I thought this from The Guardian this morning was interesting.
Warning, this is a long article.
Discuss the pros and cons of this proposal. There will be a test.
Honestly, I just want to know what people think of this. I have an opinion, but I don't want to bias the discussion by going into it yet. I've heard of the Athenian model of drawing lots to fill positions, but was unaware of all the history behind sortition until I read this article and looked into it.
Warning, this is a long article.
Tldr: Voting has been captured by vested interests and is run by elites, we should draw lots by socio-economic groups to create a new House of Parliament.Voting undermines the will of the people - it's time to replace it with sortition
Our representative form of government divides us but installing ordinary people at the heart of power would be transformative
In his new book The Future of Everything: Big audacious ideas for a better world, the author Tim Dunlop examines the vast technological shifts reshaping our world and considers how we use these shifts to create a better quality of life for all. He explores how the media, wealth creation, work, education and – in this edited extract – the way we are governed could be transformed.
If we want to fix the way our governments work, the first thing we should do is replace voting with sortition in at least some of our governing bodies. Sortition means to choose – to “sort” – by the use of lots; that is, by random sample, like the method we use to choose jurors for a court case. Instead of voting for members of parliament or congress, we should choose at least some of them randomly. It is the most straightforward way of enabling ordinary citizens to participate in the running of their country, and the effect it would have on politics and government would be transformative.
Most of us think of voting as the cornerstone of a true democracy. When a new country in the developing world moves towards democracy, we tend to judge its initial success by how soon it is able to hold “free and fair” elections. We rejoice in this coming of age. Indeed, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights presents voting as one of our fundamental rights: “The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.”
But this is the whole problem: voting has come to actively undermine “the will of the people” and we need a system that will restore their primacy. Sortition is that system.
Voting as a way of choosing politicians dates to the 18th century, the time of the American and French revolutions, and there is little doubt that the leaders of these revolutions chose voting precisely as a means of exerting elite control over the political process. Indeed, until relatively recently, only an elite of land-owning white men were allowed to vote. Even as we have fought to remove those sorts of restrictions, representative government, which has become the norm in most modern democracies, has degenerated into a way for elites to maintain control over the “democratic” process, because it is the elites – or those willing to represent the interests of elites – who are most likely to have the time and resources to ensure they are elected. If you doubt this, consider how you would fare if you decided to run for office at the next election.
The first question that arises when we transfer this process to the level of national or state government is: are we, as ordinary citizens, really up to it?
It is a common belief among the elites of most democracies, those who have and are used to wielding power in various ways, that ordinary people, the lay citizens of democracy, are either disengaged from and apathetic about politics, or are so ignorant of how it works that they should not be let anywhere near the levers of power.
Many elites believe we are both disengaged and ignorant. From the time of Plato’s Republic, they have worried about “mob rule” and the rise of a polity so governed by their base desires that good government is impossible. The modern equivalent of this ancient anxiety is often aimed at social media, which is held up as evidence of the unruliness of the democratic mob.
Others express the view that the problem is “too much” democracy. Conservative journalist Andrew Sullivan, in a piece for New York Magazine (“Democracies end when they are too democratic”), quotes Plato’s concerns about mob rule, while praising the “large, hefty barriers” created by the American founding fathers “between the popular will and the exercise of power”. He writes with approval of the various ways in which the popular will was constrained. “Voting rights were tightly circumscribed”, he notes, and that for “a very long time, only the elites of the political parties came to select their candidates at their quadrennial conventions”.
Of course, this sort of contempt is a self-fulfilling prophecy in that the institutions of democratic participation are constructed in such a way as to exclude citizen participation – or make it extremely difficult or uncomfortable – and this lack of involvement is then offered as evidence of citizens’ lack of interest in politics. The same happens with public debate on contentious issues. Excluded from mainstream institutions and from any sort of hands-on control of government processes – other than being able to vote intermittently, or to have their opinions aggregated into soundbites by polling companies – citizens use the new platforms of social media to express their frustrations. This relatively unregulated form of public speech can certainly degenerate into unedifying exchanges, but these are then taken as conclusive evidence of the unsuitability of ordinary people to participate at all. So having accused us of being disengaged, these elites hold up our actual engagement via social media as an excuse for exclusion. It is as if I called you useless for not being able to drive a car without ever giving you the opportunity to learn how.
One of the main reasons we are losing faith in our government’s ability to solve major problems is because our political system is designed to exclude ordinary people. Yes, we get to vote for members of parliament and we thus get a say in who governs us. But individual politicians are largely under the control of political parties, and political parties have their own agendas which are, in turn, under the influence of other players, particularly the rich and powerful. Once elected, politicians pay lip service to reflecting the will of the people, but we-the-people rarely feel that they are really doing this. There is something pat and predetermined in how most politicians will respond to the matters that come before them that makes the whole process seem, from a citizen’s point of view, farcical.
Writing in The Conversation (‘The proposed Senate voting change will hurt Australian democracy’), political scientist John Dryzek hits the nail on the head: “Australia’s federal parliament is today … not a deliberative assembly [but] rather a theatre of expression where politicians from different sides talk past each other in mostly ritual performance. Party politicians do not listen, do not reflect and do not change their minds.” As Dryzek suggests, the essence of good deliberation – the chief metric of its success – is whether or not those involved are willing and able to change their minds. True deliberation arises only when people come together as equals and deal openly with all the factual and emotional elements that go into making hard decisions. Party politics increasingly crowds out the ability of politicians to do this.
I propose that we create a new chamber of parliament that I’ll call the People’s House. What makes it different it from other houses of parliament is that its members will be chosen by lottery, or sortition. Any adult citizen could at some stage of their lives be called on to serve in the People’s House in the same way that we may all be called upon to serve on a jury. Instead of deciding the outcome of a criminal trial, the members of the People’s House will deliberate and vote on legislation, and therefore decide how to run the country.
In polities around the world, there is now a substantial body of work involving so-called citizens’ juries, deliberative polls or other forms of elite–popular discussion. They show very clearly that a house of parliament populated by ordinary citizens chosen by sortition could work, and work well. A deliberative poll, for example, attempts to inform opinion by providing the opportunity for wide public discussion among those polled. This is done by bringing together a representative sample of the population – selected by a polling company – for two days at a central venue where they can discuss the issues with each other in small groups, as well as put questions to a panel of experts who represent a range of opinions on the topic at hand.
A deliberative poll was held in 1998 on the topic of whether Australia should become a republic. According to Issues Deliberation Australia, which ran the poll, “Australians were jumping at the chance to be involved … a final sample of 347 representative Australians arrived in Canberra on October 22nd, 47 more than our original goal.”
This high turnout attests to the fact that participants perceived the issue to be important and the forum to be credible. Ordinary citizens revelled in the chance to question the various experts gathered for their benefit, and as their confidence grew, they were quite willing to challenge the information they were being given.
Such forums cannot abolish the division of intellectual labour – lay people don’t suddenly become experts – but they can make discussion between experts and non-experts more equal. As such, the forum potentially does much more than improve the public’s general and specific knowledge of the issue at hand: it provides a forum of cooperation and deliberation that helps engender trust and respect among participants. It tends to break down, from both sides, the tendency for experts and non-experts to view each other as adversaries – where the experts view the citizens as merely ignorant and a slate to be written upon, and where the citizens view the experts as an elite merely asserting the power that arises from superior knowledge. Those operating as experts in this environment are not simply articulating their own views in a way that a lay audience can easily understand. They are making available their knowledge for a lay audience to reach their own conclusions about the issue.
The lessons we learn from these experiences with deliberative democracy is that extending them into a more formal and permanent part of our governing process is worth thinking about seriously, and any claims that such a concept could never work because ordinary people are disengaged or apathetic should be treated with the contempt that these examples suggest they deserve.
If we are really serious about bottom-up reform of our democratic institutions, then reforming the seat of government itself in this way, a way that installs ordinary people at the heart of power, is essential. Our neoliberal economy and the representative form of government that dominates our societies do everything they can to divide us from and pit us against each other. A People’s House transcends these divisions and brings us together. The basic concept of sortition is pretty straight-forward, and introducing it as a replacement for voting in, say, the Australian Senate, while leaving that body’s other powers intact, represents, at least administratively, fairly minimalist change. But on every other level, the potential effect is explosive. In one fell swoop, you diminish the power of the parties and that of many of the lobbyists who exist to influence their decisions. You transform the way in which the media covers politics. You hand control of at least part of the legislative process to a genuinely representative sample of the population as whole, rather than vesting it in a bunch of elites and their representatives. You empower people in a way that the current system could never hope to do, and you reconnect our chief democratic institution with the life in common.
Nothing is going to change until the main source of power in our society, our seat of government, is populated by people who are genuinely representative of the society at large. We have been taught forever that the way to do that is by voting, but that is simply wrong, and the quicker we unlearn it the better, no matter how counterintuitive it might seem at first. If you want a truly representative government of, by and for the people, then you need to choose it not by voting, but by sortition.
Now, that is power.
Discuss the pros and cons of this proposal. There will be a test.
Honestly, I just want to know what people think of this. I have an opinion, but I don't want to bias the discussion by going into it yet. I've heard of the Athenian model of drawing lots to fill positions, but was unaware of all the history behind sortition until I read this article and looked into it.
