"This method was based on the belief that all citizens had an equal right to office and that random selection is more impartial than elections, which tend to favor the wealthy or well‑connected."
From what I can tell, this is the standard assumption among contemporary democratic theorists. And from what I am able to work out, there is good reason to think that it is wrong.
Sortition amongst the Greeks was more likely to be favoured in democracy because it was a way of constraining the power of the rich, who could otherwise disproportionately use their influence to control the constitution vis-a-vis the poor. After all, if office is assigned by lot, then it is pure luck, and the rich can't do things like e.g. buy votes (or equivalent, given that office is undertaken directly not through representation). If you are an ancient Greek living in a small city state, if democracy is to continue and to function tolerably well as a democracy, it needs to ensure that it *remains* a democracy, and that means that the many must not become extensions of the desires and ambitions of the few.
It is at times like this that reading Aristotle is I think really helpful. The ancient Greeks were really not like us. The central question at the heart of their constitutional arrangements was deciding who gets to make decisions, based on their class allegiances. The rich, or the poor? So it is not just that they did "direct" democracy, whereas ours is representative. It is that the nature of polis politics was explicitly about class based confrontation. Sortition was not about giving everybody an equal "right" participate, it was a mechanism for preserving democracy in the face of oligarchy.
I think modern democratic theorists are really missing a trick here...
To clarify: what is important and doing the work is not that sortition is "impartial", it is that sortition is a tool for controlling the rich and powerful
However, for human groups with a homogeneous degree of knowledge and a common training (that eases communication and the division of intellectual labor) the lottery is the best tool to achieve homogeneous, replicable and impartial decisions. Both the ancient Romans and John Rawls represent justice behind a veil of ignorance: the just decision is one that does not depend on proper names or special circumstances, but on the application of general laws and principles to the particular case.”
Mind opening and critical, political philosophy at its best. I recall a pol philosopher arguing for this at a talk I attended decades ago, can’t recall his name. With so much being conjectural, a small-scale experiment would be worthwhile.
Wow this seems like a wonderful idea! Or at least conceptually. For some reason I hadn’t come across it. Hopefully there’s at least some practical movement this way? Baby steps somewhere? Unfortunately effective governing can only occur if politics itself permits such governing to exist.
From the post it seems like these books are taking a very abstracted view of how legislatures work, in that they're about policy enactment. But in our existing systems aren't that simple and I think when contemplating government redesigns you have to take into account some of these complexities. For example, is there an administrative state with career civil servants running in parallel to the mini-publics? How do they interact? If you're revamping a parliamentary system with these, are the mini-publics selecting the prime minister and agency heads, or do traditional elections have a role in that? And even in the abstract, I think you'd have to worry about "power-behind-the-throne" style dynamics where the ostensibly apolitical staff and advisory positions have a lot of practical power with unclear accountability (e.g. whoever makes the rulings about which of the twenty SILLs need to be involved in a particular policy proposal may be making the most consequential decision).
Whatever the shortcomings may be of such new designs for running large complex societies I admire those with the guts to take on this incredibly difficult challenge and throw up a straw man.
Lottocracy’s framing rests on a critical error: it treats today’s centralized, consultant driven electoral system as “democracy.” It is not.
For most of its history, the United States sustained a far richer democratic architecture, federated mass-member parties that doubled as civic legislatures, dense local press ecosystems, local public science boards, local capital structures, state-chartered banks and savings institutions, polytechnic schools and normal colleges tied to local industry, public works boards, labor councils, religious parishes, orchestras, historical societies, and other civic associations, all woven into a plural system that distributed authority across political, economic, social, scientific, and cultural spheres, that gave ordinary people real leverage over policy. This Old Republic system was decentralized, participatory, and resilient, and it persisted well into the mid-20th century. Its dismantling during the decades that followed WW2, not “voter ignorance”, explains the hollow state of elections today.
By erasing that institutional history, the debate you stage between elections, sortition, and authoritarian drift becomes a false choice. Ordinary citizens have governed complex systems effectively when institutions were designed to embed expertise in plural, local, and civic channels. The problem is centralization, not the ballot box which is just one institutional element of any lower case "d" democratic system.
If we are serious about democracy’s future, the path is not lotteries or resignation to today’s degraded order, but reconstruction of the decentralized civic infrastructure that once made democracy real.
I’ve long been a fan of this idea. But it’s interesting to note that with 20 bodies selecting 100 new members per year, there are 2,000 per year, or about 100,000 in a person’s adult working age lifespan, so less than 1/3,000 Americans would ever participate in one over their lifespan - but there would usually be someone serving on one of these boards who had already served on another one before.
It deals well with the problem of rational voter ignorance - though I think in some of your discussion of the comparisons with existing systems, it’s unclear where Guerrero is saying it is an advantage over the current electorate and where he is saying it’s an advantage over the current legislature, because the advantages over each of them are very different.
One other thing I was wondering while reading this is how a transition from an electoral system with parties to this sort of system would work. If there weren’t already organized parties, this system seems like it wouldn’t give rise to them. But if half of the people come into these bodies with a pre-existing partisan identity, I suspect that would greatly affect how they function.
I don't much go for blueprints of new systems. Of course it's a free world and people can spend their time doing whatever the damn hell they like. But this kind of speculation seems idle to me.
The task is not to dream up some entirely new system – as if
1) the world is waiting for a blueprint;
2) you understand what it should be; and
3) the powerful won’t stop you getting to first base.
I think the task is to understand which acupressure point you might press, what retrovirus you might introduce into the existing system, which has a low risk of going wrong and, as it demonstrates its benignity, has the potential to spread.
"This method was based on the belief that all citizens had an equal right to office and that random selection is more impartial than elections, which tend to favor the wealthy or well‑connected."
From what I can tell, this is the standard assumption among contemporary democratic theorists. And from what I am able to work out, there is good reason to think that it is wrong.
Sortition amongst the Greeks was more likely to be favoured in democracy because it was a way of constraining the power of the rich, who could otherwise disproportionately use their influence to control the constitution vis-a-vis the poor. After all, if office is assigned by lot, then it is pure luck, and the rich can't do things like e.g. buy votes (or equivalent, given that office is undertaken directly not through representation). If you are an ancient Greek living in a small city state, if democracy is to continue and to function tolerably well as a democracy, it needs to ensure that it *remains* a democracy, and that means that the many must not become extensions of the desires and ambitions of the few.
It is at times like this that reading Aristotle is I think really helpful. The ancient Greeks were really not like us. The central question at the heart of their constitutional arrangements was deciding who gets to make decisions, based on their class allegiances. The rich, or the poor? So it is not just that they did "direct" democracy, whereas ours is representative. It is that the nature of polis politics was explicitly about class based confrontation. Sortition was not about giving everybody an equal "right" participate, it was a mechanism for preserving democracy in the face of oligarchy.
I think modern democratic theorists are really missing a trick here...
To clarify: what is important and doing the work is not that sortition is "impartial", it is that sortition is a tool for controlling the rich and powerful
I have the opposite view of Sortition: It is an excellent mechanism to chose among experts, and specially necesary for the supreme court:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/PyqPr4z76Z8xGZL22/sortition
However, for human groups with a homogeneous degree of knowledge and a common training (that eases communication and the division of intellectual labor) the lottery is the best tool to achieve homogeneous, replicable and impartial decisions. Both the ancient Romans and John Rawls represent justice behind a veil of ignorance: the just decision is one that does not depend on proper names or special circumstances, but on the application of general laws and principles to the particular case.”
Mind opening and critical, political philosophy at its best. I recall a pol philosopher arguing for this at a talk I attended decades ago, can’t recall his name. With so much being conjectural, a small-scale experiment would be worthwhile.
Wow this seems like a wonderful idea! Or at least conceptually. For some reason I hadn’t come across it. Hopefully there’s at least some practical movement this way? Baby steps somewhere? Unfortunately effective governing can only occur if politics itself permits such governing to exist.
From the post it seems like these books are taking a very abstracted view of how legislatures work, in that they're about policy enactment. But in our existing systems aren't that simple and I think when contemplating government redesigns you have to take into account some of these complexities. For example, is there an administrative state with career civil servants running in parallel to the mini-publics? How do they interact? If you're revamping a parliamentary system with these, are the mini-publics selecting the prime minister and agency heads, or do traditional elections have a role in that? And even in the abstract, I think you'd have to worry about "power-behind-the-throne" style dynamics where the ostensibly apolitical staff and advisory positions have a lot of practical power with unclear accountability (e.g. whoever makes the rulings about which of the twenty SILLs need to be involved in a particular policy proposal may be making the most consequential decision).
Whatever the shortcomings may be of such new designs for running large complex societies I admire those with the guts to take on this incredibly difficult challenge and throw up a straw man.
Really goof one. But is itwowork on third world countries?
Lottocracy’s framing rests on a critical error: it treats today’s centralized, consultant driven electoral system as “democracy.” It is not.
For most of its history, the United States sustained a far richer democratic architecture, federated mass-member parties that doubled as civic legislatures, dense local press ecosystems, local public science boards, local capital structures, state-chartered banks and savings institutions, polytechnic schools and normal colleges tied to local industry, public works boards, labor councils, religious parishes, orchestras, historical societies, and other civic associations, all woven into a plural system that distributed authority across political, economic, social, scientific, and cultural spheres, that gave ordinary people real leverage over policy. This Old Republic system was decentralized, participatory, and resilient, and it persisted well into the mid-20th century. Its dismantling during the decades that followed WW2, not “voter ignorance”, explains the hollow state of elections today.
By erasing that institutional history, the debate you stage between elections, sortition, and authoritarian drift becomes a false choice. Ordinary citizens have governed complex systems effectively when institutions were designed to embed expertise in plural, local, and civic channels. The problem is centralization, not the ballot box which is just one institutional element of any lower case "d" democratic system.
If we are serious about democracy’s future, the path is not lotteries or resignation to today’s degraded order, but reconstruction of the decentralized civic infrastructure that once made democracy real.
I’ve long been a fan of this idea. But it’s interesting to note that with 20 bodies selecting 100 new members per year, there are 2,000 per year, or about 100,000 in a person’s adult working age lifespan, so less than 1/3,000 Americans would ever participate in one over their lifespan - but there would usually be someone serving on one of these boards who had already served on another one before.
It deals well with the problem of rational voter ignorance - though I think in some of your discussion of the comparisons with existing systems, it’s unclear where Guerrero is saying it is an advantage over the current electorate and where he is saying it’s an advantage over the current legislature, because the advantages over each of them are very different.
One other thing I was wondering while reading this is how a transition from an electoral system with parties to this sort of system would work. If there weren’t already organized parties, this system seems like it wouldn’t give rise to them. But if half of the people come into these bodies with a pre-existing partisan identity, I suspect that would greatly affect how they function.
I don't much go for blueprints of new systems. Of course it's a free world and people can spend their time doing whatever the damn hell they like. But this kind of speculation seems idle to me.
The task is not to dream up some entirely new system – as if
1) the world is waiting for a blueprint;
2) you understand what it should be; and
3) the powerful won’t stop you getting to first base.
I think the task is to understand which acupressure point you might press, what retrovirus you might introduce into the existing system, which has a low risk of going wrong and, as it demonstrates its benignity, has the potential to spread.
Entrenched interests and the power of governing elites will hinder this experiment… What would they do if it works?