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It would be chaos, and the real power would shift to the administrators. If you select people at random, they will have even less understanding of the issues t

It would be chaos, and the real power would shift to the administrators. If you select people at random, they will have even less understanding of the issues they vote on than career politicians. They don't have established networks of experts they believe they can trust. They lack the skills to have effective meetings between more than a handful of people, to negotiate, and to make collective decisions. Administrators would have to provide all that. That would be bureaucracy in the literal sense of the word.

roenxi 3y ago
There'd need to be some filtering before people take office. I like the idea of randomly selecting a small pool of candidates then voting within that pool. Maybe people elect and elector who's job it is to sit for 12 months just assessing people to hold actual power. Career politicians are better than monarchs or aristocrats, but the fact is that making governance decisions is technically easy. Anyone can do it in principle. Politicians literally don't understand what they are voting on because the breadth of topics is too large and famously the US Congress can go from proposing to voting on complex trillion-dollar spending bills [0] in 48 hours. There is literally no way a random pool of people can do worse than that. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolidated_Appropriations_Act%2C_2018 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolidated_Appropriations_Ac...
- jltsiren 3y ago
  The two-party system in the US probably works in a different way than the multi-party system in the EU. In the EU, and especially in national parliaments, political parties are the primary actors. While individual politicians are often ignorant of the topics they vote on, the parties usually have the relevant expertise, though they are not always willing to take advantage of it. After all, one of the primary functions of a political party is to provide a pool of resources and trusted expertise that is independent both from the government and lobbyists.
  - roenxi 3y ago
    These two positions are sitting in contradiction to each other. People chosen by lot are said to lead to administrators making the decisions and that would be bad ... but career politicians govern by giving decision making power to an administrator making the decision and that that is good. I don't think your original comment got to the heart of what you don't like about demarchy. Furthermore, I personally just flat out don't believe "parties usually have the relevant expertise". What exactly, in detail, is that supposed to mean? Because as I've never seen that technical expertise coming out of a political party.
    - jltsiren 3y ago
      It's all about checks and balances. When elected representatives have experts of their own, experts whom they trust, they are not as much at the mercy of the government and the lobbyists. It's the same thing as with elections. You can trust the elections without trusting the government running them, because the party you vote has its own people overseeing the elections. And it's always a party you vote, even in systems where you nominally cast your vote for an individual candidate, because individuals acting on their own are too weak to challenge the system. The experts you are aware of may be members of a political party, participating in the internal processes of the party to varying degrees. It's one way to be an active citizen. You usually don't know that, because it's not your business to know. Political affiliation is a private matter, after all.
logicchains 3y ago
>If you select people at random, they will have even less understanding of the issues they vote on than career politicians This isn't necessarily true. Politicians aren't selected for understanding; their ability to obtain and retain power is entirely due to their ability to attract voters and make deals with other politicians. If you assume a normal distribution of traits, then when people are selected based on scoring a high percentile in just one trait (in this case, political charisma), on average they'll be worse at other traits than if you'd selected a similar number of people completely randomly.
- jltsiren 3y ago
  Traits may be normally distributed, but they are not independent. People who are good at something tend to be above average in other things. People have done some research on that in Finland. Due to mandatory military service, the vast majority of men have taken the same intelligence and personality tests. The research found that male politicians performed better in the intelligence test and were more likely to have favorable personality traits than men in the general population. The effect was already present among the candidates in local elections. The higher up you went, the more significant the effect became.
  - jerojero 3y ago
    Citizens assemblies, also called minipublics, have been trialed for years in many places and in many different topics. In real life these people do not produce legislation/recommendations that are of less quality than politicians. I recommend a book called "open democracy" that goes into detail about this kind of decision making processes. The OCED has also done a lot of work and has a few reports on the matter too, if you look at their recommendations for "the future of democracy". Some big experiments in this area have been done in France as recent as a few months ago, in Ireland, in Iceland and the European union as a whole did a very big one a few years ago.
Rzor 3y ago
>If you select people at random, they will have even less understanding of the issues they vote on than career politicians. This reminds me of Varoufakis wanting to take the issue to the Greeks, during the Greek bailout negotiations, being told that he was "putting [his] people in a difficult situation of having to make a pivotal decision on complicated matters". He replied "Yes, it's called democracy".
ClumsyPilot 3y ago
> They don't have established networks of corrupting lobbyists, that the main thing they are missing. The average age in the Senate is what, 65? The percentage of people with degrees in science, architecture or engineering is like 10%. These people are not keeping up with changes in the world, they are not more informed than an average Joe and are definitely less capable of processing new information. There is no formal qualification required to become a politician and they are not selected based on intellectual merit. In fact my local politician is a ex-convict.

roenxi 3y ago

There'd need to be some filtering before people take office. I like the idea of randomly selecting a small pool of candidates then voting within that pool. Maybe people elect and elector who's job it is to sit for 12 months just assessing people to hold actual power. Career politicians are better than monarchs or aristocrats, but the fact is that making governance decisions is technically easy. Anyone can do it in principle. Politicians literally don't understand what they are voting on because the breadth of topics is too large and famously the US Congress can go from proposing to voting on complex trillion-dollar spending bills [0] in 48 hours. There is literally no way a random pool of people can do worse than that. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolidated_Appropriations_Act%2C_2018 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolidated_Appropriations_Ac...

jltsiren 3y ago
The two-party system in the US probably works in a different way than the multi-party system in the EU. In the EU, and especially in national parliaments, political parties are the primary actors. While individual politicians are often ignorant of the topics they vote on, the parties usually have the relevant expertise, though they are not always willing to take advantage of it. After all, one of the primary functions of a political party is to provide a pool of resources and trusted expertise that is independent both from the government and lobbyists.
- roenxi 3y ago
  These two positions are sitting in contradiction to each other. People chosen by lot are said to lead to administrators making the decisions and that would be bad ... but career politicians govern by giving decision making power to an administrator making the decision and that that is good. I don't think your original comment got to the heart of what you don't like about demarchy. Furthermore, I personally just flat out don't believe "parties usually have the relevant expertise". What exactly, in detail, is that supposed to mean? Because as I've never seen that technical expertise coming out of a political party.
  - jltsiren 3y ago
    It's all about checks and balances. When elected representatives have experts of their own, experts whom they trust, they are not as much at the mercy of the government and the lobbyists. It's the same thing as with elections. You can trust the elections without trusting the government running them, because the party you vote has its own people overseeing the elections. And it's always a party you vote, even in systems where you nominally cast your vote for an individual candidate, because individuals acting on their own are too weak to challenge the system. The experts you are aware of may be members of a political party, participating in the internal processes of the party to varying degrees. It's one way to be an active citizen. You usually don't know that, because it's not your business to know. Political affiliation is a private matter, after all.

logicchains 3y ago

>If you select people at random, they will have even less understanding of the issues they vote on than career politicians This isn't necessarily true. Politicians aren't selected for understanding; their ability to obtain and retain power is entirely due to their ability to attract voters and make deals with other politicians. If you assume a normal distribution of traits, then when people are selected based on scoring a high percentile in just one trait (in this case, political charisma), on average they'll be worse at other traits than if you'd selected a similar number of people completely randomly.

jltsiren 3y ago
Traits may be normally distributed, but they are not independent. People who are good at something tend to be above average in other things. People have done some research on that in Finland. Due to mandatory military service, the vast majority of men have taken the same intelligence and personality tests. The research found that male politicians performed better in the intelligence test and were more likely to have favorable personality traits than men in the general population. The effect was already present among the candidates in local elections. The higher up you went, the more significant the effect became.
- jerojero 3y ago
  Citizens assemblies, also called minipublics, have been trialed for years in many places and in many different topics. In real life these people do not produce legislation/recommendations that are of less quality than politicians. I recommend a book called "open democracy" that goes into detail about this kind of decision making processes. The OCED has also done a lot of work and has a few reports on the matter too, if you look at their recommendations for "the future of democracy". Some big experiments in this area have been done in France as recent as a few months ago, in Ireland, in Iceland and the European union as a whole did a very big one a few years ago.

Rzor 3y ago

>If you select people at random, they will have even less understanding of the issues they vote on than career politicians. This reminds me of Varoufakis wanting to take the issue to the Greeks, during the Greek bailout negotiations, being told that he was "putting [his] people in a difficult situation of having to make a pivotal decision on complicated matters". He replied "Yes, it's called democracy".

ClumsyPilot 3y ago

> They don't have established networks of corrupting lobbyists, that the main thing they are missing. The average age in the Senate is what, 65? The percentage of people with degrees in science, architecture or engineering is like 10%. These people are not keeping up with changes in the world, they are not more informed than an average Joe and are definitely less capable of processing new information. There is no formal qualification required to become a politician and they are not selected based on intellectual merit. In fact my local politician is a ex-convict.