Chapter 17: Selecting a Path to Sortition

From "The Trouble With Elections: Everything We Thought We Knew About Democracy is Wrong," Chapter 17.1

Photo by Tara Scahill on Unsplash

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)

1. Some interesting and practical suggestions for such an approach can be found in William Ury's book, The Third Side: Why We Fight and How We Can Stop .

2. I subscribe to the social construct analysis of political leadership advanced by Murray Edelman, that “belief in leadership is a catalyst of conformity and obedience.” Constructing the Political Spectacle. Narratives about the accomplishments of leaders should be treated with extreme skepticism, as explained by Philip M. Rosenzweig, The Halo Effect: How Managers Let Themselves Be Deceived.