I thought this post covered some of the accountability risks of citizens assemblies, but it felt like it pulled some punches.
The author discusses 3 risks and potential solutions, given below for easy recall:
1. policy accountability risk: “If the majority threshold of a jury vote is less than the acceptable confidence level for the sample size, in order to provide accountability and assurance of representativeness, a second jury could be called (perhaps larger) to see if they come to the same conclusion.”
2. Bribery risks: “In a modern context, the same anti-bribery provisions that protect against jury tampering can be applied to sortition bodies. The threat of prosecution for wrong-doing should also remain. It would be important to protect against pay-offs to former mini-public members in cash, job offers, or other perks, from groups interested in the legislation the representative had worked on. All mini-public members might be told that an “undercover” person might pretend to try to bribe them, and if they report it they would get a reward.”
3. Representational accountability risks: “If, however, a sortition system is poorly designed (by replicating some of the corrupting aspects of existing elected legislatures), the representational accountability could be hampered. Simply substituting selection by election with selection by lot is not enough. If a law-making body (selected by lot), dealt with a wide range of issues, and had a long term of office, it is likely that power hierarchies would develop, vote trading and other untoward practices would arise…Rotation as practiced in Athens and many other jurisdictions is a key component for avoiding all kinds of corruption and unrepresentativeness.”
But the amount of words spent on these actual risks is only a fraction of the post’s total. Most of the words in this post are discussing the anti-corruption features of sortition. The previous 2 posts were a good place for these anti-corruption ideas, but this post should try to steelman the argument for why sortition is risky, and how to ameliorate those risks.
Also, there were some more risks I am surprised he didn’t discuss:
1. Policy accountability risk: What prevents CA members from voting in their short term interest, since they don’t have any external long term electoral pressures like politicians do?
2. Problems with the randomness of sortition: how can the public reliably verify that a sortition was done using true randomness? What are the ways that the random sortition process could be subverted, and how do we protect against it?
3a. CA members inability to write legislation: randomly selected citizens likely aren’t going to be lawyers, so they aren’t going to be good at writing laws. How do citizens assemblies reliably turn the representative citizen views into wise legislation?
3b. If the CA members aren’t writing the legislation, but instead hand off their output to a group of lawyers, how are the resulting principal-agent risks dealt with?
Overall, I think this post started to get at the risks of sortition, but it would be improved by removing some of the pro sortition paragraphs and replace them with accounts of additional risks to sortition.
Since these points occurred to you, they will probably occur to others, so I better address them in this chapter.
Point 1. is implicitly addressed through the entire book, but an express explanation should probably go here.
Your point 2 was addressed in an earlier chapter, where I contrasted the transparency of an honest lottery with the problem of proving the honesty of an election here:
Point 3a was addressed where I talked about the multi-body design, (and previously) Interest Panels (not random assemblies) would prepare draft bills for random Review Panels to consider. These Review Panels would have professional staff to refine, draft amendments, etc. (elected legislatures also use staff for these tasks).
Point 3b. was addressed several places as well. These staff need to be overseen by a separate body with the sole task of monitoring the impartiality and competence of staff (anybody could charge a staff member with partiality or manipulation).
I should at least refer to those earlier explanations in THIS chapter.
👏
I thought this post covered some of the accountability risks of citizens assemblies, but it felt like it pulled some punches.
The author discusses 3 risks and potential solutions, given below for easy recall:
1. policy accountability risk: “If the majority threshold of a jury vote is less than the acceptable confidence level for the sample size, in order to provide accountability and assurance of representativeness, a second jury could be called (perhaps larger) to see if they come to the same conclusion.”
2. Bribery risks: “In a modern context, the same anti-bribery provisions that protect against jury tampering can be applied to sortition bodies. The threat of prosecution for wrong-doing should also remain. It would be important to protect against pay-offs to former mini-public members in cash, job offers, or other perks, from groups interested in the legislation the representative had worked on. All mini-public members might be told that an “undercover” person might pretend to try to bribe them, and if they report it they would get a reward.”
3. Representational accountability risks: “If, however, a sortition system is poorly designed (by replicating some of the corrupting aspects of existing elected legislatures), the representational accountability could be hampered. Simply substituting selection by election with selection by lot is not enough. If a law-making body (selected by lot), dealt with a wide range of issues, and had a long term of office, it is likely that power hierarchies would develop, vote trading and other untoward practices would arise…Rotation as practiced in Athens and many other jurisdictions is a key component for avoiding all kinds of corruption and unrepresentativeness.”
But the amount of words spent on these actual risks is only a fraction of the post’s total. Most of the words in this post are discussing the anti-corruption features of sortition. The previous 2 posts were a good place for these anti-corruption ideas, but this post should try to steelman the argument for why sortition is risky, and how to ameliorate those risks.
Also, there were some more risks I am surprised he didn’t discuss:
1. Policy accountability risk: What prevents CA members from voting in their short term interest, since they don’t have any external long term electoral pressures like politicians do?
2. Problems with the randomness of sortition: how can the public reliably verify that a sortition was done using true randomness? What are the ways that the random sortition process could be subverted, and how do we protect against it?
3a. CA members inability to write legislation: randomly selected citizens likely aren’t going to be lawyers, so they aren’t going to be good at writing laws. How do citizens assemblies reliably turn the representative citizen views into wise legislation?
3b. If the CA members aren’t writing the legislation, but instead hand off their output to a group of lawyers, how are the resulting principal-agent risks dealt with?
Overall, I think this post started to get at the risks of sortition, but it would be improved by removing some of the pro sortition paragraphs and replace them with accounts of additional risks to sortition.
Since these points occurred to you, they will probably occur to others, so I better address them in this chapter.
Point 1. is implicitly addressed through the entire book, but an express explanation should probably go here.
Your point 2 was addressed in an earlier chapter, where I contrasted the transparency of an honest lottery with the problem of proving the honesty of an election here:
https://open.substack.com/pub/democracycreative/p/better-than-election-reforms?r=cvh3h&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Point 3a was addressed where I talked about the multi-body design, (and previously) Interest Panels (not random assemblies) would prepare draft bills for random Review Panels to consider. These Review Panels would have professional staff to refine, draft amendments, etc. (elected legislatures also use staff for these tasks).
Point 3b. was addressed several places as well. These staff need to be overseen by a separate body with the sole task of monitoring the impartiality and competence of staff (anybody could charge a staff member with partiality or manipulation).
I should at least refer to those earlier explanations in THIS chapter.