Pic: USGOV (PD)
“It is accepted as democratic when public offices are allocated by lot, and as oligarchic when they are filled by election.” – Aristotle (Politics IV. 9, 1294b8)
I was in the process of cobbling together a piece on sortition (the selection of government officials by lottery) but it turns out that Alexander Guerrero – an assistant professor of philosophy, medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania – has beaten me to the punch, and then some! He has written a superb essay about the subject and has also come up with an alternative system which he has dubbed “the lottocracy”, an idea which is challenging, thought-provoking, and incredibly hopeful…
So what’s wrong with the system of representation which we currently employ?
“In the presence of widespread citizen ignorance and the absence of meaningful accountability, powerful interests will effectively capture representatives, ensuring that the only viable candidates — the only people who can get and stay in political power — are those who will act in ways that are congenial to the interests of the powerful.”
What is the historical precedent for sortition?
“In ancient Athens, the birthplace of democracy, lottery-selection was used to choose political actors in three of its four major governmental institutions. Selection of political officials in late medieval and early renaissance Italy incorporated selection by lot. More recently, Citizens’ Assemblies (in which citizens were chosen at random to serve on the assembly, and in which citizens heard from experts prior to coming up with their own proposals) were used in the Netherlands to reform election law, and in Canada (in British Columbia and Ontario). Randomly chosen citizens were also brought into the process of constitutional reform in Iceland in 2010, but nothing of the scope that I am envisioning has been tried before.”
How would Guerrero’s “lottocracy” function?
“First, rather than having a single, generalist legislature such as the United States Congress, the legislative function would be fulfilled by many different single-issue legislatures (each one focusing on, for example, just agriculture or health care). There might be 20 or 25 of these single-issue legislatures, perhaps borrowing existing divisions in legislative committees or administrative agencies: agriculture, commerce and consumer protection, education, energy, health and human services, housing and urban development, immigration, labour, transportation, etc.
“These single-issue legislatures would be chosen by lottery from the political jurisdiction, with each single-issue legislature consisting of 300 people. Each person chosen would serve for a three-year term. Terms would be staggered so that each year 100 new people begin, and 100 people finish. All adult citizens in the political jurisdiction would be eligible to be selected. People would not be required to serve if selected, but the financial incentive would be significant, efforts would be made to accommodate family and work schedules, and the civic culture might need to be developed so that serving is seen as a significant civic duty and honour. In a normal year-long legislative session, the 300 people would develop an agenda of the legislative issue or two they would work on for that session, they’d hear from experts and stakeholders with respect to those issues, there would be opportunities for gathering community input and feedback, and they would eventually vote to enact legislation or alter existing legislation.
“Single-issue focus is essential to allow greater learning and engagement with the particular problems, especially given the range of backgrounds that members would bring to the institutions, and the fact that these individuals would be amateurs at the particular task of creating legislation. Lottery-chosen representatives would have more time to learn about the problems they’re legislating than today’s typical representatives, who have to spend their time learning about every topic under the sun, while also constantly travelling, claiming credit, and raising funds to get re-elected. In the lottocratic system representatives will be — at least over a long enough run — descriptively and proportionately representative of the political community, simply because they have been chosen at random. But they will not have in mind the idea that they are to represent some particular constituency. Instead, they will be like better-informed versions of ourselves, coming from backgrounds like ours, but with the opportunity to learn and deliberate about the specific topic at hand.”
This all sounds great, but has he considered what might go wrong?
“No pure lottocratic system has ever existed, and so it’s important to note that much could go wrong. Randomly chosen representatives could prove to be incompetent or easily bewildered. Maybe a few people would dominate the discussions. Maybe the experts brought in to inform the policymaking would all be bought off and would convince us to buy the same corporate-sponsored policy we’re currently getting. There are hard design questions about how such a legislative system would interact with other branches of government, and questions about the coherence of policymaking, budgeting, taxation, and enforcement of policy. That said, it’s worth remembering the level of dysfunction that exists in the current system. We should be thinking about comparative improvement, not perfection, and a lottocratic system would have a number of advantages over the current model.”
What would be the potential advantages of such a system?
“The most obvious advantage of lotteries is that they help to prevent corruption or undue influence in the selection of representatives. Because members are chosen at random and don’t need to run for office, there will be no way for powerful interests to influence who becomes a representative to ensure that the only viable candidates are those whose interests are congenial to their own. Because there is no need to raise funds for re-election, it should be easier to monitor representatives to ensure that they are not being bought off.
“Another advantage of lotteries over elections is that they are likely to bring together a more cognitively diverse group of people, a group of people with a better sense of the full range of views and interests of the polity. Because individuals are chosen at random from the jurisdiction, they are much more likely to be an ideologically, demographically, and socio-economically representative sample of the people in the jurisdiction than those individuals who are capable of successfully running for office. As a point of comparison, 44 per cent of US Congresspersons have a net worth of more than $ 1 million; 82 per cent are male; 86 per cent are white, and more than half are lawyers or bankers. Recent empirical work by Scott Page and Lu Hong has demonstrated that cognitively diverse groups of people are likely to produce better decisions than smarter, or more skilled, groups that are cognitively homogenous.”
Read the rest of the interview here.
***
Guerrero is currently writing a book on this subject and for those who may be interested, he mentions several others who are also engaged in discussing these issues: ”There are also a number of academics who have argued for a role for lotteries in the selection of political officials, including C L R James, Oliver Dowlen, and Peter Stone. Other people whose work you might track down, if you’re interested, include, in the UK (Anthony Barnett, Peter Carty, Oliver Dowlen, Ben Saunders, Peter Stone, Keith Sutherland), in the US (Terrill Bouricius, Ernest Callenbach, Hélène Landemore, Ethan Leib, Neil McCormick, Kevin O’Leary, Michael Phillips, Alex Zakaras), in Canada (Mark Warren and Hilary Pearse), the Australian philosopher John Burnheim, the late Afro-Trinidadian philosopher C.L.R. James, Paul Lucardie in the Netherlands, Yoram Gat in Israel, the French activist Étienne Chouard, the political party Partido Azar in Spain, Belgian MP Laurent Louis and the Youth Parliament of Belgium—all have argued for the use of lottery selection in politics, in various forms and to various degrees.” And, as it turns out, there is also a blog – Equality by Lot – which is dedicated to discussing these issues.
“Our ignorance is not so vast as our failure to use what we know.” – M. King Hubbert
The Lottocracy Has Arrived: Say Goodbye (and Good Riddance!) to Campaigns, Candidates, and Elections
No comments:
Post a Comment