at a time from elected to sortition bodies with final authority, provides a plausible path toward institutional change. Election campaigns and politicians would simply no longer deal with those issue areas that had been removed from their purview. Since they would not be going head to head on the same issue, this would reduce the motivation for elected legislators to challenge the legitimacy of the sortition model. At some point along this path, it is likely that the elected politicians would fear sortition bodies were becoming a real threat to their power and status, and efforts to delegitimize them would be embraced as a strategy. It is impossible to predict the public attitude towards sortition at this future juncture, but it can be hoped that positive performance over time (and continued disdain for professional politicians as a class) might protect sortition from efforts at delegitimation. Reformers might also phase in the transition to maintain limited authority and status of electeds for some years, recognizing that politicians are more concerned with protecting their individual power and status than the power and status of the institution of elections itself.

In this evolutionary vision, elected chambers may never fully disappear—but could recede to the periphery, just as the once powerful Council of Areopagus of pre-democratic Athens endured, but ended up with severely restricted responsibilities once democracy was ascendant. In a similar way, essentially ceremonial monarchs persist in many modern electoral regimes, but with few remaining legal powers. Path dependence may preclude the total abolition of electoral representation, but as a fundamentally oligarchic tool, elections should not be championed as necessary or beneficial for democracy, which is often the case with those advocating hybrid bicameralism.

The key takeaway from this book is that democracy does not mean elections. Elections are actually a tool of oligarchy, and a barrier to achieving genuine democracy. However, the “right to vote” is a widely cherished thing. Even those who regularly neglect voting, might object to losing the option of voting. While each individual’s vote is effectively irrelevant, when an entire class of people are granted the vote, as in the case of the formerly enslaved, or women, the vote might make a difference. The principle of distinction may end up resulting in the same sort of elites winning elections, but voting leaves open the possibility that ordinary citizens could win here and there. But more than that, the right to vote has great symbolic importance to many – attesting to their standing as formally equal members of society. So how can we expect people to freely give up the right to vote, even if we are replacing it with the equality of a lottery?

Changing attitudes towards voting will take time. Recognizing it as tokenism, and a faulty tool for a democracy isn’t something that we can expect immediately. I would not advocate that people refrain from voting in the current elections. There are greater and lesser evils in the world, and collective voter campaigns can matter, even if they can’t deliver democracy or popular rule.

So, what realizations do people need to have to willingly give up elections and their right to vote? Seeing a successful and workable democratic alternative in the form of sortition in their associations and local governments is certainly instrumental. People can also come to appreciate that participation should be informed, rather than be “mob-like.” People understand why we don’t allow all to vote on the guilt or innocence of an accused person, without having been immersed in the carefully designed learning process of a trial. While the rules of evidence, and specific court procedures may be faulty, simply “having an opinion” from having seen a post on social media, is understood as insufficient for “having your say” in the verdict. Yet, mass elections, whether for candidates, or a policy referendum have no system for assuring that voters are even minimally informed. Such mass elections generally are more consequential in terms of their reach than the trial of a single individual. I might go so far as to say people defending their right to vote in mass elections are akin to the mob wanting their right to throw stones at the accused blasphemer in the Monty Python movie The Life of Brian, regardless of any facts or logic. The multi-body sortition design maintains a right of anyone who wishes to participate in public decision making in the form of preparing arguments and draft proposals. But this participation requires that those participating “do the necessary work.” 

The only way to facilitate informed decision-making on the thousands of decisions that must be made in society is to delegate the task to subsets of the people. The only way to also protect political equality is to have that subset regularly rotated with equal chance. And, the only way to have those decisions reflect the interests and informed judgment of the population as a whole (rather than of an elite) is to have those subsets be randomly selected representative samples.

I don’t have a firm idea of how the transition to a sortition democracy might occur. It might be through the step by step peeling strategy I present here. It also could be that grassroots efforts and civil society will set up separate parallel sortition institutions outside of the official government (like the Belgian G-1000), that eventually come to be accepted as the more legitimate decision-making system. It is also conceivable that a sudden national crisis, akin to the Arab Spring of 2010 and 2011 (if the concept of sortition were already widely understood), could lead to a wholesale replacement of elected leaders. This seems to me to be the least likely transition, simply because in times of crisis the human proclivity for followership is exacerbated, seeking a charismatic leader who can save us from the crisis.

Orchestrating a transition is the hard part. I have only touched on some ideas of how to proceed. This book is not fundamentally a strategy book. As I said in the introduction, my goal here is to point to sortition as the North Star of democracy, and to help others see what I see, about what direction we should seek to travel.

Share

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Archive (from the beginning)

I am doing final edits to the final section of the final chapter of this book, and will post it within a few days. However, I also need to add a section to chapter 13 “Objections to Sortition” that goes into more detail on the thorny issue of legitimacy. I need to do some more reading before completing that, so it may take a few weeks.

Once this entire book draft is complete, I return to the task of trying to get the book published as a paper book that can be sold in bookstores and online. For years I have sent out book proposals to at least 50 different publishers. But, no acquisition editors have taken it up. If any of you have good ideas, or contacts, that would help it get published, you can leave a comment. I may end up going the self-published route, but will need advice on that as well.

So, there are still a two more posts to come (end of chapter 17, and then later, another section of chapter 13). I have released one or more posts per week starting on May 18, 2023 — sixteen months ago. Whew.

Leave a comment

Archive (from the beginning)

To avoid the problems of a hybrid bicameral system, I propose a system that allows elections to coexist with sortition, whether permanently, or during a transition to an all-sortition system, though not in a bicameral design. Below, I explain why sortition should eschew an all-purpose chamber even without a bicameral design, and use multiple citizen bodies instead.

Avoiding an all-purpose legislative chamber

An all-purpose legislative chamber is a mismatch for sortition, whether in a unicameral or hybrid bicameral system. All-purpose (full-charge) elected bodies manage a huge variety of issues by dividing into smaller committees. The chamber as a whole does not meaningfully deliberate, or even understand the nuances of most of the bills they nominally debate and vote on. Instead, members rely on one of a few heuristics. Commonly, they simply defer to the judgment of the members of their own party who serve on the committee of reference.

This approach has shortcomings for elected chambers, but is even less appropriate for a sortition chamber. Even if members of the allotted body organized into partisan caucuses (undercutting one of the benefits of sortition), small committees would have a greater likelihood of being unrepresentative of the population, simply owing to smaller sample sizes. Deferring to even a conscientious committee could result in very unrepresentative decisions. The sheer number of bills under consideration by an all-purpose chamber precludes dealing with them all in a committee of the whole. Hypothetically, this problem might be resolved with a vast chamber with hundreds of members on each committee. David Owen and Graham Smith have proposed something a bit like this, but also with frequent rotation, but this has not generally been the scheme imagined by advocates of hybrid bicameralism.

A transition strategy, which occasionally occurs to people, is adding some randomly selected members to a body that is currently made up of elected members. Variants of this “mixed-member” idea is that voters could select “none of the above” on their ballot, or the ratio of non-voters in the population compared to voters could apportion the randomly selected seats. One proposal that occasionally surfaces is even to have a political party contend in the election that commits to appointing any seats won to random citizens. All of these mixed-member chamber concepts are untenable. Having two classes of “members” in a chamber, one with no experience, often not a lot of self-confidence, and no agenda on the one hand; and the other class of members made up of self-confident professionals with partisan goals, who would likely seek to recruit the allotted members into their partisan caucus, and who also have a career path, only exaggerates the problems of a hybrid bicameral system. The logic of their legitimacy is also starkly different, and fundamentally incompatible in a mixed body.

Anthoula Malkopoulou notes that "lotteries may offer valuable improvement to current practices of democratic selection, but only if special measures are taken to compensate for the limitations they entail.” The special measures she favors (limiting the role and power of mini-publics) are nearly the exact opposite of those I support, but we agree that one must adjust the law-making design to fit the unique character of mini-publics. The framers of the United States Constitution substantially copied the design and legislative form of the British House of Commons, since they were not making any fundamental change to the principle of distinction for an elected elite governing the populace. Even the Senate was largely modeled on the House of Lords, but substituting a “natural aristocracy” selected by the various state legislatures, for its hereditary aristocracy (US Senators were not directly elected until 1914 following the ratification of the 17th amendment, but even then persisted with essentially the same kind of elites.) The sort of fundamental shift in the locus of power envisioned by a sortition democracy precludes such rubber-stamp replication of design. As Karl Marx wrote, in evaluating the revolutionary governance of the  Paris Commune of 1871, “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and set it in motion for its own purposes.”

The Peeling Transition Strategy

Most of the experience with modern-day sortition has been through citizens’ assemblies that have had a single function and topic.  Also, the vast majority of citizens’ assemblies have been asked to deal with issues where the elected politicians have not already staked out partisan positions, thus side-stepping the risk of “head-butting” I worried about in the section above. While recent citizens’ assemblies have been exceptionally successful in terms of deliberation and policy (though significantly less successful in terms of seeing follow through on their recommendations by elected decision-makers), that internal success is irrelevant to how well a full-charge sortition chamber might function.

In this book I have presented the concept of a sortition democracy with an interconnected network of mini-publics, each with a specific legislative function or a specific topic or issue. In addition to being a more desirable end state, unlike a full-charge allotted chamber (which handles all functions and issues in the way a standard elected chamber does), the means of transition is built into the model itself. I refer to this as the peeling strategy. 

Peeling away issue areas one at a time from elected representatives and transferring those policy domains to allotted bodies allows communities to learn from the experience of recent experiments in terms of process. But, crucially, it also avoids the danger of an elected chamber and a newly established full-charge sortition chamber opposing each other head-to-head on a given bill, which could trigger the aforementioned sortition delegitimation. 

The ultimate design using multiple single issue and single function mini-publics not only solves the dilemmas of sortition design discussed in chapter 16. It is also pragmatic, and provides a step by step path for evolution to an all-sortition democracy. This transition strategy also avoids the need for a sudden seizure of power, as in the Paris Commune of 1871. By peeling away one issue area or function at a time from the traditional elected legislature and entrusting it to a compound sortition process, it might be possible to transfer power to a sortition wing of government in a sequential process. 

There are certain inviting issue areas where this might begin, such as issues in which elected legislators either have a conflict of interest (election laws, as in the case of the British Columbia Citizens' Assembly, ethics oversight, etc.), or “hot potato” issue areas that elected officials are happy to be rid of because they are no-win topics from a politician’s campaign perspective (such as the nuclear waste issue tackled by a mini-public in South Australia, or abortion in Ireland). Initially, bills with no substantial budget impacts are most appropriate, as coordinating conflicting budget requests is a higher order challenge for a system based on separate mini-publics.

The goal is to institutionalize the transfer of an issue area on an ongoing basis. The authority of the sortition process must be decisive, rather than merely advisory. This must also be combined with verifiable independence, such that a mini-public is not subject to manipulation by the elected government through control of their staff or information flows. In the short term, this might be accomplished through facilitation by an impartial non-governmental organization, such as Australia’s newDemocracy Foundation or a university. Ultimately, however, there must be a budget and staff not beholden to the elected representatives. The staff and functioning of the sortition process should be overseen by a mini-public devoted to these tasks.

If the public appreciates the fruits of these mini-publics, governments could feel a growing pressure to try this model for other issues, especially following scandals that crop up among elected representatives. 

Imagine a scandal in which a developer was discovered to have bribed members of a city council for some favorable spot zoning to allow a profitable project. If the sortition option were well known, it is possible to imagine that all future zoning decisions would be removed from the city council and instead entrusted to a jury-like sortition process. Community groups might demand this reform, and the city council members might wish to be seen as permanently solving the problem of zoning bribes, while not having much interest in holding on to zoning authority in any event.

This approach allows for baby steps (likely at the municipal level first), with a gradual popular assessment that might grow more favorable with each process refinement along the way, cresting into a huge tsunami wave of reform. Creating an all-purpose sortition chamber dealing with all bills would require a greater leap of faith all at once. In this way, elections steadily become less and less significant. I use the analogy of what happened to the monarchies of Europe. While many nominally still exist, they are virtually powerless today. I foresee a future in which elected chambers may still exist, but are reduced to passing resolutions naming post-offices after local celebrities.

Key for the advance of a sortition-based democracy is the use of sortition in forming municipal charter review commissions and constitutional conventions. A randomly selected constituent assembly seems far more likely than an elected chamber to transfer powers from elected bodies to other sortition bodies. There have already been precedents that suggest this strategy has potential. When the legislature of British Columbia established the Citizens' Assembly, it set up a process that allowed the Assembly's recommendations to go directly to referendum without further involvement of the elected legislators. Ireland and Iceland have incorporated random selection in recent constitutional review bodies, although in an advisory role, explicitly interposing the elected legislature between the mini-public and the opportunity for referendum on the mini-public's proposals. Neither of these are the precise model needed, but they hint at the possibility.

Share

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Archive (from the beginning)

Purported Political Expertise

Another argument for maintaining elections in a bicameral legislature with a sortition chamber is the presumed political expertise of elected officials. I debunked this notion in chapter thirteen, but a brief review would be useful here. I am not aware of any compelling evidence that elections are effective at selecting individuals with competence at governing. James Surowiecki, in The Wisdom of Crowds, points out that we shouldn’t believe people are more expert simply because they assert as much. A feeling of certainty that one is right just as often signals a lack of intellectual humility. Failure to recognize one’s ignorance impedes deliberation and stunts the growth of actual expertise. Studies have found no significant difference between liberals and conservatives in this regard, but it seems likely that the subset of individuals from across the political spectrum who are willing to run for office tend towards harmful “intellectual arrogance” rather than beneficial humility.  Moreover, we should not conflate political (campaign) expertise and policy expertise. Often legislators' policy expertise is superficial or narrowly confined to a handful of issues with which their particular committees deal. In fact, it is well documented that most expertise resides in the professional staff and lobbyists (who draft nearly all bills), rather than in the politicians themselves. One problem with electing representatives is that they have a distorted interest in consulting fundraising and campaign experts more than genuine policy experts, and shaping policies accordingly. 

By contrast, members of a sortition minipublic would presumably recognize the need to employ and consult genuine policy experts. Just as legislators hand off the details of drafting and negotiating legislation to staff, the sortition body might do the same—but without giving special consideration for lobbyists who want to tailor those details to their own purposes. Even assuming allotted citizens start out with cognitive biases comparable to those of elected representatives, it is far more feasible for a minipublic to require a well-designed deliberative architecture to dampen, what Hélène Landemore refers to as, “the known cognitive biases of human beings,” rather than exacerbate them. Citizen deliberators can also more feasibly be required to have training that minimizes psychological traps. Carey Morewedge and colleagues found that training can successfully reduce cognitive bias in both the immediate and long term. Overcoming cognitive biases, motivated reasoning, and automatic judgments creates a more competent decision-making body.

Sortition Benefits are Lost if Paired with Elections

Even if maintaining elections provides nothing beneficial, however, some might reason that the benefits of sortition if added to elections would ameliorate elections’ harms and still result in a net improvement. Since eliminating elections is a daunting task, adding a sortition body, in a hybrid bicameral system, seems more achievable. The hope would be that adding a sortition element to elections could make at least marginal improvements.  My concern is that the hoped for beneficial effects of sortition in one chamber would be overwhelmed by negative bleed-through from the campaign effects of the elected chamber. In this next section, I will argue that if an elected chamber deals with the same bills as its sortition counterpart, this would not only sacrifice the potential benefits of sortition, but further, it could cause the discrediting of sortition, making any advance, and even the continuation of any sortition questionable.

Agenda Setting

Politicians who are constantly preparing for the next election seek out (or manufacture) those issues that they believe will help them in the next election. Important long-term issues (but with less public salience) are regularly ignored, and fail to make it onto the public agenda – until they become a crisis that cannot be ignored any longer.

In a hybrid system, the agenda setting priorities of the elected chamber will still monopolize the news, public awareness, and—unless painstakingly shielded—the attention of members of the sortition chamber as well. Unlike the members of the allotted body, the politicians are skilled at getting attention and will do everything they can to get the spotlight. Also, a substantial portion of the sortition chamber's agenda will be automatically established by what bills the elected chamber chooses to send them. Indeed, a number of hybrid bicameral proposals imagine the elected chamber being the sole generator of legislation, with the sortition body being a review body, with authority to adopt or veto bills on offer from the elected politicians.

Even if the sortition chamber is empowered to initiate its own bills, the agenda will be warped by media and public attention shaped by partisan exigencies. In chapter three I highlighted Murray Edelman’s analysis that news coverage of issues selected by politicians, skilled in public relations, will dominate public attention and effectively shield from view important issues, which politicians would rather ignore. Many crucial issues are simply too problematic for campaign purposes. If allowed, some prickly issues may be raised by the sortition chamber, but political gravity will constantly draw it back to the agenda favored by elected politicians facing re-election.

Rational Ignorance and Active Aptitude

When paired with an elected chamber, the members of the sortition chamber are more likely to succumb to rational ignorance and fail to attain active aptitude. When people face a daunting cognitive task and experience uncertainty, it has been demonstrated that it is common for us to defer to those who project a demeanor of certainty, and may also have higher status. The sortition chamber would suffer a cognitive “social loafing” or “free-rider” problem. When another chamber dealing with the same pieces of legislation, full of articulate and often charismatic people who insist they have figured out the right answer, are pushing members of an allotted chamber to follow their lead, independent, slow and rational thinking falls by the wayside. Within a partisan societal environment, where a strong sense of team loyalty or tribalism is fomented, it seems likely that many members of an allotted chamber would adhere to their favored party leaders’ platforms. Indeed, unless prohibited in some manner, the elected politicians would also seek to recruit members of the sortition chamber into a partisan caucus. Team loyalty has an emotional draw that regularly trumps independent rational analysis.

The sortition chamber in a hybrid bicameral system may not degenerate to a mere rubber stamp for the elected chamber’s decisions, but the intended achievements of sortition will not be realized. This loss of active aptitude underlies a whole host of other losses of anticipated sortition benefits, including the tapping of diffuse knowledge and collective intelligence; as well as independent judgment and the wisdom of crowds.

Other Benefits Lost

The descriptive representativeness and diversity of cognitive styles touted by sortition advocates would be significantly harmed by the continuation of an elected chamber. A chamber selected by lot would still look diverse, but the loss of active aptitude will mean that the private knowledge and perspectives distributed across that diverse membership will be less likely to be expressed by those members. Status deferral and information cascades will short-circuit both collective intelligence and the wisdom of crowds.

The anti-corruption potential of sortition, integrated into carefully designed assembly rules that promote securities against misrule, is one of its most appealing characteristics. Continued elections, however, risk corrupting the law-making process as a whole. It is possible that the sortition chamber could draw attention to that corruption, but contrary to the maxim that “sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants, ” experience suggests this is not an effective deterrent. Shining a light on institutionalized corruption is not enough.

Danger of Delegitimation

If we set aside the concerns raised above, and assume that all of the negative consequences of maintaining an elected chamber could be dealt with through careful design, there are still other grave failings. If the sortition chamber is not a rubber stamp, what happens when the two chambers disagree about an important bill? In cases where both chambers are elected, they tend to have a nearly equal power relationship. But what would happen when one chamber is made up of people identified as “chosen leaders,” and one is made up of a random assortment of ordinary people? We can get an inkling by looking at countries where one chamber is elected and the other is not, such as the House of Lords in the UK or the Senate in Canada. In these cases, the bodies are not equal. The elected chamber is preeminent, even though the lesser body has the ostensibly prestigious title of “upper house.”

What are some likely consequences of the sortition chamber rejecting a bill passed by the elected chamber? The two chambers would have a fundamentally different, and conflicting basis for claiming legitimacy, which might be summarized by the term popularized by Bernard Manin as “the principle of distinction,” in the case of an elected chamber, and what Aristotle termed “the principle of equality and likeness,” in the case of the sortition one. When in conflict with an allotted chamber, the members of the elected chamber would have a compelling strategic incentive to sidestep the details of the policy differences, and instead seek to undermine the legitimacy of the sortition chamber. In contrast, the allotted members would not be protecting personal careers in politics, since they would shortly be “out of power” regardless. Unlike the allotted citizens, the elected members would tend to be highly practiced, articulate public speakers with exceptional public relations skills. Portraying themselves as champions for their constituents, the elected leaders would likely play the “natural aristocracy” card (but by a less arrogant name, of course). It is easy to predict the themes they might use — dismissing the sortition chamber as “a random gaggle of dishwashers and hairdressers who are completely unaccountable to you, the people, because they never have to face you in an election.”

Worse still, the natural hostility of elected representatives towards any sortition threat to their power in a hybrid system makes the evolution towards a sortition democracy along this bicameral path extremely unlikely. If they ever butt heads by disagreeing about some important bill, the professional politicians will demolish the allotted body of amateurs. If sortition begins in a hybrid system in which the chambers contend, it is more likely to die there, than expand.

Share

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Archive (from the beginning)

Many of those working to advance sortition view it as a means of increasing citizen participation, or improving the quality of decisions by providing the elected lawmakers or government bureaucrats with better advice through better deliberative mechanisms. Others, including me, see it as a superior democratic tool, and seek to replace some or all elected decision-making with decisions made by empowered mini-publics. This final chapter is devoted to discussing the strategies for replacing elections with sortition – in whole or in part.

Proposals for incorporating sortition into the law-making process (beyond a merely advisory role) frequently envision a hybrid bicameral legislature with the members of one of the chambers selected by lot. The vestigial House of Lords in the UK, is particularly tempting as a vehicle for substituting a traditionally hereditary chamber with an allotted one. This may be viewed as a model on the path to a fully sortition-based legislature—sort of a trial run or waystation to see if such a body can behave in a competent manner. I think this is a mistake.

Throughout this book I have presented reasons why reliance on elected representatives is fundamentally undemocratic. But for many theorists a hybrid system incorporating both election and sortition is the final goal. John Gastil and Erik Wright argued that despite the host of problems with election-based representation, there are important beneficial aspects of an elected chamber that would be lost in an all-sortition system.  I will argue that the purported benefits of maintaining elections are illusory. Also, the all-purpose legislative chamber design is a mismatch for sortition, which would sabotage sortition's hoped for benefits and delegitimize a sortition chamber. I will conclude by arguing that there are better ways to transition into a virtually all-sortition law-making system.

Purported benefits of maintaining an elected chamber

First, I will examine several commonly asserted benefits of maintaining an elected chamber alongside a sortition chamber. Citizens would be loath to forfeit an elected chamber for fear of losing at least four presumed benefits: the societal benefits of parties; the utility of having elected officials as authorized negotiators; the political leadership cultivated by electoral politics; and the political expertise provided by elected officials. In turn, I will cast doubt on the existence, or importance, of each.

Benefits of parties

Without elections it is suggested that parties would atrophy, yet parties ideally play an important role in formulating political programs, educating the public about policy alternatives, and mobilizing citizens. Others, such as Frank Fischer, argue that US parties

“have become little more than political labels behind which well-financed candidates organize their electoral bids.”

Parties would inevitably change in an all-sortition system, but they would not necessarily atrophy. Active political parties have organized across the globe under non-electoral regimes, even when outlawed. Rather than contesting in elections, parties would aim to influence the general public, who would form the mini-publics. And, of course, political parties are not the only avenue for important social mobilization, with Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, or the Pro-Life movements in the US being examples. With parties stripped of their unique electoral significance, such popular mobilizations might be more common and effective under a sortition system.

But let's focus in on the effects of eliminating the competitive electoral function of political parties in an all-sortition democracy. Anthoula Malkopoulou argues that voting in elections

“offers a real and continuous relationship between government and citizens that, aided by the excitement of competition, produces a higher incentive to stay informed and form an opinion about general political issues.”

She asserts that:

“sortition does away with the momentum of discursive interaction and contestation, which the experience of election provides."

We need to scrutinize the nature of this “discursive interaction” of partisan politics, and not presume that it is inherently beneficial for society. As with most news coverage, the citizens’ engagement focuses on the tactics of the partisan contest itself, rather than the ideas that are presumed to underlie that contest. Not all electoral democracies experience the level of partisan animosity present in American politics, but the divisions within society into warring factions of us vs. them certainly have some negative consequences that would carry over into civil society and hence into a mini-public. We need to consider whether incompatible interests result in antagonisms that in turn get expressed through political parties, or if political parties fan, or even manufacture, differences to frighten and mobilize constituencies. Both occur, but as I discuss in the next section, elections are not the only—nor necessarily the best—way to manage incompatible interests.

In this context it is worth repeating the points I made in chapter eight on voter decision making. Researchers have found that people who are deeply engaged in partisan political issues and follow the news are also likely to have an elevated, yet false, sense of their own level of understanding of the issues. This leaves them ill-prepared for the meaningful give-and-take of deliberation. Disturbingly, it turns out that voters informing themselves (reading news stories, watching TV news, etc.) to keep up on public issues do not become more adept at evaluating candidates or policy choices. A study by Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler found that those with a favorable opinion about a particular political figure and who also had more political knowledge (in that they followed the news, etc.) were more immune to factual corrections that contradicted their bias than were people who also had a favorable view of the politician but were less-well informed. Indeed, the factual corrections tended to harden the erroneous beliefs of the “better informed” participants, presumably as a sort of psychological defense mechanism.

Thus, even balanced presentations, in a partisan environment fueled by competitive elections, may not lead to a common understanding of reality by citizens, as each chooses which facts to accept and which to reject. Partisan loyalty trumps reality. This “discursive interaction and contestation” frequently consists of parroting talking points generated by partisan propagandists, and may have more in common with the insult-yelling of die-hard fans of sports teams, than the republican virtues hoped for by some theorists. In sum, the vaunted “discursive interaction and contestation” in a party-based environment may make citizens less capable of learning and deliberating if selected to serve in a mini-public.

Authorized negotiators

Some issues are not amenable to the common-ground-seeking process of deliberation. Deliberation is based on the idea of participants being open to revising their opinions and preferences as they deliberate. However, as pluralists note, some public policy choices pit incompatible interests against each other and will inevitably have winners and losers. Negotiated compromise between conflicting interests is widely seen as the better way of resolving such conflicts compared to simply counting heads. Parties and elected representatives are seen to have legitimacy as bargaining agents empowered to cut deals on behalf of conflicting interests, whereas randomly selected citizens, not being authorized agents for constituencies, do not.

Because negotiation is such a prevalent part of decision-making in elected chambers (and elsewhere), it is common to assume that negotiation is the appropriate way to resolve conflicting interests. However, negotiation is not the only, nor necessarily the best, alternative to deliberation. 

Negotiation reflects relative power, and often involves threats as well as inducements. Should public decisions necessarily be a manifestation of relative power? Even when power is more equal, negotiation often devolves to horse trading on completely unrelated policy matters. Negotiation and bargaining among elected legislators can mean: you get that amendment, which benefits your group but hurts society as a whole, and I get this other amendment, which benefits my group but hurts society as a whole. Indeed, legislators are especially motivated to negotiate deals when their sought after policies cannot be justified as beneficial to society.

One alternative to both deliberation and negotiation (when incompatible interests clash) is arbitration with an impartial entity serving as judge in pursuit of fairness or justice.1 This tool is “off the table” as an option in elected chambers, which evince relative power (rather than fairness). One can imagine a dispute resolution process in which each interest group on a particular issue offered their optimal compromise and a mini-public selected from among the possible compromises offered, using fairness, rather than power, as their standard. This process might deliver poor outcomes from time to time, but there is no reason to think results would be as bad as negotiated settlements within elected chambers today.

Cultivating political leaders

Gastil and Wright also assert that:

“elections create the possibility for political careers and the development of skillful politicians as political leaders.”

I question the assumption that this variety of political leaders are, on balance, a positive thing for a democracy.2 Leadership derives from the human proclivity for followership, which prompts citizens to suspend independent judgment and defer to leaders to whom they may have some emotional attachment. As Daniel Kahneman suggests, followership is generally grounded in "“system one, ” emotional, non-rational thinking. Research suggests opinion leaders may lead people astray more often than to the best answers. A leader may lead well on one matter, but also be followed on many unrelated matters about which the leader has no clue. Elected leaders also exhibit the dilemma of the package deal; a candidate with desirable leadership skills or personality traits may champion bad policies and vice versa, but the voters can't recombine these to create their ideal candidate.

Even if we accept, for the sake of argument, that good leaders are beneficial, elections are a poor mechanism for selecting and promoting desirable ones. The skills, motivations, and traits needed to win elections, including public relations skills and extreme self-confidence, are not necessarily the optimal attributes for socially-beneficial leaders. Elections tend to entice and promote ego-driven men (meaning males) who are ill-suited for the give and take of deliberation. A candidate's projection of confidence and certainty – whether justified or not – is nearly essential for election. But intellectual humility – the opposite – has been shown to be essential for effective deliberation. In the new book, The Certainty Trap: Why We Need to Question Ourselves More—and How We Can Judge Others Less, sociologist Ilana Redstone argues that certainty and democracy are fundamentally incompatible.

It is cliché to suggest that the accrual of power also has a tendency to corrupt, even if the candidate isn't sociopathic at the outset. In chapter nine I discussed the psychology of elected representatives, and subscribed to the assessment made by former Foreign Secretary of the UK, David Owen. He wrote a book expressing his concerns about what he termed “hubris syndrome” that afflicts so many politicians in high office. In terms of selecting political leaders, mass elections may be better than violent seizure of power, but they are worse than almost all other plausible selection methods.

(political expertise will be addressed in the next post)

Setting the rules of the process (Rules Council)

The rules committee of a traditionally elected legislature has a built-in conflict of interest. The faction in the majority typically tailors the rules to favor their preferred agenda by enhancing the power of the majority. Balanced, fair rules that facilitate deliberation are anathema to elected majority factions. To avoid this tendency in allotted legislative bodies, I propose the creation of an allotted Rules Council, similar in form to the Agenda Council. 

The Rules Council  would establish rules and procedures for all of the other Panels and Councils, such as the lottery process, quorum requirements, means for soliciting expert testimony, procedures to be used in deliberation, compensation, etc. Members would have limited terms and could not know how the rules might hurt or help any particular piece of future legislation they might have a personal interest in. Their natural motivation would be to assure the fairest and best functioning of all of the bodies. 

It might be appropriate to limit the lottery pool for this particular Council to those who have previously served on some other allotted body, so that they understand the dynamics involved. This won’t be possible at the commencement of the multi-body sortition design, since that lottery pool will be empty or at a minimum, too small. However, since it is the Rules Council itself that makes these sorts of process and design decisions , it is important that any changes adopted by the Rules Council affecting the Rules Council itself (a snake eating its own tail) not go into effect until the membership has completely turned over through rotation and lottery, so that the Council members are not able to inappropriately enhance their own power.

Enforcing the rules (Oversight Council)

While the Rules Council decides the rules and procedures, monitoring a large number of mini-publics would over-tax this body. There would need to be at least one, but more likely, a large number of Oversight Councils, responsible for enforcing the rules. Take for example, the question of who presents the pro and con arguments to the Policy Juries, and how do they decide exactly what content to include, in order to give a “balanced” presentation? Even the relative charisma, eloquence, appearance or social status of different presenters may be significant. One possible approach the Rules Council might adopt is to have the same staff members present both pro and con arguments crafted by members of the Interest and Review Panels who fall on either side of the pro con divide. However, this leaves the Policy Jury in danger of being steered by the administrative bureaucracy promoting its own interests -- a common problem with elected bodies. Many state and national legislatures try to solve this problem by allowing each legislator to hire their own staff. However, this individualized staff often ends up spending an inordinate amount of time on re-election concerns, such as public relations and constituent service, rather than policy. 

Instead, for a sortition system, I propose the creation of Oversight Councils, chosen by lot, which deal exclusively with staff performance and fairness, rather than the policy issues themselves. In addition to evaluating the general competence of the staff, they would rule on complaints about biased or unfair presentations given by staff. They should also have the power to hire and fire staff serving the other sortition bodies.

At a state or national level it might be appropriate to have several separate meta-legislative councils. I have described a Rules Council establishing rules and procedures for good deliberative process, and an Oversight Council overseeing the staff of all of the sortition bodies. A full sortition system might also have one that monitors the performance of the executive in implementing the laws adopted by the Policy Juries, as well as a Coordinating Council that seeks to harmonize and integrate laws passed by Policy Juries when they conflict. For a municipality, a single meta-legislative council seems appropriate; with the limited task of assuring that sortition-formed bodies have good process and staff that provide balanced presentations – independent of any existing government or bureaucracy. 

Summary

At a bare minimum, democracy requires that agenda setting and the final decisions are in the hands of informed and genuinely representative bodies. However, replacing elected legislators with randomly selected representatives also opens the door for innovative and superior means of proposing and evaluating draft legislation. In traditional elected legislatures the same set of elite elected officials are empowered to establish the agenda, prepare specific bills and amendments. They are also responsible for engaging in (or sidestepping) fact-finding, advocacy for or against bills, and finally judging legislation to adopt or reject it. With a randomly selected set of legislators these tasks should be divided among a variety of other groups of people. These groups should generally be randomly selected, (or possibly self-selected in the case of Interest Panels) to optimize diversity, representativeness, avoid self-selection distortion, and promote resistance to corruption. Interestingly, both the randomly selected Australian Citizens’ Parliament and the Belgian G-1000, two of the earliest sortition implementations, provided an additional means for interested individuals who were not part of the randomly selected body to participate in a manner online, by providing proposals or assessments and “raw material” for the formal deliberators. This process of providing a come-one-come-all opportunity for interested citizens to feed into the decision-making process, but countering the self-selection bias by then submitting proposals to the more descriptively representative body, is a model worthy of emulation.

While it seems inevitable that the use of sortition in the near term will be as part of a hybrid system that also includes elected representatives, it is important to understand that maintaining an electoral component is not essential, nor desirable, for democracy, and that it would be possible to have a democracy with no mass elections at all. In this chapter I set forth a multi-body design of democracy that does not use elections. Societies have been on the beaten path, relying on elections for so long that such a sharp break in how we think about formulating a democracy is extremely challenging. I will examine some transition strategies in the next (final) chapter. But the design I set out here is intended to help people appreciate that elections should not be the default tool when setting up a democracy. We need to understand that a better way is possible before people will willingly abandon the familiar ways.

Share

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Archive (from the beginning)

A key feature of this proposal is that we don’t leave the final decisions on legislation to Interest Panels nor to Review Panels. Because of the risk of groupthink, pride of authorship, or simply inaccurate representativeness (due to smaller sample size and self-selection bias), final decisions are made by separate bodies, I call Policy Juries. This separation of functions would also reduce the likelihood of extreme polarized majority positions coming out of the Review Panel, since members of both the Interest Panels and Review Panels would understand that their final products must be able to pass muster in front of a large, fully representative Policy Jury. Finding middle ground, or win-win options, and addressing the needs of minority perspectives might enhance their chances of ultimate adoption.

Each Policy Jury would vote on one piece of legislation, like the Legislative Panels (nomothetai) of Athens did. To avoid self-selection distortions, jury service should ideally be quasi-mandatory (though with reasonable hardship excuses allowed). It is unlikely that early implementations would have legal authority to mandate service, so substantial alternative means of encouraging participation would need to be employed. People have few, if any comparable opportunities for civic engagement in modern America, so we can only speculate about potential participation rates. Short service durations (perhaps a week or two) combined with compensation and some symbolic status honors might achieve adequate participation, and thus descriptive representativeness. A state or national Policy Jury should probably have between 500 and 1,500 members to achieve a representative sample. A municipal Policy Jury would probably be significantly smaller, simply for financial reasons, and the fact that the issues would generally be significantly less consequential. 

The essential task, and the procedures of the Policy Jury are intrinsically different from those of the Interest Panels and Review Panels. Like the Athenian Legislative Panels (nomothetai)  and People’s Courts (dikasteria), a Policy Jury would listen to pro and con presentations on the proposed legislation, and without further debate, vote to adopt or reject the law by secret ballot. This procedure is intended to benefit from the wisdom of crowds described in James Surowiecki’s book while avoiding the groupthink and polarization dynamics that can arise when participants engage in discussion and advocacy. 

This procedure elevates the skill of democratic listening – an often neglected skill that is distinct and apart from debate. Some researchers and political theorists note that it is unfortunately far more common to focus on the value of speaking, or “voice,” than listening when examining democratic behaviors. But when debating (or even conversing), as we hear another speaker, our mind often gets preoccupied with making a plan for our response or counter-arguments, not openly absorbing or seeking to understand others’ perspectives. Debate is about winning – not learning. Narrowing the jurors’ task to listening to presentations and voting, (with the uncommon inducement of exercising actual decision-making authority) will also increase willingness to participate and thus the jury’s descriptive representativeness. 

The secret ballot is important, as it helps avoid the social pressures and deference to high-status members that can interfere with a juror’s ability to make their own independent assessment, and vote as they think best. The secret vote also reduces the risk of corruption and vote buying. Jury tampering protections (including announced sting operations of pretend bribers) would still be appropriate, but potential corrupters are less tempted to try buying votes when there is no way of knowing if the votes were delivered.

Preparation of the pro and con presentations could be overseen by the members of the Review Panel who had been on opposite sides of the decision within that body. The Rules Council might be wise to also allow jurors to ask clarifying questions, and perhaps even seek out independent expert witnesses. The Policy Jury is the failsafe check that assures new laws will be deemed appropriate and desirable by an informed population. 

Since the jurors aren’t engaging in all-to-all deliberation, it would be logistically feasible to create far larger juries – in the thousands – through the use of the Internet. Here we face one dilemma that requires an additional procedure to resolve. The larger the sample, the more statistically accurate the representation, but also the greater the risk of inattention and the resurfacing of rational ignorance (“my one vote won’t matter”), or what Jeremy Bentham termed a lack of “active aptitude."  One option is to hope that trial and error will eventually lead to finding the “sweet spot” that achieves adequate statistical representation but also motivates participants to overcome rational ignorance, and put in the effort needed to make a considered judgment. 

The alternative strategy is to adjust the majority voting threshold. If a bill receives a seventy percent majority in a jury of 500 people, it is almost certain it would also have passed if the body had been 1,500 (though not necessarily by the same margin). However, if it passes in a jury of 500 by a mere fifty-one percent majority, we would be right to be concerned that the bill might have been defeated if the sample size had been 1,500, which more precisely represented the will of the community. One solution is to set an adoption threshold greater than a simple majority, and then if a bill gets a small majority, smaller than the threshold, convene an entirely new Policy Jury, which could be larger, to see if they come to the same conclusion about the bill.

Policy Jury members are not intended to “represent” geographic constituents (as in an electoral system), nor any particular constituents (e.g. based on demographics or partisan loyalty). The electoral concept of accountability of individual representatives to particular constituencies simply doesn’t apply. This may seem strange at first, but once the jury analogy is fully understood, it is obvious. We expect jurors of a particular race, for example, to seek justice, rather than be "accountable" to citizens of their race. They may be more likely to assess information and think in a similar way, but “accountability” is not pertinent. Each member of a Policy Jury (as with a court jury) is expected to vote as they think best, with the collective result mirroring what the community as a whole would decide if they had the information and time to reflect. 

Experience with deliberative polls conducted by James Fishkin, in which randomly selected community members are asked to make decisions about public policy matters, suggest that such representative groups may be more able to favor long-term and community interests over egocentric self-interest, than elected representatives are. Even if no elected official were corrupt or self-serving, re-election campaign dynamics may pressure them to make harmful, but “popular” decisions on high-visibility issues. This can happen if they believe their constituency would initially favor the short-sighted decision, due to a lack of information, understanding, and reflection, rather than decisions that the elected representative genuinely believes would be in their constituents’ long-term interest. If a politician considers taking a long-term view on a policy, they know that their partisan opponents will seek to frame their vote as detrimental to the (short-term) interests of their constituents in the next campaign, making such principled votes problematic for politicians.

To enhance democratic listening, and this promotion of the common good, it might be beneficial to have members make a pledge, not unlike the Athenian Heliastic Oath that reverberates down the ages from two and a half millennia ago. The pledge might state that they will vote impartially as their conscience suggests will be most just and beneficial for the community. I drafted a possible Juror’s Pledge during my work on a global sortition design effort in 2017 : 

“I agree to treat all participants with respect. I will listen with an open mind, and delay making any final decision on the matters under consideration until I have heard all of the evidence and arguments. I recognize that some things that I believed to be true may turn out to be wrong, and that other things that I did not accept may turn out to be valid. I commit to making a final decision that on balance I genuinely believe is in the best interests of all.”  

Although research on the unconscious “priming effect” has been called into doubt by failures of replication studies, such a pledge, which makes these expectations express and overt, might help members consciously seek to withhold their decisions until they have heard all the evidence.

But even if we assume that most members of a randomly selected body will ignore the common good (or we assume that the very concept of a “common good” is a vain myth), and instead vote according to each member’s selfish interests, at worst we arrive at the ideal outcome championed  by adversarial competitive (electoral) democracy, which is finding the majority preference among competing interests.

Share

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Archive (from the beginning)

In the comprehensive multi-body sortition design there would be a separate Review Panel for each policy area established by the Rules Council (for example, one for transportation, one for healthcare, etc.). The process of the Review Panel would be significantly different than that of an elected legislature. The Review Panels fulfill most of the functions of traditional legislative committees, excluding agenda-setting and the the initiation of legislation. They also have no role in the final passage of legislation. The Rules Council might establish a process closer to that of the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly, with a learning phase, a deliberation phase, and drafting phase. They would receive the raw inputs from the Interest Panels, compare, combine, reject and amend various draft proposals to prepare a final piece of legislation to pass on to a Policy Jury for final adoption or rejection.

While the purview of each Review Panel is far wider than the single topic Interest Panels, it is far narrower than existing legislatures, or the proposed second chamber sortition models, which deal with all issues (a hybrid design in which one chamber is elected and the second chamber is selected by lot). This allows the members to develop a deeper understanding within a defined policy domain than is possible in an all-encompassing legislature. In traditional (elected) legislatures, it is typically only a small portion of the members – those who serve on a particular committee – who have any likelihood of fully understanding any given bill. Most elected legislators never read or understand the details of the bulk of the bills they vote on. They inevitably vote based on other considerations, such as vote swapping (“I’ll vote for your highway earmark, if you vote for my education subsidy amendment”), or based on some heuristic – typically following the lead of their fellow party members who serve on a bill’s committee of reference. Thus the homogeneity of the legislature as a whole is compounded by having only a small fraction of the full body even attempting to understand each bill. The Review Panel concept promotes having every member seek to understand every bill they deal with, and eliminates, or at least reduces, vote-swapping and partisan gamesmanship.

The Review Panels would be selected in the same manner as the Agenda Council – a lottery of the willing. Unlike the Interest Panels, volunteers for the Review Panel lottery would not choose the subject they would be assigned to, in order to avoid special interest distortion. In other words, those selected in the initial lottery would be asked if they would be willing to serve on some Review Panel that dealt with important public policy legislation, without specifying in what policy area.

The Review Panels would be much larger than the Interest Panels (perhaps 150 members at a state level). They would be reasonably compensated, and provided with meals, childcare, and a pleasant working environment. Members might also garner a certain amount of status or honor. Each Review Panel would also have professional staff. For reference, in the United States, the various congressional committees have a total of around 6,000 staff. However, the individual elected members of Congress each have personal staff for such things as constituent outreach, district office staff, schedulers, speech writers, et al., which total another 12,500 or so. While none of these are officially campaign related, most of them exist to enhance re-election prospects. Nearly all of these personal staff would not exist in a sortition system.

For a national design, these panels would be full-time, with overlapping terms of perhaps three years (to gain familiarity with the subject matter). For a municipal implementation, this would likely be part-time work, and it might be appropriate to have meetings on weekends or evenings so as to not interfere with normal employment. This body would be far more descriptively representative than the Interest Panels. Screening of prospective members should be avoided entirely, or be extremely minimal (perhaps the ability to read or listen to background materials) so as to not unduly distort the representativeness of the final body.

The procedures used by the Review Panel require careful design so as to maximize problem solving potential and minimize both groupthink and internal polarization Cass Sunstein warned about in his book Why Societies Need Dissent. These psychological tendencies are powerful, but can be minimized with good design according to other researchers. However, since the risk of bad results from information cascades and groupthink, etc. cannot be completely eliminated, and the fact that the Review Panels are not fully representative of the population (having a certain amount of self-selection distortion), there is no design fix that would justify allowing these bodies to make final decisions about legislation they crafted.

Sortition researchers, such as John Gastil, advocate that the micro- and macro-level elements necessary for genuinely “democratic deliberation” deserve intense study. These design elements could include developing a set of agreed upon facts as a basis for discussion. Too often members of groups simply talk past each other because each has their own separate understanding of “the facts.” Once a draft has been generated, alternating pro and con speakers for any particular amendment is preferable to a discussion style where the initial majority persuasion dominates. Psychologists have shown that people have a tendency to lean towards the apparent majority side simply due to a desire to fit in – a sort of social bonding instinct. According to Sunstein, this can also lead to polarization into subgroups that move further apart as members adhere to arguments that support their initial position, and dismiss arguments that don’t fit their view. Yet, researchers such as Asher Koriat have shown that communication between group members that includes feedback about members’ confidence levels improves decisions in many situations. As the science of group decision-making advances, the procedures of democratic institutions should be adjusted accordingly.

The next post will discuss the Policy Juries, which are the large, statically representative bodies with the authority to finally adopt new laws proposed by Review Panels.

Share

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Archive (from the beginning)

This proposal uses a variety of bodies, each with unique characteristics (such as selection method, and term of office) that are optimized for the task each body handles, and to overcome the dilemmas discussed above. The proposal below is comprehensive – a sort of “reference design” such as that used by architects. In real-world applications, it is likely that certain bodies described might be used, and others not. For example, a city government might utilize the Rules Council, Review Panel and Policy Juries within one specific policy area, but keep the Interest Panel, Agenda Council, and Oversight Council functions within the existing city council.

Setting the Agenda (by Agenda Council and Petitions)

An allotted body called an Agenda Council would have responsibility for setting the agendas of policy-making bodies – but not for developing bills, voting on them, or anything else. I call this a meta-legislative body, because it legislates about the process of legislating. This is distinct from the mature Athenian system, which did not completely isolate agenda setting from the drafting of proposals, since the Council of 500 (boule) could play a role in both. However, in cases where the People’s Assembly (ecclesia) initiated consideration of some new legislation, the task of drafting it fell to individual citizens, with the ultimate decision falling to a randomly selected Legislative Panel (nomothetai). Assigning meta-legislative tasks to a separate body from normal legislation follows the long-standing principle of “checks and balances,” or separation of powers as advocated by the likes of Montesquieu and Madison. 

This body might be selected using a two-tier lottery system of the willing, similar to that used in the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly in 2003-4 as discussed by R. B. Herath in his book: Real Power to the People: A Novel Approach to Electoral Reform in British Columbia. This two-step lottery has also been employed in the bulk of recent citizens’ assemblies around the world. A somewhat different but similar two-step lottery system was also used in Athens, where a group of 6,000 citizens over the age of 30 were randomly selected from volunteers for one year terms to serve in a sort of jury pool for the people’s Courts and Legislative Panels, with individual juries, numbering in the hundreds, being selected by lot for any given court case or law. However, in this multi-body sortition system rather than seeking volunteers to join the lottery pool, as in Athens, the “volunteers,” would be randomly invited from the entire population. However, those initially drawn could decline – thus having a second final lottery of the willing. This is an important distinction from typical volunteer systems, because many people who would never put themselves forward as volunteers would be willing to accept if invited into the pool. This would dramatically improve the representativeness of the pool and of the final body.

If stratified sampling, such that several demographic factors are balanced to match the diversity of the general population, random selection will also tend to produce a body that resembles the general population in terms of various other characteristics not specifically stratified for, such as political attitudes.

The Agenda Council and their staff would seek out problems needing attention, rather than merely react to media or special interest group pressures. For example, the United States now faces a little discussed, but indisputable, infrastructure deficit (transportation, water systems, etc.) that arguably is ignored by elected representatives because raising the issue doesn’t benefit re-election. The goal is to set an agenda rationally, in the public interest, rather than according to the dictates of electoral imperatives, where being able to blame political opponents is the priority.

In the spirit of isegoria, it would also be desirable to have an alternate means for agenda setting, open to all citizens. Therefore, anybody would be allowed to initiate a petition drive to force a topic onto the agenda. Establishing rules that allow any citizen to promote an agenda item through petitions, but that do not encourage special interests to flood the agenda, is challenging. The signature threshold and rules for such a petition effort should not be made by the Agenda Council, because it might be tempted to defend its prerogatives by establishing unreasonably steep barriers to petitions. Instead, a separate allotted body called a Rules Council (discussed in a subsequent post) would handle this task, adjusting the rules over time, seeking to optimize isegoria, while avoiding special interest domination. 

An important point here, however, is that placing a topic on the agenda by petition does not shape the resulting policy. For example, a group advocating abolishing income taxes, could put the topic of income tax on the agenda, but the final result might be higher income taxes. Thus, groups who think their preferred policy would be popular with ordinary citizens, once they were well-informed, would have an incentive to try the petition route, if their concern was sidestepped by the Agenda Council, but this would not be a productive pathway for special interests, since the outcome could be the opposite of their goal.

An Agenda Council would be intermediate in size, perhaps 150 members. This is small enough to allow quality active all-to-all deliberation, but large enough to assure broad diversity, and rough representativeness (with stratified sampling). The two-tier lottery of the willing assures a willingness to “do the work.” But, since they are not developing, let alone adopting any laws, the lack of highly accurate representativeness (only achieved through quasi-mandatory service in a general lottery) is not an issue. The use of a lottery and relatively short term in office in selecting the Agenda Council (perhaps a month or two) also promotes protection against corruption.

Drafting Proposals (by Interest Panels)

Once an agenda topic was established, there would be a call for volunteers to serve on Interest Panels, each panel being small enough to facilitate active participation (perhaps a dozen members). The Interest Panels would generate legislative proposals, but have no power to adopt them. In Athens, self-selected citizens (ho boulomenos) could propose laws or decrees, but these generally had to pass through multiple self-selected and allotted bodies (the Assembly, the Council of 500 and Legislative Panel) before final enactment.

There would be as many Interest Panels on a given topic as the number of volunteers would fill. This is derived from, but also modifies, the principle of isegoria. Unlike Athens, in this case the individual is not speaking directly to the ultimate decision-making body. However, dividing into many smaller units means the amount of input would be far greater, with the potential for any individual participating on a Panel to affect the final legislation. Interest Panels at the local level might meet in person on weekends or evenings, but, as Internet access becomes more common throughout society, many would likely use Internet collaboration tools that allow members to communicate and work on proposals sequentially, rather than needing to coordinate meeting times.

The Interest Panels could be formulated in more than one way. Some Interest Panels might be self-organized by like-minded individuals. This might lead to the generation of extreme proposals. However, since these panel members would know that they are not the final decision-makers, they would have an incentive to temper their proposals in order to win approval at the final stage before a fully representative Policy Jury. Alternatively, the volunteers could be randomly mixed on Interest Panels to promote diversity of perspectives and cognitive styles. 

Self-selection at the level of the Interest Panel allows experts who would be unelectable (due to their appearance, lack of wealth, personality, or other traits) to contribute to governance. It also means that special interests and self-deluded incompetents could participate. While a panel of a dozen would be likely to identify and discount the ideas of “wackos,” it is likely that some Interest Panels would put forth terrible legislative proposals. This is one reason why it is desirable to have a large number of Interest Panels, and why self-selected Interest Panels should not make ultimate decisions. Some of them might deadlock, or disintegrate due to quorum failures. In most cases, however, multiple Interest Panels would produce draft proposals for the next level allotted body – a Review Panel – to consider. Review Panels will be discussed in the next post.

Share

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Archive (from the beginning)

Many elements of this chapter appeared in a 2013 journal article of mine entitled: “Democracy Through Multi-Body Sortition: Athenian Lessons for the Modern Day”

We should carefully consider human factors and design elements that contribute to, or hinder, good legislative decision making, especially for randomly selected legislative bodies. We should not only be concerned with the legitimacy or fairness of decision-making, but also the quality of the outputs. Hélène Landemore makes an interesting argument in her book Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many, that democratic group decisions have a greater probability of being “good,” than the decisions of smaller oligarchic groups, even if both groups have the best of intentions. 

However, democracy does not assure justice or “good” decisions. It may open the door to such decisions with optimal institutional design, but all it can promise is freedom from oppression by a powerful minority. An informed majority can still make “mistakes.” A majority, or even unanimous decision that causes the death of millions, might arise through a democratic process. The citizens of Athens democratically decided to launch wars of aggression. The use of democratic process does not change the moral or ethical predisposition of the participants. Also, an intolerant, illiberal culture, which places inordinate weight on the opinions of certain individuals (whether political, religious or otherwise), may not be able to benefit from the advantages of democratic design. 

Setting aside definitions of morally or ethically bad decisions, we can focus on avoiding “bad” decisions that the makers of the decisions themselves would agree were bad if they had had more information, understanding, or after-the-fact hindsight. Being minimally “democratic” is desirable, but not sufficient for avoiding such bad decisions. 

Rather than focusing on design elements that are hoped to generate good decisions, many political theorists have deemed it more practical to focus on design elements intended to avoid bad decision-making. Madison’s hope that a vast republic with institutional checks and balances could prevent any one faction from taking control to pursue their narrow self-interest was essentially a defensive concept (though the quick rise of national political parties that spanned the three branches of government effectively stymied his hope). Devising ways of preventing bad decision-making more than assuring good decision-making was also the approach of other theorists, such as Jeremy Bentham. The goal can be summarized by the title of one of Bentham’s nineteenth century works and that of modern theorist Jon Elster of Columbia University – Securities Against Misrule. How can we minimize the problematic proclivities of human psychology (such as confirmation bias, group-think, and self-aggrandizement) and their tendency to poison good decision-making? What institutional design features and procedures minimize the likelihood of “bad” decisions, and maximize the likelihood of “good” ones? 

A vast array of cognitive biases are notoriously difficult to avoid, but recent research suggests that certain procedures and bias reduction training may indeed help. Such procedures and training are in fundamental conflict with politicians’ power-seeking priorities, but could readily be deployed within mini-publics. We should examine ancient insights as well as modern discoveries of social psychology in order to avoid the pitfalls that have crippled so many democratic efforts over the centuries. What follows is a partial list of factors that need consideration. We will quickly discover that there are dilemmas for which solving one design problem will make another problem worse. In short, no single design can be optimal across the board. A single body will necessitate inevitable trade-offs. However, as I described at the end of chapter 12, there is a design that can resolve these dilemmas and avoid trade-offs. I refer to it as the multi-body sortition model.

Five dilemmas of sortition design 

When people first imagine a sortition democracy it is common to imagine a one-for-one replacement of an elected chamber, with one selected by lot. This would be a big mistake. All single-body sortition proposals face five dilemmas – five pairs of opposing objectives – which can’t be reconciled with only one type of body. 

1. There is a conflict between maximizing accurate and descriptive representativeness, versus maximizing interest and commitment among members of a deliberative body. In Deliberative Democracy in America: A Proposal for a Popular Branch of Government, Ethan Leib seeks to maximize descriptive representativeness and avoid the bias of “participatory distortion” by insisting on mandatory service as in a jury or draft. Some other theorists and advocates put more priority on assuring interest and motivation. Their designs tend more towards volunteerism, or a lottery of the willing. Accurate representativeness also requires a large sample – a group that is then too large to engage in active deliberation effectively. 

2. There is a conflict between spreading participation widely, maximizing resistance to corruption on the one hand, through a large number of short terms of office, versus maximizing participants’ expertise or familiarity with the issues under consideration through far fewer, longer terms. Longer terms increases expertise, but also increases the risk of corruption. Further, certain sorts of people would be willing to serve long terms, but others would consider it an unacceptable imposition, and would be unwilling to “do the work.”

3. There is a conflict between giving every citizen the right to speak (encouraging self-selection) – offering agenda items, information and arguments for the deliberative process (isegoria), versus the danger that the self-selection of those most motivated to speak will promote domination by special interests and steer outcomes away from the common good. Those who seek to speak are not usually typical or representative of the general population.

4. There is a conflict between wanting a diverse body that engages in problem solving through active deliberation, fostering collective intelligence, versus independent personal assessment and private deliberation that taps the wisdom of crowds and avoids information cascades, but which shuts out the sharing of private knowledge. There is persuasive research showing the value of cognitive diversity for problem solving, but also the value of independent, private assessment of information . Group deliberations can also suffer from deference to high status members or group solidarity, leading either to group-think or polarization.

5. Lastly, there is a conflict between maximizing democratic power by allowing a deliberative body to set its own agenda, draft its own bills, and vote on them, versus avoiding the bundling of issues, with the resulting vote-swapping, as well as arbitrary decisions arising from the persuasive powers of a few unrepresentative charismatic members. These five dilemmas are not exhaustive, but are crucial. 

Before diving into the solutions to these dilemmas I am proposing (in the next post), I want to touch on a couple of other design considerations.

Motivation to participate

Any proposed system that requires an increase in the amount of citizen participation, as this one does, must respond to the question of whether there would be sufficient motivation among broad swaths of the population to participate. After all, only a minority of citizens is willing to vote in most American elections, and that requires relatively minimal time and effort. New England communities that still have town meetings also see only a fraction of their citizens attending. The competing uses for personal time in modern society, and the “unattractiveness” of politics to most people, raise serious questions about the viability of any such democratic undertaking, especially one centered on deliberation and broad participation. Even in Classical Athens, democracy was an activity only of that (quite large) portion of the citizenry who chose to participate by volunteering for the lottery pool, or attending the ecclesia. The goal with this plan is to go Athens one better, and include the general population, rather than merely those who are eager to participate.

The (testable) assumption I make here, is that most citizens would readily participate for a set period of time, with appropriate compensation, in a process in which they believed their input really mattered (unlike mass elections). This democratic process would bear almost no relationship to “politics” as we know it today. While there are high levels of satisfaction reported by participants in various deliberative processes, such as the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly, or the Danish Consensus Conferences (Fischer 2009), this may be misleading, since participants were randomly selected from among those who already responded that they were interested in being one of those “selected.” Satisfaction with serving on a court jury is more indicative, and suggests sorition for policy making does have the potential to overcome the “rational ignorance” problem of mass elections. Just as jurors in court systems may complain about the nuisance of serving, they almost universally take the job seriously. Indeed, many jurors go away with a heightened sense of citizenship. The multi-body system described in chapter 12 also seeks to accommodate varying levels of willingness to commit personal time to self-governance. The largest portion of participants would commit a very limited time – say, no more than a week (serving on a municipal-level policy jury). Those serving on a national-level Review Panel might serve a year or more.

Ongoing Design Improvement

In a mature sortitional democracy the group or organization that designs institutions and deliberative processes should also be democratically controlled. Otherwise, the designers may corruptly create a system that tilts policy outcomes in their preferred direction. Ideally, this meta-legislative design task would be undertaken, or at least overseen, by a separate mini-public created specifically for this function, rather than by a citizens’ assembly as an initial step of a policy deliberation. Isolated from any particular legislation, people who would be on opposite sides of a debate on a “policy issue” can agree on what procedures, rules and expert witness selection process should be used by future mini-publics, which they won’t be a part of. A randomly selected meta-legislative body could consult experts and use the latest research on group decision-making and cognitive biases to engineer an optimal decision-making process, without the electoral imperative that forecloses this possibility for an elected chamber. Therefore, the design I presented at the end of chapter 12 and further explicate below in relation to the dilemmas discussed above, is only a starting point, which I expect to be improved over time.

Share

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Archive (from the beginning)

Whether democracy is achievable or appropriate on a global scale is not immediately self-evident. Currently, politicians, autocrats, and various special interest experts negotiate global treaties and coordination protocols. These have regulated trade, the spread of nuclear weapons, or restrictions on chemicals that harmed the life-protecting upper atmosphere ozone layer. But none of these were the result of democratic process, and they tend to reflect nations’ unequal power relationships. In many cases, what is best for the politicians of a nation state is not what is best for the people of the world, or even best for the people of that particular country. There is a vast range of challenges facing humanity on a global scale (climate change and artificial intelligence being two that are currently front and center) where democratic governance could make a fundamental difference. While enforcement procedures are an obvious hurdle (not even the UN can enforce its resolutions), a crucial initial step is to devise a means of making global decisions with sufficient moral weight. This is where sortition is key.

In 2017, sortition scholars and activists on four continents crafted a proposal for how sortition could be used on a global scale to dramatically improve global decision making on tough problems with global reach, such as climate change, nuclear weapons, regulation of artificial intelligence, and poverty. The plan was prepared for a prize competition sponsored by a Swedish charity, the Global Challenges Foundation, seeking innovative ways to improve the world’s fraught global situation. While the design did not win the competition (and the $5 million award) the effort did generate a design that really could make a difference in the world. I was one of those working on this effort. The team used the multi-body sortition design I had developed in 2013 (and discussed in this book) as its jumping off place. The abstract from that grant proposal nicely sums up the task:

“Global cooperation and coordination on crucial pan-global problems has been stymied by parochial interests - either of national governments and their politicians, or business enterprises with short-term imperatives. No decision making process currently exists that carries sufficient moral legitimacy to compel global action. This proposal can solve that crucial problem and generate that global, moral authority. This can be accomplished by facilitating decision-making by the people of earth themselves, rather than as bickering national, religious, corporate, ethnic, or other factions. The key question is this: ​“What would the people of the world choose to do in addressing various global problems if they could somehow all focus on one particular problem, learn all about it, hear a wide range of possible solutions, deliberate and decide what to do?” 

“Through the use of statistically representative mini-public design we are able to answer this fundamental question. In a nutshell the concept is that initially one global problem selected by the UN General Assembly (perhaps from the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development) would be tackled. National and regional mini-publics, termed Citizens’ Assemblies, would take place all over the world, where perhaps 400 people at each mini-public would convene to learn all about the issue, interrogate experts and examine proposals generated by a variety of volunteer Interest Panels for addressing the problem. Each mini-public would seek to narrow the wide range of proposals down to those they believed were most desirable, and generate questions needing to be answered before a final choice could be made. A few members from each of these national and regional mini-publics would be randomly selected to serve on either a Global Citizens’ Assembly, or a Global Agenda Council, which would select the issue to be tackled in the next round. The Global Citizens’ Assembly would again hear from experts and ultimately adopt a resolution carrying at least the weight of a UN resolution, except this would constitute the considered democratic judgment of the people of the world, rather than of politicians.

“Of course a global citizens’ policy does not automatically carry the force of global law (legitimate coercion to compel compliance). As with UN resolutions, nation states can violate the new global policy. But this is an alternate approach, which has the possibility of exceeding the legitimacy of the undemocratic United Nations (”undemocratic” because it is based on one nation one vote regardless of population, not to mention the arbitrary veto power of the permanent members of the Security Council), which represents nation states rather than people. Whether the sovereignty of the people of the world can ultimately supersede the sovereignty of any individual jurisdiction remains an open question.”

In 2021, the first global sortition project was conducted to coincide with the global climate change conference, COP 26 (Conference of the Parties).1 This Global Assembly convened one hundred ordinary people from around the world to discuss and make recommendations on issues of global concern, beginning with climate change. The citizens’ assembly was sponsored by a number of civic organizations including Missions Publiques, as well as the Danish Board of Technology, the Scottish government, with support from the UN, with the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra acting as its secretariat.

The sampling method failed to meet the genuinely random standard, with the pool of representative people being submitted by local civic organizations around the world. Random selection on a global scale would always be challenging, with many governments having no central lists of residents, and many people living in makeshift shelters without addresses, etc. Even if the members were genuinely randomly selected, however, the sample size of one hundred was also inadequate to provide meaningful statistical representativeness. Thus this first global assembly was largely symbolic. However, this was an initial step along a vital path.

In 2023, the Global Citizens Assembly Network (GloCAN) was founded. This consortium is seeking to learn from the experience of that first global assembly and do further research to lay the groundwork for future global democratic decision-making using sortition.

The goal of this chapter has been to prompt the reader to think of other possible circumstances in their own situations where sortition might be useful. There must be widespread every-day experience with sortition before it is likely to supplement or (I hope) supplant elections at the governmental level.

A valuable avenue for advancing sortition-based democracy is within schools and colleges. Student government is supposed to be both a (very limited) venue for democratic governance and an educational model for how democracy functions. In reality, of course, it is recognized that student government elections are generally a deeply flawed popularity contest (not completely unlike the “real world"). While not effectively teaching the idealized vision of democracy, these student elections ironically come closer to teaching its actual defective character.

At a large number of colleges and universities students have attempted to improve the quality of student government elections by moving beyond winner-take-all plurality election, by incorporating ranked choice voting (discussed briefly in chapter 2). But as I have discussed in this book, such reforms may be better than the status quo but don’t allow genuine self-government. In a few places, however, schools are beginning to experiment with sortition. 

Under the typical existing high school student government with an elected student council, a handful of kids may learn democratic skills such as parliamentary procedure, tools of persuasion, and debate. These few students are effectively groomed to become future elites, while most students (those not on the student council) learn that democracy is about being relatively passive voters, and then leaving decisions to those who are “better” or more popular than they are. As with so many pedagogical approaches, a common “lesson” can teach different students different things. A teacher with an authoritarian style may teach most of the students how to accept an authoritarian boss in a future job, while kids from more privileged circumstances may learn from that same experience how to act as an authoritarian boss themselves one day. 

What if, instead of using elections, students were randomly selected to serve on a mini-public student council, with regular rotation, such that most students got a turn as policy-makers? In addition to teaching far more students about how to engage in democratic deliberation, this could open the door to this democratic process in other domains once they become adults. The selection could be a stratified sample to assure an appropriate balance of classes, genders, etc., rather than selecting from a single unified pool containing all students. The executive officers could be selected by the student mini-public, rather than a mass popularity contest. 

Of course, if the student government doesn’t have any meaningful authority, many of the selected students may not take the task seriously. For democracy education to have any hope of working, the student government would have to be empowered to make some decisions that actually mattered to the students. 

The discouraging impact of not having much real authority doesn’t become apparent as an issue in traditional elected student councils simply because the councils are self-selected candidates willing to run and participate in that largely symbolic and relatively powerless role if elected. Students may choose to run for student council for reasons of status, ego, resume-building, or similar motivations, even if it is a sham activity with no genuinely meaningful decision-making power. I haven’t seen any statistics on this, but suspect that a disproportionate share of elected governmental politicians were elected members of some student government in their youth.

It is beyond the scope of this book to propose what sorts of decisions that high school students themselves would deem worthy of their time and effort, but I am confident they exist. A fundamental question, of course, is whether administrators, faculty, and communities would agree to cede any such authority to children. It would have to be decision domains that wouldn’t put school finances, quality of student education, or safety at risk if poor decisions were made – because democracy can result in some bad decisions as well as good ones. It would need to go beyond choosing a school team mascot, however.

Starting in 2014, an organization called Democracy In Practice worked in multiple public schools in Bolivia to replace traditional student elections with voluntary lotteries. The lotteries were typically done in a way that ensured an even gender balance and a representation of different grade levels. Once formed, these student governments then employed a second round of sortition to determine individual roles, such as spokesperson and treasurer. The idea was to ensure that all students, regardless of popularity or charisma, had the same opportunity to enter student government and learn different roles as a way to develop civic skills. If a selected student did not take the position seriously or do an adequate job, they could be removed by their peers. Lotteries were also used in these student governments to assign necessary tasks that no one wanted to do, and to distribute occasional prizes that incentivized attendance and punctuality. 

While there are some who hold that they should elect the “most capable” to form student government, most students and staff at these Bolivian schools have embraced the lotteries seeing them as fairer and more equitable — resulting in more representative student governments, which are also more participatory. Although this particular project has come to an end, the practice may start to catch on, as in 2017 it was named one of the one hundred most inspiring educational innovations globally by the Finnish organization HundrED, and featured by the renowned author Malcolm Gladwell in one of his podcasts. Democracy In Practice published free PDF guides and videos on their website (www.democracyinpractice.org), to help educators and students around the world bring sortition and other democratic innovations into their schools.

When we graduate to universities, young adults can be trusted to seriously take responsibility for a raft of decisions that significantly affect them while at the university. Jeffrey Kennedy and Simon Pek published an important paper examining the inadequacy and failings of most existing university student participation systems, and argued that sortition is a promising tool for addressing the democratic deficit and enhancing the “deliberative capacity” of universities. After surveying the shortcomings of existing student participation methods, including self-selection bias, and the lack of descriptive representativeness, they offer sortition as an alternative tool. They propose using advisory mini-publics as a starting point, and point to the use of sortition at Queen Mary University of London School of Law, and Victoria University in Canada as recent examples. As with the strategy expressed throughout this book, such one-off uses can serve as proof-of-concept experiments that could eventually fundamentally transform university democracy and the core of what university life could be. Further, the authors suggest that universities often serve as transmission belts for spreading ideas throughout society. Students who experience genuine democracy with sortition, would be more likely to make those democratic demands and changes in wider society as adults.

Share

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Archive (from the beginning)

Let’s look at the way that a typical consumer co-op might select its governing board, in its attempt to be democratic. The members of the small board of directors might have overlapping terms of two or three years, with some portion of the board elected each year. If there aren’t term limits, many board members probably are re-elected to multiple terms. It is likely that there is a nomination committee, usually appointed by (and often drawn from) the existing board. In some unusual cases they may propose more candidates than there are seats to fill, in order to give an actual choice to the members, but more often they nominate the same number of candidates as seats to be filled. From time to time, there may also be renegade members who get over the necessary hurdles to get their names on the ballot. Nonprofit boards often have a dearth of candidates seeking to serve. Those who do put themselves forward may happen to be excellent, but alternatively may have problematic traits or conflicting interests. Some may simply be seeking to bolster their resume by adding some “leadership” credentials.

The general members typically get a bit of information, such as a brief bio and candidate statement and perhaps even answers to some standard questions, and a photo of each candidate. It is rare to have any real campaign or opportunity for candidates to challenge each other’s assertions in their statements, and no fact-checking. Then, a small percentage of members take the time to vote, generally with little or no understanding of the issues facing the co-op and little or no reliable knowledge about substantive differences between the candidates, generally relying on superficial impressions. If things are running smoothly at the co-op, the incumbents are likely to be returned, and if there are serious problems there is some chance they may be replaced — if there happen to be any alternative candidates. Many members are unaware that the election is even taking place. Any efforts to improve turnout (perhaps a raffle prize?) have only a small effect, prompting a few more, still uninformed, members to send in their ballot, or attend the annual meeting. This is probably the best that can be realistically hoped for under an electoral scheme.

In some cases, it may be the intention of the co-op leadership to maintain an undemocratic status quo, by intentionally minimizing member participation. But more often it is the lack of interest and lack of knowledge among members that is the crux of the problem. In the eighteenth century, English philosopher Jeremy Bentham used the term “active aptitude” to describe the conscientious attention to duty that a decision-maker needed to have. He wasn’t referring to some inherent character trait of people, but rather the results of various possible procedures and designs of legislative bodies. It is this active aptitude that citizens will generally fail to exhibit when acting as a rank and file member of a large “democratic” association. While the pejorative term “apathy” may be applied, “rational ignorance” is a more appropriate term. It just isn’t reasonable to expect most people to devote the amount of effort needed to remain “up to speed” on the large number of issues that face every would-be democratic association, especially when their one vote as part of a mass is extremely unlikely to actually make any difference (especially when a slate is proposed that matches the number of seats to be elected). This rational ignorance applies whether voting in an issue referendum or candidate election.

Sortition can solve these problems. The solution that sortition offers is asking a subset of members to give full attention to the needs of their co-op for a relatively short period of time, with the expectation that another subset will take a turn subsequently, and then another, etc. Not all members can have active aptitude, but some can for a limited duration. A large statistically representative sample might be needed on occasion (for very big decisions), but much smaller random samples may be sufficient for certain governance tasks. Unlike governmental mini-publics, which sometimes need to balance fundamentally incompatible societal interests, members of democratic associations generally have a common shared interest that permit a somewhat smaller sample to suffice. Also, members of a smallish board of directors are more akin to delegated agents, rather than constituting an accurately representative body. This concept is affirmed by the commonly used term “board of trustees.”

However, I need to be clear that the idea is not to randomly select a small board of directors. There are many obvious problems with such an approach. If the only concern were impartiality and protection from corrupt manipulation (such as for a court jury), random selection of a small sample might suffice — but democracy also requires some degree of representativeness. Such a small sample size has a high risk of being unacceptably unrepresentative of the membership. Statistical representativeness is tied to the law of large numbers.  Another, perhaps more serious problem with selecting a small board by random selection, is the issue of commitment. A board would need to serve longer terms than a typical court jury — probably a year at an absolute minimum —  and many members simply wouldn’t have the necessary level of commitment, free time, or energy to give adequate attention. Further, a typical board of directors ideally would have an assortment of traits, some of which might be fairly rare in the pool of members. These desired traits would probably be included in a largish mini-public, but could easily be missing in a small board. There is a distinction between a mini-public that only makes broad decisions about policy direction, as opposed to the ongoing detailed oversight of a business’s finances, etc. typically required of a board.

The better way to employ sortition, if a relatively small board is intended, is through a two-step process. A larger, more representative short duration mini-public could be randomly selected to act as a sort of nominating or hiring committee to recruit and select a smaller board of directors, or in lieu of a board of directors, adopt strategic plans while evaluating, as well as hiring and firing, a manager directly. My focus here is not whether a small board of directors, or large member assemblies make policy, but rather how the general membership can exercise informed control of the organization. To maximize the willingness of ordinary members to participate in a mini-public, the jury would be of short duration (perhaps only a few meetings) and its members would be compensated in some manner (e.g. a discount, catered meals during meetings, or direct payments). Short duration representative juries are an excellent way to assure ultimate authority and regular oversight by the ordinary members as a whole. Very few members will keep on top of their coop's issues week by week, year after year, but most members would be willing to focus on their coop governance matters for a small amount of time (perhaps with some compensation), knowing other regular members will do likewise in turn. 

Relying on pure volunteerism for this task is dangerous, since self-selection bias can allow unrepresentative special interests to dominate. However, one impetus toward oligarchy, which Michels discussed, was the control of information by the existing staff or board. It is entirely possible that a temporary mini-public could be artfully manipulated if they were dependent on such “oligarchs' ' for their information. For this reason an effort to use sortition as a democratic tool also necessitates independent facilitation and staffing, not selected by the existing staff or board. The procedure for ensuring independence needs to be institutionalized at the outset, and not be an ad hoc effort at the time of each lottery drawing. There are many possible ways of managing this. Perhaps a separate oversight board made up of members from previous mini-publics would be charged with arranging facilitation for the next mini-public. If sortition became widespread, a cottage industry of experienced mini-public facilitators might grow (indeed has grown in many countries) who would be crowd-source-evaluated for such things as competence and impartiality, etc. Chosen facilitators would need to have free access (with appropriate confidentiality commitments) to all of the co-op’s records and information, to assure the mini-public got fully informed. These facilitators would be evaluated by the staff and members of the mini-public, and file a report about problems and successes at the conclusion of the mini-public that the subsequent facilitator could use to make improvements.

To demonstrate another superiority of a sortition recruiting process for boards, over elections, let's take a hypothetical example of a cooperative whose members all want to have a balanced board that reflects the diversity of the membership. They all want a board that also includes a member with a legal background, one with budget and bookkeeping experience, and one with lots of media skills. Suppose plenty of candidates meeting these criteria decide to run for the board in an election. Because of the problem of voter coordination, regardless of whether a block plurality, ranked-choice preferential, or other voting method is used, it could easily turn out that the mix on the board that gets elected fails to meet most of these criteria that all of the members believe are important. The board may turn out to be all white males without any media or bookkeeping experience. The way that some coops try to overcome this problem is by having a nomination committee select a favored “slate.” For this to work, the election itself must be nominal or token, and it is the selection of the nominating committee that is the point of democratic challenge. With the jury model, a large representative nominating committee can be selected by lot. This randomly selected mini-public could interview potential board members and seek to come to a consensus about the best mix of people to form a balanced board. The election could be dispensed with or maintained merely pro forma or to give the membership a veto option. While most democratic associations have bylaws that mandate the use of elections, they rarely mandate the details for the process of nomination, leaving the door open for easy implementation of a sortition process. Once the system has proven itself, however, it is desirable to amend the bylaws to institutionalize the sortition procedure, because the iron law of oligarchy will always remain a threat with some current group in authority seeking to cement their power.

However, even if the board is democratically selected using a sortition recruitment body, there is another potential locus of “elite control.” An executive director is generally hired and fired by the board. But the board is very part-time and gets most of their information from the executive director, who promotes a friendly “same-team” relationship. It is common for nonprofits to actually have the executive director or staff manipulate the board and preserve oligarchic control. For this reason, it is better to have the executive director hired and fired not by the board, but by single-purpose lottery selected review bodies that have no relationship with the executive director, but can interview supporters and detractors.

The lottery selection process itself must be completely transparent and public so that there is never any question within the membership whether the mini-public selection was honest or manipulated. In Classical Athens, a simple mechanical device was invented called a kleroterion, which was used to randomly and publicly assign citizens to mini-publics tasked with making public decisions. It might be wise to display and honor this lottery drawing as the foundation of the organization’s democracy with some sort of public celebratory event.

Share

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Archive (from the beginning)

All large membership organizations that seek to govern themselves democratically (co-operatives, nonprofits, unions, home-owner associations, worker-owned enterprises, etc.)  face perennial problems. Key among these is, how can an organization maintain member interest in matters of organizational governance year after year, and avoid elite or management “capture?” The path to a solution requires understanding that the nearly exclusive reliance on elections as the tool for selecting governing bodies is incapable of remedying the problem. The problems of apathy, self-selection bias, and rational ignorance (discussed previously), plague both election-based systems, as well as open participation direct-democracy attempts at democracy.

Early in the 20th Century, German sociologist Robert Michels examined what happened within organizations that intended to be internally democratic.  His study of political parties revealed an apparently unstoppable tendency towards elite control. His landmark analysis, published early in the twentieth century, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy, has come to be known as the “iron law of oligarchy.”

 He asserted that any organization, regardless of intent, will sooner or later develop an internal “ruling class.” This governing elite may consist of paid staff, or an elected board of directors. Even if these elite members share the goals of the general membership, they will also develop interests uniquely their own, which include preservation of their role as leaders. In many cases the interest of this governing elite may veer away from the original interests of the membership that created the organization, until the original purpose becomes lost in a forgotten history.

Michels argued that the driving force of this dynamic was that all large and complex organizations use a division of labor. Division of labor in turn leads to specialization, and, according to Michels, specialization leads to oligarchy. Because of their focused attention to the internal workings of the organization the elite can magnify their power. This may be done through control over the flow of information to members, or control over the decision-making rules, combined with low participation rates and indifference among members. As Michels wrote, “the apathy of the masses and their need for guidance has its counterpart in the leaders’ natural greed for power.” Member non-participation is often blamed on “apathy.” That term can connote a certain moral failing by those members, just as the term “ruling class” can connote sinister motivation on the part of the subset that takes the reins. Let’s set aside these connotations and recognize that ordinary members have other commitments in their life, which may be more pressing than the workings of their union or co-op.

The managers of the would-be democratic organization may simply feel the need to step in and fill the vacuum of decision-making created by uninterested members. Oligarchy can arise by default, rather than usurpation by power-hungry managers or elected elite. Everyone may wish that the organization were more democratic.  It can be the design of the governance system that is at fault rather than necessarily the moral flaws of a staff, or board, or general members. In other cases, though, the ruling class enjoys elevated salaries, psychological rewards or other privileges and prerogatives that drive them to effectively oppose true democratization of the organization. Michels argued that the goal of representative democracy free of elite domination was virtually impossible. Elections and other trappings of democracy were a mere façade. Examples that run counter to this view frequently come from unions or associations in crisis, when members are motivated to give full attention. Even if members occasionally reassert control during some organizational crisis and resulting mobilization, generally an oligarchic elite (perhaps a replacement one) eventually ends up holding power. Perpetual crisis — an association rife with factionalism or suspicion of distant leaders — is not an acceptable price for maintaining member involvement and democracy.

Michels identified a powerful tendency, but I and others, such as Thomas Diefenbach, argue it falls short of an “iron law.” The tendency to oligarchy is shaped by institutional design and other factors. A key is to allow a division of labor but avoid specialization in the key domain of decision-making, through the use of regular rotation by means such as sortition. This requires rejecting the hegemony of the concept of expert leadership — the belief that there are typically certain difficult-to-learn skills or character traits that make for uniquely superior leaders, and the belief that such leaders are essential or inevitable. If such people do exist in certain organizations and circumstances, they should be advisors rather than deciders. 

Even if one accepts the more limited definition of democracy in which the members aren’t expected to self-govern, but merely monitor and sanction their leaders, normal attention and detailed knowledge of leader performance is almost always inadequate. A contributor to the momentum towards oligarchy is the simple fact that the members have other life issues to attend to, and it is completely unrealistic to hope that all, most, or even many members will give the attention needed to maintain a meaningful democracy, even for the relatively short duration of an election. The issue of rational ignorance, which I have brought up repeatedly, rears its head yet again. The problem of rational ignorance is multiplied in the cases of non-governmental democracies, especially if a person is a member of more than one would-be democratic association — for example, a member of a food co-op, a union at one’s workplace, a credit union, and a number of charitable associations, each seeking the engagement and attention of the member. The small minority of members of an organization who are deeply engaged may bemoan the “apathy” of the other members, but no amount of cajoling or mobilization tactics will overcome the reality that members have a limited amount of time and attention they are willing to offer on an ongoing basis, year after year. 

Perhaps we need a different term than “oligarchy” to describe a system that is non-democratic, but in the absence of would-be oligarchs. Democracy requires more than formal equality of members. It is also more than the nominal “consent” of the governed. Democracy requires that decisions track with the decisions that would be made if somehow all members were fully informed and participating. Sortition is the tool that can achieve this. But even then, the tool must be wielded appropriately, as it would be a serious mistake to simply select a board of directors by lottery.

Share

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Archive (from the beginning)

Up to this point I have focused primarily on sortition as it applies to governmental units, whether national, state or municipal. However, there are many sorts of non-governmental associations that nominally operate (or seek to operate) democratically. These would-be democratic organizations include unions, consumer cooperatives, housing associations, credit unions, worker-owned businesses, political parties, and even global non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Even virtual associations such as Internet platforms could function democratically. There are also countless organizations that do not currently seek to operate democratically, but perhaps should, including schools, charities, and even for-profit business firms. These would-be, and could-be, democratic associations have a pretty poor track record in terms of achieving equality, participation, and self-rule. Many of the failings that afflict nominal governmental democracies are also visited upon non-governmental democracies. Some problems, such as expensive election campaigns and gerrymandering may not apply, but the more fundamental problems, such as rational ignorance and elite domination are rampant.

Very small organizations may function using some variant of direct democracy. Think of the stereotypical worker-owned business that has frequent all-member collective meetings. These micro-democracies have their own problems, including time inefficiency. But the tougher issue is that this direct democracy isn’t scalable to huge organizations. With more and more members, at some point, virtually every democratic organization resorts to some sort of representative system by necessity. Such representative systems almost universally rely on elections. Elections are the only familiar tool for representative selection. The jury model of sortition never enters the minds of members as an alternative to consider. In this chapter we will explore the advantages of sortition. Sortition can allow non-governmental associations to solve many of their democratic deficits. It is generally easier to make big reforms within private associations than within governments. But even some private associations may be chartered under state statutes that mandate the use of elections — so some research needs to be done before launching any specific reform effort.  By experimenting with sortition in non-governmental associations, democratic reformers can amass a wealth of real-world experience that will also be useful for subsequent governmental reforms. Trial and error is an essential part of perfecting democratic procedures and design.

When is Sortition Appropriate

It is important to note that sortition is not always the appropriate democratic tool. Dissatisfied members of an association have the classic choice of “voice or exit” — speak up or quit. Sortition is most useful for larger organizations with defined memberships, where exit by individuals would be a personal hardship. Governments meet this criterion, as do associations dealing with necessities like housing, or employment. Simon Pek has argued that sortition might be a good tool for reviving democracy within labor unions . While a person might technically be able to leave their union or job by quitting and looking for new employment, and a condominium owner might be able to leave a condo association by selling their unit and moving, the effort entailed makes this an impractical hardship. Exercising voice through some democratic process is fitting. In contrast, voluntary advocacy organizations with more porous membership boundaries, (such as political parties or movement organizations seeking to make changes in society), do not satisfy this criterion. Members of such organizations have a wide range of commitment levels, with many members being peripheral. Members who disagree with the direction of their organization can easily quit. They can even help form a new organization more in keeping with their preferences. Such associations might prefer the principle that the more one contributes through personal effort to the project of the association the more say one should get. Members who attend a lot of membership meetings and do lots of volunteer work, get to have more say about how the organization is run. This is an alternative to the democratic principle of political equality. 

Deciding when sortition is a good fit is not always obvious. In an example at the intersection of governmental and association representation, the leftist Mexican political party, the National Regeneration Movement (Morena) has used random selection to nominate some of its candidates.  In 2015, 2018 and 2021 Morena used a lottery among a pool of party members who have been advanced by district party assemblies to nominate a portion of its candidates in the party list proportional representation election for both chambers of the national legislature. This is an unusual application of a sortition, both because of the restricted pool from which nominees are drawn and because those nominated then need to pass through a filter of election. This electoral filter, however, is very different than in the single-seat constituencies we are accustomed to (and which Mexico also uses for most of the seats in its legislature). The winning seats elected by proportional representation are filled from a party list in proportion to the national vote for each party.  This means that the individual candidate-based “principle of distinction” as described by Bernard Manin (and discussed in chapter 7) we are accustomed to in single-seat winner-take-all elections is less dominant. However, this lottery nomination process was essentially symbolic, as it only filled out the bottom of the party list, making it unlikely any of the lottery designated nominees would actually take office. Even if the full slate were nominated in this manner, since those names put forward by local units would likely a “certain sort” of people, this lottery process would serve more of an anti-corruption function (to avoid obligations and deal-making with party leaders) than a democratic function.

Platform Democracy

In addition to long existing member associations that seek to govern themselves democratically, there is a new sort of association made possible by peer-to-peer creations on the Internet. As an example, suppose some large Internet entity such as Uber or facebook were owned by its users in a cooperative, rather than owned by stock investors. The term “platform co-op” can be used to describe such organizations. Many platforms can develop with minimal upfront capital. The paradigm by which the founders eventually get to cash in with a public stock offering is not the only way such Internet firms could mature. A democratic co-op option is possible. But how could an organization with members who may be spread across the globe, most of whom have minimal or no direct knowledge or interaction with other members beyond that mediated through the particular application, run the organization as a democracy? How could they hold elections in which members are well informed about issues and candidates (when even high stakes governmental elections fail this standard)? Certainly the Internet could allow all members who wished to vote  directly on policy in a sort of indirect-direct democracy, but the problem of rational ignorance would still dominate. Elections are only a responsible governance tool if the voters understand what they are voting on. Rather than throwing one’s hands up and concluding that a global democracy of a business or other sort of association with many millions of members is just too impractical, we need to consider sortition. 

Imagine a cooperatively-owned ride sharing service. It might be owned by the drivers, or by the riders, or both. Let’s take an example owned by the drivers. A feature of a lottery, is that although for typical associations it is standard to give an equal probability for each member to be drawn in a governance lottery, it is also possible to tailor it to unique circumstances. We could assign drivers proportionate chances in the lottery based on how many hours per month they drive, for example. If a driver governing assembly is drawn, it could fairly reflect the interests of the drivers as a whole, including a balanced share of full time and part time drivers. These drivers might get a healthy salary to devote themselves to the issues of governance for a set period, in lieu of their regular driving time. But with regular rotation, these directors would know they were making decisions that would affect them once they returned to being drivers. There are numerous possible variations on this theme, in terms of what tasks mini-publics might be charged with, their terms of office, their size, etc. A worker-owned business might decide to use a stratified random sample to assure each department gets an appropriate number of members (such as from the sales department, factory floor, human resources, etc.)

Sortition could even be a useful tool for other sorts of business governance. The problem of rational ignorance and ill-informed members of a traditional stock-ownership corporation being asked to elect a board of directors could be addressed in a similar manner as the co-op model described in a previous chapter. A “representative” subset of shareholders randomly drawn (whether based on equality or based on the number of shares owned) could constitute a  hiring body that becomes well-informed and crafts a desired board of directors. While the term “democratic” is inappropriate in situations in which there is intentionally no equality among members, sortition can still play a useful role. While I am not advocating this reform (more akin to the aristocratic use of sortition in Renaissance Italian city states, than democracy), the fact that this tool hasn’t even been considered is striking, but not surprising. Existing elites hold their current positions thanks to the status quo system of selection, and it would take an incredibly well organized shareholder revolt to change it. Sortition might better be used within a capitalist firm in conjunction with something like the German codetermination (mitbestimmung) laws, which require large investor-owned firms to include worker representatives on their boards of directors.

Public oversight role for sortition

The anti-corruption potential for sortition suggests new sorts of public oversight mini-publics. There are situations where some activity has a significant impact on the public, but where the public has no, or ineffective input. Here I am discussing quasi-governmental functions, which are not currently handled by existing governments, but might be well suited for sortition oversight. I will not present any fully formed proposals here, but merely suggest the sorts of things sortition could be used to address.

Some cities that have had serious problems with relationships between police departments and the community, have appointed community oversight boards. Rather than having elected officials appoint a group of self-styled “community leaders,” a community panel that is fully representative of the community could be drawn by lottery. The goal would not be to assemble leaders or experts, but rather facilitate the expression of community priorities and values. Any such oversight body obviously needs its own staff and control of information flows independent of the politicians and the entity being monitored. The body would also need to have real power over the organization they were overseeing. 

Some examples of possible uses will help. As technology advances, we are entering an age in which aerial drones and public video cameras, linked to facial recognition software and identity databases could make policing much more effective, but also subject to abuse and loss of privacy.1 If such technology is to be deployed, it makes sense to assure that it remains permanently under democratic control of the populace and that no government officials or police department can abuse it. The jury model is a natural fit here. In ancient Athens, public officials were subject to review by an auditing jury, as a further protection against corruption. A  constantly refreshed body of ordinary citizens supported by their own staff could prevent or punish abuse today as well. Citizens gathered into a jury have an interest in fighting corruption such as bribery. One by one, citizens often have an immediate short-term interest in participating in corruption, such as seeing their own individual bribe be successful (to speed the issuance of some personally needed permit, etc.). But as a group (on a jury), they have a more powerful democratic community interest in punishing and preventing bribery and corruption as a whole.

We have barely begun to scratch the surface of all the places where sortition could improve public life.

By 2015 sortition implementations were becoming so commonplace in dozens of countries all around the world (though still almost completely unknown in the United States), that a case by case recitation is happily now impossible. While some of the many hundreds of sortition panels were set up by civic organizations, a huge number were formally sponsored by local, regional, and national governments. Citizens’ assemblies have tackled a wide range of topics: from neighborhood concerns, to legalizing abortion in Ireland; from whether to locate a nuclear waste dump in Australia, to a huge number addressing climate change. I will highlight just a few examples.

The institutionalization of sortition within government is making progress around the world. Australia took some early strides. With impetus from the NewDemocracy Foundation, founded and financed by the industrialist Luca Belgiorno-Nettis, (with support from a number of leading “elder statesmen” — retired government leaders from across the political spectrum, and academics, such as Lyn Carson) there is growing interest in sortition in Australia. In 2009, the NewDemocracy Foundation organized a nation-wide Citizens Parliament among a representative sample of 150 randomly selected residents, to deliberate on issues of democratic reform. In 2012, with the assistance of the NewDemocracy Foundation, the city council of Canada Bay (a suburb of Sydney ) in New South Wales, established a 24-member Citizens’ Policy Panel by sortition to essentially decide on the council budget (“What services should we deliver in the City of Canada Bay, and how should we pay for them?”). While nominally advisory, the city council had committed to follow the recommendations prior to its commencement. Following the success of that initial use, in 2014 the city council established another Citizens’ Policy Panel to deal with the issue of leasing policy for city-owned properties. Largely due to the work of the NewDemocracy Foundation the sortition model has been spreading across Australia with large cities like Melbourne employing it for major budget decisions, and in 2016 the state of South Australia used sortition to advise on whether to establish a nuclear waste dump (the State Premier had favored this as a revenue source, but the citizens’ assembly rejected it). 

In response to the “yellow vest” protests in France, which began in 2018, President Emmanuel Macron initiated the creation of the Citizens’ Convention for Climate. Macron stated that “citizens have asked for more democracy because they do not simply want to be the people who respect laws: they now want to take part in developing laws themselves.” In 2019 and 2020 One hundred and fifty randomly selected citizens deliberated and adopted a long list of de-carbonization policy proposals. Although Prime Minister Edouard Philippe had committed to advancing all proposals without a filter, there did end up being some cherry-picking and watering-down.

In 2019, with the help of the G1000 organizers and others, the small German-speaking eastern region of Belgium, Ostbelgien, institutionalized sortition, with two sorts of lottery-selected bodies. The Citizens’ Council is a twenty-four member permanent body whose randomly selected members each serve for eighteen months. This body serves as the Agenda Council in my multi-body sortition design. It can select issues the members believe need attention, and call into creation a short duration, randomly-selected Citizens’ Assembly of around fifty members (akin to the Review Panels of my design) to deliberate and issue recommendations. While the government is required to respond to these recommendations, these sortition bodies do not have binding policy authority. 

The Brussels region of Belgium also formally institutionalized an ongoing sortition process, though the design is problematic. Committees consisting of 15 members of the area parliament combined with 45 randomly selected citizens each tackle an issue chosen by the Bureau of the Parliament from among those topics proposed by petition of at least a thousand residents. The parliamentarians and allotted members can deliberate together, but vote separately, with only the votes of the parliamentarians having legal force, with parliamentarians who abstain or vote against a proposal with majority citizen approval must explain their objection.

In France, which had a number of high visibility sortition panels, the city of Paris also established a permanent sortition arm of government with 100 randomly selected citizens. Like the Ostbelgien model, the proposals generated are merely advisory to the elected city council, though the expressed hope is that this body can help hold the electeds to account. 

The spread of sortition and its partial or possibly complete supplanting of elections will be a lengthy historical process. A first step is to spread awareness of sortition as a democratic tool – a goal of this book. This must certainly be followed by small scale or narrowly limited implementations so that people can become familiar with sortition and evaluate how it works. These steps are self-evident since nobody will demand a reform they have never heard of and have never seen in use. 

There are many possible types of implementation, including both governmental and non-governmental scenarios. Here is a sample of possible roles for random selection that may have beneficial effects in and of themselves as well as disseminating the model more widely.

• One time projects (as with the BC Citizens’ Assembly)

• Specific issue areas (e.g. zoning, healthcare)

• Advisory (to elected body or to voters in a referendum — as in Oregon)

• Budgets (as in Australian municipalities)

• An allotted chamber serving in conjunction with an elected chamber in a bicameral system, (in a later chapter I will explain why this is not a good use of sortition)

• Oversight of legislature (such as ethics rules enforcement, or redistricting)

• Single-issue short-term juries that can accept or reject legislation

• Total replacement of an elected legislative branch

• Departmental Oversight (e.g. community police commission)

• Hiring and firing chief executive (similar to the city manager concept, but selected by a jury rather than an elected city council)

• Rotation among a pool of qualified executives

• Rotation of Judges (e.g. from among a pool of qualified lawyers)

• Constitutional Convention (as in Ireland)

• Non-governmental associations (e.g. unions, co-ops)

• Workplace/enterprise governance - German co-determination labor law - seats on board of directors

• Home associations - whether low-income public housing or high-income condo and home-owners’ associations, or even prisons

• Voluntary Non-profits  

I will discuss in a later chapter, why straight sortition to select non-profit board members is less appropriate for purely voluntary associations in which the level of member commitment varies widely and members can simply leave if dissatisfied. However, juries of members serving for a short duration in order to recruit and “hire” a well-balanced board has many advantages over traditional elections.

Share

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Archive (from the beginning)

Following the momentous British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly, a similar sortition assembly, also looking at election reform, was empaneled in Ontario in 2006. After extensive study and deliberation, this citizens’ assembly recommended a Mixed Member Proportional system for the province. However, in the ensuing referendum, which was held in conjunction with the regular election, Assembly members complained of inadequate general voter education about the relatively complex reform proposal, and the plan was rejected by the voters in the 2007 referendum. While education and deliberation by average citizens in the Citizens’ Assembly led to a decision in favor of a system of proportional representation for parliamentary elections, rational ignorance resulted, as usual, in an electorate that lacked an understanding of the pros and cons of what they were voting on. It appears that most voters simply followed the lead of politicians from their preferred political party. Only the NDP and Green Parties, which together garnered under 25 percent of the vote, formally endorsed the reform proposal. In British Columbia, none of the political parties formally endorsed that proposal, so it may have lacked the partisan flavor of Ontario’s election.

Also in 2006, a Netherlands' Citizens' Assembly (Burgerforum) was established by sortition to advise the parliament on election reform as well. This panel proposed maintaining the existing system of proportional representation, but reforming some details of the election law, which were subsequently passed by the parliament. The proliferation of sortition had begun.

In 2009-2010, in response to the economic crisis of 2008 an Icelandic civics organization with the eventual endorsement of the national government sponsored a randomly selected forum to address constitutional revisions. In 2011-2012 an innovative and grand sortition implementation known as G1000 took place in Belgium in response to the partisan electoral stalemate in that country. Again, this was initiated outside of government. More than 700 randomly selected citizens attended a summit, and thousands more participated online and in other ways. The final report contained concrete proposals on issues such as employment policy, and garnered substantial media attention, notice from politicians, and general interest in this deliberative model. Support for sortition within Belgium grew rapidly.

In Ireland the government convened a Constitutional Convention, with 66 out of its 100 members chosen by lot, to discuss possible amendments. The Convention met from December, 2012 through March, 2014. Like most of the other citizen assemblies it was granted only an advisory role, with the government not bound to accept its recommendations. The government failed to respond to the Convention’s recommendations by the proposed deadline, suggesting the government clearly saw the Convention as ancillary. But one particular item that emerged from the Constitutional Convention was the proposal to legalize same-sex marriage, which was put to a national referendum in 2015 — which passed by a wide margin (62 percent in favor.) A deeply Catholic country, it seems unlikely such a proposal could have been enacted so soon if left to cautious politicians. The fact that this was the first time in the world that a country had adopted same-sex marriage through a referendum was widely reported. But was less well known, but perhaps more fundamental was that this marked the first time a national constitution had been amended based on recommendations of a convention primarily drawn by lot.

In 2011 the Citizens Jury model of Ned Crosby was institutionalized in the state of Oregon, USA. The government adopted a law establishing a Citizens’ Initiative Review Commission. Under this law, prior to each statewide referendum on a proposal initiated by petition, the Commission can appoint a Review Panel of between 18 and 24 people. The Commission uses random sampling methods, stratified according to various demographic factors to assure representativeness, to select the members of each panel. Each Review Panel meets for five days, studies the ballot measure, hears from supporters and opponents, and issues a report of their findings, which is published in the voter guide that is made available to all voters. Such reports typically present a majority report and a minority report summarizing the reasons some participants were for and others against the proposal at the end of the deliberation. These reports are obviously just advisory, with the referendum voters having the final say. In the initial run in 2012, it appears that most voters did not read, or even know about, this guidance, but awareness has grown in subsequent referendums. This sortition model of deliberative advice leading up to a referendum was also used in the Valsamoggia region of Italy in dealing with a proposed amalgamation of five municipalities.

Variants of the citizens’ assembly and citizens jury were not the only sortition models that began to spread. A model similar to the German Planning Cells, called a “consensus conference” was developed in Denmark in the 1980’s. It is used specifically for issues of new technology, where it was recognized that policy implications extend outside the technological realm (such as genetically modified food and electronic surveillance). The goal was to open the debate beyond just technology experts and politicians. These Danish consensus conferences invited a random sample of Danes with no particular technological background to read and hear presentations from a range of experts and issue findings to help guide government policy. The Danish Board of Technology invites two-thousand randomly selected residents to participate, and from those who step forward, the Board selects a demographically representative group (in terms of age, gender, employment and geographic residence) of between fourteen and sixteen participants. After a couple of educational preparatory weekend sessions, the participants engage in an intense four-day deliberation in which they ask questions of expert witnesses on different sides of the issue and draft a final report, which is provided to policy makers and members of parliament. This model has been replicated in Holland, England, France, Switzerland, Norway, Canada, Australia, Japan, Korea and Israel. 

In 1987, another political scientist, James Fishkin of Stanford University,  developed the concept of deliberative  polling. In summary, the deliberative opinion poll works like this: A statistically representative random sample of people is surveyed on some public policy question. The respondents then are given “carefully balanced” background materials to read before being gathered to listen to a series of presentations by competing experts. They develop questions for the experts in small group discussions to clarify their understanding, but do not directly debate among themselves. Finally participants are surveyed again to see how their opinions change. As Fishkin contends that the changes in opinion reflect the changes and conclusions that the public in general would reach, if people had the opportunity and motivation to become better informed and more engaged.

Participants are paid for their time, and may need to travel and be put up in hotels, so this isn’t cheap. Fishkin and colleagues have received funding from a variety of governmental and non-governmental organizations to conduct many such deliberative polls around the world. One high visibility deliberative poll in Brussels in 2007 was billed as “Europe in One Room.” A 362-member representative sample from all twenty-seven EU countries gathered to deliberate on public policies such as European pensions and retirement. The product of this deliberation was informative but had no binding effect. 

In China, in 2008, Fishkin and colleagues implemented an effectively binding deliberative poll to decide on infrastructure investments in Zeguo Township in Wenling City. Government officials committed to fund the projects favored by a representative random sample of households. By sampling households, instead of adults, a male bias was introduced as most households chose to have a male member participate. But this bias was nowhere near as extreme as that of the party and government. The goal was to avoid any appearance of corruption, and gauge public support for 30 different projects, including bridges, roads, schools, sewage treatment plants, community gardens, etc. Party and government officials were pleasantly surprised by the results of the public deliberation. According to Fishkin and colleagues, 

“Jiang Zhaohua, the Zeguo Town party secretary, expected neither the high ratings for sewage treatment and other environmental projects nor the low ratings for ‘image’ or road projects. … More generally, he was surprised at the difference between the local leadership’s perception of what the people would want and what they actually wanted after deliberating.”

The use of democratic sortition within a non-democratic government system creates interesting discomfiture in terms of democratic ideals. As Jiang Zhaohua noted, 

“Although I gave up some final decision-making power, we gain more power back because the process has increased the legitimacy for the choice of priority projects and created public transparency in the public policy decision-making process. Public policy is therefore more easily implemented.”

A number of other jurisdictions followed suit and invited Fishkin to conduct several additional deliberative polls in China. In 2017, the nation of Mongolia adopted a law requiring this method of in-person deliberative polling, using a large random sample of citizens, to review any proposed constitutional amendments. The second implementation took place in 2023.

However, the citizens’ assembly model of sortition has been implemented many hundreds of times around the world in the past couple of decades

Share

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Archive (from the beginning)

The sortition model that has become the predominant design in the early twenty-first century is known as the citizens’ assembly. It was launched in 2004 in British Columbia (BC), when the provincial government appointed Dr. Jack Blaney to chair and coordinate the creation of a representative body of non-politicians to examine and propose any needed reforms to the province’s election system. The creation of the  British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly was perhaps the most significant advance for the worldwide awareness of sortition as an alternative democratic tool.  I agree with the chair of the Citizens’ Assembly, who stated in a public address to municipality leaders in BC, 

“In the histories of democracies, this will not be a footnote. This will be something very, very important.”

The circumstances that led to the creation of this landmark use of sortition are interesting. In 1996, although the BC Liberal Party won a plurality of the votes province-wide over their main rival the New Democratic Party (NDP), by 42 percent to 39 percent, with most of the remainder going to parties of the right. However, due to split-votes in a series of winner-take-all plurality multi-party contests in districts (ridings) throughout the province, the NDP (though receiving fewer votes) won more seats in the provincial legislature and formed the government. This “unfair” distortion of the “public will,” generated by the specific characteristics of the electoral system, prompted Liberal leader Gordon Campbell to pledge that the next time the Liberal Party gained power they would convene an assembly to examine the electoral system and propose reforms, if deemed appropriate. In the following election, in 2001, the Liberal Party won a majority (57.6 percent) of the popular votes, but as a result of the winner-take-all plurality election rules in each riding, won a wildly inflated 97.5 percent of the seats in the legislature (seventy-seven out of seventy-nine seats).  Such wild swings in election outcomes from substantial, but still far more modest swings in voter preferences, are a risk in any winner-take-all single-seat election system. Rather than simply enjoying their extreme good fortune, the Liberal Party leader Campbell followed through on his commitment to convene a special assembly to study how to improve the election system. 

In 2002 the new Liberal government appointed a respected former legislator, Gordon Gibson, to propose a format and process for an assembly. Recognizing that politicians had an inherent conflict of interest when it came to evaluating election systems (naturally favoring those methods likely to favor their party) Gibson recommended setting up a body containing no politicians, and not appointed by any politicians. He proposed the innovative1 concept of using sortition. Average citizens would be paid to work (mostly on weekends) over a ten month period on behalf of the entire citizenry. The Citizens’ Assembly was authorized and financed by a unanimous vote of the legislature in 2003, and was convened in 2004. 

To assure a body that was “broadly representative of the adult population,” it was decided to supplement the ancient Athenian lottery process by adding modern scientific stratified sampling. An equal number of men and women, stratified according to age, were randomly selected from the voter lists of each of the province’s 79 districts. These people were invited to attend a local selection meeting where they could ask questions and learn more about the process. Out of 23,000 people invited, 1,700 expressed interest in participating and a little under 1,000 attended the final selection meetings. Thus, unlike mandatory jury duty, there was a substantial self-selection element within the random selection process. 158 people (half male, half female) were selected by lot from this pool. One small minority, the aboriginal (called “Native American” in the U.S.) was unrepresented, so a special random drawing from among all the aboriginal people who had attended any of the meetings was held to select one additional man and woman, making a total of 160 members. The Assembly had professional staff and was chaired by a former University president and experienced facilitator, Dr. Jack Blaney.

The citizens’ Assembly had three phases:

1) A learning phase: Over six weekends from January through March the members met in plenary sessions and small groups to learn all about the variety of election methods used around the world. Staff gathered a vast amount of balanced and impartial information reviewed by a committee of academics and experts, and arranged presentations. The Assembly members not only attended meetings but ate many meals together and developed an esprit de corps based in respect and a common purpose.

2) A public hearings phase: In May and June members of the Citizens’ Assembly participated in 50 public hearings across the province. The hearings were two-way, with presentations for the public and input from British Columbian individuals and organizations. The Citizens’ Assembly also received some 1,600 written submissions. At the time, I was working with FairVote promoting proportional representation, and submitted one of those 1,600 documents. 

3) A deliberation phase: From September through November, the Assembly used a variety of means to identify the most important values they wanted from an election system. The group quickly reached a consensus that some sort of proportional representation system would be superior to the plurality winner-take-all single-seat district system currently in place (the same as that widely used throughout the United States). The options were narrowed to two. In a secret vote, 123 members favored the single transferable vote (STV) method of PR used in Australia and Ireland, while 31 preferred Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) form of PR used in Germany. In the final vote the members agreed to recommend that the province adopt STV by a vote of 146 in favor and 7 against.

This proposal for a new election system, according to the legislative act creating the Citizens’ Assembly, then went directly to the voters in a referendum, bypassing the provincial parliament (as provided for in the enabling legislation – again recognizing that the politicians had a conflict of interest). The reform recommendation was approved by 57.7 percent of the vote, following a campaign in which both supporters and opponents received equal government funding for voter education. Unfortunately, the parliament had imposed a super-majority 60 percent requirement, thus preventing the new system from taking effect. Ironically, that 57.7 percent was just larger than the 57.6 percent majority the Liberal Party, which had imposed the super-majority requirement, had received in the previous election, and substantially more than the 45.8 percent the Liberal Party received to win a majority of seats in the 2005 election.

Despite the fact that the product of their work did not pass into law, the competence, commitment of the participants in this sortition deliberative process was inspirational. As Jack Blaney noted in a public address near the end of the process, praising the work and civic-mindedness of this random selection of residents, the politicians

“invited 160 British Columbians – ordinary British Columbians, they called them….[T]hese 160 British Columbians feel a great sense of responsibility to all British Columbia. They have become the most extraordinary British Columbians the government could have created…Attendance at the meetings is about 98 percent. This is a Guinness-Book-of-Records kind of statistic. I have not in my life belonged to an organization where there has been such dedication and commitment.”

The members of the Citizens’ Assembly were extremely positive about the experience. As one member said during the final wrap-up, this

“democratic experiment, I think, is going to have a profound impact on not just ourselves, as individuals, but our society as a whole.”

From the earliest days of elected representative government, problems associated with elections have been readily apparent. In both England and the United States, candidates commonly passed out intoxicating spirits or meals to buy votes. Indeed, the disgust about the tumult and corruption of election campaigns prompted one anonymous subscriber to the English journal The Political Register and Impartial Review of New Books in 1768 to propose a “Scheme of a Political Lottery, for the Peace of the Kingdom” (presumably tongue in cheek). The author proposed that elections for parliament be replaced by a lottery. Lottery tickets would be sold, with the winners getting seats in parliament. Five percent of proceeds would be set aside to buy “guzzle” for all the boroughs, with the remainder going to pay off the national debt;

“by which scheme the noisy and expensive business of electioneering (which puts the whole kingdom in a ferment) will be over in two hours, many people have an opportunity of serving their country cheap, and much bribery and corruption prevented.”

Despite their glaring flaws, elections came to be thought of as the only alternative to authoritarianism. Sortition was still used in some Italian city republics, but as an anti-corruption tool among the elite ruling families – not for popular democracy. By the early eighteenth century democratic sortition had evaporated from both the public’s and political theorists’ consciousness. For nearly two centuries hardly any published proposals for sortition appeared. The first serious essay I know of in the twentieth century1 was by the Trinidadian anti-Stalinist Marxist and historian, C. L. R. James in 1956 entitled “Every Cook Can Govern: A Study of Democracy in Ancient Greece; Its Meaning for Today.”

In recent years, however, advocacy and real-world implementations of sortition have been mushrooming around the globe. In this chapter I will look at a few of these. They range from unofficial advisory “deliberative polls,” to formal public policy decision-making bodies. A number of sortition theorists started experimenting with real-world applications towards the end of the twentieth century. The modern reinvention of sortition can be traced to several parallel developments in Europe and North America. 

German Prof. Dr. Peter C. Dienel in 1972 developed what are called “Planning Cells,” to better connect average citizens with government decision-making. A random sample of 25 people directly or indirectly affected by some policy issue are paid to study an issue and deliberate over a five to seven day period. They are provided with background material, and then gathered to listen to presentations from experts and various competing advocates. The participants then break into small groups for discussion. At the end of the process, the planning cell adopts final policy recommendations. These planning cells are typically convened by governmental entities that are willing to adhere to the recommendations that come out of the process, and participants are generally very engaged and pleased with the deliberative process. First employed in the town of Schwelm, in the Ruhr District of Germany, planning cells have since been used more than a hundred times in Germany, Spain and even the United States. 

A similar model has been employed in Austria through what are called “Wisdom Councils.” The Office of Future Related Issues (OFRI) in the State of Vorarlberg, Austria has facilitated local governments in convening dozens of Wisdom Councils. These are randomly selected groups of 12 to 15 residents who tackle an issue of their choosing, using facilitation in an attempt to reach a consensus position. In some cases issues are pre-selected by government officials, in which case they are referred to as “Creative Insight Councils.” 

In the United States, Ned Crosby, apparently unaware of this German invention, founded the Jefferson Center in 1974 to facilitate the development of a similar model he called a “Citizens Jury.” This is variously spelled as “Citizen Jury,” “Citizens’ Jury,” and “Citizens Jury,” the last of which was trademarked by the Jefferson Center. Pulling together a random sample of average citizens, various Citizen Juries, initially in Minnesota and in later decades across the country, tackled a variety of thorny issues such as health care reform, presidential elections, agricultural impacts on water quality, physician-assisted suicide, global climate change, etc. The goal was to see if a deliberative process in which participants heard all sides could uncover common ground and discover a sort of group wisdom. The juries were generally small (a dozen or more participants), but were often conducted multiple times to gauge the consistency of decisions. Both participants and organizers were happy with the process and outcomes. But these were essentially academic exercises demonstrating the validity of the deliberative model, rather than having an actual impact on public policy.

A few books began to appear with proposals for selecting at least some legislators by lot, including Un-Vote for a New America in 1976. and A Citizen Legislature by Ernest Callenbach and Michael Phillips in 1985. The renowned political scientist Robert Dahl proposed a sortition body to enhance democracy, which he called a “minipopulus.” Dahl, who was called the “dean of American political scientists,” by Foreign Affairs magazine, in the conclusion of his important book, Democracy and its Critics, proposed sortition to create a set of deliberative bodies (what he termed a “minipopulus”) each dealing with a defined issue area, as a possibility for a future democracy. In his proposal a minipopulus would complement, rather than replace conventional democratic institutions. Each minipopulus could be attended by “an advisory committee of scholars and specialists and by an administrative staff. It could hold hearings, commission research, and engage in debate and discussion” for perhaps a year before rendering a judgment. By creating a microcosm of the full citizenry through sortition, as in the case of jury service, the participants suddenly have an interest in becoming informed and attentive because there is a substantial possibility that their vote, or their contribution to debate, will actually matter.

The sortition model that has become the predominant design in the early twenty-first century is known as the citizens’ assembly. It was launched in 2004 in British Columbia, Canada when the provincial government appointed Dr. Jack Blaney to chair and coordinate the creation of a representative body of non-politicians to examine and propose any needed reforms to the province’s election system. I will describe this historic launch and model in some detail in the next post, and then continue with a survey of the variety of sortition designs promulgated shortly thereafter.