Multi-Body Sortition

From "The Trouble With Elections: Everything We Thought We Knew About Democracy is Wrong," Chapter 12.5

It is better to read the post below before examining the details in this old infographic.

Now I will focus on an optimal design for democratic control of a legislative process. While not a catchy name, I coined the term “multi-body sortition” in a 2013 paper, “Democracy Through Multi-Body Sortition: Athenian Lessons for the Modern Day.” For smaller municipal or regional implementations, some of the elements might be modified or eliminated, and the size of the bodies would likely also be adjusted. The implementations embedding sortition as a permanent part of governments in East Belgium and the city of Paris, France have incorporated some aspects of this multi-body sortition design. 

There are a variety of distinct tasks involved in developing, assessing, adopting and implementing government policies. It is a mistake to have each of these separate tasks performed by the same group of people, or by the same procedures. Not only are different design characteristics appropriate for different tasks, but the performance of one task actually hobbles the ability of that group of people to perform certain other tasks. 

Rather than retrace the lengthy process that led me to the multi-body sortition design (see more here ), in this section I will simply provide a summary of the design, with justifications for each element. A much fuller description can be found in the paper by David Schecter and me, “An Idealized Design for the Legislative Branch of Government.”

The final decision-making body for new laws would always be a large Policy Jury, functioning much the way nomothetai did in ancient Athens. They would convened to hear pro and con presentations about a proposal coming from a separate sortition body, and vote it up or down. These juries would each deal with a single proposal, meet for a relatively short duration, have quasi-mandatory service (like court juries), and be quite large (perhaps a thousand members for a national jury). All of the other bodies in the multi-body design (except the Interest Panels) might be permanent, but with regular rotation by cohorts. Service terms would be significantly longer than Policy Juries (perhaps one of two years), and they would be much smaller (perhaps 150 members) to allow all-to-all active deliberation. Those called by lottery for these other bodies would be allowed to decline, due to the workload and duration of service. Thus, they would be somewhat less representative, and therefore they would not make final decisions on behalf of the population.

Core Bodies

Agenda Council

 An Agenda Council will be created periodically (or as a permanent body, with rotating members) to set the agenda for topics, policies, or laws deemed important to address in the coming period of time. This body might consist of 150 - 400 members. A serious problem with the current system of politicians setting the agenda is the priority of mobilizing voters by selecting hot-button issues that make it easy to vilify other politicians. It is also electorally inconvenient to raise issues that are highly complex, or don’t have easy sound-bite policy options, unless the reality on the ground or crisis has forced this agenda item forward. A random sample of citizens has an  interest and motivation to hear from a variety of opposing experts, and take a long-term view (rather than prioritize the next election cycle), and so is likely to generate an agenda more beneficial for society. The Agenda Council would issue a call for proposals on each of the agenda items selected

Interest Panels

Good ideas for specific policies are spread throughout society, and this is a compelling reason to open the gates wide for draft proposals on the agenda topics. Here self-selection is useful, as people who would never run in an election, or could not win, may have crucially important insights to offer society. The ancient Athenian concept of isegoria suggests that anybody who wishes can contribute to the democratic process, by offering ideas and information (in this case through joining an Interest Panel.) This is real democratic participation, as opposed to partisan marketing, which is the center of electoral participation. These interest Panels could be structured in a variety of ways. As one example: A group of perhaps ten people could self-organize (perhaps with a common concern), while others could be randomly matched with other volunteers in more diverse panels. There would be as many panels as needed to allow anyone who wished to participate to do so. These panels would be generating raw material, rather than making any final policy decisions, so their lack of representativeness is less important. However, because they know that their work product will have to pass muster in front of subsequent representative bodies, they have an incentive to craft proposals that serve the common good, rather than just some special interest.

Review Panels

Review Panels would be created to tackle each topic on the Agenda Council’s call. They might have perhaps 150 members. Their task would be to examine the raw material generated by the Interest Panels. They could select one proposal, or cobble together pieces from several. Or ask some Interest Panel to make some revisions, etc. The goal is to generate a final policy or draft bill. A democratic lottery process similar to that used by citizens’ assemblies today, likely using a two round lottery – first to find people willing to put in the required time and effort (but not knowing the policy domain, to avoid selecting a biased panel), followed by a stratified random sampling to constitute a roughly representative body. Because their workload would be substantial a significant portion of the population would probably decline to serve, so stratified sampling would be necessary to approximate representativeness. However, since they also would not be making a final yes/no decision on legislation, their rough representativeness and small size (150 is too small to have an adequately high probability of accurate representativeness in any event) facilitates active give-and-take deliberation. These bodies would benefit from great diversity, while also being mostly free of special-interest self-selection bias and corruption. Their task is to prepare a final piece of legislation for a Policy Jury to consider and vote up or down. Review Panels might be ongoing (with regular rotation) for each policy domain (rather than specific to an agenda item). Thus there might be one on education, one on healthcare, one on transportation, etc. (something like legislative committees).

Policy Juries

Since the Review Panels will be too small (but smallness is needed for good deliberation) and not have mandatory service, they would lack the needed legitimacy to make final decisions on behalf of the community. This is the job of the much larger Policy Jury, ideally selected by democratic lottery with quasi-mandatory service (a civic duty in a democracy). The policy Jury would learn about the policy proposal from a variety of opposing experts, hear prepared pro and con arguments, and vote to pass or reject the bill. In some cases, they might decide to refer a bill to referendum instead, but this would only be in unique circumstances where public acceptance of the policy is more important than its actual merit. Using a one-off Policy Jury instead of elected politicians is the key feature of this design. This assures that well-informed and accurately representative samples of the population, without hidden agendas, partisan tribalism, or manipulation of media will be deciding on public policy. Because this system relies on a vast number of everyday people to take on the tasks of self government – serving for a time, and then returning to their regular lives – this helps avoid the concentration of power. It is beneficial to divide up the tasks so that no individual group of people has too much power, but also so they don’t suffer information overload and have too heavy a burden.

Coordination Council

Because Review Panels would be siloed by policy domain, yet some issues would inevitably have implications outside their core domain (especially in terms of budget), a Coordination Council, similar to the Agenda Council would propose modifications to harmonize passed policies. To avoid a concentration of power, the proposals of the Coordination Council would also need to pass muster in front of a Policy Jury.¹

Meta-Legislative Bodies

Rules Council

A lottery-selected body (with new members regularly rotated in) should be constantly monitoring how the system is functioning, to propose improvements. Changes might have to do with the lottery process, the size or duration of bodies, the procedure for selecting expert witnesses, etc. These changes would also go to a Policy Jury to assure proposed changes would not inappropriately increase the power of the Rules Council itself. 

Oversight Council

This lottery-selected body would be responsible for monitoring the performance and impartiality of facilitators, researchers, and other staff serving the various sortition bodies. It might be appropriate to have this body drawn from a pool of people who have previously served on some sortition body. Allegations of bias or corruption against some staff member would be handled by this body. In order to avoid Michels’s “iron law of oligarchy,” the process must not be in the hands of staff, but must have democratic oversight, with a regular supply of new randomly selected members.

I will discuss the potential use of sortition to achieve democratic control of the executive function in the chapter that also deals with use of sortition by non-governmental organizations, such as unions, homeowners associations, co-ops, etc.

1. Note that this body was not included in my original design, but the need for it became apparent.