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.
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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.
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.
> 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.