Chapter 12: Sortition Can Fix the Problems of Elections

From "The Trouble With Elections: Everything We Thought We Knew About Democracy is Wrong," Chapter 12.1

This chapter will consider some of the advantages sortition offers, and examine many of  the concerns about the widespread use of random selection.

First: Clearing Some Weeds

Before I dig into the potential benefits of sortition, I want to clear away a few assumptions, or “weeds” that may prompt some to prejudge or even dismiss the concept before considering the arguments. This book focuses on the many negative features of democracy based on elections. However there are certain common functions of elective office, which are generally accepted as positive, that we would remove from legislators in a sortition democracy. Three functions that elected legislators are commonly expected to fulfill are political leadership, constituency service and providing legislative expertise. 

LEADERSHIP

Political leadership is an extremely misunderstood and convoluted phenomenon.  I discussed leadership in some detail above in the section on executive elections in chapter 2, but it warrants a cursory recapitulation here. Leadership is something that is unlikely to go away because followership seems to be hard-wired by evolution as one of our default human survival strategies. But leadership has both positive and negative effects. I would argue it is often dramatically over-rated due to a hind-sight “halo-effect,” as renowned professor of business management Phil Rosenzweig calls it. We praise leaders when things go well, even when they had no actual control over the situation. When things go badly, we tend to blame the leaders, rather than more complicated underlying dynamics that they likely had no awareness of, let alone control over. Simple, straight-line cause-and-effect narratives with good and bad leaders distract us from tackling actual systemic challenges.

While the quality of leadership and our ability to judge good leaders is suspect, in any group of people, when a common difficulty arises, some people will take on, or be thrust into, leadership roles. This will doubtless be true in a sortition body as well, just as juries in most current court systems select a foreman. There are many different types and styles of leadership — some of which serve the group and some of which are self-serving and feed a hunger for domination. There is no evidence that people who seek out election as political leaders are any better leaders for groups than people who don’t seek election. Indeed, there is some logic to the witticism that anyone who seeks power through political leadership should automatically be disqualified.

Another aspect of leadership is policy promotion and inspiration to get the group, or even a whole society, working for a common goal. There is no reason that this role should be fulfilled by members of the legislative branch, or government at all. Competitive elections of offices such as the presidency also limit the effectiveness of leaders as unifiers in times of national disaster. Unlike a symbolic head of state, like a king or queen, a policy-drenched executive or legislator inevitably has opponents who seek out opportunities to undercut the office holder. A sortition democracy would certainly still have many policy leaders with broad appeal seeking to gain public support for particular proposals — they simply wouldn’t be elected officials. One problem with elected leaders is that each is expected to lead on a wide range of issues. Popular leaders often conjure up tribalism, and end up with a huge number of followers deferring to the leaders judgment on all issues, without reasoned assessment. Thus an elected official who is leading in a positive direction on issue A (e.g. education) may also be undercutting the public well-being by miss-leading on issue B (e.g. foreign policy). Rather than taking leaders as package deals for a whole host of policies (which is common with elected leaders), it might be better if society could recognize issue leaders à la carte. It is my contention that political leadership in electoral systems (as actually exercised, rather than idealized) does far more harm than good for society.

CONSTITUENCY SERVICE

As I discussed in the section on “planning to stay in power” in chapter 3, a major function that American legislators take on is constituency service — such as helping citizens wend their way through a confusing government bureaucracy to get services they are entitled to. A significant portion of congressional staff time is devoted to such constituent service. Rather than accepting this as a positive, we should recognize this as a failing of government. An important point to recognize is that it is in the interests of legislators to preserve a faulty system that constantly feeds a stream of voters to them seeking help. Like the various patronage schemes of old, constituency service allows incumbents to curry favor with voters in hopes of receiving their votes down the road. Incumbent legislators actually have a built-in incentive to not fix systemic problems, in order to keep this source of voter help and reciprocation in place. An opportunity their election challengers can’t match. An impartial system of ombudsmen combined with a steady improvement of systemic flaws would be a natural alternative in a sortition democracy.

LEGISLATIVE EXPERTISE

Many people assume that legislators exhibit a certain kind of expertise. After all, society has grown so complicated that surely our representatives must develop an appropriate level of expertise, at least in the policy area of their committee assignments. Elected politicians tend to become experts in the fields of negotiation, public relations, and campaigning, while leaving to lobbyists and their staff the task of mastering policy and bill drafting expertise. In an article titled “Three Reasons Congress Is Broken,” the author and former Washington Post  journalist, Robert Kaiser, quotes Sen. Ted Kennedy from his 2009 memoir. Senator Ted Kennedy estimated that ninety-five percent of the drafting and negotiating in congress is done by staff rather than legislators. Legislators learn sufficient terminology, and memorize enough specific facts and budget numbers to seem well-informed, but only occasionally become bona fide experts on policy matters (and those that they believe they are expert, generally suffer from the illusion of knowledge bias I discussed at the end of chapter 9). Elected legislators typically rely on lobbyists and staff to fulfill that role, while they focus on the public relations, fund raising, and campaign implications of policy. When legislators bring experts into their offices to advise them, it is these tangential considerations that their staff often bring to the top of the agenda, rather than the substance of policy. 

If modern society is indeed so complicated that average citizens simply don’t know enough to govern themselves, then elected legislators are even further from that level of adequacy. In short, professional politicians are ego driven professional public relations people rather than policy experts. Average citizens in an allotted decision-making body at least have an inherent interest in finding genuine and impartial experts for advice, without the overwhelming diversion of electoral campaign and public relations concerns. Thus, putting “average” citizens in the drivers’ seats enhances the likelihood that true and appropriate experts will be called upon as needed. This is a key point. When proposing the idea of allowing everyday citizens to make complex policy decisions, many people recoil with fear —  imagining this would mean a loss of policy expertise. I contend that just the opposite effect would dominate. Elected representatives also have minimal actual policy expertise, but have the distorting incentive to seek out advice from like-minded partisans, special interest lobbyists (with large campaign donation potential), and media manipulation experts. Everyday citizens, on the other hand, would have an incentive to seek out advice from a range of genuine policy experts.