Selecting a Path to Sortition ... continued

From "The Trouble With Elections: Everything We Thought We Knew About Democracy is Wrong," Chapter 17.2

Purported Political Expertise

Another argument for maintaining elections in a bicameral legislature with a sortition chamber is the presumed political expertise of elected officials. I debunked this notion in chapter thirteen, but a brief review would be useful here. I am not aware of any compelling evidence that elections are effective at selecting individuals with competence at governing. James Surowiecki, in The Wisdom of Crowds, points out that we shouldn’t believe people are more expert simply because they assert as much. A feeling of certainty that one is right just as often signals a lack of intellectual humility. Failure to recognize one’s ignorance impedes deliberation and stunts the growth of actual expertise. Studies have found no significant difference between liberals and conservatives in this regard, but it seems likely that the subset of individuals from across the political spectrum who are willing to run for office tend towards harmful “intellectual arrogance” rather than beneficial humility.  Moreover, we should not conflate political (campaign) expertise and policy expertise. Often legislators' policy expertise is superficial or narrowly confined to a handful of issues with which their particular committees deal. In fact, it is well documented that most expertise resides in the professional staff and lobbyists (who draft nearly all bills), rather than in the politicians themselves. One problem with electing representatives is that they have a distorted interest in consulting fundraising and campaign experts more than genuine policy experts, and shaping policies accordingly. 

By contrast, members of a sortition minipublic would presumably recognize the need to employ and consult genuine policy experts. Just as legislators hand off the details of drafting and negotiating legislation to staff, the sortition body might do the same—but without giving special consideration for lobbyists who want to tailor those details to their own purposes. Even assuming allotted citizens start out with cognitive biases comparable to those of elected representatives, it is far more feasible for a minipublic to require a well-designed deliberative architecture to dampen, what Hélène Landemore refers to as, “the known cognitive biases of human beings,” rather than exacerbate them. Citizen deliberators can also more feasibly be required to have training that minimizes psychological traps. Carey Morewedge and colleagues found that training can successfully reduce cognitive bias in both the immediate and long term. Overcoming cognitive biases, motivated reasoning, and automatic judgments creates a more competent decision-making body.

Sortition Benefits are Lost if Paired with Elections

Even if maintaining elections provides nothing beneficial, however, some might reason that the benefits of sortition if added to elections would ameliorate elections’ harms and still result in a net improvement. Since eliminating elections is a daunting task, adding a sortition body, in a hybrid bicameral system, seems more achievable. The hope would be that adding a sortition element to elections could make at least marginal improvements.  My concern is that the hoped for beneficial effects of sortition in one chamber would be overwhelmed by negative bleed-through from the campaign effects of the elected chamber. In this next section, I will argue that if an elected chamber deals with the same bills as its sortition counterpart, this would not only sacrifice the potential benefits of sortition, but further, it could cause the discrediting of sortition, making any advance, and even the continuation of any sortition questionable.

Agenda Setting

Politicians who are constantly preparing for the next election seek out (or manufacture) those issues that they believe will help them in the next election. Important long-term issues (but with less public salience) are regularly ignored, and fail to make it onto the public agenda – until they become a crisis that cannot be ignored any longer.

In a hybrid system, the agenda setting priorities of the elected chamber will still monopolize the news, public awareness, and—unless painstakingly shielded—the attention of members of the sortition chamber as well. Unlike the members of the allotted body, the politicians are skilled at getting attention and will do everything they can to get the spotlight. Also, a substantial portion of the sortition chamber's agenda will be automatically established by what bills the elected chamber chooses to send them. Indeed, a number of hybrid bicameral proposals imagine the elected chamber being the sole generator of legislation, with the sortition body being a review body, with authority to adopt or veto bills on offer from the elected politicians.

Even if the sortition chamber is empowered to initiate its own bills, the agenda will be warped by media and public attention shaped by partisan exigencies. In chapter three I highlighted Murray Edelman’s analysis that news coverage of issues selected by politicians, skilled in public relations, will dominate public attention and effectively shield from view important issues, which politicians would rather ignore. Many crucial issues are simply too problematic for campaign purposes. If allowed, some prickly issues may be raised by the sortition chamber, but political gravity will constantly draw it back to the agenda favored by elected politicians facing re-election.

Rational Ignorance and Active Aptitude

When paired with an elected chamber, the members of the sortition chamber are more likely to succumb to rational ignorance and fail to attain active aptitude. When people face a daunting cognitive task and experience uncertainty, it has been demonstrated that it is common for us to defer to those who project a demeanor of certainty, and may also have higher status. The sortition chamber would suffer a cognitive “social loafing” or “free-rider” problem. When another chamber dealing with the same pieces of legislation, full of articulate and often charismatic people who insist they have figured out the right answer, are pushing members of an allotted chamber to follow their lead, independent, slow and rational thinking falls by the wayside. Within a partisan societal environment, where a strong sense of team loyalty or tribalism is fomented, it seems likely that many members of an allotted chamber would adhere to their favored party leaders’ platforms. Indeed, unless prohibited in some manner, the elected politicians would also seek to recruit members of the sortition chamber into a partisan caucus. Team loyalty has an emotional draw that regularly trumps independent rational analysis.

The sortition chamber in a hybrid bicameral system may not degenerate to a mere rubber stamp for the elected chamber’s decisions, but the intended achievements of sortition will not be realized. This loss of active aptitude underlies a whole host of other losses of anticipated sortition benefits, including the tapping of diffuse knowledge and collective intelligence; as well as independent judgment and the wisdom of crowds.

Other Benefits Lost

The descriptive representativeness and diversity of cognitive styles touted by sortition advocates would be significantly harmed by the continuation of an elected chamber. A chamber selected by lot would still look diverse, but the loss of active aptitude will mean that the private knowledge and perspectives distributed across that diverse membership will be less likely to be expressed by those members. Status deferral and information cascades will short-circuit both collective intelligence and the wisdom of crowds.

The anti-corruption potential of sortition, integrated into carefully designed assembly rules that promote securities against misrule, is one of its most appealing characteristics. Continued elections, however, risk corrupting the law-making process as a whole. It is possible that the sortition chamber could draw attention to that corruption, but contrary to the maxim that “sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants, ” experience suggests this is not an effective deterrent. Shining a light on institutionalized corruption is not enough.

Danger of Delegitimation

If we set aside the concerns raised above, and assume that all of the negative consequences of maintaining an elected chamber could be dealt with through careful design, there are still other grave failings. If the sortition chamber is not a rubber stamp, what happens when the two chambers disagree about an important bill? In cases where both chambers are elected, they tend to have a nearly equal power relationship. But what would happen when one chamber is made up of people identified as “chosen leaders,” and one is made up of a random assortment of ordinary people? We can get an inkling by looking at countries where one chamber is elected and the other is not, such as the House of Lords in the UK or the Senate in Canada. In these cases, the bodies are not equal. The elected chamber is preeminent, even though the lesser body has the ostensibly prestigious title of “upper house.”

What are some likely consequences of the sortition chamber rejecting a bill passed by the elected chamber? The two chambers would have a fundamentally different, and conflicting basis for claiming legitimacy, which might be summarized by the term popularized by Bernard Manin as “the principle of distinction,” in the case of an elected chamber, and what Aristotle termed “the principle of equality and likeness,” in the case of the sortition one. When in conflict with an allotted chamber, the members of the elected chamber would have a compelling strategic incentive to sidestep the details of the policy differences, and instead seek to undermine the legitimacy of the sortition chamber. In contrast, the allotted members would not be protecting personal careers in politics, since they would shortly be “out of power” regardless. Unlike the allotted citizens, the elected members would tend to be highly practiced, articulate public speakers with exceptional public relations skills. Portraying themselves as champions for their constituents, the elected leaders would likely play the “natural aristocracy” card (but by a less arrogant name, of course). It is easy to predict the themes they might use — dismissing the sortition chamber as “a random gaggle of dishwashers and hairdressers who are completely unaccountable to you, the people, because they never have to face you in an election.”

Worse still, the natural hostility of elected representatives towards any sortition threat to their power in a hybrid system makes the evolution towards a sortition democracy along this bicameral path extremely unlikely. If they ever butt heads by disagreeing about some important bill, the professional politicians will demolish the allotted body of amateurs. If sortition begins in a hybrid system in which the chambers contend, it is more likely to die there, than expand.