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We Should Let a Lottery Decide Our Government (2019)

64 points by Tomte 1y ago

pjio 1y ago
I'm absolutely for trying this out. But not in the country I live in.
- PaulHoule 1y ago
  I think it makes sense in terms of a multicameral legislature. I can't imagine you want to pick the president by lottery or probably not even senators but why not the House of Representatives? Maybe we need a lawyer-heavy legislative body to write laws, but we also need legislators who aren't lawyers so people believe somebody in the legislature has some empathy for them.
  - pjio 1y ago
    As an additional committee which has to approve laws this might really make sense.
  - adrian_b 1y ago
    I think that it is for the president where this would be most beneficial. For senators and representatives there still is a little randomness, but when I look at many presidents that have been elected in recent years in various countries, it is more than obvious that any randomly chosen individual would have been almost certainly a less bad human and more suitable for the presidential position. After a president is chosen by lottery, there should be a rejection procedure, to eliminate any really inappropriate candidate, but then a new candidate should be chosen by lottery to replace the rejected one, until no reasons for rejection can be found.
xivzgrev 1y ago
Could be interesting. My main fear would be a wider variability in behavior, reducing effectiveness. Currently there are incentives against representatives acting too much like assholes - they would lose the support of their political party, effectively ending their career. Randomly chosen people have no such incentive. Take the loudest, most obnoxious people and put them in our congress? Nothing would get done, they’d just be grand standing all day, taking selfies, or breaking various rules. I’m sure most people chosen would be fine, but it only takes a few bad apples to ruin the batch / process.
- PaulHoule 1y ago
  It goes the other way around. I'd think the kind of people who get elected today, if offered a chance to be corrupt, would often decline politely or it would be possible for people to extend feelers to get some idea about it. Trying to corrupt a set of random Americans who weren't selected by "being good at politics" would be like a game of Russian Roulette. Some people would go for it but sooner or later you'd be looking at the barrel of a gun or get the police called on you or something.
  - vorpalhex 1y ago
    The primary form of corruption we see is an indirect tit-for-tat. "You buy our x,y and z and we'll hire you for a cushy gig many years from now." And when we look at amateur politicians (smaller elections, smaller electoral pools, first time candidates) then we see this happen.. more. Much, much more. Government by lotto would dramatically increase corruption.
    - cjbgkagh 1y ago
      If the lotteries are regular the number of people that would need to be bribed increases as does the risk of exposure. At some point it stops being worth the risk. On the spectrum of centralization such that only one person decides to the other end with complete devolution such that each person decides there is a trade off on how much it cost to bribe the ‘politician’ and how much gain could be obtained from the bribe. In the extreme case of everyone deciding you’d have to bribe everyone and it would be impossible for the value extraction to be greater than the bribe. It would be hard to do worse than entrenched political parties and who tend to have lifetime and even hereditary tenures.
    - dylan604 1y ago
      and when "many years from now" finally arrives, what guarantee is there that the promise of a cushy gig would be remembered if honored? seems like a very risky proposition for the one being corrupted much more than the one doing the corrupting. that's the best "i'll gladly pay you on tuesday for a hamburger today" arrangement.
ramesh31 1y ago
Conveniently ignoring the fact that the word "citizen" in Athens referred to wealthy (free) adult males who had completed military service, whose parents were both citizens, and even then not always. It was in no ways representative, even if nominally democratic among those privileged few. We take the 14th amendment (birthright citizenship + equal protection) for granted now, but it was truly a revolutionary act in all of world history at the time. Our modern systems of mass elected representative democracy were shaped in the aftermath of that, and are far more equal than anything the people of Athens could have ever dreamed of.
- WesolyKubeczek 1y ago
  > the word "citizen" in Athens referred to wealthy (free) adult males > whose parents were both citizens Something does not compute here for me.
  - ramesh31 1y ago
    Athenians had many subtly different tiers of citizenship. Women of noble birth, whose father had served in the military, were considered "citizens" in the sense that their male children would be considered legitimate, and they would be granted certain social and economic rights, although this did not extend to political rights for themselves [0]. [0] http://athensjournals.gr/history/2017-3-2-2-Che.pdf http://athensjournals.gr/history/2017-3-2-2-Che.pdf
chr15m 1y ago
Why not both? The selection of the Venetian Doge had alternating rounds of election and sortition. Apparently this served to ward off power hungry egomaniacs. Could be useful today.
- chr15m 1y ago
  It was like that for 500 years: > New regulations for the elections of the doge introduced in 1268 remained in force until the end of the republic in 1797. Their intention was to minimize the influence of individual great families, and this was effected by a complex electoral machinery. Thirty members of the Great Council, chosen by lot, were reduced by lot to nine; the nine chose forty and the forty were reduced by lot to twelve, who chose twenty-five. The twenty-five were reduced by lot to nine, and the nine elected forty-five. These forty-five were once more reduced by lot to eleven, and the eleven finally chose the forty-one who elected the doge.[31] > --wikipedia
  - aeontech 1y ago
    Wow, that is a brilliant approach. Thank you for sharing. In the US we seem to be stuck in a local maximum (or local minimum) with little chance of changes to the existing system - I wonder what kind of solutions exist to transform an entrenched institutional process, barring drastic upheaval...
- namlem 1y ago
  Yep! I actually wrote a piece about how the Venetian system might be adapted for the modern day: https://open.substack.com/pub/unfacts/p/the-case-for-a-technocratic-doge https://open.substack.com/pub/unfacts/p/the-case-for-a-techn...
cjbgkagh 1y ago
The hereditary House of Lords had a bit of a random walk property where the original peerage given by the King many generations ago becomes quite disconnected to the peer now in the house. To have this property it needs to be an old tradition - to recover this property if recreating it from scratch perhaps an initial lottery could be used. In any case it is an example of some randomness in the political process and in my opinion probably better than non-hereditary peerage where the peer has bought their position from the sitting government. Though that is a rather low bar. With regards to historical lotteries if I remember my history class from decades ago the various great families didn’t want the role of governance because they had to act in the national interest instead of their house interest, and the randomness of the lottery meant that if they ruled in their own favor they’d be open to reprisal after their tenure was completed.
- PaulRobinson 1y ago
  Hereditary peers are now a minority and on their way out. Within the next generation they'll all be gone. Did you know you can just apply to be a peer? Like, literally, anyone can do this: https://lordsappointments.independent.gov.uk/how-to-apply-2 https://lordsappointments.independent.gov.uk/how-to-apply-2
  - cjbgkagh 1y ago
    I think the government strategy there was to make it worse to the point people question why even have the House of Lords and there being no good answer.
    - PaulRobinson 1y ago
      On the contrary, life peers have made it more obvious that non-political "talent" can be brought into the upper chamber, and people you'd never see out campaigning can bring their expertise to scrutinize legislation. "People's Peers" can't take a political whip, and there is more scrutiny over cash for peerages now than there ever was. It's deeply flawed how the PM can appoint, and there isn't enough diversity, but they can pause legislation (if not actually stop it), to cause a rethink. That's happened most recently on the assisted dying bill. Many are glad it's happened because it's improved the outcome, albeit at the cost of a delay. I do think there is a better way than the current system, but I'm not entirely sure I can describe it, yet.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
jccalhoun 1y ago
Treating legislation like jury duty could be interesting. The question is who would be responsible for weeding out the legislator pool? Representatives from the political parties perhaps? Maybe a senate proposes laws and then a true representative body would be in charge of deciding if the proposal should pass? They serve a couple weeks passing laws and then are dismissed. It might be interesting to try on a state/local level.
- xp84 1y ago
  > Representatives from the political parties Okay, hold it right there: any proposal for reform that doesn’t begin with throwing all of those people straight into the ocean is a nonstarter for me.
whack 1y ago
Most modern incarnations of this idea revolve around Citizen Assemblies. Ireland, as an example, convened a citizen assembly in order to discuss and propose reforms on topics like abortion, climate change, and political reform. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens%27_Assembly_(Ireland) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens%27_Assembly_(Ireland) The idea behind Citizens Assembly isn't very controversial. Randomly select a large pool of citizens, have them discuss a topic in great detail with plenty of testimony from experts, and then vote on their recommendations. In concept, this is very similar to how courtroom juries operate. We don't just let millions of people vote on whether a defendant is innocent or guilty. We instead pick a smaller pool of jurors, force them to sit through weeks of expert testimony and arguments from both sides, after which they cast their votes. Hence why there is a movement to similarly have courtroom juries elect our political representatives as well https://www.electionbyjury.org/ https://www.electionbyjury.org/
- martin-t 1y ago
  I don't see why not just skip the "representatives" part and have juries vote on laws directly. If you take away the little power people have to influence the government, why not at least do it without adding another layer of indirection? The idea of a representative is flawed from the start to begin with. There is probably no single person in my country who agrees with me on everything. Therefore any person I choose to represent myself is only an approximation of what I really want. I increasingly feel like the belief that people need to be ruled by powerful individuals (or worse, i single individual) comes from some primitive need that evolved back when combat ability was your group's primary predictor of survival.
  - dmoy 1y ago
    Yea one nice characteristic of a representative democracy is that the voting is a rough approximation of who would win if the swords (guns, whatever) came out and it devolved into civil war. But without the bloodshed and loss. Doesn't work as well as a proxy in the modern age with our level of technology though I suppose.
  - xp84 1y ago
jawns 1y ago
If you're interested in a literary take on this concept, read "The Napoleon of Notting Hill" by G.K. Chesterton in 1904. Available on Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/20058/20058-h/20058-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/20058/20058-h/20058-h.htm
rafd 1y ago
Terry Bouricius (Vermont politician) has a draft book on this topic (link below). He used to be a strong advocate for electoral reform, but after seeing Citizen Assemblies in action, now advocates for Sortition. He has some interesting ideas about how to structure a modern government with sortition - it wouldn't just be replacing the House and Senate with randomly selected representatives, but, instead: having more smaller bodies with more limited scope (ex. a body for defining the rules of bodies), and spinning out a new group for every major law proposal. My favorite discovery on this topic (mentioned in the book), were letters between the Founding Fathers of the US where they explicitly discussed not having "democracy" in the United States, because it would give too much power to the people, and so they purposefully chose an election based system because it allowed for elites to retain control by using money to run campaigns (note also: "democracy" at the time referred exclusively to Athenian style democracy). https://democracycreative.substack.com/p/the-trouble-with-elections https://democracycreative.substack.com/p/the-trouble-with-el...
- shw1n 1y ago
  Would these letters be The Federalist Papers?
  - dmoy 1y ago
    I don't think you can characterize the federalist papers as letters between the founding fathers. Those were essays by like 2-3 of them, published and pretty widely distributed
toss1 1y ago
I've long thought sortition could be adapted for our government and make it more democratic. Properly randomized selection among the qualified and willing would ensure no one has a sufficient chance of great power to make it worth attempting to plot to exploit the system for their benefit (although some opportunist would try while in office). I'd have it work something like the following: Once a person has achieved a certain level of demonstrated competence and responsibility, they are entered into the pool. The criteria might include a college degree, certain military rank, level of business responsibility, running a charity of a certain size and success level, etc. The willing must also pass a series of tests, e.g., the standard security clearance, citizenship test, knowledge of humanitites, science, technology, history, finance, and law, and be vetted with a background check filtering out criminal behavior, tax evasion, etc. Once in the pool, it is like Jury Duty; your number comes up, you get a quick screen for the office, exemptions for hardship (so the alternate is picked) and that will be your job for the term. To mitigate the problem of everyone in govt being newbies, once in office, any official can stand for a confidence/no-confidence vote for re-election for one or two terms (depending on the office). The pay would be the greater of the 75th percentile earnings or 100% of the officials documented income for the previous three years. Obviously, this is a mere headline sketch and needs many more details and suggestions to work, but it seems it would improve on the current situation. Thoughts?
- Tuperoir 1y ago
  >knowledge of humanitites, science, technology, history, finance, and law, and be vetted with a background check filtering out criminal behavior, tax evasion, etc. Who would remain ? What would be the incentive to train for this, besides money ?
  - toss1 1y ago
    I'm not talking expert-professional-level knowledge. Merely sufficient familiarity with the STEM, History, etc. to be able to pass undergrad distributive requirements. In this age, if you do not have a clue about how the scientific process actually works and basic concepts, and you don't understand the basics of how and why the country and it's constitution are built, you do not have any business writing the laws of the country. Too many current congress people couldn't pass these tests and it shows. If we cannot, among a country of ~330 million, with 90+million with college education or above [0], find less then 20,000 [1] qualified and willing to fill state and national offices, we are pretty much doomed as a nation. Even if we do something like include all 500k local offices, and then require prior local or state service to fill a national office, it should be a good selection. OFC, if there is a problem, you can always increase the incentives (good idea) or lower the standards (bad idea). Since it is a temporary office, making the pay even more attractive than I mentioned above would be good -make it 95th-percentile or 115% of previous income to compensate for any inconvenience (e.g., a business owner who must vacate their position for 2yrs will likely have costs) [0] https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2022/demo/educational-attainment/cps-detailed-tables.html https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2022/demo/educational-att... [1] https://poliengine.com/blog/how-many-politicians-are-there-in-the-us https://poliengine.com/blog/how-many-politicians-are-there-i...
PaulRobinson 1y ago
We shouldn't do this, because it's not democratic. First, people talking about the Athenian system - it was limited to "Free men" of Athens. The discrimination might be something you feel we could counter today - all men and women could be selected - but what about convicted felons? Would they have a right to participate? Today, one is President of the USA (yes, I know, many think that's a sham, but legally he is). What about gay people? 50 years ago they almost certainly wouldn't have been allowed in. 150 years ago black people wouldn't. What about today's political third rail populations? Would communists or socialists or anarchists be allowed in? What about trans? Or people not born in the USA? There will always be a group some part of the spectrum wants to other and exclude, but today there is a democratic short circuit: an Austrian can be voted into being the Governor of California; a convicted felon can be voted into the position of President; a transgender woman can be voted into Congress by her Delaware constituents. Balloting - almost like voting today - will get systematic tinkering. Voting isn't perfect. Gerrymandering in the US is out of control and a more neutral system like the UK's needs creating, and yeah, donations are a mess... ... but choosing people at random is never really random, and there is no easy way to short circuit the orthodoxy. Minorities will get better representation at first, but they'll always be minorities and if the majority wants rid, they'll be locked out forever, just the same way women and slaves were in Athens.
- thecrash 1y ago
  Your concerns about a majority oppressing a minority are well-founded, but a system where people vote for career politicians don't seem to be moderating this problem - if anything it's exaggerating it. If you trust the general population to vote a marginalized person into office in order to push legislation which benefits that marginalized community, why wouldn't you trust the general population to pass that legislation directly? The only explanation I can think of is that you think that professional political representatives will have better ideas than the general population.
- namlem 1y ago
  Actually, it's elections that are fundamentally undemocratic. Democracy literally means "rule by the public", which elections are not. Elections are merely rule by elites which have the nominal consent of the public. In practice, this consent is mostly illusory, as voters have no incentive to spend hours of time and effort becoming well-informed given how dilute their individual votes are. So really, elections are rule by influential groups such as media institutions and organized voting blocs. You cite the UK as an example, but it's even less representative than the US. Parties often win majorities in parliament with only ~35% of the vote. Sortition meanwhile, takes a representative sample of the public and offers them the time and resources to carefully research and deliberate. It's much closer to the democratic ideal of direct rule by the demos.
gjm11 1y ago
This submission is currently marked as [flagged] but I can't see what is supposedly wrong with it: it's an interesting article about an interesting idea, and while it's kinda politics-adjacent it's not the sort of party-political that tends to induce rage and stupidity, and the comments here seem pretty reasonable. I guess there's a sizeable contingent of HN readers who don't want anything having anything to do with politics on HN, but I think some politics-related things -- including this -- fall into the category of "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity".
- rawgabbit 1y ago
  It is either they are willfully ignorant as we watch habeas corpus and due process erode. Or they are just ostriches putting their heads in the sand.
- patcon 1y ago
  @dang given that HN is a pretty powerful place, and things read here are what a certain a sort of world shaper will know about: can you say whether there have been any interference operations by nation-state adversaries to subtly prune content? I wonder whether HN's monitoring tools are robust to detect such things When I see this being downvoted, it's a field I know well, and it's considered by many to be the best response to the neo-reactionary movement and radical progressive left's division of the political conversation, and perhaps the best hope for unifying a shattered US democratic system. I can't help but be suspicious of in whose interest it would be to suppress these conversations and ideas.
snapplebobapple 1y ago
I'd be ok with this if any tax increase had to be voted on in a referendum with a super majority of 70% voting for the tax increase and if anyone who wanted to participate in the lottery had to post 2 weeks of their average income for the last five years (with a floor at 2 weeks minimum wage) as a bond for the duration of the government and any deficits the government incurred came out of the posted bond first. It's unfortunate their justification for this is racist, ageist and anti-success though. It's easy to see how 300-400 randomly selected citizens would probably do a better job than career politicians at spending a given pot of money, they would just be much worse at deciding how big the pot of government money should be due to the preference to take from the successful and enrich oneself and one's group.
ClayShentrup 1y ago
Yes!! https://www.electionbyjury.org/manifesto https://www.electionbyjury.org/manifesto
delichon 1y ago
Take two political extremists, one believes that taxation is theft, the other that property is theft. The difference could make Kamala and Donald seem like twins. Sortition is a way for either to become decision makers by chance. Whichever is more objectionable to you, could you really endorse a process that would put them in power, as opposed to a traditional election where the extremes tend to winnow out? That seems like a large increase in the risk of getting an extreme result.
- AnimalMuppet 1y ago
  Sure, that's true - for any one person. Now take a representative body with 100 members. You get, say, five extremists on the left and seven on the right. The other 88 members basically leave those 12 extremists on the margins, and the extremists become irrelevant. Now, if extremists (total of all flavors) exceed 50% of your population, you're in trouble. But you were probably in trouble in a democracy, too...
  - delichon 1y ago
    So you endorse sortition for large bodies, but not for an executive or a small committee? What's a reasonable threshold?
    - AnimalMuppet 1y ago
      I think that's right. The point of sortition is for the body to look (statistically) like the wider public. The smaller the number of people in the body, the more likely it is that they are not representative. I'm sure statisticians could give a better answer than I can about where the line should be. I think it is basically a statistical question. But for a one-person executive? No, probably not a good idea.

64 points by Tomte 1y ago

pjio 1y ago

I'm absolutely for trying this out. But not in the country I live in.

PaulHoule 1y ago
I think it makes sense in terms of a multicameral legislature. I can't imagine you want to pick the president by lottery or probably not even senators but why not the House of Representatives? Maybe we need a lawyer-heavy legislative body to write laws, but we also need legislators who aren't lawyers so people believe somebody in the legislature has some empathy for them.
- pjio 1y ago
  As an additional committee which has to approve laws this might really make sense.
- adrian_b 1y ago
  I think that it is for the president where this would be most beneficial. For senators and representatives there still is a little randomness, but when I look at many presidents that have been elected in recent years in various countries, it is more than obvious that any randomly chosen individual would have been almost certainly a less bad human and more suitable for the presidential position. After a president is chosen by lottery, there should be a rejection procedure, to eliminate any really inappropriate candidate, but then a new candidate should be chosen by lottery to replace the rejected one, until no reasons for rejection can be found.

xivzgrev 1y ago

Could be interesting. My main fear would be a wider variability in behavior, reducing effectiveness. Currently there are incentives against representatives acting too much like assholes - they would lose the support of their political party, effectively ending their career. Randomly chosen people have no such incentive. Take the loudest, most obnoxious people and put them in our congress? Nothing would get done, they’d just be grand standing all day, taking selfies, or breaking various rules. I’m sure most people chosen would be fine, but it only takes a few bad apples to ruin the batch / process.

PaulHoule 1y ago
It goes the other way around. I'd think the kind of people who get elected today, if offered a chance to be corrupt, would often decline politely or it would be possible for people to extend feelers to get some idea about it. Trying to corrupt a set of random Americans who weren't selected by "being good at politics" would be like a game of Russian Roulette. Some people would go for it but sooner or later you'd be looking at the barrel of a gun or get the police called on you or something.
- vorpalhex 1y ago
  The primary form of corruption we see is an indirect tit-for-tat. "You buy our x,y and z and we'll hire you for a cushy gig many years from now." And when we look at amateur politicians (smaller elections, smaller electoral pools, first time candidates) then we see this happen.. more. Much, much more. Government by lotto would dramatically increase corruption.
  - cjbgkagh 1y ago
    If the lotteries are regular the number of people that would need to be bribed increases as does the risk of exposure. At some point it stops being worth the risk. On the spectrum of centralization such that only one person decides to the other end with complete devolution such that each person decides there is a trade off on how much it cost to bribe the ‘politician’ and how much gain could be obtained from the bribe. In the extreme case of everyone deciding you’d have to bribe everyone and it would be impossible for the value extraction to be greater than the bribe. It would be hard to do worse than entrenched political parties and who tend to have lifetime and even hereditary tenures.
  - dylan604 1y ago
    and when "many years from now" finally arrives, what guarantee is there that the promise of a cushy gig would be remembered if honored? seems like a very risky proposition for the one being corrupted much more than the one doing the corrupting. that's the best "i'll gladly pay you on tuesday for a hamburger today" arrangement.

ramesh31 1y ago

Conveniently ignoring the fact that the word "citizen" in Athens referred to wealthy (free) adult males who had completed military service, whose parents were both citizens, and even then not always. It was in no ways representative, even if nominally democratic among those privileged few. We take the 14th amendment (birthright citizenship + equal protection) for granted now, but it was truly a revolutionary act in all of world history at the time. Our modern systems of mass elected representative democracy were shaped in the aftermath of that, and are far more equal than anything the people of Athens could have ever dreamed of.

WesolyKubeczek 1y ago
> the word "citizen" in Athens referred to wealthy (free) adult males > whose parents were both citizens Something does not compute here for me.
- ramesh31 1y ago
  Athenians had many subtly different tiers of citizenship. Women of noble birth, whose father had served in the military, were considered "citizens" in the sense that their male children would be considered legitimate, and they would be granted certain social and economic rights, although this did not extend to political rights for themselves [0]. [0] http://athensjournals.gr/history/2017-3-2-2-Che.pdf http://athensjournals.gr/history/2017-3-2-2-Che.pdf

chr15m 1y ago

Why not both? The selection of the Venetian Doge had alternating rounds of election and sortition. Apparently this served to ward off power hungry egomaniacs. Could be useful today.

chr15m 1y ago
It was like that for 500 years: > New regulations for the elections of the doge introduced in 1268 remained in force until the end of the republic in 1797. Their intention was to minimize the influence of individual great families, and this was effected by a complex electoral machinery. Thirty members of the Great Council, chosen by lot, were reduced by lot to nine; the nine chose forty and the forty were reduced by lot to twelve, who chose twenty-five. The twenty-five were reduced by lot to nine, and the nine elected forty-five. These forty-five were once more reduced by lot to eleven, and the eleven finally chose the forty-one who elected the doge.[31] > --wikipedia
- aeontech 1y ago
  Wow, that is a brilliant approach. Thank you for sharing. In the US we seem to be stuck in a local maximum (or local minimum) with little chance of changes to the existing system - I wonder what kind of solutions exist to transform an entrenched institutional process, barring drastic upheaval...
namlem 1y ago
Yep! I actually wrote a piece about how the Venetian system might be adapted for the modern day: https://open.substack.com/pub/unfacts/p/the-case-for-a-technocratic-doge https://open.substack.com/pub/unfacts/p/the-case-for-a-techn...

cjbgkagh 1y ago

The hereditary House of Lords had a bit of a random walk property where the original peerage given by the King many generations ago becomes quite disconnected to the peer now in the house. To have this property it needs to be an old tradition - to recover this property if recreating it from scratch perhaps an initial lottery could be used. In any case it is an example of some randomness in the political process and in my opinion probably better than non-hereditary peerage where the peer has bought their position from the sitting government. Though that is a rather low bar. With regards to historical lotteries if I remember my history class from decades ago the various great families didn’t want the role of governance because they had to act in the national interest instead of their house interest, and the randomness of the lottery meant that if they ruled in their own favor they’d be open to reprisal after their tenure was completed.

PaulRobinson 1y ago
Hereditary peers are now a minority and on their way out. Within the next generation they'll all be gone. Did you know you can just apply to be a peer? Like, literally, anyone can do this: https://lordsappointments.independent.gov.uk/how-to-apply-2 https://lordsappointments.independent.gov.uk/how-to-apply-2
- cjbgkagh 1y ago
  I think the government strategy there was to make it worse to the point people question why even have the House of Lords and there being no good answer.
  - PaulRobinson 1y ago
    On the contrary, life peers have made it more obvious that non-political "talent" can be brought into the upper chamber, and people you'd never see out campaigning can bring their expertise to scrutinize legislation. "People's Peers" can't take a political whip, and there is more scrutiny over cash for peerages now than there ever was. It's deeply flawed how the PM can appoint, and there isn't enough diversity, but they can pause legislation (if not actually stop it), to cause a rethink. That's happened most recently on the assisted dying bill. Many are glad it's happened because it's improved the outcome, albeit at the cost of a delay. I do think there is a better way than the current system, but I'm not entirely sure I can describe it, yet.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

jccalhoun 1y ago

Treating legislation like jury duty could be interesting. The question is who would be responsible for weeding out the legislator pool? Representatives from the political parties perhaps? Maybe a senate proposes laws and then a true representative body would be in charge of deciding if the proposal should pass? They serve a couple weeks passing laws and then are dismissed. It might be interesting to try on a state/local level.

xp84 1y ago
> Representatives from the political parties Okay, hold it right there: any proposal for reform that doesn’t begin with throwing all of those people straight into the ocean is a nonstarter for me.

whack 1y ago

Most modern incarnations of this idea revolve around Citizen Assemblies. Ireland, as an example, convened a citizen assembly in order to discuss and propose reforms on topics like abortion, climate change, and political reform. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens%27_Assembly_(Ireland) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens%27_Assembly_(Ireland) The idea behind Citizens Assembly isn't very controversial. Randomly select a large pool of citizens, have them discuss a topic in great detail with plenty of testimony from experts, and then vote on their recommendations. In concept, this is very similar to how courtroom juries operate. We don't just let millions of people vote on whether a defendant is innocent or guilty. We instead pick a smaller pool of jurors, force them to sit through weeks of expert testimony and arguments from both sides, after which they cast their votes. Hence why there is a movement to similarly have courtroom juries elect our political representatives as well https://www.electionbyjury.org/ https://www.electionbyjury.org/

martin-t 1y ago
I don't see why not just skip the "representatives" part and have juries vote on laws directly. If you take away the little power people have to influence the government, why not at least do it without adding another layer of indirection? The idea of a representative is flawed from the start to begin with. There is probably no single person in my country who agrees with me on everything. Therefore any person I choose to represent myself is only an approximation of what I really want. I increasingly feel like the belief that people need to be ruled by powerful individuals (or worse, i single individual) comes from some primitive need that evolved back when combat ability was your group's primary predictor of survival.
- dmoy 1y ago
  Yea one nice characteristic of a representative democracy is that the voting is a rough approximation of who would win if the swords (guns, whatever) came out and it devolved into civil war. But without the bloodshed and loss. Doesn't work as well as a proxy in the modern age with our level of technology though I suppose.
- xp84 1y ago

jawns 1y ago

If you're interested in a literary take on this concept, read "The Napoleon of Notting Hill" by G.K. Chesterton in 1904. Available on Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/20058/20058-h/20058-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/20058/20058-h/20058-h.htm

rafd 1y ago

Terry Bouricius (Vermont politician) has a draft book on this topic (link below). He used to be a strong advocate for electoral reform, but after seeing Citizen Assemblies in action, now advocates for Sortition. He has some interesting ideas about how to structure a modern government with sortition - it wouldn't just be replacing the House and Senate with randomly selected representatives, but, instead: having more smaller bodies with more limited scope (ex. a body for defining the rules of bodies), and spinning out a new group for every major law proposal. My favorite discovery on this topic (mentioned in the book), were letters between the Founding Fathers of the US where they explicitly discussed not having "democracy" in the United States, because it would give too much power to the people, and so they purposefully chose an election based system because it allowed for elites to retain control by using money to run campaigns (note also: "democracy" at the time referred exclusively to Athenian style democracy). https://democracycreative.substack.com/p/the-trouble-with-elections https://democracycreative.substack.com/p/the-trouble-with-el...

shw1n 1y ago
Would these letters be The Federalist Papers?
- dmoy 1y ago
  I don't think you can characterize the federalist papers as letters between the founding fathers. Those were essays by like 2-3 of them, published and pretty widely distributed

toss1 1y ago

I've long thought sortition could be adapted for our government and make it more democratic. Properly randomized selection among the qualified and willing would ensure no one has a sufficient chance of great power to make it worth attempting to plot to exploit the system for their benefit (although some opportunist would try while in office). I'd have it work something like the following: Once a person has achieved a certain level of demonstrated competence and responsibility, they are entered into the pool. The criteria might include a college degree, certain military rank, level of business responsibility, running a charity of a certain size and success level, etc. The willing must also pass a series of tests, e.g., the standard security clearance, citizenship test, knowledge of humanitites, science, technology, history, finance, and law, and be vetted with a background check filtering out criminal behavior, tax evasion, etc. Once in the pool, it is like Jury Duty; your number comes up, you get a quick screen for the office, exemptions for hardship (so the alternate is picked) and that will be your job for the term. To mitigate the problem of everyone in govt being newbies, once in office, any official can stand for a confidence/no-confidence vote for re-election for one or two terms (depending on the office). The pay would be the greater of the 75th percentile earnings or 100% of the officials documented income for the previous three years. Obviously, this is a mere headline sketch and needs many more details and suggestions to work, but it seems it would improve on the current situation. Thoughts?

Tuperoir 1y ago
>knowledge of humanitites, science, technology, history, finance, and law, and be vetted with a background check filtering out criminal behavior, tax evasion, etc. Who would remain ? What would be the incentive to train for this, besides money ?
- toss1 1y ago
  I'm not talking expert-professional-level knowledge. Merely sufficient familiarity with the STEM, History, etc. to be able to pass undergrad distributive requirements. In this age, if you do not have a clue about how the scientific process actually works and basic concepts, and you don't understand the basics of how and why the country and it's constitution are built, you do not have any business writing the laws of the country. Too many current congress people couldn't pass these tests and it shows. If we cannot, among a country of ~330 million, with 90+million with college education or above [0], find less then 20,000 [1] qualified and willing to fill state and national offices, we are pretty much doomed as a nation. Even if we do something like include all 500k local offices, and then require prior local or state service to fill a national office, it should be a good selection. OFC, if there is a problem, you can always increase the incentives (good idea) or lower the standards (bad idea). Since it is a temporary office, making the pay even more attractive than I mentioned above would be good -make it 95th-percentile or 115% of previous income to compensate for any inconvenience (e.g., a business owner who must vacate their position for 2yrs will likely have costs) [0] https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2022/demo/educational-attainment/cps-detailed-tables.html https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2022/demo/educational-att... [1] https://poliengine.com/blog/how-many-politicians-are-there-in-the-us https://poliengine.com/blog/how-many-politicians-are-there-i...

PaulRobinson 1y ago

We shouldn't do this, because it's not democratic. First, people talking about the Athenian system - it was limited to "Free men" of Athens. The discrimination might be something you feel we could counter today - all men and women could be selected - but what about convicted felons? Would they have a right to participate? Today, one is President of the USA (yes, I know, many think that's a sham, but legally he is). What about gay people? 50 years ago they almost certainly wouldn't have been allowed in. 150 years ago black people wouldn't. What about today's political third rail populations? Would communists or socialists or anarchists be allowed in? What about trans? Or people not born in the USA? There will always be a group some part of the spectrum wants to other and exclude, but today there is a democratic short circuit: an Austrian can be voted into being the Governor of California; a convicted felon can be voted into the position of President; a transgender woman can be voted into Congress by her Delaware constituents. Balloting - almost like voting today - will get systematic tinkering. Voting isn't perfect. Gerrymandering in the US is out of control and a more neutral system like the UK's needs creating, and yeah, donations are a mess... ... but choosing people at random is never really random, and there is no easy way to short circuit the orthodoxy. Minorities will get better representation at first, but they'll always be minorities and if the majority wants rid, they'll be locked out forever, just the same way women and slaves were in Athens.

thecrash 1y ago
Your concerns about a majority oppressing a minority are well-founded, but a system where people vote for career politicians don't seem to be moderating this problem - if anything it's exaggerating it. If you trust the general population to vote a marginalized person into office in order to push legislation which benefits that marginalized community, why wouldn't you trust the general population to pass that legislation directly? The only explanation I can think of is that you think that professional political representatives will have better ideas than the general population.
namlem 1y ago
Actually, it's elections that are fundamentally undemocratic. Democracy literally means "rule by the public", which elections are not. Elections are merely rule by elites which have the nominal consent of the public. In practice, this consent is mostly illusory, as voters have no incentive to spend hours of time and effort becoming well-informed given how dilute their individual votes are. So really, elections are rule by influential groups such as media institutions and organized voting blocs. You cite the UK as an example, but it's even less representative than the US. Parties often win majorities in parliament with only ~35% of the vote. Sortition meanwhile, takes a representative sample of the public and offers them the time and resources to carefully research and deliberate. It's much closer to the democratic ideal of direct rule by the demos.

gjm11 1y ago

This submission is currently marked as [flagged] but I can't see what is supposedly wrong with it: it's an interesting article about an interesting idea, and while it's kinda politics-adjacent it's not the sort of party-political that tends to induce rage and stupidity, and the comments here seem pretty reasonable. I guess there's a sizeable contingent of HN readers who don't want anything having anything to do with politics on HN, but I think some politics-related things -- including this -- fall into the category of "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity".

rawgabbit 1y ago
It is either they are willfully ignorant as we watch habeas corpus and due process erode. Or they are just ostriches putting their heads in the sand.
patcon 1y ago
@dang given that HN is a pretty powerful place, and things read here are what a certain a sort of world shaper will know about: can you say whether there have been any interference operations by nation-state adversaries to subtly prune content? I wonder whether HN's monitoring tools are robust to detect such things When I see this being downvoted, it's a field I know well, and it's considered by many to be the best response to the neo-reactionary movement and radical progressive left's division of the political conversation, and perhaps the best hope for unifying a shattered US democratic system. I can't help but be suspicious of in whose interest it would be to suppress these conversations and ideas.

snapplebobapple 1y ago

I'd be ok with this if any tax increase had to be voted on in a referendum with a super majority of 70% voting for the tax increase and if anyone who wanted to participate in the lottery had to post 2 weeks of their average income for the last five years (with a floor at 2 weeks minimum wage) as a bond for the duration of the government and any deficits the government incurred came out of the posted bond first. It's unfortunate their justification for this is racist, ageist and anti-success though. It's easy to see how 300-400 randomly selected citizens would probably do a better job than career politicians at spending a given pot of money, they would just be much worse at deciding how big the pot of government money should be due to the preference to take from the successful and enrich oneself and one's group.

ClayShentrup 1y ago

Yes!! https://www.electionbyjury.org/manifesto https://www.electionbyjury.org/manifesto

delichon 1y ago

Take two political extremists, one believes that taxation is theft, the other that property is theft. The difference could make Kamala and Donald seem like twins. Sortition is a way for either to become decision makers by chance. Whichever is more objectionable to you, could you really endorse a process that would put them in power, as opposed to a traditional election where the extremes tend to winnow out? That seems like a large increase in the risk of getting an extreme result.

AnimalMuppet 1y ago
Sure, that's true - for any one person. Now take a representative body with 100 members. You get, say, five extremists on the left and seven on the right. The other 88 members basically leave those 12 extremists on the margins, and the extremists become irrelevant. Now, if extremists (total of all flavors) exceed 50% of your population, you're in trouble. But you were probably in trouble in a democracy, too...
- delichon 1y ago
  So you endorse sortition for large bodies, but not for an executive or a small committee? What's a reasonable threshold?
  - AnimalMuppet 1y ago
    I think that's right. The point of sortition is for the body to look (statistically) like the wider public. The smaller the number of people in the body, the more likely it is that they are not representative. I'm sure statisticians could give a better answer than I can about where the line should be. I think it is basically a statistical question. But for a one-person executive? No, probably not a good idea.