3 ms·

I've long been interested in the use of sortition in political decision making, and it always surprises me how little it has been seriously studied and consider

by fela 11y ago

I've long been interested in the use of sortition in political decision making, and it always surprises me how little it has been seriously studied and considered compared to the potential it seems to have. Much of the information there is is of pretty low quality. It might of course just be such a bad idea that everybody smart enough to give high quality contributions on the topic does not want to waste their time with the idea. But if this is the case it is totally non obvious to me, and most criticism I've read seem to be from people that do not have a clear understanding of the potential advantages sortition might have. Very briefly, for the uninitiated, the main potential advantage of sortition is that it would make political decision making a lot more democratic. People representative of the population at large would actually discuss to make the decision, instead of the citizens making their choice by casting one vote every few years among a set of very similar parties (I know, this simplifies the debate a lot, but it is the main idea). This is very interesting if you are of the opinion (as I am) that lack of democracy is a big problem of our political systems. I believe that most time politicians go agains the will of people they do so for the wrong reasons and with the wrong goals, and way too often. The law of large number makes sure the randomness in sortition is limited and predictable. Whereas with elections there is a big number of arbitrary factors that can greatly influence the results. Of course sortition in practice might have a number of problem often brought up, but none seems unsolvable to the point where it's not even worth exploring the idea further. How do you separate expertise from decision power, while still being able to make proper use of the expertise? How to implement sortition in practice? Would they ever let us? Would people be able to handle the pressure? Would they accept the position? And all criticism to democracy in general applies even more to sortition. I think however that if you talked about elections to somebody who never heard about it, you could come up with just as a big number of potential problems. I don't know if sortition really is a better idea, but maybe it's an idea worth thinking about. I recently read this article on sortition that appeared on the Atlantic which I think is really good: http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-a-college-admissions-lottery/361585/ http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/05/the-cas... Another good starting point for further exploration is the blog Equality by Lot: https://equalitybylot.wordpress.com/ https://equalitybylot.wordpress.com/

dragonwriter 11y ago
> The law of large number makes sure the randomness in sortition is limited and predictable. Whereas with elections there is a big number of arbitrary factors that greatly can influence the results. With elections, there are constraints which make deviations from the preference of the electorate less likely the greater the salience of the issue is. Sortition distributes the issues on which the decisionmakers deviate from the represented population randomly, which means that salience of the issue does not affect the likelihood of deviation between the decisionmakers and the represented population. This is a significant weakness in sortition compared to elections, that needs to be weighed against whatever advantages are identified for it.
- fela 11y ago
  Edit to say that your point is interesting and one I hadn't really thought about. This make elections a referendum on the most salient topics, which I guess makes sense. I still think that in elections there are a lot of other factors that influence decisions and given certain voting preferences there are a lot of arbitrary factors that influence the results, more so that in sortition, whose main drawback, as I see it is how little we know about how it would work in practice. Original message: But even for salient issues there are a lot of random factors in elections. Suppose there is a issue so important that everybody cares and votes based only on that issue. Suppose there are only two candidate, and they have a clear and opposing position on this issue so that things are very simple for voters. Suppose candidate A gets 50,999,897 votes Suppose candidate B gets 50,456,002 votes B can still win, as happened with Bush, depending on the voting system. This is just an example and of course depends on the specific voting system. The real point being that for sortition you have simple statistical guarantees, always, independently from salience.
- clock_tower 11y ago
  For a particularly dramatic example of this, read G.K. Chesterton's _The Napoleon of Notting Hill_. In the book, England, late in a long and uneventful history, is governed by lot; a randomly-chosen individual is crowned King and given dictatorial powers. Eventually, the lot falls on a bored nihilist with a fondness for 16th-century uniforms, and within twenty years London is a patchwork of feuding principalities with antiquated weapons, beautiful heraldry, and a whole lot of innocent people dead. This book confirms what you're saying: it's not very likely that a barking madman will be randomly chosen as dictator, but it only has to happen once. (The strangest thing about it is that Chesterton saw the most troublesome belligerents, who at one point threaten to use a water tower as a sort of late-Victorian atomic bomb, as the good guys; their willingness to use violence brought beauty and dignity back to a pacific, indolent world. This book was written before Chesterton became Catholic, and its bored nihilism reflects his own feelings at the time; I strongly suspect that it had an influence on the development of fascism, given that Mussolini was a fan of Chesterton's.)

by fela 11y ago

dragonwriter 11y ago

> The law of large number makes sure the randomness in sortition is limited and predictable. Whereas with elections there is a big number of arbitrary factors that greatly can influence the results. With elections, there are constraints which make deviations from the preference of the electorate less likely the greater the salience of the issue is. Sortition distributes the issues on which the decisionmakers deviate from the represented population randomly, which means that salience of the issue does not affect the likelihood of deviation between the decisionmakers and the represented population. This is a significant weakness in sortition compared to elections, that needs to be weighed against whatever advantages are identified for it.

fela 11y ago
Edit to say that your point is interesting and one I hadn't really thought about. This make elections a referendum on the most salient topics, which I guess makes sense. I still think that in elections there are a lot of other factors that influence decisions and given certain voting preferences there are a lot of arbitrary factors that influence the results, more so that in sortition, whose main drawback, as I see it is how little we know about how it would work in practice. Original message: But even for salient issues there are a lot of random factors in elections. Suppose there is a issue so important that everybody cares and votes based only on that issue. Suppose there are only two candidate, and they have a clear and opposing position on this issue so that things are very simple for voters. Suppose candidate A gets 50,999,897 votes Suppose candidate B gets 50,456,002 votes B can still win, as happened with Bush, depending on the voting system. This is just an example and of course depends on the specific voting system. The real point being that for sortition you have simple statistical guarantees, always, independently from salience.
clock_tower 11y ago
For a particularly dramatic example of this, read G.K. Chesterton's _The Napoleon of Notting Hill_. In the book, England, late in a long and uneventful history, is governed by lot; a randomly-chosen individual is crowned King and given dictatorial powers. Eventually, the lot falls on a bored nihilist with a fondness for 16th-century uniforms, and within twenty years London is a patchwork of feuding principalities with antiquated weapons, beautiful heraldry, and a whole lot of innocent people dead. This book confirms what you're saying: it's not very likely that a barking madman will be randomly chosen as dictator, but it only has to happen once. (The strangest thing about it is that Chesterton saw the most troublesome belligerents, who at one point threaten to use a water tower as a sort of late-Victorian atomic bomb, as the good guys; their willingness to use violence brought beauty and dignity back to a pacific, indolent world. This book was written before Chesterton became Catholic, and its bored nihilism reflects his own feelings at the time; I strongly suspect that it had an influence on the development of fascism, given that Mussolini was a fan of Chesterton's.)