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"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 tha

by 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.
  - noam87 10y ago
    On corruptibility, true, it's not been tested so one can't say one way or the other. But at least in principle it rules out many of the common paths to corruption. Let's take four major forms corruption takes: (1) a big bag of money dropped on your table. (2) I rub your back, you rub mine, reciprocal relationship. (3) Blackmail. (4) Personal: the desire for power. (1) is of course still possible, but you're gonna need a lot more bags, and you're gonna have to be very careful with how you approach. Usually, the path to bribing someone requires a "romancing" phase; you have to make sure the other side is open to your proposal and, most importantly, won't give you up. This is a lengthy process that is much easier when the pool of candidates is small and doesn't change very often. How valuable is that bag of money when that person won't have any influence in 4 years' time? You're gonna need a lot more bags, and you're gonna have to be a lot more careful about who to approach. (2) This one is out of the question. These sort of reciprocal relationships take years to cultivate, and we've immediately removed one of the prime motivating factors which is campaign funding. (3) Blackmail. This one will still work, but again: you're gonna need a lot more detective work to dig up brand new dirt, every 4 years, on every member of a senate. This becomes very impractical. Also I'm gonna go out on a limb and say the sort of secrets an average sample of the population can be blackmailed on is not the same as that of a small group of career politicians. (4) Again, mostly out of question. There is a much higher incentive to pass laws that benefit people "like you", but not much you can do to benefit yourself directly (excluding the unlikely chance that the person who drew the lottery ticket is, say, CEO of some large corporation), and still, this only works if by some chance a large proportion of other lottery winners are like you. Otherwise, strategically, the only personal benefit you can get out of a position of power is to pass laws that benefit the country as a whole. On the definition of Democratic. Yes, that's a fair point. Or perhaps sortition lives in a sort of quantum state being both democratic and dictatorial. I hope someone manages to test this out. To me it seems obvious that the biggest threat to society is not climate change, or antibiotic resistance, or bad economies or poverty: all of these have a single root cause: corruption. There's no lack of scientific innovation to solve the other problems; it's corrupt institutions that stand in their way. Our number one focus as a species right now should be to figure out how eliminate corruption from our institutions and lessen the impact of bad actors.
- sevensor 10y ago
  I see the appeal of sortition, and I'd like to see it tried. My biggest concern is that, in any transition to election-by-lot, the chosen representatives are at a disadvantage compared to the lobbyists and the national bureaucracy. I worry that these entrenched interests would find it very easy to manipulate representatives who have much less policy experience than they do.
  - tremon 10y ago
    I don't want sortition to replace our two-house electoral system. But I would like to see more regular people involved in politics. Maybe we could replace a part of the parliament seats with "public" seats (i.e. have 30% of the lower house filled with a sortition-based draft)? Doing it this way means that you can still guarantee a continuity of government, and replace the sortition seats every six months (maybe with voluntary term extension). You'd not replace general electoral voting, but the article doesn't make a strong case that it's really broken anyway.
- AnimalMuppet 10y ago
  Sortition also may be less corruptible. If the group is constantly changing, that may be harder to corrupt than having the same representative in DC for 30 straight years.

by milesf 10y ago

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.
- noam87 10y ago
  On corruptibility, true, it's not been tested so one can't say one way or the other. But at least in principle it rules out many of the common paths to corruption. Let's take four major forms corruption takes: (1) a big bag of money dropped on your table. (2) I rub your back, you rub mine, reciprocal relationship. (3) Blackmail. (4) Personal: the desire for power. (1) is of course still possible, but you're gonna need a lot more bags, and you're gonna have to be very careful with how you approach. Usually, the path to bribing someone requires a "romancing" phase; you have to make sure the other side is open to your proposal and, most importantly, won't give you up. This is a lengthy process that is much easier when the pool of candidates is small and doesn't change very often. How valuable is that bag of money when that person won't have any influence in 4 years' time? You're gonna need a lot more bags, and you're gonna have to be a lot more careful about who to approach. (2) This one is out of the question. These sort of reciprocal relationships take years to cultivate, and we've immediately removed one of the prime motivating factors which is campaign funding. (3) Blackmail. This one will still work, but again: you're gonna need a lot more detective work to dig up brand new dirt, every 4 years, on every member of a senate. This becomes very impractical. Also I'm gonna go out on a limb and say the sort of secrets an average sample of the population can be blackmailed on is not the same as that of a small group of career politicians. (4) Again, mostly out of question. There is a much higher incentive to pass laws that benefit people "like you", but not much you can do to benefit yourself directly (excluding the unlikely chance that the person who drew the lottery ticket is, say, CEO of some large corporation), and still, this only works if by some chance a large proportion of other lottery winners are like you. Otherwise, strategically, the only personal benefit you can get out of a position of power is to pass laws that benefit the country as a whole. On the definition of Democratic. Yes, that's a fair point. Or perhaps sortition lives in a sort of quantum state being both democratic and dictatorial. I hope someone manages to test this out. To me it seems obvious that the biggest threat to society is not climate change, or antibiotic resistance, or bad economies or poverty: all of these have a single root cause: corruption. There's no lack of scientific innovation to solve the other problems; it's corrupt institutions that stand in their way. Our number one focus as a species right now should be to figure out how eliminate corruption from our institutions and lessen the impact of bad actors.
sevensor 10y ago
I see the appeal of sortition, and I'd like to see it tried. My biggest concern is that, in any transition to election-by-lot, the chosen representatives are at a disadvantage compared to the lobbyists and the national bureaucracy. I worry that these entrenched interests would find it very easy to manipulate representatives who have much less policy experience than they do.
- tremon 10y ago
  I don't want sortition to replace our two-house electoral system. But I would like to see more regular people involved in politics. Maybe we could replace a part of the parliament seats with "public" seats (i.e. have 30% of the lower house filled with a sortition-based draft)? Doing it this way means that you can still guarantee a continuity of government, and replace the sortition seats every six months (maybe with voluntary term extension). You'd not replace general electoral voting, but the article doesn't make a strong case that it's really broken anyway.
AnimalMuppet 10y ago
Sortition also may be less corruptible. If the group is constantly changing, that may be harder to corrupt than having the same representative in DC for 30 straight years.