So happy to find you! I'm a huge fan of sortition. I agree with--well, let's see--Aristotle, Machiavelli, Harrington, Montesquieu, and Rousseau that elections aren't democratic institutions but are good fits for aristocracies and oligarchies. (Jefferson and Adams and Tocqueville in DoA's second volume, too.) Civic meetings (e.g., boards of supervisors, homeowners' association) are hell, but apparently meetings where we share agency to change our neighborhoods/workplaces/villages make some addicted to a newfound public freedom.
exactly. i'm not familair with harrington, i'll have to look that one up.
to be fair to past humans, in the 1700s, i, too, probably would have been convinced that a natural aristocracy was the best bet after escaping monarchies.
Me, too! As you probably know, Jefferson and Adams corresponded about whether Americans were good at electing Jefferson's "natural aristocracy." Adams didn't think so, and he thought "natural aristocrats," if they existed, would become like garden-variety (Jefferson's "artificial") aristocrats over time.
About Harrington (and the other political thinkers who equated elections with aristocracy and sortition with democracy), here's a link to my Substack post on the subject:
I'm not an activist, so I can't imagine the constant responses of "It'll never happen." I admire your work and your patience in our less-than-democratic public fields. Thanks for this lively and thoughtful defense of sortition, too. So glad to find you and Assembling America.
Thank you for reminding me about sortition! I've been proselytizing it at my friends and they're like "tell me more" and I'm like "uhhh" so I need to a) research it more and b) write about it. And actually join one of those nonprofits. I have too many things on my plate. But, I am plotting to get our county to use sortition for next year's Comp Plan update ... I know this is considered very small potatoes compared to (Nonviolently) Overthrowing The System but it's a start. I'll be amazed if I can make it happen. Nobody is happy with how things are going here but ... inertia is a hell of a drug.
Speaking of intertia, the first few revolutions of a snowball are probably the most important and most fragile, right? So I'm very excited about your efforts and please let me know if I can help.
And I'll be awaiting your post about sortition. Writing about it, as I'm sure you know, will really force you to think through it.
I don’t like think sortition is very useful for Modern Politics, but for the judiciary and in general for the implementation of impartial decisions is the best option:
Thanks for linking your forum post. It seems like your major concerns for using sortition to legislate would be empowering the bureaucratic apparatus surrounding them and the sorition body would lack the expertise for the complicated policies required in modern societies.
Terry Bouricious has influenced my thinking on this heavily.
TL;DR the competence that elections select for is not what is wanted. Elections apply a very strong filter. (Note this does reference the Dunning-Kruger effect, which, a la the replication crisis, seems to be disputed now.)
TL;DR the term "political expertise" is fuzzy, oftentimes, politicans expertise is in securing funding and ~95% of legislating is done by staffers at present, and where executive expertise is needed (like in your examples of judges) sortition can select it best.
Also, I recommend the last post on Assemble America's blog by Paul Melman:
Politicians are not very well informed nor educated when compared to the upper echelon of academia, corporations or the government bureucracy, but compared to the general population they are at the top. And they often arrive to high offices after long experience in lower positions.
For the time being, political science mostly favor consociational parlamentarianism, based on proportional representation:
i see. yes, i agree that propostional representation and an executive that is held responsible by the legislative is much superior to presidentialism!
(also, skipping around in "Why Not Parliamentarism?" was very interesting, especially the segment about Fisher and smoking, never knew about Fisher)
fully agree that FPTP is a very flawed method in a 3+ candidate race. however, i'm skeptical of RCV or STAR voting solving it.
while PR and parliamentarism and voting reform are much better than most of the systems in the Americas, i'm not sure it will address one of the major issues with elections, which is the class interest of the electeds. even if there's less centralized power in a single executive (a president), they still have such strong shared interests in maintaining the power structures that embedded them that they are at odds with the people.
so many of the countries listed that parliamentarists are rife with tyranny!
I agree with your argument, but there is still not example of a workable and scalable systems where political power is not held by an oligarchy: consequently i am for the oligarchic institutions that have proven better for the general interest and freedom of the people.
I will admit that I was, at first, disappointed that the 2nd greatest and Los Alamitos politician, Camilo Barahona, was not mentioned once in this entire article. After the initial letdown, I am pleased to say I enjoyed this, and I'm on board. Maybe it was the lack of proposed paid parking that resonated with me; whatever it was, I am feeling the urge to participate in some activism.
The United States once had genuinely democratic governance structures, however imperfect and limited, fundamentally based around decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member parties. The Democratic Party, as a small "d" democratic institution, and the Republican Party, as a small "r" republican institution, were honest in their naming and functioned within a politically, economically, governmentally, financially, and scientifically decentralized and pluralized system. These parties, while far from flawless, allowed for real representation, genuinely participatory governance structures even for very serious policy matters with real participation, and a level of public accountability in political, economic, governmental, financial, and scientific decision making.
However, after WW2 a long multi decadal transformation began due to the dirty deeds of a convergence of several interests and an assortment of powerful special interest groups, and then our parties were transformed into centralized, exclusionary membership organizations. The so called Democratic Party has become a technocracy party, and the so called Republican Party became a conservative party. Neither really represents their original principles of democracy or republicanism, and they dont offer meaningful access or representation to the public. This transformation of the parties has been accompanied by a broader centralization of political, economic, and scientific decision making, which has caused the effective loss of most democratic governance structures.
Well written, and well reasoned, but sortition has a few issues.
1. The societies that used it limited it to male citizens, who were functionally the aristocrats of their society. The best estimates on the democracies of Ancient Greece put the citizen body at about 10% of the population who were coincidentally the wealthiest 10% of the population of their respective Polis.
2. We have an existing sortition like mechanism already and it does not work well, which are Jury Trials.
3. This will end up with an issue around the bell curve. Sortition will invest an enormous amount of power in the permanent civil service and whoever selects what goes in front of the sortition committees. The citizens in the center of the bell curve are unbelievably ignorant.
That being said, I don’t want to simply complain without being constructive.
I think sortition could play a role in community politics at a much more local level (eg a block or neighborhood getting to spend a budget on road improvements.
My alternative solution is that the problem with representation is that we are represented on a single axis, geography, which it turns out means we select the same assholes.
Alternative axes could include age, gender, and profession/industry.
His name was Henry George, uh… I mean Robert Paulson. ✊
So happy to find you! I'm a huge fan of sortition. I agree with--well, let's see--Aristotle, Machiavelli, Harrington, Montesquieu, and Rousseau that elections aren't democratic institutions but are good fits for aristocracies and oligarchies. (Jefferson and Adams and Tocqueville in DoA's second volume, too.) Civic meetings (e.g., boards of supervisors, homeowners' association) are hell, but apparently meetings where we share agency to change our neighborhoods/workplaces/villages make some addicted to a newfound public freedom.
exactly. i'm not familair with harrington, i'll have to look that one up.
to be fair to past humans, in the 1700s, i, too, probably would have been convinced that a natural aristocracy was the best bet after escaping monarchies.
Me, too! As you probably know, Jefferson and Adams corresponded about whether Americans were good at electing Jefferson's "natural aristocracy." Adams didn't think so, and he thought "natural aristocrats," if they existed, would become like garden-variety (Jefferson's "artificial") aristocrats over time.
About Harrington (and the other political thinkers who equated elections with aristocracy and sortition with democracy), here's a link to my Substack post on the subject:
https://www.polidevo.com/p/voting-isnt-democratic-its-oligarchic?r=2xryfr&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
I'm not an activist, so I can't imagine the constant responses of "It'll never happen." I admire your work and your patience in our less-than-democratic public fields. Thanks for this lively and thoughtful defense of sortition, too. So glad to find you and Assembling America.
Thank you for reminding me about sortition! I've been proselytizing it at my friends and they're like "tell me more" and I'm like "uhhh" so I need to a) research it more and b) write about it. And actually join one of those nonprofits. I have too many things on my plate. But, I am plotting to get our county to use sortition for next year's Comp Plan update ... I know this is considered very small potatoes compared to (Nonviolently) Overthrowing The System but it's a start. I'll be amazed if I can make it happen. Nobody is happy with how things are going here but ... inertia is a hell of a drug.
Speaking of intertia, the first few revolutions of a snowball are probably the most important and most fragile, right? So I'm very excited about your efforts and please let me know if I can help.
And I'll be awaiting your post about sortition. Writing about it, as I'm sure you know, will really force you to think through it.
I don’t like think sortition is very useful for Modern Politics, but for the judiciary and in general for the implementation of impartial decisions is the best option:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/PyqPr4z76Z8xGZL22/sortition
Thanks for linking your forum post. It seems like your major concerns for using sortition to legislate would be empowering the bureaucratic apparatus surrounding them and the sorition body would lack the expertise for the complicated policies required in modern societies.
Terry Bouricious has influenced my thinking on this heavily.
https://democracycreative.substack.com/p/politicians-and-competence
TL;DR the competence that elections select for is not what is wanted. Elections apply a very strong filter. (Note this does reference the Dunning-Kruger effect, which, a la the replication crisis, seems to be disputed now.)
https://democracycreative.substack.com/p/political-expertise
TL;DR the term "political expertise" is fuzzy, oftentimes, politicans expertise is in securing funding and ~95% of legislating is done by staffers at present, and where executive expertise is needed (like in your examples of judges) sortition can select it best.
Also, I recommend the last post on Assemble America's blog by Paul Melman:
https://assemblingamerica.substack.com/p/there-is-no-meritocracy-without-lottocracy
Personally, I'm not a great fan of massive nation-states, so I wouldn't be upset if they shrunk.
Politicians are not very well informed nor educated when compared to the upper echelon of academia, corporations or the government bureucracy, but compared to the general population they are at the top. And they often arrive to high offices after long experience in lower positions.
For the time being, political science mostly favor consociational parlamentarianism, based on proportional representation:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/uW77FSphM6yiMZTGg/why-not-parliamentarianism-book-by-tiago-ribeiro-dos-santos
But still I am a firm supporter of meritocracy+sortition for any “technical board”, including the High Courts.
Regarding the size of the countries, unfortunately, as long as big autocracies exist, large democracies are necessary.
i see. yes, i agree that propostional representation and an executive that is held responsible by the legislative is much superior to presidentialism!
(also, skipping around in "Why Not Parliamentarism?" was very interesting, especially the segment about Fisher and smoking, never knew about Fisher)
fully agree that FPTP is a very flawed method in a 3+ candidate race. however, i'm skeptical of RCV or STAR voting solving it.
while PR and parliamentarism and voting reform are much better than most of the systems in the Americas, i'm not sure it will address one of the major issues with elections, which is the class interest of the electeds. even if there's less centralized power in a single executive (a president), they still have such strong shared interests in maintaining the power structures that embedded them that they are at odds with the people.
so many of the countries listed that parliamentarists are rife with tyranny!
here's where Terry B talks about what he thinks are the shortcomings of PR (proportional representation) specifically: https://democracycreative.substack.com/p/proportional-representation-part-6d0
I agree with your argument, but there is still not example of a workable and scalable systems where political power is not held by an oligarchy: consequently i am for the oligarchic institutions that have proven better for the general interest and freedom of the people.
I will admit that I was, at first, disappointed that the 2nd greatest and Los Alamitos politician, Camilo Barahona, was not mentioned once in this entire article. After the initial letdown, I am pleased to say I enjoyed this, and I'm on board. Maybe it was the lack of proposed paid parking that resonated with me; whatever it was, I am feeling the urge to participate in some activism.
yes, one day, if we're lucky, mr. barahona will bless us with his wisdom.
The United States once had genuinely democratic governance structures, however imperfect and limited, fundamentally based around decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member parties. The Democratic Party, as a small "d" democratic institution, and the Republican Party, as a small "r" republican institution, were honest in their naming and functioned within a politically, economically, governmentally, financially, and scientifically decentralized and pluralized system. These parties, while far from flawless, allowed for real representation, genuinely participatory governance structures even for very serious policy matters with real participation, and a level of public accountability in political, economic, governmental, financial, and scientific decision making.
However, after WW2 a long multi decadal transformation began due to the dirty deeds of a convergence of several interests and an assortment of powerful special interest groups, and then our parties were transformed into centralized, exclusionary membership organizations. The so called Democratic Party has become a technocracy party, and the so called Republican Party became a conservative party. Neither really represents their original principles of democracy or republicanism, and they dont offer meaningful access or representation to the public. This transformation of the parties has been accompanied by a broader centralization of political, economic, and scientific decision making, which has caused the effective loss of most democratic governance structures.
Well written, and well reasoned, but sortition has a few issues.
1. The societies that used it limited it to male citizens, who were functionally the aristocrats of their society. The best estimates on the democracies of Ancient Greece put the citizen body at about 10% of the population who were coincidentally the wealthiest 10% of the population of their respective Polis.
2. We have an existing sortition like mechanism already and it does not work well, which are Jury Trials.
3. This will end up with an issue around the bell curve. Sortition will invest an enormous amount of power in the permanent civil service and whoever selects what goes in front of the sortition committees. The citizens in the center of the bell curve are unbelievably ignorant.
That being said, I don’t want to simply complain without being constructive.
I think sortition could play a role in community politics at a much more local level (eg a block or neighborhood getting to spend a budget on road improvements.
My alternative solution is that the problem with representation is that we are represented on a single axis, geography, which it turns out means we select the same assholes.
Alternative axes could include age, gender, and profession/industry.
Thank you for your thought provoking piece.