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>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. Politic

>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.

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.