Democracy by Lottery
January 10, 2023 6:54 AM   Subscribe

The Case for Abolishing Elections: More disturbing, he noted how his fellow politicians—all of whom owned their homes—tended to legislate in favor of landlords and against tenants. “I saw that the experiences and beliefs of legislators shape legislation far more than facts,” he said. “After that, I frequently commented that any 150 Vermonters pulled from the phone book would be more representative than the elected House membership.”

I've served as a state legislative employee for several years now, and the strongest belief I've come away with from the experience is that any randomized assortment of citizens from across the state would not only be more representative, but would do a better job.
posted by N8yskates (91 comments total) 31 users marked this as a favorite
 
The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.

To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.

To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.

posted by saturday_morning at 6:55 AM on January 10, 2023 [43 favorites]


We need legislative committee service as an alternative to jury duty.

It would make jury duty itself a more consistent experience. If you get the summons, you KNOW that you'll be pulled off work for a minimum of 5 or so days, and there is no point trying to game it and get yourself challenged.

It would mean sitting on a legislative committee, as a voting member, and compel a change in how legislation is drafted.
posted by ocschwar at 7:00 AM on January 10, 2023 [14 favorites]


"Democracy by Lottery": I'm sorry to be the one to say this, but this is a terrible idea.

Yes, politicians are terrible. Yes, the campaign finance system is crooked and broken and needs to be scrapped. Yes, Washington is a cesspool of influence and bad faith.

But people are stupid. There's no way I would want the ordinary people I see at the Walmart to have the opportunity to make decisions that affect the lives of 350 million people.

I think the people who support this idea are really saying that would rather replace the other side's politicians with a lottery of regular people. Certainly, I would take anyone off the street over Matt Gaetz or Marjorie Taylor Greene. But taking an ordinary person off the street over Jamie Raskin's deep Constitutional knowledge, or AOC's communication skills, or Nancy Pelosi's savvy and diplomacy? No way.

IAAL, and I can tell you that laws are complicated. I'm on a committee that helps my state legislature craft statutes regarding corporations, and I can promise you that it's very difficult even when we all agree on the outcome we are trying to achieve. Just like you want your doctor to be well versed in, you know, medicine, we should expect more out of our legislators rather that just scrapping the whole thing.
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 7:06 AM on January 10, 2023 [80 favorites]


I don't think democracy can work because people are too easy to fool and elections are too dependent on money. I have been arguing with random people about the benefits of sortition over democratic elections (citizen assemblies) for a couple years now. It is pretty annoying for them, I would guess.

But seriously though.. what if instead of electing people, we had a random selection (a jury, sort of) that was sized to be representative of the citizenry, and they were tasked with _hiring_ the people that used to be elected. It would be a hiring committee. This group would review the resumes, do interviews, have a couple days to review some propaganda from lobbyists, deliberate, and then offer the job to the best candidate. No campaign. No campaigning, not even during their term!

The committees would get paid so they take it seriously and can afford to take time off from work.

The rest of the government works the same, this just removes elections because they suck.
posted by pol at 7:07 AM on January 10, 2023 [5 favorites]


There's no way I would want the ordinary people I see at the Walmart to have the opportunity to make decisions that affect the lives of 350 million people.

Wouldn't say that the Instacart users are somehow more qualified to make those decisions. Individual people might be stupid (though I'd argue with that characterization, frankly) but most of the state legislators I have met during my tenure weren't exactly Rhodes Scholars either. I think a well-designed sortition system could encourage intellectual engagement with the issues rather than the general hackery seen in many state assemblies.
posted by N8yskates at 7:15 AM on January 10, 2023 [9 favorites]


The current system started as one where only property owners were able to vote. There is also the idea of the dream of owning property — you ain’t any kind of man without some land. There is even a view that property owners have a more long term view and commitment to the community than renters who are seen as transitory. When someone buys a home we say they are putting down roots. This seems to be at the root of all of this. Even if we went to a lottery we wouldn’t get a different outcome because there is a deeper cultural problem of how we value people and how many people value themselves at a very deep level.
posted by interogative mood at 7:20 AM on January 10, 2023 [5 favorites]


My dream system that I've never thought about too hard:
Still a democracy, but we vote for policies/values instead of people. The actual governing gets done by people hired to fulfill that role
posted by Acari at 7:21 AM on January 10, 2023 [8 favorites]


I do not want my kids to have to live in the People's Republic of McKinsey, tyvm.

Representative democracy is the worst way to run a nation except for all the others.
posted by flabdablet at 7:24 AM on January 10, 2023 [11 favorites]


But seriously though.. what if instead of electing people, we had a random selection (a jury, sort of) that was sized to be representative of the citizenry, and they were tasked with _hiring_ the people that used to be elected. It would be a hiring committee. This group would review the resumes, do interviews, have a couple days to review some propaganda from lobbyists, deliberate, and then offer the job to the best candidate. No campaign. No campaigning, not even during their term!

That makes a little more sense. If nothing else, if I Ran The World, we'd overturn Citizens United and get all money out of politics. Donations are made to a general pool, which is split up among the candidates equally. TV stations are mandated to give equal time. Candidates are given something like 6 weeks to make their case.
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 7:24 AM on January 10, 2023 [4 favorites]


William F. Buckley said that: “I have often been quoted as saying I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University" - this is one of those sentiments that crosses political lines.
posted by madcaptenor at 7:27 AM on January 10, 2023 [1 favorite]


I expect that Buckley meant that more as a criticism of Harvard than a compliment to the good people of Boston.
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 7:33 AM on January 10, 2023 [19 favorites]


I do not want my kids to have to live in the People's Republic of McKinsey, tyvm.

Exactly. Reading the article, and the comments here so far, it's all very handwavey about how these systems would actually be implemented. Who would operate and manage these complex systems of continual random selection and replacement? The articles nods towards "the aid of professional staff", consultation with experts, advisors, experts, etc. This would just be a permanent class of McKinsey-esque staffers running things.

Like, look at the suggestions above:

We need legislative committee service as an alternative to jury duty...It would mean sitting on a legislative committee, as a voting member, and compel a change in how legislation is drafted.

You know who famously does the best work? Someone who doesn't want to be at a job and resents being forced to be there.

And, frankly, however this may have worked in trials in other countries, I think America is too fucked for this to work here. I think you'd end up with 4chan: The Legislature dicking around while a powerful permanent civil service/"professional legislative staff" does the actual governance.
posted by star gentle uterus at 7:36 AM on January 10, 2023 [13 favorites]



I don't think democracy can work because people are too easy to fool and elections are too dependent on money.


You think elections are too dependent on money, just wait until we have a political lotto, and your local council representative, who was chosen by lotto, doesn't have enough money nor enough experience to spot the bribes and graft.

Yikes.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:37 AM on January 10, 2023 [3 favorites]


But people are stupid. There's no way I would want the ordinary people I see at the Walmart to have the opportunity to make decisions that affect the lives of 350 million people.

But if we start from the idea that people are too stupid to govern themselves, we end up in some pretty bad places--here, for instance, where our leaders are, for the most part, illogical, venal, consumed with greed, and worse, have the CEO disease where they think that power confers intelligence, and so are willing to swallow the worst ideas in the world, as long as they're spoken by someone wearing the right suit and tie.

If in fact the people at Walmart are too stupid to rule themselves, then why should they have a vote at all? What's the point of giving them any say in who rules them? On what possible principle could a nation of idiots be allowed a vote?

"Should people be allowed to govern themselves" is a question that has always throughout history been answered with a resounding no! But maybe we should be concerned by the unanimity of that idea, the strength of it, and the way it always characterizes common people as stupid.

Most of us manage to pick up a skill or two in our lives, even if we are not Renaissance geniuses. Plumbers learn the weird rules that keep toilets running, electricians untangle complicated wiring so we can have lights without setting the house on fire, cashiers find the UPC codes on frozen vegetables ten times faster than I can at the U-Scan. Is legislation--or the process of thinking through issues that ends up in legislation--a skill so complex that no one could learn it? Clearly people do learn it.

I don't think it's a particularly workable idea, having random people take office by lottery, but I think it's a useful idea, because it challenges our notion of who should be in office, and makes us question our prejudices against the people who are, in the end, the victims of all these laws.
posted by mittens at 7:49 AM on January 10, 2023 [45 favorites]


The piece undercuts its own thesis with this line:
Of course, at the time, this category included only free men, not women, immigrants, or the enslaved—a mere 30,000 or so people out of a total population of some 300,000.
It amazes me that the author is unable to grasp that a system that excludes 90% of the population (including all of the women) is not a system that fights elite capture - it is elite capture.

Beyond that, arguments like "American elections are awash in money" ignore that this is a fundamentally American problem, with elections in other countries not having that problem. Which gets to the real problem at the heart of this issue - the real problem is the utterly illegitimate Citizens United ruling (remember - if the Supreme Court was actually bound to actual ethics, the ruling would have been at the very least 4-4, upholding the constitutionality of campaign finance laws) and American deification of free speech as an end of itself. Which the author also dodges.
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:52 AM on January 10, 2023 [12 favorites]


Elections are not the end-all be-all of democracy... especially when peoples' votes can be easily suppressed my monied interests.
Sortition seems to scare a lot of commenters; but random selection would result in the average "intelligence" of legislators mirroring that of the gen pop (if you could achieve true randomness, which nah.) It's not difficult to implement, since it's the same process as for jury duty but scaled-up. It's been tried before, and the failure modes don't seem especially notable.

Elections, done properly, could be a good tool for measuring the "will" of the electorate. As implemented in the US, they are not. Sortition based on jury lottery would probably be better, but there are many other aspects of democratic decision-making which would be better.

There's no "one weird trick" to fix democracy. For democracy to work, citizens must work at it. Most industrialized citizens don't have time for the work of democratic citizenship between work and other time demands. That needs fixed first, and the rest of democracy-repair can flow from that once a significant population of engaged citizens is available to do the necessary study and work.
posted by Rev. Irreverent Revenant at 7:57 AM on January 10, 2023 [11 favorites]


I swear to God I feel like I am living through the end of that great American masterwork Revenge of the Sith... finally abolishing that Senate full of losers and idiots and putting all the power in the hands of the Emperor, I mean the President... sadly I never got to try death sticks
posted by kingdead at 8:02 AM on January 10, 2023 [1 favorite]


Worth noting that we had a thread about a potential method of "democracy by lottery": citizens' assemblies. I posted in that thread about the potential headwinds such a concept faces, but I think it also attempts to address some of the problems being mentioned here, like "people are stupid and legislators have specific knowledge we don't want to lose."

Ultimately I agree there's no "one weird trick" and that making citizens' assemblies work on a regular basis (or other alternative systems) likely requires us to modify society to explicitly carve out more space for people to engage in civic governance and consultation.
posted by chrominance at 8:05 AM on January 10, 2023 [7 favorites]


If in fact the people at Walmart are too stupid to rule themselves, then why should they have a vote at all? What's the point of giving them any say in who rules them? On what possible principle could a nation of idiots be allowed a vote?

There are those who have said (and I sometimes agree) that the best system of government would be benevolent dictatorship. The problem, obviously, is the benevolent part.

Most of us manage to pick up a skill or two in our lives, even if we are not Renaissance geniuses. Plumbers learn the weird rules that keep toilets running, electricians untangle complicated wiring so we can have lights without setting the house on fire, cashiers find the UPC codes on frozen vegetables ten times faster than I can at the U-Scan. Is legislation--or the process of thinking through issues that ends up in legislation--a skill so complex that no one could learn it? Clearly people do learn it.

People can certainly learn it, and we should expect our legislators to learn it. You certainly don't need to be a genius to write laws, but you have to know how to do it and the consequences of doing it wrong. I wouldn't choose my electrician by holding a lottery of the people who live on my block.

It's the same way that there is this weird "outsider" fetish in Washington -- people say they want politicians who are not "Washington insiders". Nobody says that about any other profession. "I want someone to do this work who has neither the knowledge nor the experience to do this work!"
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 8:05 AM on January 10, 2023 [12 favorites]


Whenever I see jury selection used as a positive example of democracy, I assume the author has never served on a jury.

I live in a state with a citizen initiative system. At any time a few hundred petitions are gathering signatures, and around a half dozen wind up on the ballot most years. They are, almost without exception, badly flawed, because they are written by people without legislative experience and don’t go through committee review. In the past few years we’ve had drug decriminalization that took effect immediately, while the treatment systems to support it are still being built; a gun control measure that was in obvious violation of the constitution but still sent people on a gun-buying spree; and multiple attempts to ban GMOs, abortion, and same sex marriage. (That last one passed and is still in the constitution.) All of which is to say that there’s a lot to be said for professionalization of political work.
posted by Just the one swan, actually at 8:17 AM on January 10, 2023 [7 favorites]


Sortition seems to scare a lot of commenters;

I'm not scared by sortition - rather, I'm annoyed at the outright dishonesty of its advocates. To start with, Athenian sortition - the original model - was very much an oligarchy by design. As the article in the OP openly admits, the system de jure excluded 90% of the Attic population as a whole, and of the remaining 30k people in the actual polity, the reality was that only 20% of that number attended the assemblies on a regular basis, a population that selected for the wealthy elite of the ancient Athenian population because if you're a free Attic farmer, your priority is going to be the crops that provide you a living. And a number of those pressures transfer over to citizens' assemblies in the modern era - for example, there are few people who can put their lives on hold for the duration of such an assembly, biasing their population towards the elderly and the wealthy; as well as the lack of permanence in the body proper relocating the locus of institutional knowledge to the professional "facilitators" these groups would need to be able to function.
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:18 AM on January 10, 2023 [7 favorites]


When I was in DC and interned on capitol hill a long long time ago I was really shocked to discover that the typical member of congress is about as charismatic and intelligent as a bag of rocks.
posted by interogative mood at 8:22 AM on January 10, 2023 [9 favorites]


and your local council representative, who was chosen by lotto

I agree this can't work. Plus we want to get people who are good at their job (of governing) doing that. Not a rando.

The ONLY change I want is to remove elections. Everything else is basically the same. Instead of electing anyone, we have a randomly selected assembly of people who hire the person. That's it! Everyone who is currently appointed will still be.

We then make incremental changes from that point, to get away from the "elections are politics" mess. There will still be incumbent effect problems, but we have those anyway. There will be no election season, and there would be a lot of detail to sort out about whether or how much of the process will be public (or how public), given the amount of heat the members are likely to receive.

So we can't randomly select people to do skilled work that requires experience and expertise, that is a terrible idea. But allowing a statistically significant randomly selected group to hire those people is not a terrible idea.

Or maybe it is! I am curious about rebuttals.
posted by pol at 8:22 AM on January 10, 2023


In my experience, “people who shop at Walmart” are working class people and immigrants. If the issues that needed to be solved by a governing body involved how to get people’s needs met when there wasn’t enough money in the budget to actually cover everything, I’d much rather have a randomly chosen group of Walmart shoppers working on that problem than a randomly chosen group of upper middle class folks.

It really highlights the question of the sense in which “stupid” is being used when “people who shop at Walmart” are being used as the archetypal illustrative example.
posted by eviemath at 8:24 AM on January 10, 2023 [30 favorites]


(In most such. cases, I would likely be happier with the work of a randomly chosen group of Walmart shoppers than a non-randomly selected group of upper middle class folks, in fact.)
posted by eviemath at 8:26 AM on January 10, 2023 [8 favorites]


I've seen a plausible theory that choosing members of the government by lottery just hands governing over to the bureaucracy-- they're the people with experience and continuity.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 8:27 AM on January 10, 2023 [4 favorites]


I've come away with from the experience is that any randomized assortment of citizens from across the state would not only be more representative, but would do a better job.

Alternatively, if one were to randomly select among qualified people already suitable to work in an agency, then it may work. As career professionals they don't have the grifter's charm and charisma to ever be elected, or suffer the negative impact on their careers if they tried. This is how we ideally select judges, but this time more random and temporary as lawmakers. As professionals they would be party free, and would focus on their expertise and not rush to pass laws written by lobbyists, because they aren't getting paid for profits and they have more personal stake in the outcome by their committed experience in the field. Every country that never had a democratic tradition would have benefited from this after transitioning from dictatorship, such as Iraq, Russia, Iran, etc. Typically though, a corrupt system was established by outsiders and more conflict ensued.
posted by Brian B. at 8:28 AM on January 10, 2023


But allowing a statistically significant randomly selected group to hire those people is not a terrible idea.

But they won't be randomly selected. There are inherent pressures - pressures that existed all the way back in ancient Athens, even! - that will bias the pool towards the powerful in society. And no, you can't fix this because those pressures are due to the simple fact that the wealthy and powerful are the people who can afford to be on these assemblies because most of us can't just put our lives on hold (a problem that has plagued jury duty, and in several countries has led to the creation of professional jurors.)
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:30 AM on January 10, 2023 [4 favorites]


It really highlights the question of the sense in which “stupid” is being used when “people who shop at Walmart” are being used as the archetypal illustrative example.

I see how my use of that phrase could sound like a class judgment, but I did not intend it that way.

I shop at Walmart. I am neither an immigrant nor working class. It's just the most convenient place to get a whole bunch of things that most people need or want. So I was using it more in the modern-agora sense than a "lol look at those poor people" sense.

If it helps, replace Walmart with the DMV. Everyone has to go to the DMV.
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 8:33 AM on January 10, 2023 [2 favorites]


a problem that has plagued jury duty

Quite a lot of this. You want jurors? Pay 'em $1000/day. Bang. Everyone wants to be on a jury. If it's really such an important pillar of your democratic system then you'd fucking pay them like it. But ya don't, so obviously it's less important than the guy dancing around with a "condos for sale" sign by the highway. "Pillar of our system" my ass.
posted by aramaic at 8:45 AM on January 10, 2023 [23 favorites]


I agree that in a workable version of this system, the citizen's assembly members would need to be paid a good, livable wage during the term of their service, in contrast to the situation in many state legislatures today.
posted by N8yskates at 8:51 AM on January 10, 2023 [4 favorites]


I think we'd do a lot better, although it would take a while to recover, by going back to teaching civics. It really seems like a lot of legislatures these days don't even understand how legislation works. (Not to even touch the problem of local government - my wife won office by being the only person to post on Facebook that she was willing to accept it in a write-in campaign in 2020, and therefore we've gotten a front row seat to the selectboard blundering around and crashing into things in often expensive and illegal ways.)
posted by restless_nomad at 8:55 AM on January 10, 2023 [2 favorites]


a problem that has plagued jury duty

I think that people not wanting to be on a jury is more a trope than a reality. Bad jurors are due to lawyers throwing out all the decent, non crazy jurors in the jury selection process IMO.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:11 AM on January 10, 2023 [5 favorites]


It feels like determining whether this idea would be good is difficult to disentangle from the setup required to make it work.

If we were to flip a switch and move to this system, would the US be able to perform it as-is? Almost certainly not. We have a long history of "Swap the structure while leaving the foundation unchanged, be surprised when foundational issues resurface". Look at Reconstruction. The Civil Rights Act. Prohibition, arguably. It's not *easy* work, but not doing it means we carry forward systemic issues while papering over them & thinking we're done here.

On the other hand, if we were able to take ~20 years + implementation time and lay the groundwork. *Then* it may be promising.
What sort of common understanding of civics & labor would we want to have people going into it with?
What barriers to learning & internalizing that understanding of civics would we need to clear away first? (hunger, housing precarity, etc)
What else would we want people to have, so we could feel confident we're not painting targets on people's backs?


On the other hand, if we were able to plan & commit to this sort of generational project; we'd already be in the better future presented by it. So in order to make revolutionary change possible, we must first carry out revolutionary change.
posted by CrystalDave at 9:12 AM on January 10, 2023 [5 favorites]


Basically, we are talking about picking someone to do a job. First, do they have the skills to do the job? There needs to be criteria to decide this. And the ability to apply those criteria effectively to judge the applicant. So it seems that a person given the job to pick someone also must have skills and should have gone through some selection process to insure that these skills exist. Random selection does not address this.

Politics has never been seen as employment, where there is job to be done and we need to get the best person to do that job, implying finding someone with the required skills. Instead, via our political system, we as voters are given choices based a lot on a pre selection process run by the parties and funded by the rich and powerful. Skills are not addressed. If we look at all the politicians in this country and measure their skill sets, I think you will find few people with both the skills and intelligence to do a good job. And the ethics, which is really important. The fact that certain people, frequently mentioned on the blue, as primary examples of people who should not be in office, are in office, illustrates how our current selection process fails. The fact that TFG was the president…
posted by njohnson23 at 9:13 AM on January 10, 2023 [2 favorites]


I think that people not wanting to be on a jury is more a trope than a reality. Bad jurors are due to lawyers throwing out all the decent, non crazy jurors in the jury selection process IMO.

This is a genuine problem, and one you can't just handwave away because it makes your position harder to defend. The reality is that many people can't serve on juries because doing so would be a genuine hardship, either from a caretaker standpoint, an inability to work out their service with their employer, medical issues, or a number of other problems stemming from the fact that many people don't have the ability to put their life on hold. This piece by an Iowa judge discusses the issue of hardship excuses on jurors and how difficult the balance is, and it's worth pointing out that this was one of the issues that led to a few countries moving to professional jurors.

And as bad as the issue is with jurors, it would be even worse with assemblies. Beyond the issues with pausing one's life, there's also things like selection placing burdens on the selected, like requiring them to have to put their investments into blind trusts.
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:39 AM on January 10, 2023 [6 favorites]


Every Cook Can Govern, by CLR James.
posted by grobstein at 10:23 AM on January 10, 2023 [3 favorites]


This is a genuine problem, and one you can't just handwave away

If we paid the jurors well enough, and make sure that taking the time doesn't result in their getting fired from their current one... I don't know. I think this might be impossible to solve - if people don't have time for participating in government, they probably won't have time to cast informed democratic votes either (though that is certainly easier on the scheduling).

I don't think this is a panacea, but I hate elections. I think they are awful and the worst way to pick someone to do important work (not to mention the egregious bribery). I think that lottery is also bad, but for different reasons. I think that a middle zone is best - use randomness to make the selection process as fair as we can given our current reality, and iterate on that.

I have yet to encounter a system that I think would work better. (ok, ranked choice voting is maybe a distant second place, but it makes the election game even more of a focus point and the campaigning and bribery will just continue).
posted by pol at 10:27 AM on January 10, 2023 [1 favorite]


aside from not being very representative at all, the system in athens wasn't that stable - there were periods of dictatorship and instability and when the tally is done, we've managed to keep our system longer, for whatever that's worth

the biggest problem is you get joe or jane average selected by lot, they go to congress and then people offer them life changing amount of money for their votes - not all will take it, but some will - true, this goes on in our system, but one shouldn't assume that this wouldn't happen with sortition

actually, i don't think you can come up with a good system if you have a corrupt populace - and we do
posted by pyramid termite at 10:38 AM on January 10, 2023 [1 favorite]


In my mind representation can mean two things:

1. Representation in the sense of a given person is similar to their constituency on a number of traits (socioeconomic status, etc.).
2. Representation in the sense that a given person has been freely assigned the responsibility of acting on behalf of / in the best interests of the other.

I think our founders constructed our American experiment in terms of #2 whereas the article / concept of sortition is more focused on #1. There are obviously downsides - I think pursuing #2 can confuse freely assigned responsibility with elitism / the idea that people who have managed to win an election should be "better" than those that they represent.

However - in my own experience I do think there are specific individuals I know, trust, and would very much like to enlist in organizing how we govern ourselves. People who are responsible, trustworthy, show up on time, do the work, etc. etc. I think this type of trust is what our founders had in mind and what our current system of "mega elections" and party politics hasn't really delivered.

My own fanciful idea is a recurring system of elections where every group of 20 people selects one person to represent them on everything, that person meets with 20 other similar leaders to make decisions relevant to all 400 and then nominates one person to deal with the next level, etc. and it rolls all the way up. Call it ~6 levels of government to cover the U.S. population.
posted by web5.0 at 11:00 AM on January 10, 2023 [1 favorite]


aside from not being very representative at all, the system in athens wasn't that stable - there were periods of dictatorship and instability and when the tally is done, we've managed to keep our system longer, for whatever that's worth

We also had a period of stasis (the Solonian word for civil war) that lasted four years and killed almost a million people.

The Athenian constitution was interrupted several times, usually because it was conquered by an outside force. (The dictatorship of the Thirty was imposed by Sparta, for example, although it was composed of local oligarchs, and anyway lasted only months.)

But it is not unreasonable to count from the constitution of Solon (c. 590) to the abolition of home rule by the Romans (146), most of four centuries of democracy. And the traditional liberties of the city were maintained for longer, even when it was under Roman rule. For example Acts 17 reports the visit of Paul to Athens, where he was greeted with philosophical curiosity and his doctrines debated in the traditional public squares.
posted by grobstein at 11:08 AM on January 10, 2023


actually, i don't think you can come up with a good system if you have a corrupt populace - and we do

to what extent are we in better/worse shape than societies from the past? are we due for a smiting? I'm open to the idea that networked communications have permitted our worst natures to really grab the helm, but it's such a weird call to make. every second of time, every person who lived, led up to this moment. Are we really any worse or better than anyone, anytime? and the question remains, and we seem to be running out of time to answer, and I'm not sure if part of the problem is we invented things we don't really know how to use well.
posted by elkevelvet at 11:13 AM on January 10, 2023


are we due for a smiting?

well, there's a lot of people around who would love to smite somenoe
posted by pyramid termite at 11:19 AM on January 10, 2023 [1 favorite]


This is a genuine problem, and one you can't just handwave away


I guess, but I've been called for jury duty like 10 times, so obviously just an anecdote, but plenty of people have shown up across all walks of life. Most trials don't last that long (less than a full day or two at the most), so maybe it's a bigger issue for long trials.
posted by The_Vegetables at 11:42 AM on January 10, 2023


You know who famously does the best work? Someone who doesn't want to be at a job and resents being forced to be there.


Fine. Vote "present" and go home. No harm done.
posted by ocschwar at 11:43 AM on January 10, 2023 [1 favorite]


If not sortition, how about ostracism?

You want jurors? Pay 'em $1000/day.

Seems a bit pricey. There are 260 work days in the federal calendar. Senators have a base pay of $174,000. Granted, they don't work full time, but even so.
posted by BWA at 12:50 PM on January 10, 2023


Most of us manage to pick up a skill or two in our lives, even if we are not Renaissance geniuses. Plumbers learn the weird rules that keep toilets running, electricians untangle complicated wiring so we can have lights without setting the house on fire, cashiers find the UPC codes on frozen vegetables ten times faster than I can at the U-Scan. Is legislation--or the process of thinking through issues that ends up in legislation--a skill so complex that no one could learn it? Clearly people do learn it.

We also have a Cult of Ignorance that runs at least half the country. Learning more is "bad" (history, equal rights, etc). I don't want them running the country. I also don't want 75% of the house running the country right now (wing nut republicans and somehow-despite-40-years-of-failure-still-neoliberal democrats).
posted by Slackermagee at 1:14 PM on January 10, 2023 [2 favorites]


My own fanciful idea is a recurring system of elections where every group of 20 people selects one person to represent them on everything, that person meets with 20 other similar leaders to make decisions relevant to all 400 and then nominates one person to deal with the next level, etc. and it rolls all the way up. Call it ~6 levels of government to cover the U.S. population.

So this group of 20 first-elected-level leaders would be a citizens council, to give it a name? I'm guessing that probably wouldn't be their full-time job at that level, but at some point it might be. And then one layer up, a council of councils? I'm not sure how you'd break up the groups; historically it'd probably have been geographic, building up to town councils and so on, but I'm sure there could be more modern approaches to it. Maybe where you are & what your main affiliation is (some people might value identity, some their field of work, etc.) You'd have to be careful about coercion though, lest a company CEO apply pressure down the management tree. Eventually, you'd probably have something approximating county-level councils, state-level, etc. Would it be better for that terminal level of council to further concentrate decision-making into one person?

I'm sure the devil's in the details, but that does sound like a more democratic form of democracy. Perhaps some day we'll see it tried out.
posted by CrystalDave at 1:15 PM on January 10, 2023


I've got no idea how to govern, I wonder if effective management of animals as clever and fractious as humans is even possible.

However, I do think anyone trying to pass new laws should have to debate their ideas with high schoolers and win, in a formal debate, judged by a 50/50 panel of youth and the aged gathered randomly from the populations affected by the law in question.

I also think every political campaign should have the same defined budget.

I also think I'll be long dead and my ashes scattered to the winds before money is ever allowed to be disconnected from politics

In summary, eat the rich.
posted by signsofrain at 1:27 PM on January 10, 2023 [1 favorite]


I was going to say that party politics are the problem because so many people decide on who their team are and then just vote for them regardless so in safe seats it almost doesn't matter who the candidates are which allows parties to field some pretty unhinged candidates. Ideally the candidate should have to work for their support and the fact that they could garner a plurality in their area in the election is proof they belong in the legislature.

But then I was thinking about how in our local elections there are no parties and as a result there is a huge advantage to the incumbent as voters have at least heard of them while the other candidates are for the most part a bunch of nobodies so voters have no idea which of the many candidates they should vote for. A party at the very least will let you know what the candidate stands for in general and is also a kind of filter where the candidates had to already get the support of the local party so they met some minimum standard.

I guess people ruin everything. Maybe we have to keep working on AI until it gets to the level of Minds from the Culture books and then we'll be OK, assuming we can survive that long.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 1:58 PM on January 10, 2023


If you want a better country, be better citizens. - Jim Wright

It really is the only way.
posted by irisclara at 2:02 PM on January 10, 2023 [3 favorites]


actually, i don't think you can come up with a good system if you have a corrupt populace - and we do

Agreed, but if we want a huge middle class then we need to let them rule somehow before they disappear, because they are mentally competent to tax the rich, and they aren't as easily duped into voting for the rich based on superstitions about money from heaven.
posted by Brian B. at 2:03 PM on January 10, 2023 [1 favorite]


>>But people are stupid. There's no way I would want the ordinary people I see at the Walmart to have the opportunity to make decisions that affect the lives of 350 million people.

>But if we start from the idea that people are too stupid to govern themselves, we end up in some pretty bad places--here, for instance


You know what I can't stop imagining? If it really was a lottery, think how well we would educate our children. Think how strong our investment would be in making sure our populace is trained, empowered, ready for responsibility.
posted by MiraK at 2:20 PM on January 10, 2023 [7 favorites]


You know what I can't stop imagining? If it really was a lottery, think how well we would educate our children. Think how strong our investment would be in making sure our populace is trained, empowered, ready for responsibility.


Yes!!!

I don't believe "people" are by nature "stupid" and incapable of governing themselves. They have done it before. If we find they are stupid, it can only be because of the way we've set things up.
posted by grobstein at 2:47 PM on January 10, 2023 [2 favorites]


The Legislature dicking around while a powerful permanent civil service/"professional legislative staff" does the actual governance.

Not that I agree with the FPP proposal, but this essentially describes what we have right now. Legislature dicking around while civil servants and consultants do the work of governance.
posted by Emily's Fist at 2:56 PM on January 10, 2023 [3 favorites]


If it really was a lottery, think how well we would educate our children.

Most people do this now, for economic survival and well being. We don't typically educate them in law or critical thinking even when they are expected to serve on juries.
posted by Brian B. at 2:56 PM on January 10, 2023 [1 favorite]


I've heard that Greek education (Athenian?) was precisely to prepare the elite to govern.

What would education look like if a lottery system were taken seriously?
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 3:01 PM on January 10, 2023


You know what I can't stop imagining? If it really was a lottery, think how well we would educate our children. Think how strong our investment would be in making sure our populace is trained, empowered, ready for responsibility.

This feels analogous to John Rawls' "veil of ignorance" and "original position": if everyone got together to make rules for society but didn't know what their role was in society what kind of system would they design? Similarly, if anyone could be called upon at any given time to fulfil some civic responsibility, what changes would we need to make to the way we've structured things?
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 3:02 PM on January 10, 2023 [3 favorites]


we have a randomly selected assembly of people who hire the person.

That's . . . that's what an election is?

Seriously - every 2 years I (as random John Q. Citizen) and a random assortment of my neighbors go fill in a little bubble or push buttons on a touch screen or whatever to indicate "I would like to hire this person for 2 or 4 or 6 years to participate in running the government. These people in turn will (hopefully) hire other knowledgeable and competent people (aka bureaucrats) to assist in the implementation and in carrying out the policies."

That's it. That's an election.

Now there are certainly systemic and often very intentional factors that make the "assembly of people" and who they are able to hire less random or qualified (not getting Election Day as a holiday, or the growth of dark money thanks to the Citizens United decision, just as 2 examples) but this is a problem of a corrupted process, not a problem with the inherent qualities of elections. Don't confuse the two. As has been pointed out upthread, lots of other countries do better at this than the US.

Also, you can barely get 4 people who like each other to agree on where to go for lunch - you think you're gonna get 20? 50? 200? (how many people are in this "randomly selected assembly" anyway?) to come to some agreement on who to hire to decide where their tax dollars go? C'mon.

You're not actually fixing the method by which we decide who runs the government and how, you're just shifting the complications from the initial step of deciding who "votes" to the later step of "decide who to hire".
posted by soundguy99 at 3:51 PM on January 10, 2023 [3 favorites]


First, politically active person here… Parties do NOT select the candidates at the local level. People decide for a variety of reasons that they want to run.

Parties can SUPPORT a candidate based on any number of criteria. That support begins with local party endorsement. Without local party endorsement, they can still get on the ballot, but being able to get volunteers, use of party resources such as office space, voter data bases which have contact information and some idea of how likely the voter is to vote your way does not happen without local party endorsements. That is where the local party vets the candidate. Candidates are sent questionnaires and will be interviewed by the local executive board of their party. The executive board is basically a steering committee with the county and legislative district chairs and vice - chairs. In areas which are heavily populated, running even at the lowest level, Precinct Committee Officer ( Chair or Captain) can be competitive. Running for County or Legislative District Chair can also be pretty competitive. In my area since my party is a minority party, it can be difficult to fill these offices. Trust me ALL of us shop at Walmart. Not by preference but because none of us have high incomes. We in several cases have physical disabilities. In fact the only reason some of us even have time for this is disability or being retired.
In a big city these offices within the party would be held by people with more money, connections and social capital. Locally we can’t offer money, but we have an office, we can host events and phone banks, and canvases can be launched. There’s parking and internet. We all personally donate to our candidates.
The other side in our town has a bit more money.

Candidates usually seek endorsements of other groups, such as labor unions, immigrant rights groups, LGTBQ rights groups interest groups like say The Cattleman’s Association, associations of realtors, associations of builders, some of these groups only endorse. Others may help by turning out volunteers and donating respectable sums of money.

the would be candidate needs all that to get the money needed to buy air time on TV or radio, to buy campaign signs, buttons, T-shirts, hats, printed materials. Those printed materials often need to be not only in English, but maybe in Spanish, even in other languages, like Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, Russian, Ukrainian… In my area, the big minority language is Spanish. Candidates have such a hard time recruiting Spanish speaking volunteers to phone bank or canvass that in our area it’s one of the last positions which may be paid.

So candidates of either major party really are self selected. Part of why they they are is that running is a HUGE commitment of time and money. One of our local candidates put in a lot of their own money, and closed a business in order to run.
All parties do right up to the Congressional level is vet the candidates and back them if approved.

At the level of Senate and Presidential races the role of parties is greater. Especially this is true of Presidential races. If the Primary process does not shake out a clear front - runner that is what happens at the National Convention.

Ultimately though, all politics of the sort which affects your daily life is local. Local is where you can get involved and affect your future.
Hope this helps.
For what it’s worth, yes things suck here. It’s our own fault. Not enough sane people are getting involved.
I helped keep our office open in the pandemic, and helped keep our legislative organization alive during the 2016 - 2022 period. 3 terms as a legislative district chair.
It might have been nice to have more help.
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 3:52 PM on January 10, 2023 [5 favorites]


I've heard that Greek education (Athenian?) was precisely to prepare the elite to govern.

Again, this was also an education only given to a small portion of the population! Athenian sortition was highly oligarchic in nature, both because of the de jure exclusion of the vast majority of the Attic population from the polity, and the de facto exclusion of a large part of the polity from the assembly by the nature of their lives - again, if you're a free farmer, you're going to have a hard time participating because crops and livestock do not care that the assembly is today, they need care now. As such, it turns out that the Athenian assembly was dominated by the elite because they were the ones who a) had the right and b) the ability to participate.

(Astute observers may note that these issues are the same ones that plague modern direct democratic systems such as the caucus and public town meetings. This is not coincidence.)

When I talked about the dishonesty of supporters of sortition, this is one of the big examples. There is a very blatant dodging of the nature of Athenian sortition, because acknowledging how it worked in practice undercuts the argument for sortition. And while you can argue that the de jure issues are fixed by a more inclusive polity, the de facto issues are much harder to resolve (as seen by the fact that modern direct democratic systems still struggle with them.)
posted by NoxAeternum at 4:01 PM on January 10, 2023 [2 favorites]


Beyond that, arguments like "American elections are awash in money" ignore that this is a fundamentally American problem, with elections in other countries not having that problem.

I don't doubt that there are countries that have much less issue with it, but money in elections is far from a US-specific problem. It's been having a massively distorting effect on just about all UK politics for at least a couple of decades now, despite much tighter rules around donations, campaigning, equal airtime, etc.
posted by Dysk at 4:16 PM on January 10, 2023 [3 favorites]


Maybe a bit late to the conversation, but for added context to the initial post, Gladwell's Revisionist History podcast did an episode in 2020 called The Powerball Revolution where he features Adam Cronkright and "Democracy in Practice" who has been working for a while in schools in Bolivia, Canada, and the US to get kids more involved in student government through volunteerism and lotteries to determine leadership positions.

At the secondary school level this sure has potential, in my opinion. And if this kind of change can work in schools, then at least that's a start.
posted by kneecapped at 4:29 PM on January 10, 2023


I've heard that Greek education (Athenian?) was precisely to prepare the elite to govern.

Greece was a land of contrasts, but this is not really accurate to Athens in its democratic period.

The Athenian democracy arose out of recurring class conflict in the fifth and sixth centuries BC. There were generally three factions: the old aristocrats, the merchant and crafts class, and the non-propertied workers. When Athens democratized, it was because of a coalition of interest between the middle and lower classes. Thus the reforms of Solon, which removed most of the aristocratic political privileges, and also forgave all debts and abolished debt peonage. Conversely, when it reverted towards oligarchy, it was because of a coalition of interest between the middle and upper classes. The high period of democracy in the fifth century was one in which all classes participated by right in government.

The tradition of private education for an elite was practiced by the aristocratic class. They educated their children by private tutors who were members of their households.

But governance was understood to be the right and responsibility of all citizens, not just the aristocrats. Because of this, there was a thriving economy of teachers who worked for fees, and drew their clientele from the middle classes. Teachers from across the Greek world would come to Athens to make a living. They taught many areas of knowledge, but notably they taught rhetoric. Because participation in government was understood to be important for every citizen, the discipline of how to think and argue carried particular importance. It is a mark of the democratic culture of Athens that education in political participation -- the art of speaking, not just listening -- was so vital and widespread.

This system was sharply criticized by Socrates and Plato, who condemned democracy. In Plato, Socrates always denies he is a teacher and is quick to point out that he doesn't accept fees, unlike the "sophists." To Socrates, the idea of someone like a shoemaker participating in his own government is ridiculous, so the existence of an economy of teachers who help prepare the city's shoemakers to govern is equally ridiculous. In works like the Republic, Socrates indeed lays out a system of specialized education to prepare an elite to govern. But Socrates was not describing the system as it was. He was proposing a radical change, basically a reversal of all the democratic principles of the system he lived under.
posted by grobstein at 4:49 PM on January 10, 2023 [3 favorites]


I always kinda liked (because it’s so bonkers) the Venetian method of electing the Doge. Presumably they were trying to complicate the bribery/corruption situation?
posted by aramaic at 4:55 PM on January 10, 2023 [1 favorite]


But governance was understood to be the right and responsibility of all citizens, not just the aristocrats.

And yet during the height of Athenian democracy, they employed the red rope to force people to attend.
posted by NoxAeternum at 4:57 PM on January 10, 2023


I started reading TFA and quickly ran out of patience. Then I scanned the thread and didn't see this.

The problem with legislatures chosen by lottery is the problem of term-limited legislatures. Legislating turns out to be pretty demanding work, and is done better by people who have had years of practice. Amateur legislators are no match for the advocates of the commercial world, from whom they must of necessity accept some inputs. Witness the collapse of competence in State legislatures that implemented term limits, those States now being run largely by lobbyists, who are the only denizens of the Capitols to have the tenure needed to have real insight into their issues.

Also, maybe the modal person is not too dumb to even be a prospect, but we do have a solid 27% of the population here who don't know a damned thing about anything worth knowing, who also are convinced that their opinions about life-and-death-of-the-world issues is just as good as anybody's. The electoral system is better at excluding these people from actual power than a lottery would be.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 6:41 PM on January 10, 2023 [3 favorites]


We do not want random jurors "writing laws" in some "legislative committee", ocschwar, due to the "people are stupid" problem.

We do want randomly selected jurors "approving laws" though, Ben Trismegistus. We've ample evidence the truth becomes somewhat more compelling when people watch debates, sit for jury duty, etc. than when they casually consume news or social media.

Juries mitigate the "people are stupid" problem somewhat by making jurors listen to multiple sides, not enough for average people to write laws, but enough for average people to gauge corruption and to judge oral arguments for and against laws.

We could maybe make specific other decisions by voting too, like maybe the approximate budget could be allocated by referendum. We'd have trouble with advertising influencing the budget, but maybe less bad then our corruption problem.
posted by jeffburdges at 7:41 PM on January 10, 2023 [1 favorite]


The existence of stupid people does not just justify the conclusion that "people are stupid."

Ignorance is a much bigger problem than stupidity. Ignorance, however, is treatable.
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 10:03 PM on January 10, 2023 [2 favorites]


I used quotes for a reason but anyways..

It's not merely treatable. It's inexpensively treatable by having them watch debates during a trial-like setting, but this only qualifies them to form a somewhat less biased opinion about the arguments presented. It does not qualify them to do original creative work on the underlying question.

We need other techniques to bring wider life experiences, creativity, more science, etc. into the law writing process, but it's imho more doable once representatives become more focused upon convincing jurors:  A scientific argument becomes quite powerful if presented well.  A bullshit "promise" by proponents, which deviates from the text, could become hours of debate, and discredit the proposed law. In fact, debates are source material for case law, so discovering miss-steps that demand such "promises" helps nerf the legislation.
posted by jeffburdges at 10:57 PM on January 10, 2023


I'm not sure if part of the problem is we invented things we don't really know how to use well.

I'm completely sure that that's a huge part of what lies beneath humanity's every current problem.

What a tool is is exactly whatever it takes to reduce the personal effort involved in shaping the world around us for our own short-term convenience in some fashion. Technology, always and everywhere, is a power multiplier.

What technology is not, and never has been, is a responsibility multiplier. The only successes that humanity has ever had in making itself more responsible have been primarily cultural, not primarily technological, and it seems to me that what all of those cultural successes have in common is the positive embrace of certain kinds of personal inconvenience. A culture needs frequent reminders that human whims and desires and priorities are not and should not be the only things of consequence; jettison those reminders and we choke and smother and drown ourselves in our own collective hubris and take substantial portions of the rest of the biosphere down as we go.

For example, it seems to me that it should take a lot more work than it presently does to cut down a five hundred year old tree and reduce most of it to woodchips and those to toilet paper. The idea of wiping one's arse on something that had been alive for at least five times as long as the oldest living human should be an obscenity and a taboo, not a routine industrial occurrence. But technology reduces effort, and therefore reduces the price of the products of that effort, and therefore reduces the effort required to pay those prices, and therefore reduces the value that a technology-dominated culture ascribes to the entire production chain all the way back to the extracted raw materials.

Technological innovation, always and everywhere, gets marketed first and foremost as a shiny new convenience. And because so many people in "advanced" industrial societies are time-poor, new conveniences are easy to sell. But each new convenience comes with usually non-obvious social costs attached, and in 2023 we in the industrialized nations find ourselves in this vicious circle where the less time we have, the easier it becomes to sell us new technological conveniences, and the more willing we become to overlook all the ways in which the processes involved in providing that tech continue to shift the prevailing culture toward keeping people time-poor at scale and fucking with our ability to think clearly about that.

Most industrialized citizens don't have time for the work of democratic citizenship between work and other time demands. That needs fixed first, and the rest of democracy-repair can flow from that

I see time poverty and broken democracy as two problems in a chicken-and-egg relationship. I don't think we can separate them out cleanly enough in order to fix one before starting to fix the other. It seems to me that what each of us needs to be doing is keeping both of these problems at the forefront of our own thinking, and then taking whatever opportunities present themselves to make a contribution toward solving either. Think globally, act locally.

It further seems to me that a certain degree of neo-Luddism is an attitude that helps with that. I think that the first question each of us needs to give serious consideration to, before jumping eagerly onto the next disruptive-tech bandwagon, is this: in whose hands will almost all of the money to be made off this new tech end up? Because if the answer to that is not "huge numbers of people who currently have very little" then the new tech is not in fact disruptive, it's just say hello to the new boss same as the old boss.
posted by flabdablet at 11:58 PM on January 10, 2023 [2 favorites]


> "Democracy by Lottery": I'm sorry to be the one to say this, but this is a terrible idea.

> Worth noting that we had a thread about a potential method of "democracy by lottery"

Continuous elections - "I do not favor sortition for the constitution of our legislatures. There is a lot to be said for choosing among representatives who express an interest in and commit to doing the work, and to some kind of voting process that ideally filters for quality. What I do favor is an idea called 'lottery voting' or 'random ballot.'"* :P

> My own fanciful idea is a recurring system of elections where every group of 20 people selects one person to represent them on everything, that person meets with 20 other similar leaders to make decisions relevant to all 400 and then nominates one person to deal with the next level, etc. and it rolls all the way up. Call it ~6 levels of government to cover the U.S. population.

non-territorial voting!*
"Suppose instead of election a man were qualified for office by petition signed by four thousand citizens. He would then represent those four thousand affirmatively, with no disgruntled minority, for what would have been a minority in a territorial consituency would all be free to start other petitions or join in them."

> What would education look like if a lottery system were taken seriously?

The Priority of Democracy - "We live in big, complex societies, which means we are thoroughly interdependent on each other, and that we will naturally have different ideas about how our life in common should go, and will have divergent interests. This means that politics we shall always have with us. It also means that political problems are largely ones about designing and reforming the institutions which shape how we interact with each other..."[1]
But because political problems are so hard, even if we could agree on what we wanted our institutions to achieve (which we don't), we can basically never know in advance what the best institution for a given problem is. (That markets should always and everywhere be the default institution is a claim Knight and Johnson carefully examine before rejecting, whereas I would simply mock.) We also can basically never be sure when changed conditions will make existing institutions unsatisfactory. Put this together and what we need is, as they say, experimentation, with meta-institutions for monitoring how the experiments are going, and deciding when they should be changed or stopped.

This is where democracy comes in... But remember that democracy is going to work better the more people can and do really ("effectively") contribute, especially to the debate... To participate in the democratic debate, people need a lot of skills and cognitive tools: literacy; numeracy; knowing what other people are going on about and why it matters to them; the cultural knowledge and rhetorical skill to argue effectively with fellow citizens[2]; knowledge of the world in general. Gaining all these skills and tools takes teachers and time... Making sure that everyone has an equal opportunity to participate in democracy would be very demanding, and we are very far from doing so. We are even far from making sure everyone has some non-farcical minimum of opportunity. We can and should move towards spreading those opportunities, and make democracy more of a reality and less of a mere promise.
@coffeepine@mastodon.world: "Capitalism is failing HARD, people find it generally easier to unleash their frustration on an outgroup then tackle the problem. Demagogues use this fact and fear... BOOM fascism... Democracies are under attack everywhere because the system is failing."
posted by kliuless at 12:00 AM on January 11, 2023


"Suppose instead of election a man were qualified for office by petition signed by four thousand citizens. He would then represent those four thousand affirmatively, with no disgruntled minority, for what would have been a minority in a territorial consituency would all be free to start other petitions or join in them."

That is an astoundingly bad idea that really does not comprehend things like organization and its ramifications. Or to put it more bluntly, the logic behind that concept is why a town in New Hampshire had its education budget gutted.
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:38 AM on January 11, 2023


Because if the answer to that is not "huge numbers of people who currently have very little" then the new tech is not in fact disruptive, it's just say hello to the new boss same as the old boss.

That doesn't follow; disruptive doesn't mean good. Amazon was certainly disruptive to the bookshop industry, precisely because it centralised control and money to a much greater degree. Its not new boss, same as old boss - the new boss can be different by being worse as well as better.
posted by Dysk at 1:20 AM on January 11, 2023 [2 favorites]


I like to emphasize that one of the original terms for democratic rule was isonomy, and it explicitly involved lotteries. Consider the account Otanes gives in Herodotus’ History:
“[T]he rule of the multitude [plêthos de archon] has… the loveliest name of all, equality [isonomiên]…. It determines offices by lot, and holds power accountable, and conducts all deliberating publicly. Therefore I give my opinion that we make an end of monarchy and exalt the multitude, for all things are possible for the majority.” (Herodotus 1982, 3.80)
Here Otanes identifies democracy with the strict equality accomplished through lots, rather than election by popular balloting. Though this might seem too random when compared to the collective choice of representatives, the appeal of this vision of isonomy is that the lottery supplies an equal opportunity for rulership to each citizen, guaranteeing equality well in excess of the American ideal of equality ‘before the law.’ But note that this equality is only possible when combined with two forms of accountability: that accounting by which an officer must give an accurate tally of expenditures during the administration or be held liable, and the figurative accountability by which the officer owes his fellow citizens his reasons for the decisions made in the public deliberations before, during, and after the decision is taken. The use of loteries only functioned insofar as citizenship was radically restricted, and in the dialogue Herodotus recounts Otanes justifications for the ‘rule of the multitude’ fell flat against Darius’ account of the tendency of all regimes to fall into monarchy insofar as both oligarchies and democracies produce agonistic tensions from which one man eventually emerges the victor and is designated the most excellent and the wisest of the contenders. (Herodotus 1982, 3.82)

The three norms of isonomy are mutually reinforcing: equal participation requires that the office-holder act with the understanding that she might be replaced by any other member of the community. She cannot abuse her office without being held to account at the end of her term. For the same reason she must regularly give reciprocally recognizable justifications for her actions, without which her decisions might be reversed by the next office-holder, or even punished when her office no longer protects her from prosecution. The ideal result of such a regime is a strong preference for deliberation, consensus, and mutual respect, alongside a cautious honesty and transparency with regard to potentially controversial decisions. That's hardly guaranteed though!

The reverse of isonomy is bureaucracy. Bureaucracies are supposed to be more procedurally rational and more efficient, but insofar as they are predicated on expert knowledge, they’re not intended to involve every citizen or to answer to them directly. According to Joseph Schumpter’s popular formulation of the relationship, too much democratic control makes it difficult for the administrative state to efficiently pursue the public goods citizens ultimately want, so bureaucrats have to be insulated from direct control by the multitude. Civil service protections and political parties help to do that, but at the predictable cost of responsiveness.
posted by anotherpanacea at 3:40 AM on January 11, 2023 [2 favorites]


the new boss can be different by being worse as well as better

Of course. But same as the old boss in the sense that they're still playing the same game of personal aggrandisement at everybody else's expense.
posted by flabdablet at 7:43 AM on January 11, 2023


we do have a solid 27% of the population here who don't know a damned thing about anything worth knowing, who also are convinced that their opinions about life-and-death-of-the-world issues is just as good as anybody's. The electoral system is better at excluding these people from actual power than a lottery would be.

I have been involved in political organizing for half my life, and been a state legislative employee for years. I've met hundreds, if not thousands of elected officials, and I've seen absolutely no evidence for this claim. The vast, vast majority I've encountered have been self-centered, willfully ignorant, and concentrated either on advancement at all costs or the narrow interests of themselves or a specific (usually affluent) constituency
posted by N8yskates at 7:56 AM on January 11, 2023 [2 favorites]


This thread has been fascinating - thank you all.

I amend my earlier statement that people are stupid to instead say that some people are stupid, while others are merely ignorant, apathetic, biased, venal, bigoted, or downright cruel. It is the combination of those factors that makes rule by the masses an unappealing idea to me.

Seriously though, this is a hard nut to crack. I agree with Aardvark Cheeselog's comment above about the problem with term limits (legislation being a difficult skill that requires years of practice), but recognize the problem that it seems to be all the wrong people who end up staying in Congress forever (looking at you, Chuck Grassley).

I am entranced by MiraK's idea that a more populist solution would lead to better education, but haven't seen anything to suggest that would be the case. We have an issue where approximately half the population appears unable to give a crap about people who aren't in their immediate circle, and therefore the proposition of spending tax money to help other people (through education or otherwise) is anathema. Not sure what the solution is to that one either.
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 8:06 AM on January 11, 2023


But people are stupid.

boy do I have some stories about appointed directors of state institutions that would blow your mind if you're looking for examples of ignorance and incompetence like the one I was under for four years who literally spent the entire day just printing off articles from Fox News and browsing porn sites and emotionally abusing his secretary whenever he had to actually go somewhere and give a speech

afaik, most electeds and especially their crony appointees are actually pretty fucking bad at their jobs - it's the people around them, their staff, that actually need the education, the knowhow, etc to get the jobs done

and even then, you have literal scientific evidence being provided to, say, the Supreme Court about the racism inherent in gerrymandering or the public health outcomes of overturning Roe v Wade and you're telling me that we need their legal expertise to rule on laws? when someone like Samuel Alito is sitting on the bench?
posted by paimapi at 8:19 AM on January 11, 2023 [3 favorites]


That's it. That's an election.

You are right, I was not clear! I should have clarified "campaign" instead of "election" (I lumped them together). It's the campaign part of the election that I hate (not the mechanics of the procedure to select someone, though I like approval voting best). Even a sortition jury is not going to be totally unanimous and you will need a method to determine who gets the job. This would be some kind of election, you are correct.

But what it would not have is a campaign that never ends and legalized bribery. In my mind the current "spectacle campaign" (citizens united only made it worse, it didn't make a good thing bad) is incompatible with democracy. The key benefit (I think) of sortition is that it is harder to manipulate a randomly selected jury than it is to manipulate a statistically significant subset of the voting public.

I don't think that a committee of a couple hundred people evaluating applicants would allow for campaigning at the same scale (there will be some showmanship to be sure). It wouldn't last for months, it wouldn't have any kind of funding/campaign structure... all that stuff is gone. You have a person who wants to be governor, and a group of people evaluating them in a series of structured sessions.

And the group of people are in a room together, split into groups, so that they can talk to each other about the candidate responses, and deliberate. Will it be unanimous? No way. Will charismatic smooth-talkers dominate their tables as they do on juries? Sure will! But they have to make it to that table randomly, they can't self-select in the same way that a jury is not supposed to get stacked. I suspect that this assembly would make better decisions about competency of candidates based on this process than the current one. And it reduces the leverage of campaign corruption, because there would be no campaign as a vehicle for such corruption. Could it have all the same problems we currently have? Maybe? I don't know.

You could even roll it out incrementally: do it with a few positions at first, and if that works out, expand it to others.

how many people are in this "randomly selected assembly" anyway?

This too has some statistical rigor behind it, it depends on how many people you have in the population that is to be represented. But this is a tractable problem, and I think the examples of it working (Ireland's gay marriage situation being the most notable) show it's merits.
posted by pol at 9:47 AM on January 11, 2023


Guys, let’s not fight. Jury selection is terrible because they don’t adequately compensate jurors AND because they kick you out if you have worked any job that gives you expertise in anything and/or have an advanced degree and/or seem like a person other people would like!
posted by corb at 10:01 AM on January 11, 2023 [4 favorites]


It would mean sitting on a legislative committee, as a voting member, and compel a change in how legislation is drafted.

We have tried the experiment of having perpetually inexperienced legislators with a couple decades worth of term limits in many states. All it has done is increase the use of model legislation written by the likes of ALEC and further entrenched the role of lobbyists.

Perhaps having a legislative "jury" of sorts with veto power over legislation passed by the legislature could work, though. I definitely don't want amateurs drafting bills. It's shocking the kind of nonsense we get out of statehouses already, completely separate from the merits of the underlying idea.
posted by wierdo at 10:12 AM on January 11, 2023 [1 favorite]


But what it would not have is a campaign that never ends and legalized bribery

I don't think that a committee of a couple hundred people evaluating applicants would allow for campaigning at the same scale

I don't see how your sortition plan eliminates campaigns. If anything, it would make campaigning worse.

So, the idea is that a random lottery is drawn to select a number of people who will then meet to hire . . . who? Senators and House Representatives? (If so, that is profoundly anti-democratic, completely negating the very idea that all citizens & residents have a say in choosing their government.)

But, OK, setting that aside, we now have a situation where anyone who wants to become a member of Congress, or President, or Governor, or Attorney General, or etc etc etc, still has to convince an unknown-to-them group of people (the potential lottery winners) that they are the right person for the job. How is this different from the current situation? That's what campaigns are, convincing groups of people that you're the right person to hold a government position. All you've done with the sortition process is add another layer to the process.

it is harder to manipulate a randomly selected jury than it is to manipulate a statistically significant subset of the voting public.

Boy do I have doubts about that. Even so, if you think the "applicants" are gonna just quietly sit there and wait to turn in their resumes to the committee after the lottery has been drawn, wow, hah, NO. No, they're gonna blast the airwaves and the internet and IRL with campaigns, because they need to make sure they reach the lottery winners to let them know that they're the person for the job. And since they don't have any idea who these lottery winners might be, they're gonna err on the side of "lots, early, and often." Even if their hiring is ultimately dependent on a smallish assembly of people, there's NO incentive to NOT campaign, because they want to make sure ANY POTENTIAL assembly member knows who they are and thinks good things about them.
posted by soundguy99 at 2:23 PM on January 11, 2023 [1 favorite]


IOW, you're convinced that there will be less campaigning if a politician only has to convince 7 out of 10 people to vote for them, rather than 75 out of 100. The flaw in your reasoning is that those 10 people are a subset of the 100, so the smart move for any politician is to spend a lot of time, money, and effort preemptively convincing as many people as possible out of that 100 to vote for them, even if they don't ultimately wind up in the small group that actually votes.

There's also the factor where, for example, I'm pretty darn sure that my House Representative (Shontel Brown, of the Ohio 11th, basically Cleveland and Akron) doesn't much really care what the MAGAhats in her district think of her - they're massively outnumbered. But under a sortition plan there's a good chance at least some of the lottery winners would be MAGAhats, just by luck of the draw. So, again, the smart move for her would be to massively expand her campaign to make sure that anyone who isn't a MAGAhat would view her favorably, to increase the chances that any possible MAGAhat lottery winners would be outnumbered even before the lottery is drawn.
posted by soundguy99 at 2:54 PM on January 11, 2023


If so, that is profoundly anti-democratic, completely negating the very idea that all citizens & residents have a say in choosing their government.

I would need some help to understand why there is such a "profound" difference between (e.g.) a 1/10000 share in decisionmaking and an evenly-distributed 1/1000 chance of a 1/10 share in decisionmaking. To the extent there's any difference at all, the latter seems considerably more democratic than the former, since it allows for meaningful shared deliberation.

But anyway... there is something profoundly weird about the intensity of the hostility directed toward sortitionist proposals; it is frankly reminiscent of the intensity of hostility directed toward other kinds of proposals toward democratization and equality. Given what an obvious mockery of democratic aspirations our existing systems are, I find it difficult to shake the impression that these reactions are guided by a determination to ensure that people abandon any sort of hope for a better world.

Then again, that determination may not be entirely misguided. IMO the real risk of sortitionist governance is not that it wouldn't work, or would fail to reduce corruption (although both of those are certainly possible), but that it would succeed. AFAICT the real merit of "representative" systems is that they create a central market in corruption, so that any power broker who might otherwise be ready and able to foment a civil war can buy off (or otherwise coopt) the requisite number of representatives at a much lower cost and risk than is associated with outfitting a private army. Of course it doesn't always work out that way, but a sortitionist system working as designed would seem to be at much greater risk -- precisely because it would be much more democratic.
posted by Not A Thing at 3:34 PM on January 11, 2023


I would need some help to understand why there is such a "profound" difference between (e.g.) a 1/10000 share in decisionmaking and an evenly-distributed 1/1000 chance of a 1/10 share in decisionmaking. To the extent there's any difference at all, the latter seems considerably more democratic than the former, since it allows for meaningful shared deliberation.

Because in the first case, everyone gets a say - and as cases like Lauren Bobert's recent election showed, those says do in fact matter. In the latter, if you don't get picked, you don't have a voice. It's also worth pointing out that deliberation "feeling" democratic was a long time defense of caucuses, the anti-democratic nature of which we've discussed at length, because it turns out that disenfranchisement is literally the definition of anti-democratic behavior.

But anyway... there is something profoundly weird about the intensity of the hostility directed toward sortitionist proposals; it is frankly reminiscent of the intensity of hostility directed toward other kinds of proposals toward democratization and equality.

For me, at least, it's the dishonesty of sortition advocates. Waxing poetic about the "equality" of Athenian sortition while ignoring that the system excluded 90% of the population by law and talking about how Athenians were trained to engage seriously with governance while ignoring that they to use slaves wielding rope soaked in red paint to force those same Athenians to perform said governance strikes me as quite the disconnect. Beyond that particular bit, there's the point above that disenfranchisement is anti-democratic behavior, no matter how much it might "feel" democratic, as that "feeling" is driven by the mythos of things like Athenian democracy which ignores the messy reality behind the curtains. There are also serious questions about how "random" sortition would be in practice - for example, would someone whose lot was drawn be allowed to refuse based on the hardship the position would entail (which is in fact serious given things like the need to force the elect to engage in anti-corruption policies like placing investments in blind trusts, not to mention that these people would have to put their lives on hold without guarantee that they will be able to just pick up again - read up on the issues reservists face to get an idea of the problem here.) If not, then the process won't be random but instead favor those who can afford to put their lives on hold (a problem shared with many direct democratic systems), but forcing someone chosen to serve is to demand they accept a burden they didn't choose out of an obligation to the state. The existence of the red rope illustrates how well that particular argument works in practice.

There's also the point made that aggressive term limits in several states have served to relocate the locus of institutional knowledge for state legislatures to lobbyists, and that these systems would accelerate that move - especially given so many of these proposals talk about "structured" discourse managed by "facilitators". We also have the intensive campaigns we see targeted at voters during awards season that shows that creating a selected set of voters would do little to end campaigning and in many ways would make it worse. And more besides - the thread has a number of criticisms of the idea.

The reality is that sortition has serious problems that need to be addressed and cannot be just dismissed.
posted by NoxAeternum at 6:50 PM on January 11, 2023 [2 favorites]


We already know from jury trials how sortition deliberations should be "structured" though..

Average untrained people cannot do original creative work on legislation, just like they cannot be lawyers or judges in court cases.

Average people should otoh be "legislative jurors" who determine whether each bill actually becomes law. Jurors should be sequestered like in politically sensitive court cases, which addresses bribery. Jury size should be a few hundred, giving statistically significance without juror exclusion. Advocates selected by legislative representatives votes present arguments in support of and opposed to individual line items in the bill under consideration, but ultimately the jury merely chooses between options proposed by enough elected representatives.

There do exist legal systems in which the judge, lawyer, and jury roles all have a somewhat different character, but all three typically still exist and isolate untrained people from functions that require training. Afaik we do not have legal systems where juries pick absolutely any criminal punishment they like.

If anything sortition done correctly encourages more professionalization of the legislative body because proponents and opposition both benefit from better preparing legislation and counter-arguments for the deliberative jury trial phase.

At the same time it increases transparency by requiring the legislation be explained clearly at least once. In fact, arguments should become case law, so opponents could corner proponents into making statements that nerf the legislation, even if the legislation still passes. It'd replace any presidential veto too, since a president could send an advocate or go speak themself.
posted by jeffburdges at 8:24 AM on January 12, 2023 [1 favorite]


Have not read the whole thread, so might be repeating comments by others, but the basic problem isn't (representative) democracy, it is the lack of it.

In the USA, for example, the gross imbalance in the senate. Until stuff like that is fixed and given a fair run it cannot be said that democracy itself has failed, because it has not being properly trialled in the first place.
posted by Pouteria at 4:44 PM on January 12, 2023 [1 favorite]


Have not read the whole thread, so might be repeating comments by others, but the basic problem isn't (representative) democracy, it is the lack of it.

Sortition isn't an answer to that, though. It amplifies lack of proper representation, then argues that it is fair because random choice is fair. As anyone who has played video games with an RNG element (which are often times actually biased towards the player because of how raw RNG actually feels!) can tell you, this is not a very compelling argument. It's also part of the major issue with "direct" democratic practices like caucuses and town meetings - that if you're not in the room, you don't have a voice.

Given that, why do people keep going back to this particular well? Part of it is that we're taught that these "direct" democratic systems are How Democracy Works while the anti-democratic aspects are glossed over. This is why the dishonesty over Athenian sortition is a sticking point for me - I find it rather hard to call a system that is built around excluding 90% of the population "representative". It's also what we saw with the defense of caucuses - people would argue that the system was democratic because it got people together and talking while dismissing the simple reality that caucuses by their very nature are disenfranchising because if you can't attend, you don't get a voice.

There's also the sentiment that the problem with politics are politicians and parties, and that if you can just get rid of them you'd solve everything. Which is not how it works - particularly with regard to parties, which exist because organization is the force multiplier. The reality is that sortition wouldn't get rid of these underlying forces - all it would do is remove any control over them by the populace.
posted by NoxAeternum at 11:42 AM on January 13, 2023 [1 favorite]


Sortition isn't an answer to that, though.

No argument there. Sortition, like libertarianism, is a superficially appealing idea. Until you start thinking it through.

For me democracy means one person, one vote, one value.
posted by Pouteria at 4:49 PM on January 13, 2023 [1 favorite]


Democracy is the belief that the majority rules, as a nation and a locality, based on the logic of equality and fairness, and its own force of power as a unity. Democracy was founded to avoid most of human history of having only a few people in power, which led to taxes exceeding profits in order to seize all property, resulting in serfdom and tyranny by political and ecclesiastical authority. Democracy has always shown it can defend itself by letting natural talent lead the way, defeating dictators who let their ego overrule their experts at every turn, if the experts survived the purges at all. Problems have arisen in most democratic systems where victors found a way to stuff ballot boxes or replace the entire civil service with their cronies as a reward. Modernly, we see democracy being corrupted by special interests because exposure costs money and exposure wins elections. We also see democracy electing populist dictators in fits of desperation, stupidity or brainwashing to solve imagined cultural problems, by appealing to any emotions at hand. Behind the scenes, government agencies are ruled by powerful elected officials who get their districts the greatest benefits, or cave to the corporate demands of dark political money. In brief, democracy has issues with its processes of getting elected, political favors, and mass appeals to irrational lunacy. A smart ten year-old might ask why qualified bureaucrats aren't directly writing the tax code and able to increase health and education funding as needed, since they aren't corrupted by campaign fundraising. Is it because the bureaucrats weren't elected? Or were they?
posted by Brian B. at 8:23 AM on January 14, 2023


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