Conclusion

From "The Trouble With Elections: Everything We Thought We Knew About Democracy is Wrong," Chapter 17.4

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. 

Executive Consulate of France in1800

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.