Dilemmas of Sortition Design

From "The Trouble With Elections: Everything We Thought We Knew About Democracy is Wrong," Chapter 16.1

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.