The technical term is sortition. And it is my pet unorthodox political position. The legislature should be replaced with an assembly of citizens picked by lottery.
replies(22):
Now, the idea of electing a few thousand representatives and having sortition determine who is actually selected is something I could feasibly get behind.
Since the linked article is to a substack called “Assemble America” I feel I should point out that if the apportionment House of Representatives had not been capped at 435 reps, the House would indeed be several thousand strong by now.
As I got older, I've leaned more and more into meritocracy.
If we did something like this in the US, we'd have quite a religious/irrational group of leaders. Whereas with a meritocracy, you have at least some filter. The status quo requires politicians to have a bit of an understanding of human nature. Its not flawless, I've seen inferior people beat superiors by using biases, but these were relatively equal races. I've also seen idiots run for office and never catch steam.
We can also look at history and see that society's that did anything with such equal democratic distribution were less efficient than those who had some sort of merit.
So bottom line, I’m not so sure is so important that representatives are laywers. Maybe a good mix should be ok?
We just passed that "big beautiful bill" and it was quite clear nobody knew or cared what was in it, beyond it being "trump's bill he wants". I'm guessing staffers and lobbyists had a far more detailed understanding of their portions than any elected official did.
It's a reasonable guess that 100 randos would actually write a better bill.
Ideally, the lower house are representatives elected from the common people, and the upper house are the career politicians that understand how the government works.
In the U.S., the 17th amendment[2] changed that, for better or worse (probably both).
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventeenth_Amendment_to_the_U...
It would probably make sense to start with a new new "house" or something.
Might even make sense to have some quotas (at least 50% women etc.), so the whole things doesn't have to get to Chinese government size to reflect the populus.
That or pepple would have to be replaced with high frequency
- A randomly selected lower house with an elected upper house (or the reverse)
- policy juries which deliberate only on one specific piece of legislation, which then must be approved by a separate oversight jury before taking effect
- election by jury, where candidates are chosen by "elector juries" who interview and vet the candidates before selecting one
- multi-layer representative selection based on the Venetian model where randomly selected bodies elect representatives, of whom a random subset are chosen to then appoint officials
Right now the lottocratic/sortition-based bodies that exist are purely advisory, though in some places like Paris and Belgium they have gained a good amount of soft power.
It wouldn't be that hard to implement a conservative version of one of these in certain US states though. For example, add "elect by jury" to the ballot, where if it wins the plurality, a grand jury is convened to select the winner (counties in Georgia already use grand juries to appoint their boards of equalization, so there is precedent).
But that's not to say that wouldn't also be the case otherwise.
The process has been very successful at neutralizing contentious topics. The assembly on abortion showed that a healthy majority consensus could emerge, and led to abortion being legalized in Ireland after a constitutional amendment. The political parties generally support the process because it keeps socially divisive topics out of the main political sphere. Ireland also has relatively little money in politics, limits on donations, a standards in public office commission, independent constituency boundary commissions, a multi-seat proportional representation system, limits on media ownership, and the highest percentage of University educated citizens of any country. All in all it's helped Ireland come a long way from the 80s and 90s, when Ireland was much worse on corruption indexes.
1. A filtering mechanism after the selection process. E.g., basic civics questions like how many states are there, a background check, and so on. To make sure you don't pick anyone that's compromised or incapable of serving.
2. A training program that acclimates new members to the system. If terms are say, six years long, then the first year can be entirely devoted to training.
There are some strong outliers but most are way below the bar of random selection. Do-nothing political nepo babies who are nothing but loud and in a gerrymandered district.
Our political system effectively selects for sociopathic con men. So would you prefer your laws to be written by those people vs a random group?
“I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 faculty members of Harvard University.” - William F Buckley Jr
“Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.” - Douglas Adams
- modest proposal: yes, have X random people in government, but have a Y-month paid training period before they serve for Z years; ALSO ensure their families want for nothing (read, a decent non-luxurious lifestyle), but prohibit receiving money from lobbyists, PACs, gifts, etc... AND, ensure they get reintegrated into society in a nonpolitical field (with some exceptions) by also offering Y-month long paid training in different fields.
The corruption costs reduction would significantly outweigh any increase in payroll and training.
> 9 members with IQs under 70 (i.e. mentally handicapped) > 52 members with IQs under 85 > 217 members at or under an IQ of 100 > 370 members with an IQ below the (presumptive) current congressional average of ~115
Congress is terrible, but it's hard to imagine it could be improved by making it less intelligent.
If you could incorporate the OP's point about limited eligibility and "directly select candidates at random for positions from an eligibility pool", then a "random" process would likely be superior to elections.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Bases_and_Starting_Poin...
1. Acres of Diamonds. Russell Conwell. 1900. https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/rconwellacresofdia...
2. The Gospel of Wealth. Andrew Carnegie. 1889. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Gospel_of_Wealth
simple: let voters decide. that is, eliminate the concept of pre-selected candidates and let voters select candidates from the entire population. if you need 10 people, give everyone 10 votes. everyone has a different idea what merrit is, but by giving everyone multiple votes the people for which the most voters think they have merrit will emerge as the winners of the election.
My point is that so is the percentage of males in any sortition cohort.
Therefore, a consistent female census of 10% or less in all sortition cohorts, would be as unlikely as a consistent male census of 10% or less in all sortition cohorts.
In other words, having one sortition cohort result in 10% males would not be suspicious. Having every sortition cohort result in 10% males would be suspicious in the extreme. So much so that we should start looking for whoever is "putting their finger on the scale" so to speak.
Getting your team control of a branch of government is way more important than having a 'good' rep in your district, because if you don't, they won't have any ability to do anything for it anyways.
If you couldn't get someone you wanted in the primaries, you just have to hold your nose, close your eyes, lie back, and vote for whomever made it through.
Whether this results in long term problems is a bit of an academic question, given that every election in the past decade is one where you either get to vote for the status quo, or an insane cult of personality.
The majority of the bills are written by lobbyists. Most of the bills introduced are so called "copycat" bills.
USA TODAY and the Republic found at least 10,000 bills almost entirely copied from model legislation were introduced nationwide in the past eight years, and more than 2,100 of those bills were signed into law.
Special interests sometimes work to create the illusion of expert endorsements, public consensus or grassroots support. One man testified as an expert in 13 states to support a bill that makes it more difficult to sue for asbestos exposure. In several states, lawmakers weren’t told that he was a member of the organization that wrote the model legislation on behalf of the asbestos industry, the American Legislative Exchange Council.
https://publicintegrity.org/politics/state-politics/copy-pas...
That is not because voters are stupid. It is because they are rationally ignorant. Why spend hours researching the issues and candidates for a 1 in 10 million chance of having an impact? It makes no sense. However, if we instead convened "elector juries" of a couple hundred randomly selected citizens and gave them the resources to carefully research and vet the candidates before deliberating on who is best, I think they would do a pretty good job.
- A largely unrecognized problem with our legislature here in the US is vote inflation: the number of representatives in Congress has fallen way behind the population growth, so that one rep is shared by a much larger group of constituents, devaluing the individual vote of each constituent and making it less likely that a given voter has a personal connection with their legislator.
- The increasing partisanship has reduced the number moderate and independent voices in the legislature.
We could increase the number of representatives in Congress by tripling the number of reps from each district, which would bring the rep-to-voter ratio back more in line with where it was when it was essentially frozen in 1929. Then one of those new reps would be chosen at random from a pool. Since the distribution of moderates in the general population is much higher than in Congress, this should have the effect of moderating partisanship.
OTOH, people think that rich people made it by hard working.
I’m not saying there is no correlation whatsoever. But there is much less than most think, and great amounts of luck playing a bigger role, including, but not limited to, where you were born, family, contacts, etc.
- Most people filling out their ballots aren't spending very much time on each prop -- they'll typically either vote based on their gut reaction to the title of the prop, follow a voter guide from an advocacy group they want to align with, or just vote based on whose advertising campaign was most influential.
- Ballot props, at least in CA, are pretty much directly pay-to-play. There's a price tag for getting a prop onto the ballot, because signature gathering companies charge per signature. (Though at least in SF, conservative ballot props cost more per signature because there aren't as many conservatives to sign. This implies there's _some_ correlation between the cost and the popularity of a particular proposition.)
- Ballot props are both high-latency and low-bandwidth. Coupled with the fact that they often cannot be overridden except by another ballot prop, and we're basically stuck with any flaw in the bill that passes (unless it's egregious enough that someone's willing to foot the bill for another round of signature gathering and advertising, which will cost about as much as it did for the original bill.)
- Ballot props don't go through several rounds of amendment before being passed, nor do they really have any debate; there's just a single round of "should this be on the ballot" followed by a single round of "should this be law". This means flawed bills are more likely to end up on the ballot. Because of the high latency mentioned above, voters are often stuck with a choice between a bad solution and no solution to whatever problem the ballot prop is trying to solve.
Here in the US, we use randomized groups of citizens to determine who gets locked away potentially for life or executed. Does a jury of peers also scare the heck out of you?
Those are screened.
Someone like https://youtu.be/00q5cax96yU?t=60 could be selected without some additional constraints than plain sortition. Ofc then those constraints are politicized.
Not selecting absolute random people, but people who have established their ability to intelligently handle responsibility, and avoid breaking the law. E.g., once you have achieved a certain level of educational attainment (3.0+ at well-ranked college, managerial-level at established biz, certain mil leadership rank, etc.), pass security clearance, pass citizenship test, etc., you are in the qualified pool, and may be called upon to serve in a legislature. The always-a-newbie problem could be solved by allowing legislators to serve 2nd or maybe 3rd terms by re-election/confidence vote. Same for POTUS, possibly selected by sortition out of the existing legislators who pass a confidence vote.
There is no way a reasonably and responsibly selected random group of achieving responsible people would do worse than a corrupt or craven group, especially worse than the selected-for-corruption — i.e., selected for loyalty-to-leader — currently seated.
Accept anyone from Jebus University with its miraculous 100% graduation rate, exclude anyone with a record of "Disrespecting an Officer", and the pool is quickly skewed, a reinforcing feedback-loop in favor of the groups doing the skewing.
Ambiguities get adjudicated and then built into the next version of the rulebook and so it goes with laws. Terms are given specific meaning over time by court decision and are used as boilerplate.
Honestly, yes. In the case of criminal culpability, it just happens to be the least scary of the available options of who gets to send someone to jail.
For lawmaking, this isn't the case: the work for lawmakers is much more detailed and gameable than a binary question of guilt.
Little do they realize that a more proportional system that would have them elect reps from the "bad" party in order to get them reps in the ruling party to advocate internally for Alberta does have benefits...
It isn't about being discerning. If you are going to vote and you are a swing/politically agnostic voter in a two party system (like the US/UK) you have the following three choices really:
* Vote for the least bad candidate / lesser of two evils.
* Protest Vote. In the US this would be probably the Libertarian Party / Green Party. In England this would be Reform / Liberal Democrats / Greens etc.
* Spoil the Ballet / Abstain from voting.
Red/Blue Team diehards aren't worth talking about as they don't decide elections. It is the swing voters.
> Why spend hours researching the issues and candidates for a 1 in 10 million chance of having an impact? It makes no sense.
It makes no sense because you have two actual choices (Red Team / Blue Team) or effectively to choose to not participate.
Additionally most politically agnostic that are over the age of 30 have worked out that you get shafted whoever you vote for.
* Expand the Supreme Court
2. Canadian Liberals aren't US MAGA, when they win an election they don't spend six months in caucus to figure out how they can do their best to punish the provinces and people that didn't vote for them.
There's a lot of far-right propaganda in Alberta that implies #2 is happening, but it's not actually factual. Its oil & gas sector has reached record output under the Trudeau government, and Carney is not exactly looking to kill it, either.
Transfer payments are really the only legitimate grievance Alberta should have with the federal government. All of its other problems are either imagined, self-inflicted, are caused by other provinces, or are caused by the US.
You can decide to vote, in which case you're removed from the sortition candidate pool. If you don't vote you're in the pool. A common representative body is formed at respective percentages.
This basically makes it so politicians have to race against "some random schmuck". If they can convince people they can do better, nice. Otherwise... too bad.
Of course some people will vote just to get out of the pool, but I think that's fine too.
A more organic version of this would be to select at random from people who already served at a lower level. Pick random citizens for city council, then for state you pick from the pool of people who have been city councillors in the past, then for country you pick from people who have already served at the state level. You could, in addition, add past picks to a "veteran pool" to ensure a small percentage of the legislature has been there before and can suffuse their experience.
It is a method to help maintain a balanced distributon of power, not created it when already gone awry.
In democracies, the branches of govt, legislative, executive, & judicial, and the institutions of society including the press, academia, industry, finance, sport, religion, etc. are all independent and serve to distribute and balance power. In autocracies, all of those are corrupted and/or coerced to serve the whims of the executive.
So, of course, an already-powerful centralized executive would be able to corrupt it as you describe.
But it seems much more difficult to make it happen in a well-balanced system, particularly when some have the responsibility to ensure ongoing fairness.
Do you have a better solution?
If we want to be very careful about a reform like this, we should test it at a smaller scale, such as a city for instance. We can start without any criteria and see if that works well enough. If it does, no need to overcomplicate things.
I disagree with your example, but things like deciding supreme court justices over the population of judges or department heads over the population of professors seem quite ok.
For lawmaking in particular, it looks like a bad idea. There will be lots of people trying to con the uninformed representatives into behaving badly.
]Further, by eliding deliberation, the initiative process is the worst kind of direct democracy. Except for mob rule, of course.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_democracy
The OP narrowly focuses on the calculus (?) of how randomly choosing reps actually promotes meritocracy.
This wiki article is a good overview of the whole burrito.
In any case, that's just a more chaotic form of representative democracy. It's most certainly not meritocratic in any sense.
Citizens' assembly makes policy. But then who implements it?
I (currently) believe that we'd still need executives, still need some kind of balance of powers.
So I'm okay w/ electing mayors, sheriffs, governors, etc. Perhaps even multi-seat roles; something between a council and a mayor.
Assuming, of course, we use approval voting for execs, PR for councils.
In fact, I would argue that idiots in elected bodies are a lot more likely to do damage than random idiots, because they are more likely to be narcissists, and being elected boosts their sense of self-worth. And of course, the most damage is often caused by the most intelligent of them, because the main problem is acting in bad faith, not a lack of wits.
Often the people who benefit from injustice are the very ones we've tasked with creating justice. It's easier to believe justice will appear on its own than to face the mess of making it ourselves.
This is a famously bad idea for U.S. politics.
Like, if you started a grass roots organization with this as your #1 idea, you'd have to eventually dismantle the entire edifice as 100% of your time would be spent answering questions about how this is different than tactics of the Jim Crow era. You'd also make yourself radioactive to any future grassroots efforts: e.g., "Citizens for an Educated Congress: wait a sec, is this that Jim Crow Guy again?" :)
I'm going to gently push back on that one a bit. Partially, yes, but also in part due to the federal government deferring to provinces in cases where it actually has the constitutional authority to override them.
that sounds like jury duty selection, in the US anyway, and juries are famously dysfunctional at times, with a single member ignoring the rules and trial and just voting politically.
Interesting. Looking in from a country with a smaller lower house, I think members in the US are already so numerous they seem to fade to the background and their survival becomes mostly about party politics not making a good impression on their district. It's not like most of them could make a good speech while most members are present and listening. Only senators seem individually important enough to make a name for themselves (with the exception of the speaker etc).
But I've never lived and voted in the US so maybe I'm missing something important here.
Well seems even the "home team" cant do anything either, so why not go for better candidates.
When I was in 4th grade, we struggled with public education, healthcare, etc. Now I have 4th graders of my own and they struggle with the same issues. No progress in a generation.
It is not merely adding qualifying criteria, it is setting qualifications AND sortition to select legislators and executives.
>>solve a problem that hasn't been demonstrated to exist ...The main threat to a well-functioning society are people acting in bad faith.
Your second sentence there is entirely correct, and specifically disproves the first. We have a problem
>>we should test it at a smaller scale, such as a city for instance
100% agree, we should test and adjust any changes before scaling up
>>start without any criteria and see if that works well enough
We've pretty much demonstrated that it doesn't
>>uneducated people may not be very effective in coming up with solutions, but their presence is important to remind educated people of their existence.
We do not need to hand uneducated people the keys to power to be reminded of their existence, any more than we should give loaded handguns to toddlers to be reminded of their existence. Intelligent people suitable for leadership can remember the existence of both just fine, thank you. Moreover, with qualified sortition, the selection is random so it is highly likely that qualified, educated, accomplished people who are adjacent to people with issues will be p[ut in power and able to do something for them
If yes - why is that a problem? They stick to the overarching rule, and you should argue the rules must be amended.
If not - that's a huge problem IMO and can be summarised with "why pretend jury has any say If they must not stray from the way the case is presented and defended (knowing very well how awful public defense is and how dishonest sometimes police and prosecution can be)" and not replace it with just a judge?
One very thorny issue is the fact that our system of government is built on respect for the law and the institutions, but the current regime has learned they can just do whatever they want with virtual impunity. They brought tanks, drones and nukes to a knife fight, and the other side is completely unarmed and trying to talk them out of the fight.
We are so fucked.
IIRC it's actually somewhat rare to have a bicameral legislature where both houses have roughly symmetrical powers.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_generation_sustainabilit...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longtermism#Deprioritization_o...
But I don't see how this fixes the problem currently plaguing US politics which is that elected representatives are passing bulls designed by lobbyists that the representatives don't understand well.
Ireland occasionally has a Citizen’s Assembly when the elected politicians feel it is best to do so. The members are supposed to be selected by sortition but this has not always been adhered to. “ Seven replacements joining in January 2018 were removed the following month when it emerged they were recruited via acquaintances of a Red C employee, who was then suspended, rather than via random selection.”
> The process has been very successful at neutralizing contentious topics. The assembly on abortion showed that a healthy majority consensus could emerge, and led to abortion being legalized in Ireland after a constitutional amendment.
You have to give the secretariat their due. They were excellent at getting the right facilitators, who would ensure the Assembly came to the conclusion the government wanted them to. Eventually they messed up and pushed so hard against public opinion that they got the Assembly to vote in favour of deleting mothers from the constitution and in favour of a meaningless expression of respect for carers. Both were then roundly defeated but the Assembly has been great as a way for governments to build consensus by putting their thumb on the scales.
> The political parties generally support the process because it keeps socially divisive topics out of the main political sphere.
Contemptible. If politicians don’t want to deal with socially divisive topics they should be doing something else with their lives.
There are a crazy amount of NGOs in Ireland, 1 for every 155 people, many pushing forward their own political policies and views.
https://unherd.com/newsroom/in-ireland-its-progressives-who-...
I do like sortition for certain scenarios (definitely favour that over a referendum for instance), but I think it'd work better as something that either has to veto some piece of law or can offer amendments or the likes
From a practical point of view the selection process is a bit of a red herring though. The current controls break down because the feedback loop is simply way too long to meaningfully affect the process.
While I personally subscribe to the idea that sortition is a superior way of electing representatives I don't see people considering it seriously. However what everyone can understand is using the same process but with sampling with a higher frequency.
> Contemptible. If politicians don’t want to deal with socially divisive topics they should be doing something else with their lives.
That is debatable. Too much concentration on divisive topics can distract from actual governance. We are now so deeply immersed in the social media world that we tend to consider "constantly raging culture war" to be the norm and the expected pivotal point of all politics, but it is more of a disease of the system.
There is no hard principle that politics should be exclusively performed by elected politicians. Even in the US, plenty of states have ballot initiatives, thus outsourcing decisions about some problems to the citizens themselves.
If the Irish system works similarly and reduces the systemic "inflammation", so to say, by outsourcing it to sortition-based bodies, then I would argue that it might be more efficient at governance than the "rip their throats out over scissor statements" standard that now rules the US and many other places in the world.
> > I think you have major issues with relating to other people if you’re throwing around words like idiot while expecting us to take you seriously. You’re being honest right now, and it makes me think your views are un-American, and it makes me think that you don’t understand the Constitution at all. It makes me feel that we do not have shared values or common cause. I don’t know why you think that this kind of thinking is what the US needs more of, especially to get “back on track” whatever that might mean.
> > I will not allow you to limit my franchise or that of any other citizen, so help me. Your comment is bad and you should feel bad.
> We'll see.
I’m pretty sure that we have enough information to determine that your comment was and still is bad.