7 ms·

Elections are bad for democracy

39 points by kawera 10y ago

f_allwein 10y ago
Bit long winded, but boils down to recommending sortition, which I had not heard of. Interesting: "With sortition, you do not ask everyone to vote on an issue few people really understand, but you draft a random sample of the population and make sure they come to the grips with the subject matter in order to take a sensible decision."
- AnimalMuppet 10y ago
  The problem is, if I wasn't selected, and the selected group reached the opposite decision from what I wanted, it's easy for me to feel like I wasn't listened to, no matter how well the group did their job. This is a political (or maybe psychological) problem, rather than one of "what's the best process?"
- humanrebar 10y ago
  Who decides when someone has "come to grips" with a topic? I mean, anyone who disagrees with me obviously hasn't come to grips with the issue, right?
  - jerf 10y ago
    It's very similar to jury duty. And you'd try to use similar mechanisms to keep the system fair and balanced. And it would have similar failure cases, but "system without failure cases" isn't really on the table here.
    - reitanqild 10y ago
      Agree with humanrebar that this has some serious issues. Compared to jury duty you'll face some serious scaling issues.
    - kiruwa 10y ago
      A jury is a very restricted case. There is a supervising judge and two (or more) competing advocates. The process for choosing those advocates is very formalized (defendant selection and public official). Every one of these other participants breaks the analogy enough to make it useless.
      - jerf 10y ago
        I see I may have skipped showing my work on too many steps here for my point to have made sense initially. Sorry, my fault (no sarcasm). So, when you try to concretely manifest the sortition idea, you find yourself stepping in an awful lot of the same problems you get with juries. With a twist, but very similar. I'd intend to have advocates on hand for the various positions, and if you think the bureaucracy won't be stepping in here with procedures and rules, probably enforced by a process moderator that looks an awful lot like a "judge", along with formalized rules for the other parts of the process, you don't know bureaucracies. Surely we don't expect the participants to all be auto-didacts? And yet, we can't just have one person teaching the relevant issues, or that one person has too much of the power. And I don't say this often, but the bureaucrats would be right here. They would be necessary. There's no way sortition is going to be "randomly choose 100 people, stick them in a room with nothing but a problem statement, accept their decision". It shouldn't be, either; it needs more structure than that. Right down to things like shielding the chosen participants from undue influences, and a lot of really interesting questions around transparency... again, quite like a jury.
        dragonwriter 10y ago
        > I'd intend to have advocates on hand for the various positions, and if you think the bureaucracy won't be stepping in here with procedures and rules, probably enforced by a process moderator that looks an awful lot like a "judge", along with formalized rules for the other parts of the process, you don't know bureaucracies. In a US-like system, if you replace election of leaders with sortition, there is no superior bureaucracy that can impose a judge-like supervisor on the sortition-based bodies. And if you have an bureaucracy that can impose supervision on the elected bodies you are considering replacing, then you don't have a democracy to replace with sortition to start with, you have bureaucratic aristocracy, and talking about problems of elections and democracy is kind of irrelevant to dealing with your system of government. > There's no way sortition is going to be "randomly choose 100 people, stick them in a room with nothing but a problem statement, accept their decision". There's basically a couple of possible models of sortition; there's a legislature-like model (where sortition is how you choose legislators for a term, and then they are replaced with a new body chosen by the same method.) And there's a case-by-case model where there is some method of proposing an issue, and then there is a "jury" chosen for an adversarial "trial" over the issue. (One way you could do this would be to replace one house of a bicameral legislature with case-by-case sortation, so that the remaining house would propose legislation and provide advocates for [and against, usually] that legislation, who would argue in front of a sortition-chosen panel.) In the latter, case-by-case, approach, there would probably be some bureaucracy supervising the process, and the sortition-based body would be very much like a trial jury in relation to that bureaucracy. But then you aren't replacing the elected body with sortition, you are replacing it with a bureaucracy with sortition serving some function within that bureaucracy.) In the legislature-like approach, though, a supervising bureaucracy is fundamentally inconsistent with the concept. > Surely we don't expect the participants to all be auto-didacts? I would expect members of a legislature chosen by sortition to educate themselves about issues the same way as any other legislature. This probably involves a subordinate bureaucratic infrastructure (e.g., staff employed by each member, and bodies answering to the body as a whole, like the GAO), but not a supervising infrastructure.
    - rwmj 10y ago
      The difference is that juries don't usually have any "skin in the game". It doesn't make any difference to a jury member if the defendant is convicted or not (and when it DOES make a difference, we have a word for it -- jury tampering).
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      > It's very similar to jury duty. And you'd try to use similar mechanisms to keep the system fair and balanced. Similar mechanisms to grand or petit juries? Because the latter is what most people are familiar with, but most sortition proposals would seem to be structurally more like grand juries [0]: which are, for structural reasons (including the time commitments involved) far less representative of the jury pool they are notionally drawn from than petit juries are. And the mechanisms which keep them fair and balanced are different (though similar in one way: for both kinds of juries, one of the important methods is that most of the things they do aren't decisive on their own -- except criminal acquittals -- and are inputs to final rulings by judges; for grand juries, this is particularly true, since they act at the very beginning of the process; clearly, this common aspect of the control on juries is not present in most proposals for lawmaking-by-sortition.) [0] For California (and some other US) jurisdictions, take this as "criminal grand juries", as civil grand juries may not even be notionally representative.
- protomyth 10y ago
  We'll pick a small group of people, and feed them an education that will make them vote our way. Sounds like how many prosecutors use grand juries in the USA these days.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
rwmj 10y ago
There are a ton of great alternatives. My favourite is the Demand-Revealing Referendum: http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2007/03/trident_how_to_.html http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbli...
323454 10y ago
Democracy has always been about the people being able to remove their leaders from power when they become egregiously bad. Kind of like evaporative cooling. The means by which they choose them is a second order consideration.
- iamgopal 10y ago
  I always understood election as a kind of checking power over whoever is already at the power, the ultimate authority even above supreme court and president. Only problem is its not immediate but eventual. Can mass voting system replace such authority ? [ A robotic president, which will post questions for which decision needs to be taken for polling via internet, tons of people choose from the option. ]
alain94040 10y ago
I propose a simple fix for major elections such as referendums and presidential elections. I call it the "really?" approach: An election needs to get the same results twice back to back. So for instance, you could replace the primaries and November presidential elections with that system. Vote once: whoever is first needs to win the next round to become president. Candidates may decide to drop out, or not. The public knows: if on round two, they still vote for the candidate that won the first round, that's the winner. For the UK referendum, a second vote would have eliminated the protest vote. You see the results of the first vote, and you really ask yourself: really? Do I want this to happen? And vote one more time to confirm. Simple system, with one huge caveat: no guaranteed outcome. But it would eliminate the need for polling, and hopefully result in better democratic decisions.
- steve19 10y ago
  The result would be a very low turnout on the first vote, with a meaningless result that may or may not be representative of the entire population (because everyone knows the first vote is meaningless so why bother voting), followed by a large turnout on the second vote... and then followed by howling and wailing by which ever side loses and the demanding of a third referendum. Interesting New Zealand recently had a double/two part referendum that was reported on Hacker News (due the the complexity of changing the National flag)
  - kawera 10y ago
    Unless you make voting in the first vote a pre-condition to vote on the second vote.
    - hnal943 10y ago
      to howls of "VOTER SUPRESSION!"
  - zepto 10y ago
    Not necessarily - the second vote could be a ratification of outcome the first, rather than a repeat of the question.
jerf 10y ago
You know, there is so much "Blah blah blah" about how bad democracy is, implicitly in context because "I think it came to the wrong conclusion" (which I , that I really expected the article to segue into something that basicaly amounted to "elites should just be given the power". I expected all the blah blah was trying to obfuscate this. But that's not where it went. If you are interested in reading the whole article, please be my guest, but if you'd like to jump to the payload, use your browser search for "sortition". (Though I can't help but point out the article undercuts its own premise accidentally. The EU, to the extent that it is even a democracy, is certainly subject to the exact same flaws described in the first half of the article! Therefore, logically, the decision to leave an organization where democracy is failing must not be so bad, even if it was made by a process that was itself democratically flawed. This does not "destroy the argument", in the parlance of the day, but it weakens this particular vote being used as the hook for the article. A vote on any other topic would arguably work better.)
- nutheracc 10y ago
  Could it be argued that an understanding of how x works is irrelevant, only the outcome matters, in that individuals who don't understand the workings of x are still able to tell if the outcome is positive or negative for them, and vote on that.
  - tremon 10y ago
    Not in this case. The full outcome of the Brexit vote will not become clear for another ten years, probably. Both sides have tried to win over voters by scheming with "irrefutable facts" that clearly showed the other side's facts were wrong.
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      Not only that - ten years from now people will probably assign positive and negative effects of Brexit to other, more recent causes. The idea of people voting based on the perceived outcome for themselves is limited by their memory / attention span. A lot of important decisions, like those related to infrastructure, have immediate costs but bring benefits only years later.
thr329889 10y ago
Democracy is not failing, but elites do. You need to educate people, rather than labeling everyone who disagrees as a racist.
- zepto 10y ago
  As someone who is actively anti-racist, I weirdly find myself partially agreeing with you. Racism is hard to overcome and widespread. People are not either 'racist' or 'not racist'. Certainly people can be pro-racism or anti-racist in their intentions, but that is separate from how we actually act, since a lot of racism is unconscious and invisible. Labeling actions and activities and even groups as racist is necessary, because we need to become conscious of these forces if we are ever to overcome them. However, whether labeled as racist or not, everyone's voice needs to be heard in the political process. So where I agree with you is in using the label of racism as a tool to silence or ignore people.
kristianc 10y ago
This sounds like a variation of Plato's Philosopher Kings, which uses the 'random sampling' argument to get around the obvious criticism of the elites being given the power. > The Ship of State is a famous and oft-cited metaphor put forth by Plato in Book VI of the Republic (488e–489d). It likens the governance of a city-state to the command of a naval vessel and ultimately argues that the only men fit to be captain of this ship (Greek: ναῦς) are philosopher kings, benevolent men with absolute power who have access to the Form of the Good. The origins of the metaphor can be traced back to the lyric poet Alcaeus (frs. 6, 208, 249), and it is found in Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes before Plato. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_State https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_State Unfortunately, many of the same criticisms apply to sortition as apply to Plato. The problem is that no-one really has access to the "Form of the Good", and no-one can accurately predict what the overall outcome of a decision is going to be over the very long run, however much they study it. In fact, as Popper argues, you're quite likely to draw the wrong conclusion and end up going horribly wrong. On balance, I'd rather put my faith in a large number of people selected from all social backgrounds than a small number of people selected from a potentially narrow social background. There's also a sense of shared agency about the decision making. If it turns out the wrong decision has been made, what are we to say to the person who is not only on the receiving end of said bad decision, but wasn't even allowed to vote on it? It also seems to me that one should be wary about making sweeping statements about a system that has endured for thousands of years in the wake of a decision that they themselves disagreed with.
- alienasa 10y ago
  Did you read the whole article? His most significant proposal is that modern democracies adjust their procedures to use something called "sortition" that dates back to ancient Greece. In sortition, rather than polling the entire populace about complicated issues on which they are likely not well informed, we select a balanced random sample of people from the populace , provide them information, and then allow them to engage each other on the issue. Then we have those people vote. This has several advantages: 1. It actually places "faith in a large number of people selected from all social backgrounds" depending on how large your sample, as opposed to letting elected politicians decide, which is the definition of "a small number of people selected from a potentially narrow social background". 2. It solves the problem where a huge number of people end up voting because of gut instinct or misinformation. Consider the passage of Proposition 13 in California which prohibits the raising of property taxes. If you poll the entire population, that referendum is going to win 100 times out of 100, because for most people the gut check decision is "no I don't want my taxes to go up". However, the correct way to consider that proposition is to get an understanding of how property taxes are used, how they are collected, what the procedures are for changing them in the legislature, etc. and then come to a determination. That determination might be "Yes", it might be "No", or it might be "we should not limit increases in property tax rates but instead limit increases to the real value of collected taxes, by accounting for changes in property values". [1] [1] I'm not proposing that is the right answer, I'm just suggesting that you might arrive at that conclusion if you actually had time to study the issue. Almost by definition, the vast majority of people do not have that time.
milesf 10y ago
"No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." - Winston Churchill, House of Commons, November 11, 1947
- noam87 10y ago
  The same could have been said of the horse until someone tried a train for the first time. We've never tried sortition on a large scale, and on smaller scales it's already been shown effective. A perfect opportunity to experiment with it would be the Canadian senate, IMO. Also note: sortition is a form of democracy. In fact I would argue it's the most democratic process proposed which does not run a risk of mob rule. You still have an "elite" making decisions... only that elite is constantly changing, is made of a representative sample of the general population, and is at less risk of being easily corrupted by special interest groups. It's actually quite beautiful and elegant: so simple, yet it addresses so many of the criticisms of every other system proposed. While at the same time it's incredibly flexible in implementation: it can be perfectly fitted to a parliamentary government structure or any other variation of already existing governments. Any country or state would be able to experiment with it without needing a major overhaul of how its legislative/executive branches operate (only how its members are appointed).
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > sortition is a form of democracy. No, its not. Democracy is either direct (in which each citizen has a direct vote on proposals) or indirect (in which each citizen has a vote on representatives, who either directly vote on proposals or select other officials who do.) The common element of democracy is that there is a chain of choice from the citizenry at large to the decision, what differs among forms of democracy is whether there are intermediate links on that chain, and how many, what those particular intermediate links look like. Sortition is does not share the unifying characteristic of democracy, it is, instead, one of many forms of rule by an unelected, not-democratically-accountable elite. > and is at less risk of being easily corrupted by special interest groups. People that aren't trying to get reelected , and which are rotated fast enough to be "constantly changing" (which also means that public attention on each of them is fleeting), is, if anything, more subject to corruption. They may be less valuable to corrupt (since you are more likely to be renting them for a single decision than buying them for a whole extended career), but I don't think that the combined effect makes them less risk of being corrupted. At a minimum, I think that claim requires substantial support that hasn't been offered.
reitanqild 10y ago
Now, where is the "wisdom of the crowds" when it comes to decisions that we, "the elites", don't like? This annoys me. There is no doubt the result would have been "very fair" if it had been remain. What we are seeing now is IMO hypocrisy and contempt of ordinary people at a scary level. Now, did I want Brexit? No (I had no opinion). Do I think they should have requested more than 50% of the votes? As a conservative biased person I guess so, -don't take a risk unless there is clear demand, simple as a discriminator in electronics: you want to protect against bounces and wobbling... - but this should have been said up front, not after losing. Edit: upvoted this for the discussion, not for the original article.
- brooklyndavs 10y ago
  Its hypocrisy and contempt coming from "elites" via the very institutions that are critical to a democracy, the media. When the 4th estate works in a neutral, non-biased, fact based way democracy can work. However, once you have major media bought and paid for by those "elites" to push some billionaire's agenda you sow distrust in media. Once the voters don't have a place to go for trusted information all bets are off...
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    > institutions that are critical to a democracy, the media. When the 4th estate works in a neutral, non-biased, fact based way democracy can work. I don't believe mainstream media ever worked in a neutral, non-biased, fact based way. They definitely have not been for the past few decades I've been on this planet. Maybe in the past they were more under control by various "elites", government or otherwise. Now, in the west, they are "free" - which means they actually serve Moloch[0], by writing what sells. That is, the most outrage-inducing, biased misrepresentations (and often outright lies) they can get away with. Not sure what is worse[1], but it doesn't matter much. The point is, media isn't "a place to go for trusted information", it never has been, and if this is an institution "critical to democracy", then we have a big problem right here. [0] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ [1] - "elites" at least care about something identifiably human; metaphorical Moloch does not, so the outcome may be very well something nobody wanted, including any of the "elites"
kiruwa 10y ago
This article can be summarized as "Oh no! The 'wrong sorts of people' are winning! Lets ditch popular elections."
- AnimalMuppet 10y ago
  Or, specifically, the people voted the wrong way on the referendum. Let's stop letting people vote on referendums. You see the same thing with the EU Constitution - the voters rejected it in two countries. That can't be allowed. So we'll do the same thing via the Lisbon Treaty, but we won't let anybody vote on that, because they might vote wrong.
  - mrec 10y ago
    Be fair. They let Ireland vote on Lisbon, and when Ireland voted wrong they were even nice enough to let Ireland vote again.
  - tremon 10y ago
    Yes, the same thing happened with the NL referendum on the EU constitution. The reason people voted "no" was because they had never been asked before, so this was their first chance to have their voice heard. That's about the only part of the article I agree with: if you're going to do referendums, then do them regularly. Referenda are only a useful tool if the public feel they really are involved in the process. Otherwise you'll have to answer for every decision that went around them.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
Nursie 10y ago
Ah the Guardian. It's gone into full on hypocrisy mode after the referendum fell to the 'exit' vote. It styles itself as the voice for the downtrodden and disenfranchised, but the moment they make the 'wrong' decision it posts article after article dedicated to denigrating these same people, advocating their voice be ignored. Quite sad really.
sametmax 10y ago
As usual, people confuse democracy, vote, and freedom. In many coutries, we have vote. In some countries, we have a lot of freedom. But to this day, we don't have democracy in a single country. Democracy supposes that the people has the power. It's not the case in what we call democracies today. You have a small group of people getting in the election pool because of where they come from and how much money they can manipulate. Then, this small group takes most of the decisions, which is what we call an oligarchy. Voting then, is just a way to swap people from this group. In no way it puts power in the hand of the people. Quite often people opposes dictatures with our systems to justify that if they are in that state, then we are in a democracy. The fact we have a better, and confortable system doesn't make it magically fit the definition. For the people to have power, you would need them to want it in the first place. But most don't read political programs, most don't think hard about what their country should do, and most certainly don't accept any responsability for anything happening today in their country. They won't choose what they buy or whatch on TV according to the impact on the social life. Hence, elections are not bad for democracy, it's just we never manage to use them to setup a democracy in the first place. In fact, to have a democracy we would need to educate people to want it first. To make everyday's decisions by thinking about it. And to think about what society can become on a regular basis. Right now, as most of us think and act mostly for ourself, we can't achieve democracy. Democracy cannot be brought only by using a fair political system (that we don't even have), you also need citizens.
marcoperaza 10y ago
I, for one, am exceedingly happy that the media establishment has so loudly proclaimed their disdain for democracy in the last week. Open your eyes people, they think they can run your lives better than you and they're quite upset that you've dared fight back.
nemo44x 10y ago
Sortition is just too corruptible and disagreeable I would think. You can sample a society and "educate" them but then that process will forever be under fire too. I believe that in a democracy things should be hard to change. Changing things should take a super majority. This will lead to more compromise and possibly better results for all. If there was a 2/3 requirement to change things then there would be little room for controversial changes to occur that cause an uproar among the citizenship. There would be more cooperation because to change something you'd need to compromise with your opponent for them to get a change they want instead of trying to get a slim majority in the government by election, etc. If this principal was applied in the first place the UK never would have joined the EU and Brexit wouldn't have ever even been an issue. In fact, many of the things a lot of people find disagreeable wouldn't have happened. We are divided because we let our form of democracy divide us.
- dingaling 10y ago
  Whilst I agree that a supermajority is an excellent idea for changing things, it's still staightforward for politicians ( or more precisely, civil service mandarins ) to play the long-game to achieve what they want regardless. They can operate on a longer timeline than the average voter,for whom there are more pressing daily concerns. For example, de Gaulle originally blocked the UK's entry into the EEC. So the UK went off and formed the rival EFTA with some peripheral nations, until EFTA was eventually folded into the ECSC / EEC. By the time a referendum on remaining was eventually held, in 1975, the UK was already deep in the EEC. Change had been achieved without a majority, or even a minority.
- TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
  If you impose too high a barrier to change, then laws cannot stay in sync with society, and that will lead to severe unrest.
  - mrec 10y ago
    Yes. I think this is a common misunderstanding about democracy. Democracy is not good because it provides the best government, or even competent government; much of the time it manifestly doesn't. Democracy is good because it provides for stable succession; if a discontented group is strong enough to stage a successful coup or revolution, then in a democracy it's probably strong enough to achieve its ends at far lower cost and risk by waiting a couple of years until the next election. The EU was founded in large part to prevent yet another European war; that's a noble goal and for all its flaws I think the EU can claim a lot of credit for 70 years of peace. Warnings against complacency that "it could never happen again these days" are well-made and well-taken. But we haven't had a violent revolution or civil war in western Europe for a fair while either - anything since Franco? - and I think that's largely thanks to functional democracy. Messing with that is not to be taken lightly either. You don't have to go back very far to find everyone collectively soiling their breeches every time a monarch started getting on a bit without a solid heir in sight.
Rexxar 10y ago
The goal of democracy is not to be good but to be fair. Democracy gives people what they deserve and in the long run they will try to make what is good for them. Making mistakes is the only way to learn (individually or collectively) so we shouldn't care too much for each error.
hackuser 10y ago
(Excerpting from another post:) Most nations are republican democracies, not democracies. People choose the best of them (or the best person running) to deal with these issues. Direct democracy, where the people decide issues directly, is actually not part of the system. The UK has had 3 nationwide referendums and the US none, AFAIK. There's a good reason for that: The average person has no idea what they're talking about on most issues. They have other jobs and interests, or no interest. Do I want the wisdom of the crowds deciding how the military should be funded and structured, for example, or do I want elected officials who have hearings, a staff of aids, who study the issue and talk to the generals ... egads, I pay a lot of attention to public affairs, but I wouldn't want that responsibility. Note also that while elected officials are very human and imperfect, their credentials and experience are far above average.
xlm1717 10y ago
>Our voting system worked well for decades, but now it is broken. Now that the elites don't get the desired result, it's broken. The beatings will continue until morale improves!
Lidador 10y ago
Qualitative Democracy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5cCyAqCkIw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5cCyAqCkIw

39 points by kawera 10y ago

Bit long winded, but boils down to recommending sortition, which I had not heard of. Interesting: "With sortition, you do not ask everyone to vote on an issue few people really understand, but you draft a random sample of the population and make sure they come to the grips with the subject matter in order to take a sensible decision."

AnimalMuppet 10y ago
The problem is, if I wasn't selected, and the selected group reached the opposite decision from what I wanted, it's easy for me to feel like I wasn't listened to, no matter how well the group did their job. This is a political (or maybe psychological) problem, rather than one of "what's the best process?"
humanrebar 10y ago
Who decides when someone has "come to grips" with a topic? I mean, anyone who disagrees with me obviously hasn't come to grips with the issue, right?
- jerf 10y ago
  It's very similar to jury duty. And you'd try to use similar mechanisms to keep the system fair and balanced. And it would have similar failure cases, but "system without failure cases" isn't really on the table here.
  - reitanqild 10y ago
    Agree with humanrebar that this has some serious issues. Compared to jury duty you'll face some serious scaling issues.
  - kiruwa 10y ago
    A jury is a very restricted case. There is a supervising judge and two (or more) competing advocates. The process for choosing those advocates is very formalized (defendant selection and public official). Every one of these other participants breaks the analogy enough to make it useless.
    - jerf 10y ago
      I see I may have skipped showing my work on too many steps here for my point to have made sense initially. Sorry, my fault (no sarcasm). So, when you try to concretely manifest the sortition idea, you find yourself stepping in an awful lot of the same problems you get with juries. With a twist, but very similar. I'd intend to have advocates on hand for the various positions, and if you think the bureaucracy won't be stepping in here with procedures and rules, probably enforced by a process moderator that looks an awful lot like a "judge", along with formalized rules for the other parts of the process, you don't know bureaucracies. Surely we don't expect the participants to all be auto-didacts? And yet, we can't just have one person teaching the relevant issues, or that one person has too much of the power. And I don't say this often, but the bureaucrats would be right here. They would be necessary. There's no way sortition is going to be "randomly choose 100 people, stick them in a room with nothing but a problem statement, accept their decision". It shouldn't be, either; it needs more structure than that. Right down to things like shielding the chosen participants from undue influences, and a lot of really interesting questions around transparency... again, quite like a jury.
      - dragonwriter 10y ago
        > I'd intend to have advocates on hand for the various positions, and if you think the bureaucracy won't be stepping in here with procedures and rules, probably enforced by a process moderator that looks an awful lot like a "judge", along with formalized rules for the other parts of the process, you don't know bureaucracies. In a US-like system, if you replace election of leaders with sortition, there is no superior bureaucracy that can impose a judge-like supervisor on the sortition-based bodies. And if you have an bureaucracy that can impose supervision on the elected bodies you are considering replacing, then you don't have a democracy to replace with sortition to start with, you have bureaucratic aristocracy, and talking about problems of elections and democracy is kind of irrelevant to dealing with your system of government. > There's no way sortition is going to be "randomly choose 100 people, stick them in a room with nothing but a problem statement, accept their decision". There's basically a couple of possible models of sortition; there's a legislature-like model (where sortition is how you choose legislators for a term, and then they are replaced with a new body chosen by the same method.) And there's a case-by-case model where there is some method of proposing an issue, and then there is a "jury" chosen for an adversarial "trial" over the issue. (One way you could do this would be to replace one house of a bicameral legislature with case-by-case sortation, so that the remaining house would propose legislation and provide advocates for [and against, usually] that legislation, who would argue in front of a sortition-chosen panel.) In the latter, case-by-case, approach, there would probably be some bureaucracy supervising the process, and the sortition-based body would be very much like a trial jury in relation to that bureaucracy. But then you aren't replacing the elected body with sortition, you are replacing it with a bureaucracy with sortition serving some function within that bureaucracy.) In the legislature-like approach, though, a supervising bureaucracy is fundamentally inconsistent with the concept. > Surely we don't expect the participants to all be auto-didacts? I would expect members of a legislature chosen by sortition to educate themselves about issues the same way as any other legislature. This probably involves a subordinate bureaucratic infrastructure (e.g., staff employed by each member, and bodies answering to the body as a whole, like the GAO), but not a supervising infrastructure.
  - rwmj 10y ago
    The difference is that juries don't usually have any "skin in the game". It doesn't make any difference to a jury member if the defendant is convicted or not (and when it DOES make a difference, we have a word for it -- jury tampering).
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > It's very similar to jury duty. And you'd try to use similar mechanisms to keep the system fair and balanced. Similar mechanisms to grand or petit juries? Because the latter is what most people are familiar with, but most sortition proposals would seem to be structurally more like grand juries [0]: which are, for structural reasons (including the time commitments involved) far less representative of the jury pool they are notionally drawn from than petit juries are. And the mechanisms which keep them fair and balanced are different (though similar in one way: for both kinds of juries, one of the important methods is that most of the things they do aren't decisive on their own -- except criminal acquittals -- and are inputs to final rulings by judges; for grand juries, this is particularly true, since they act at the very beginning of the process; clearly, this common aspect of the control on juries is not present in most proposals for lawmaking-by-sortition.) [0] For California (and some other US) jurisdictions, take this as "criminal grand juries", as civil grand juries may not even be notionally representative.
protomyth 10y ago
We'll pick a small group of people, and feed them an education that will make them vote our way. Sounds like how many prosecutors use grand juries in the USA these days.
deleted 10y ago
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rwmj 10y ago

There are a ton of great alternatives. My favourite is the Demand-Revealing Referendum: http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2007/03/trident_how_to_.html http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbli...

323454 10y ago

Democracy has always been about the people being able to remove their leaders from power when they become egregiously bad. Kind of like evaporative cooling. The means by which they choose them is a second order consideration.

iamgopal 10y ago
I always understood election as a kind of checking power over whoever is already at the power, the ultimate authority even above supreme court and president. Only problem is its not immediate but eventual. Can mass voting system replace such authority ? [ A robotic president, which will post questions for which decision needs to be taken for polling via internet, tons of people choose from the option. ]

alain94040 10y ago

I propose a simple fix for major elections such as referendums and presidential elections. I call it the "really?" approach: An election needs to get the same results twice back to back. So for instance, you could replace the primaries and November presidential elections with that system. Vote once: whoever is first needs to win the next round to become president. Candidates may decide to drop out, or not. The public knows: if on round two, they still vote for the candidate that won the first round, that's the winner. For the UK referendum, a second vote would have eliminated the protest vote. You see the results of the first vote, and you really ask yourself: really? Do I want this to happen? And vote one more time to confirm. Simple system, with one huge caveat: no guaranteed outcome. But it would eliminate the need for polling, and hopefully result in better democratic decisions.

steve19 10y ago
The result would be a very low turnout on the first vote, with a meaningless result that may or may not be representative of the entire population (because everyone knows the first vote is meaningless so why bother voting), followed by a large turnout on the second vote... and then followed by howling and wailing by which ever side loses and the demanding of a third referendum. Interesting New Zealand recently had a double/two part referendum that was reported on Hacker News (due the the complexity of changing the National flag)
- kawera 10y ago
  Unless you make voting in the first vote a pre-condition to vote on the second vote.
  - hnal943 10y ago
    to howls of "VOTER SUPRESSION!"
- zepto 10y ago
  Not necessarily - the second vote could be a ratification of outcome the first, rather than a repeat of the question.

jerf 10y ago

You know, there is so much "Blah blah blah" about how bad democracy is, implicitly in context because "I think it came to the wrong conclusion" (which I , that I really expected the article to segue into something that basicaly amounted to "elites should just be given the power". I expected all the blah blah was trying to obfuscate this. But that's not where it went. If you are interested in reading the whole article, please be my guest, but if you'd like to jump to the payload, use your browser search for "sortition". (Though I can't help but point out the article undercuts its own premise accidentally. The EU, to the extent that it is even a democracy, is certainly subject to the exact same flaws described in the first half of the article! Therefore, logically, the decision to leave an organization where democracy is failing must not be so bad, even if it was made by a process that was itself democratically flawed. This does not "destroy the argument", in the parlance of the day, but it weakens this particular vote being used as the hook for the article. A vote on any other topic would arguably work better.)

nutheracc 10y ago
Could it be argued that an understanding of how x works is irrelevant, only the outcome matters, in that individuals who don't understand the workings of x are still able to tell if the outcome is positive or negative for them, and vote on that.
- tremon 10y ago
  Not in this case. The full outcome of the Brexit vote will not become clear for another ten years, probably. Both sides have tried to win over voters by scheming with "irrefutable facts" that clearly showed the other side's facts were wrong.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    Not only that - ten years from now people will probably assign positive and negative effects of Brexit to other, more recent causes. The idea of people voting based on the perceived outcome for themselves is limited by their memory / attention span. A lot of important decisions, like those related to infrastructure, have immediate costs but bring benefits only years later.

thr329889 10y ago

Democracy is not failing, but elites do. You need to educate people, rather than labeling everyone who disagrees as a racist.

zepto 10y ago
As someone who is actively anti-racist, I weirdly find myself partially agreeing with you. Racism is hard to overcome and widespread. People are not either 'racist' or 'not racist'. Certainly people can be pro-racism or anti-racist in their intentions, but that is separate from how we actually act, since a lot of racism is unconscious and invisible. Labeling actions and activities and even groups as racist is necessary, because we need to become conscious of these forces if we are ever to overcome them. However, whether labeled as racist or not, everyone's voice needs to be heard in the political process. So where I agree with you is in using the label of racism as a tool to silence or ignore people.

kristianc 10y ago

This sounds like a variation of Plato's Philosopher Kings, which uses the 'random sampling' argument to get around the obvious criticism of the elites being given the power. > The Ship of State is a famous and oft-cited metaphor put forth by Plato in Book VI of the Republic (488e–489d). It likens the governance of a city-state to the command of a naval vessel and ultimately argues that the only men fit to be captain of this ship (Greek: ναῦς) are philosopher kings, benevolent men with absolute power who have access to the Form of the Good. The origins of the metaphor can be traced back to the lyric poet Alcaeus (frs. 6, 208, 249), and it is found in Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes before Plato. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_State https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_State Unfortunately, many of the same criticisms apply to sortition as apply to Plato. The problem is that no-one really has access to the "Form of the Good", and no-one can accurately predict what the overall outcome of a decision is going to be over the very long run, however much they study it. In fact, as Popper argues, you're quite likely to draw the wrong conclusion and end up going horribly wrong. On balance, I'd rather put my faith in a large number of people selected from all social backgrounds than a small number of people selected from a potentially narrow social background. There's also a sense of shared agency about the decision making. If it turns out the wrong decision has been made, what are we to say to the person who is not only on the receiving end of said bad decision, but wasn't even allowed to vote on it? It also seems to me that one should be wary about making sweeping statements about a system that has endured for thousands of years in the wake of a decision that they themselves disagreed with.

alienasa 10y ago
Did you read the whole article? His most significant proposal is that modern democracies adjust their procedures to use something called "sortition" that dates back to ancient Greece. In sortition, rather than polling the entire populace about complicated issues on which they are likely not well informed, we select a balanced random sample of people from the populace , provide them information, and then allow them to engage each other on the issue. Then we have those people vote. This has several advantages: 1. It actually places "faith in a large number of people selected from all social backgrounds" depending on how large your sample, as opposed to letting elected politicians decide, which is the definition of "a small number of people selected from a potentially narrow social background". 2. It solves the problem where a huge number of people end up voting because of gut instinct or misinformation. Consider the passage of Proposition 13 in California which prohibits the raising of property taxes. If you poll the entire population, that referendum is going to win 100 times out of 100, because for most people the gut check decision is "no I don't want my taxes to go up". However, the correct way to consider that proposition is to get an understanding of how property taxes are used, how they are collected, what the procedures are for changing them in the legislature, etc. and then come to a determination. That determination might be "Yes", it might be "No", or it might be "we should not limit increases in property tax rates but instead limit increases to the real value of collected taxes, by accounting for changes in property values". [1] [1] I'm not proposing that is the right answer, I'm just suggesting that you might arrive at that conclusion if you actually had time to study the issue. Almost by definition, the vast majority of people do not have that time.

milesf 10y ago

"No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." - Winston Churchill, House of Commons, November 11, 1947

noam87 10y ago
The same could have been said of the horse until someone tried a train for the first time. We've never tried sortition on a large scale, and on smaller scales it's already been shown effective. A perfect opportunity to experiment with it would be the Canadian senate, IMO. Also note: sortition is a form of democracy. In fact I would argue it's the most democratic process proposed which does not run a risk of mob rule. You still have an "elite" making decisions... only that elite is constantly changing, is made of a representative sample of the general population, and is at less risk of being easily corrupted by special interest groups. It's actually quite beautiful and elegant: so simple, yet it addresses so many of the criticisms of every other system proposed. While at the same time it's incredibly flexible in implementation: it can be perfectly fitted to a parliamentary government structure or any other variation of already existing governments. Any country or state would be able to experiment with it without needing a major overhaul of how its legislative/executive branches operate (only how its members are appointed).
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > sortition is a form of democracy. No, its not. Democracy is either direct (in which each citizen has a direct vote on proposals) or indirect (in which each citizen has a vote on representatives, who either directly vote on proposals or select other officials who do.) The common element of democracy is that there is a chain of choice from the citizenry at large to the decision, what differs among forms of democracy is whether there are intermediate links on that chain, and how many, what those particular intermediate links look like. Sortition is does not share the unifying characteristic of democracy, it is, instead, one of many forms of rule by an unelected, not-democratically-accountable elite. > and is at less risk of being easily corrupted by special interest groups. People that aren't trying to get reelected , and which are rotated fast enough to be "constantly changing" (which also means that public attention on each of them is fleeting), is, if anything, more subject to corruption. They may be less valuable to corrupt (since you are more likely to be renting them for a single decision than buying them for a whole extended career), but I don't think that the combined effect makes them less risk of being corrupted. At a minimum, I think that claim requires substantial support that hasn't been offered.

reitanqild 10y ago

Now, where is the "wisdom of the crowds" when it comes to decisions that we, "the elites", don't like? This annoys me. There is no doubt the result would have been "very fair" if it had been remain. What we are seeing now is IMO hypocrisy and contempt of ordinary people at a scary level. Now, did I want Brexit? No (I had no opinion). Do I think they should have requested more than 50% of the votes? As a conservative biased person I guess so, -don't take a risk unless there is clear demand, simple as a discriminator in electronics: you want to protect against bounces and wobbling... - but this should have been said up front, not after losing. Edit: upvoted this for the discussion, not for the original article.

brooklyndavs 10y ago
Its hypocrisy and contempt coming from "elites" via the very institutions that are critical to a democracy, the media. When the 4th estate works in a neutral, non-biased, fact based way democracy can work. However, once you have major media bought and paid for by those "elites" to push some billionaire's agenda you sow distrust in media. Once the voters don't have a place to go for trusted information all bets are off...
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  > institutions that are critical to a democracy, the media. When the 4th estate works in a neutral, non-biased, fact based way democracy can work. I don't believe mainstream media ever worked in a neutral, non-biased, fact based way. They definitely have not been for the past few decades I've been on this planet. Maybe in the past they were more under control by various "elites", government or otherwise. Now, in the west, they are "free" - which means they actually serve Moloch[0], by writing what sells. That is, the most outrage-inducing, biased misrepresentations (and often outright lies) they can get away with. Not sure what is worse[1], but it doesn't matter much. The point is, media isn't "a place to go for trusted information", it never has been, and if this is an institution "critical to democracy", then we have a big problem right here. [0] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ [1] - "elites" at least care about something identifiably human; metaphorical Moloch does not, so the outcome may be very well something nobody wanted, including any of the "elites"

kiruwa 10y ago

This article can be summarized as "Oh no! The 'wrong sorts of people' are winning! Lets ditch popular elections."

AnimalMuppet 10y ago
Or, specifically, the people voted the wrong way on the referendum. Let's stop letting people vote on referendums. You see the same thing with the EU Constitution - the voters rejected it in two countries. That can't be allowed. So we'll do the same thing via the Lisbon Treaty, but we won't let anybody vote on that, because they might vote wrong.
- mrec 10y ago
  Be fair. They let Ireland vote on Lisbon, and when Ireland voted wrong they were even nice enough to let Ireland vote again.
- tremon 10y ago
  Yes, the same thing happened with the NL referendum on the EU constitution. The reason people voted "no" was because they had never been asked before, so this was their first chance to have their voice heard. That's about the only part of the article I agree with: if you're going to do referendums, then do them regularly. Referenda are only a useful tool if the public feel they really are involved in the process. Otherwise you'll have to answer for every decision that went around them.
  - deleted 10y ago
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Nursie 10y ago

Ah the Guardian. It's gone into full on hypocrisy mode after the referendum fell to the 'exit' vote. It styles itself as the voice for the downtrodden and disenfranchised, but the moment they make the 'wrong' decision it posts article after article dedicated to denigrating these same people, advocating their voice be ignored. Quite sad really.

sametmax 10y ago

As usual, people confuse democracy, vote, and freedom. In many coutries, we have vote. In some countries, we have a lot of freedom. But to this day, we don't have democracy in a single country. Democracy supposes that the people has the power. It's not the case in what we call democracies today. You have a small group of people getting in the election pool because of where they come from and how much money they can manipulate. Then, this small group takes most of the decisions, which is what we call an oligarchy. Voting then, is just a way to swap people from this group. In no way it puts power in the hand of the people. Quite often people opposes dictatures with our systems to justify that if they are in that state, then we are in a democracy. The fact we have a better, and confortable system doesn't make it magically fit the definition. For the people to have power, you would need them to want it in the first place. But most don't read political programs, most don't think hard about what their country should do, and most certainly don't accept any responsability for anything happening today in their country. They won't choose what they buy or whatch on TV according to the impact on the social life. Hence, elections are not bad for democracy, it's just we never manage to use them to setup a democracy in the first place. In fact, to have a democracy we would need to educate people to want it first. To make everyday's decisions by thinking about it. And to think about what society can become on a regular basis. Right now, as most of us think and act mostly for ourself, we can't achieve democracy. Democracy cannot be brought only by using a fair political system (that we don't even have), you also need citizens.

marcoperaza 10y ago

I, for one, am exceedingly happy that the media establishment has so loudly proclaimed their disdain for democracy in the last week. Open your eyes people, they think they can run your lives better than you and they're quite upset that you've dared fight back.

nemo44x 10y ago

Sortition is just too corruptible and disagreeable I would think. You can sample a society and "educate" them but then that process will forever be under fire too. I believe that in a democracy things should be hard to change. Changing things should take a super majority. This will lead to more compromise and possibly better results for all. If there was a 2/3 requirement to change things then there would be little room for controversial changes to occur that cause an uproar among the citizenship. There would be more cooperation because to change something you'd need to compromise with your opponent for them to get a change they want instead of trying to get a slim majority in the government by election, etc. If this principal was applied in the first place the UK never would have joined the EU and Brexit wouldn't have ever even been an issue. In fact, many of the things a lot of people find disagreeable wouldn't have happened. We are divided because we let our form of democracy divide us.

dingaling 10y ago
Whilst I agree that a supermajority is an excellent idea for changing things, it's still staightforward for politicians ( or more precisely, civil service mandarins ) to play the long-game to achieve what they want regardless. They can operate on a longer timeline than the average voter,for whom there are more pressing daily concerns. For example, de Gaulle originally blocked the UK's entry into the EEC. So the UK went off and formed the rival EFTA with some peripheral nations, until EFTA was eventually folded into the ECSC / EEC. By the time a referendum on remaining was eventually held, in 1975, the UK was already deep in the EEC. Change had been achieved without a majority, or even a minority.
TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
If you impose too high a barrier to change, then laws cannot stay in sync with society, and that will lead to severe unrest.
- mrec 10y ago
  Yes. I think this is a common misunderstanding about democracy. Democracy is not good because it provides the best government, or even competent government; much of the time it manifestly doesn't. Democracy is good because it provides for stable succession; if a discontented group is strong enough to stage a successful coup or revolution, then in a democracy it's probably strong enough to achieve its ends at far lower cost and risk by waiting a couple of years until the next election. The EU was founded in large part to prevent yet another European war; that's a noble goal and for all its flaws I think the EU can claim a lot of credit for 70 years of peace. Warnings against complacency that "it could never happen again these days" are well-made and well-taken. But we haven't had a violent revolution or civil war in western Europe for a fair while either - anything since Franco? - and I think that's largely thanks to functional democracy. Messing with that is not to be taken lightly either. You don't have to go back very far to find everyone collectively soiling their breeches every time a monarch started getting on a bit without a solid heir in sight.

Rexxar 10y ago

The goal of democracy is not to be good but to be fair. Democracy gives people what they deserve and in the long run they will try to make what is good for them. Making mistakes is the only way to learn (individually or collectively) so we shouldn't care too much for each error.

hackuser 10y ago

(Excerpting from another post:) Most nations are republican democracies, not democracies. People choose the best of them (or the best person running) to deal with these issues. Direct democracy, where the people decide issues directly, is actually not part of the system. The UK has had 3 nationwide referendums and the US none, AFAIK. There's a good reason for that: The average person has no idea what they're talking about on most issues. They have other jobs and interests, or no interest. Do I want the wisdom of the crowds deciding how the military should be funded and structured, for example, or do I want elected officials who have hearings, a staff of aids, who study the issue and talk to the generals ... egads, I pay a lot of attention to public affairs, but I wouldn't want that responsibility. Note also that while elected officials are very human and imperfect, their credentials and experience are far above average.

xlm1717 10y ago

>Our voting system worked well for decades, but now it is broken. Now that the elites don't get the desired result, it's broken. The beatings will continue until morale improves!

Lidador 10y ago

Qualitative Democracy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5cCyAqCkIw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5cCyAqCkIw