I think it is nonsense to try to fix politics by making it even more arbitrary.
The biggest problem in the US is the electorial system that leads to two parties with each close to 50%. Elections are so close that it is essentially meaningless. Is a party with 50.1% really more legitimized to rule than the one with 49.9%?
Step one to fix democracy would be to get rid of the winner-takes-all system. Not only would this make more than two parties viable. You would also fix that most of the country's vote doesn't contribute at all (since people live in "safe" counties where they have little influence on the outcome.)
Then, when elections are won with clear margins, yes, you could abolish elections, and replace them by representative polls! The benefit is that polls are much cheaper, you can do them much more frequently, and the people can change bad policy quicker. It might be controversial, but I like that you can also apply "reweighting" to polls to make them more representative.
Here in Norway we have multiple parties. What has happened in the last few decades is that none of the big parties have enough votes to get majority on their own, so they have to work together with smaller parties. This creates an inversion of power, where the smaller parties gain significantly more influence than the number of seats would indicate.
The smaller parties have little to lose playing "my way or the highway" during negotiations, so end up getting at least some top items from their program pushed through. This has led to some rather poor laws and regulations in recent times.
That said, while I've thought about this vs the US two-party model a bit, I think I prefer what we got over here.
Crucially Norway doesn't use "winner take all" voting and people are able to express more nuance in their preferences, otherwise Norway would also have 2 parties. When most Americans hear "multi-party system" they tend to assume voting works the same way as in the US, but that somehow other countries reach a different equilibrium with the same inital conditions.
Canada has a parliamentary system with winner-takes-all for each seat. We have three major national parties and a regional party which regularly has a significant minority. The system is not fundamentally different from the one used to select representatives in the US. Many other countries have similar systems, but not all of them have two party rule like the US.
Odd -- Germany has a similar system and smaller parties kinda feel forced to take responsibility and thus take part in a coalition. Might be media influence, but also because "Opposition ist Mist" - "[being in the] oppoisition is garbage" (Franz Müntefering).
> What has happened in the last few decades is that none of the big parties have enough votes to get majority on their own, so they have to work together with smaller parties. This creates an inversion of power, where the smaller parties gain significantly more influence than the number of seats would indicate.
The US also has that, the different is that its less visible, and the minor factions have more power because:
(1) the minor factions are esconced within major parties, so there is no public discussions about coalitions, and
(2) because of #1, and because such arrangements are stickier, the major factions have less choice as to which minor faction to make a majority with, making them more at the mercy of the minor and extreme factions theybare bound to.
I seem to have lost a sentence in my editing. The electoral threshold reference was there to indicate they try to avoid too many small parties, but I'm not convinced it's working very well at the current level.
Step One to fix democracy would be for the US to have something approaching a representative democracy. Which means 100% voter participation, and substantial government interest in why voters do not participate.
This does not mean forcing you to vote for anyone in particular, but it does mean forcing people to turn up and indicate some type of preference - even if that preference is "no one here".
Mandatory voting is common elsewhere [1], and the sell is simple: voting is compulsory for all citizens unless a valid reason is provided (which isn't a high bar for most valid reasons) or a nominal fine is imposed (in Australia - $20 [2]). This fine isn't significant in anyway, it just has to exist because it does two things: asks people how much they seriously don't want to participate in the free thing which ensures their freedom, (2) forces the AEC to look into the matter - they have to try and collect the fine, and in turn ask why someone didn't vote, which means incidents are investigated, and (3) if a lot of people are getting fined the suddenly it's going to very much become a national issue as people make a fuss about it.
It's irrelevant to talk about anything else while substantial parts of the the American voting eligible public do not vote, and no one is responsible for investigating why and ensuring that it was a personal decision and not a problem of lack of access, time or intimidation. You can't run a democracy when the one defining characteristic of a democracy is handled so flippantly.
I'm not saying I disagree with the idea of mandatory voting, per se. But in the U.S., a fine for not voting would quickly be labeled a "poll tax", which would immediately raise the connotation of being racist in nature. In a day or two, the whole idea would be scrapped on grounds of unfairly targeting minorities and the lawmaker who suggested it would be accused of secretly being affiliated with the KKK.
I'm not saying it's right, but it is what would happen.
I do not see how you can possibly interpret a fine for not voting as a "poll tax". Especially since the jurisprudence on banning them is specifically aligned with ensuring people have access to voting.
Forcing people to vote may give an election more legitimacy to a certain kind of mind set that I don't quite understand (I think the opposite).
But is there some reason to think that it would tend to improve the decision making quality of the population? That when compulsary voters are included, there would be better choices made on laws and representatives? I can't think of one. On the contrary it would seem to compel the participation of a lot more people who don't care.
Pretending that people aren't being disenfranchised from voting as a coordinated campaign in the US is to have blinkers on. It has a long and storied history that hasn't ended[1]
> Not only would this make more than two parties viable.
All political parties are filled with petty power seekers. From the article: "Though once a member of Australia’s Green Party, inspired by its commitment to grassroots democracy, he grew disenchanted with party politics." "he made his way into the activist circles of Occupy Wall Street after college but likewise became disillusioned." One of the biggest advantages of random selection is that you select people who are not actively seeking power.
Another inherent problem with party politics is that if there are election campaigns that cost money, there's corruption built into the system.
> All political parties are filled with petty power seekers
Sure, but with more than two viable parties, you have more incentive to run on a positive message, because driving people away from one particular opponent or demobilizing their base, especially in a way that alienates your voters but to a lesser extent, is not as effective a campaign tactic when its not 1-on-1.
So Im not an American, and live somewhere with proportional voting; however from what ive read FPP is a fairly easy to justify system if you take into account two ideas:
First, that the group represented is as small as practically possible, so small numbers of people, small cultural subgroups, and a limited social distance between the elected official and the constituents.
Second, that the rules governing a group are as local as possible, large disagreements should be unusual, and ideally lead to splits in region. Issues on a state or federal level should be limited to interactions with other states or nations; weather or not you want to live in a group with legal abortion for example should be determined at the the smallest size that can make that decision; probably city by city, what people in other cities think should have no bearing.
Unfortunately the nature of government is to centralize and accumulate powers, things that were once the sole preview of a town or county are now federal issues. It seems impossible find a "fair" voting method, to reconcile how to weight two distant strangers opinion on what should be a local matter.
The problem is local bullies taking advantage of people who cant leave. If you cant put a floor under peoples quality of life, you cant avoid this problem.
Regardless of how you make the election rules, if everybody is basing their vote on; 1) hating the other team more 2) thinking the other individual candidate is an all time bad candidate that must be stopped at any cost 3) doing what the tv commercials told them to do 4) building their political views based on what the entertainment news channel wants them to believe 5) mixed with foreign nation state propaganda masquerading as organic individual opinion
you still end up with what amounts to an uninformed electorate. You've figured out how to count an uninformed opinion in a better way. And maybe eliminated number 2 and some of 1 from being a complete problem, but unpopular controversial people will still manage to drive the conversation.
> Regardless of how you make the election rules, if everybody is basing their vote on; 1) hating the other team more 2) thinking the other individual candidate is an all time bad candidate that must be stopped at any cost
Both of these are particularly incentivized in systems with FPTP and the duopoly it tends towards. So, electoral rules do matter here.
> The basic problem is a the constituents of a constituency want opposing things.
That’s true but there is also a very real constitutional problem here. My country has a system close to the US and sees the same issues.
A good constitution should foster a viable ecosystem of parties each representing the interests of a relatively homogenous group then force these parties to build coalitions through negotiations. That garanties than people feel that their opinions are represented, that there are a plurality of opinions in debates and the necessity to govern with people with different interests mean a consensus has to be reached and nothing to extreme should happen.
A system fostering two parties necessarily means the party will be caricatures. It’s obvious that both houses people with widely different opinions. It’s a travesty of democracy if you think about it.
> the electorial system that leads to two parties with each close to 50%.
In the State elections law I have read, this is set up to happen like this.
For example, Illinois election law specifically mentions Ds and Rs.
Election law in other States often sets major/minor party donation limits and ballot name ordering based on things like prior off-year Governor results. This uses math to keep the "minor" party allowable donations low.
What State election law are you in and does it mention major/minor party?
This election law setup to move toward two parties is obviously known to your State legislators who team together to prevent fixing it. And the people eat it up and argue about side issues!
The point of sortition is to apply the benefits of representative polling but while allowing the people polled to take the time to deeply research and understand the issue.
I don't see anything that is arbitrary about the process.
The solution is to ban political parties so that people have to be educated on the actual people and issues they vote on. Things like straight ticket voting are an absurd perversion of democracy.
You can't prevent people in the US from ganging up, but there is no reason elections should be required to promote parties or ballots print party next to candidates. Some offices (most judicial races for instance) do not use party affiliation.
George Washington was right when he warned us about political parties.
It means that you get long periods with no functioning government at all and when one does happen it tends to be unable to do anything coherent whilst simultaneously becoming committed to a handful of bizarre and extreme policies that the small parties demanded. It also leads to frequent collapse and re-runs of elections that yield the same deadlock.
The idea that FPTP must yield a two party system isn't right anyway. The UK uses FPTP and has quite a few different parties that routinely challenge the big two in major and impactful ways (SNP, Lib Dems, UKIP, Reform etc).
This is only a problem if you retain a first-past-the-post voting system.
My country uses a single transferable vote system - pretty much no representatives are elected with a majority of their constituency's vote - instead each constituency elects multiple representatives (3-5), and you vote with a ranked choice of all of the people running in your constituency. No one gets a majority of first preferences because there's no concept of a "wasted" vote if you vote for someone on the fringe - your vote will eventually end up transferred to your favourite candidate that can feasibly be elected.
The result is a legislature that is extremely representative of the population at large with a wide gamut of parties. Our politics is obviously still as dysfunctional as anywhere, but I don't think any of it can be chalked up to the electoral system.
In the future, the United States has converted to an "electronic democracy" where the computer Multivac selects a single person to answer a number of questions. Multivac will then use the answers and other data to determine what the results of an election would be, avoiding the need for an actual election to be held.
The story centers around Norman Muller of Bloomington, Indiana, the man chosen as "Voter of the Year" in the 2008 U.S. presidential election. Although the law requires him to accept the dubious honour, he is not sure that he wants the responsibility of representing the entire electorate, worrying that the result will be unfavorable and he will be blamed.
However, after "voting", he is very proud that the citizens of the United States had, through him, "exercised once again their free, untrammeled franchise" – a statement that is somewhat ironic as the citizens did not actually get to vote; even he himself did not vote for any candidate, law, or issue.
The idea of a computer predicting whom the electorate would vote for instead of actually holding an election was probably inspired by the UNIVAC I's correct prediction of the result of the U.S. presidential election in 1952.[1]
It's an interesting story in light of the way that the population is routinely forced to obey policies justified only via complex statistical models that require a computer to evaluate.
Sortition is also much easier to protect from fraud than voting. Generating shared randomness in a way that can’t be rigged is a straight forward well studied problem. For example everyone who wants to take part generates a random value and publishes a public pre-commitment. Then all the random values are revealed, checked against the pre-commitments and xor’d to produce the final random value. All of this can be verified by a member of the public and any member of the public could take part.
Issues around rigging the electoral roll are less of an issue than in voting because the person selected has to show up to do their job. It is far less effective to have dead people on the electoral roll because someone will need to impersonate the dead person if they are selected.
These are brilliant ideas. But we do not yet live in a society that is
technologically ready for them.
Sure. we can create the protocols, logic and software. As a technical
prospect it's within reach. All beautiful in theory.
But can you imagine the corruption that would ensue?! Where would
people store these tokens that represent literal political power? How
would they verifiably redeem them?
The problem is infrastructure. Civic cybersecurity is a great steaming
turd. Digital literacy has declined as people surrender in the face of
"convenience". Smartphones are wide open gaping holes, pre-pwned out
of the box by vendor malware. Much of our electronic communication is
designed and built in hostile nation states, served by a handful of
greedy and untrustworthy big-tech monopolies, and overseen by
governments who actively labour night and day to weaken our security.
Until we live in an entirely different kind of technological
culture, where people take more ownership of their technology
(probably not within my own lifetime) I'll choose a piece of paper and
a wooden box with a slot in it any day! That would be my informed
choice as a computer scientist. Although, it is possible that with
some clever mathematics and manufacturing technology (modern physical
cash is an advanced technology) some kind of paper equivalent might be
feasible. But first consider what happened in Russia when the people
were issued share certificates in the ex-soviet economy and bartered
them for food.
What are you talking about? No software needed other than a random number generator. After election it's all about identity. We know how to handle identity for hundreds of years already. Thousands even.
Can you provide more detail on how this would actually work or somewhere I can read more about this?
Like, if there are two people participating and one’s random number is 01 and the other’s is 11 (binary), and you XOR them you get 10. But that doesn’t match any of the participants’ numbers, so who would win? Or does the number of possible outputs need to exactly match the number of participants? If so, does that mean the number of participants needs to be an exact power of 2?
Participants generating numbers are only helping ensure the result is random. You collectively pick a number, and then use that to select a person from a predetermined(!) list (presumably picking a very large number mod the size of the list to get an index in the list).
They're suggesting 'government by jury', but what I expect it will turn out to be is 'government by the permanent bureaucracy'. The staffers who are there all the time will make suggestions to the current jury that is making decisions, and those decisions will probably 90% go with what the staffers suggest.
Right, the current system is 40% government via bureaucracy, 50% government via lobbyists/industry (including the parts of the bureaucracy that have been fully captured by industry), and 10% "the kind of freaks who run for and win public office" (who I think we should treat with reflexive suspicion on principle, even when I nominally agree with them). It's not at all clear to me that bureaucrats + lottery system would be worse, and it seems likely it'd be better.
The problem is that averages are constructs of the mind. It is a fallacy to think that random citizens are average citizens. You can average numbers, you cannot average people.
The revelation came while Bouricius was working on a housing committee. “The committee members were an outgoing and garrulous bunch,” he observed. “Shy wallflowers almost never become legislators.” 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.”
We elected the electable, not necessarily those most appropriate for the role.
Furthermore, in the majority of cases, we are only allowed to elect those who are pre-approved by The Red Party or The Blue Party. Both parties have biases. Worse they, like the examples mentioned, tend to leans towards self-serving (the party) and/or serving their own mwmbers (i.e., don't offer the best possible representation). It's like cliques in high school all over again.
What I'd like to see is simple. Add "None of the above" to every race. Let The People fully express themselves. Let them give the parties direct feedback about the products they're marketing. Yes, that's kind of what not voting it. Unfortunately, the fact is, the parties don't recognize that as a possible "Crap products" votes. They can phantom that. NotA would stuff it right in their face.
The point about pre-approval is tremendously important. Elections are a two-step process, nominations+vote. The fact that the first step is controlled by a small elite of party apparatchiks and the rich and influent is ENORMOUSLY important and very underappreciated. By the time citizens go to the polls, opaque party politics have already picked a handful of candidates (at best) for the public to choose from.
A nice quote about this, from a corrupt 19th-century NY politician and businessman: "I don't care who does the electing, so long as I get to do the nominating"
Agree on ranked choice. But NotA should still be a choice in that approach. It's a signal. It's the voice of (some) people. NotA shouldn't be repressed any more than any other group of votes should be repressed.
Congressional approval is regularly in the teens, and even presidents are now toeing into the thirties. The latter part being particularly unprecedented since there's no cognitive dissonance of the sort "Yeah congress is terrible, except my guy." The people ostensibly responsible for putting singular figures into office are now disapproving of even those figures. And the powers that be couldn't care less and are just doubling down even harder on divisive rhetoric, and frequently unpopular actions. So I don't think having a substantial None-Of-The-Above would have any positive impact.
Beyond that there's also another issue related to the above. Because of aforementioned divisive rhetoric many people are no longer even voting for people they like or even want to win, but voting against a bogeyman of an opponent. They aren't voting for "their" side, but because they fear "the other side" winning would be catastrophically worse. I suspect very few people willing to vote in the first place would intentionally and actively "waste" their vote simply to make a point. And if you get some very small chunk of NotA then suddenly the powers that be might even claim that's an endorsement of them.
Voting third party achieves the same as your ideal without the possible perverse inverse messaging of approval.
The divisive rhetoric is part of a deliberate campaign to spread unrest by China and Russia, among other actors. The Citizens United ruling gave them unlimited spending power.
Don't take my word for it, this guy could see it coming 12 years ago:
And you’d think that reducing corporate and even foreign influence over our elections would not be a partisan issue. But of course, this is Washington in 2010. And the Republican leadership in the Senate is once again using every tactic and every maneuver they can to prevent the DISCLOSE Act from even coming up for an up or down vote.
--BHO
"last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests - including foreign corporations - to spend without limit in our elections"
In response to this criticism of their recent ruling, Justice Samuel Alito shook his head and appeared to mouth "Not true."
Imagine a world where there was no other country but the United States, and even feel free to go back to 2010 or even earlier, if you want. Would politicians now somehow stop actively agitating and otherizing? Would the media stop doing the same as well? After all, it sells.
And on the individual (or grassroots) level it's really no different. Post bias affirming rage-bait drivel and get all the dopamine-hit-generating upvotes in social media one might ever want. Measured analysis? Meh, who cares about that.
And in the "real world" as well. As but one example higher educational attainment is strongly associated with dramatic increases in the perception gap [1] in society. And that gap is one of the primary driving factors in the divisiveness at all levels from politicians on down to you and I.
The conclusion? Americans have a deeply distorted understanding of each other. We call this America’s “Perception Gap”. Overall, Democrats and Republicans imagine almost twice as many of their political opponents as reality hold views they consider “extreme”. Even on the most controversial issues in our national debates, Americans are less divided than most of us think.
This would be a great time to explain why More In Common is not part of the propoganda effort. You have offices in France, Germany and the UK (according to your web page) yet you focus on the USA. You also have an 8 month old account with a few non-sequitur posts.
TL:DR; I've been doing this since 'palestine' would clumsily summon the I***i bots.
Yet it's funny how BHO's party whipped up the Trump + Russia connection, fed that fiction to their left leaning media co-conspirators, and both enties played pile on (the BS).
Yet BO didn't have anything to say about that. He's a great spokesperson. A great orator. But there are too many instance where credibility is questionable. The Paris Climate Agreement immediately comes to mind.
NoTA does not solve any problem. It just gives one more avenue for the parties to play with. E.g., parties will try to push voters of their opponents towards NotA. Also it leads to worse outcomes as dreamers/perfectionists choose NotA instead of voting for the best option available, while hardcore supporters go and vote for their favorite candidate.
I didn't say it would solve The Problem, at least not immediately.
But if you say "Any given winner must have 40% of the total vote" and NotA is included in that universe, then there is an incentive of Party X and Party Y to field viable products. Then there is an incentive for - what's currently written off as - "disinterested voters" (i.e., not, it's crap product being sold) to have a say.
We are told, voting is a means for We The People to express ourselves and influence our representatives. Suppressing the NoaA vote is just that, voter suppression.
The bottom line: NotA is a simple means to a better ends. Without much effort, it addresses a handful of the flaws in the current system.
True story: I live in NJ, just outside the Phila, PA market. We saw *all* the Fetterman v Oz ads (for PA's Senate seat). If I called it a cluster f*k I'd be giving cluster and f*k a bad name. There is simply no way voting for either one of them way sending a message to anyone. If nothing else, it gave both major parties a free pass. It made thousands of voters complicit in the X + Y cartel.
I can see this might be true in highly corrupt countries.
I think it's easy to preach this idea that political parties only serve itself and don't care about anything else.
In truth it's something that is more or less required to be effective since voting is only 1 part of it (someone had to write the legislation and do investigations).
Of course the party cares what their members think otherwise what would be the point of being a member of said political party.
And lastly it needs to be stressed if a political party or candidate don't listen to their voters then (if it's a fair election) they won't be re-elected.
Incidentally, these color associations only became fixed in 2000, before then different media outlets used different color mappings. The fixed mapping is a creation of corporate media who wanted to simplify the presentation of American politics so even people with their brains completely turned off (e.g., sat in front of a television) could follow along.
That's fascinating. I always wondered why the political colours were backwards in the USA. The left is historically associated with red globally, and conservatives normally adopt blue, but in the US it's the other way around. Had no idea that was such a recent thing.
I quite like sortition and citizens assemblies, but it's amazing how much pushback there is to even minor moves towards further democracy (proportional representation etc.) and how much energy is spent undermining the limited democracy that exists so I feel uncomfortable with the headline.
If this system is established, the corruption will come in pretty fast into this one too. Even easier because there is just so few people to influence in short time.
> Even easier because there is just so few people to influence in short time.
What do you mean by so few people? The size of the legislatures wouldn't necessarily change, so it's the same number of people at any given time, and since there's no reelection, it ends up being a larger number of people overall.
And I would say it's harder to corrupt people you don't have relationship with. Whereas long-serving politicians develop relationships with lobbyists over the years.
The biggest reduction of corruption is the elimination of campaign contributions, which is essentially legalized bribery. This leaves only illegal bribery, which can be prosecuted. You could audit randomly selected legislators for years after they leave office to make sure they're not taking bribes.
> The size of the legislatures wouldn't necessarily change, so it's the same number of people at any given time, and since there's no reelection, it ends up being a larger number of people overall.
Except that the people in the legislature would have little to no knowledge about how things work, and so would heavily rely on the advice and expertise of the bureaucrats and lobbyists to know how to move on various topics.
With experienced legislatures they know the system and when someone is trying to pull the wool over their eyes. Some people bemoan "career politicians", but in what other profession does (more experience = bad)? Carpenters, pilots, developers?
The incentive for politcians is to be popular and attract votes, not do good by the people.
If politicians were actually experienced at doing good, that would be great. Unfortunately the bulk of their experience is in popularity pageants, which does not prepare them for office.
One reason corruption might increase with sortition is that it would be much cheaper to successfully bribe a representative. Most politicians are rich so it’s very expensive to make a bribe worthwhile to them. But if people with less money are in power, they might be swayed by smaller bribes.
Also, they don’t have as much to lose if they’re caught accepting a bribe. If a career politician is caught accepting a bribe, their career as a politician is over. But if a mechanic is caught accepting a bribe during their 2 year stint as a representative, they would suffer minimal reputational damage and could just go back to being a mechanic.
You also mentioned that you could prevent this with harsh penalties and long term audits, but I think it would be pretty easy to circumvent an audit. Like, if I wanted to bribe someone elected by sortition, I would just offer them free stuff instead of money so it’s harder to trace. Like free hotel stays or prepaid gift cards.
I could imagine apolitical people treating a sortition win like winning the lottery and expecting to get money out of it. And just auctioning their vote off to the highest bidder.
With all that said though, there would be a lot of advantages to sortition so the risk of corruption and bribery might still be worth it and would still probably be better than our current system.
> Most politicians are rich so it’s very expensive to make a bribe worthwhile to them.
The question is, bribe them to do what? Usually, you're bribing them to follow the preferences of the wealthy. Which already happens if the politician is wealthy! They're already voting for self-serving legislation. So in a sense, bribing the wealthy is more redundant than expensive. However, you might be surprised how little you have to contribute to a politician's reelection campaign to get the politician to do stuff for you.
> If a career politician is caught accepting a bribe, their career as a politician is over.
They go to jail. This has happened a number of times. Bribery is illegal.
> I would just offer them free stuff instead of money so it’s harder to trace. Like free hotel stays or prepaid gift cards.
This happens with politicians too. But they still get caught. Anyway, it's no harder or easier than doing the same thing with elected politicians.
No they wouldn't, because that's not how bribes work anymore. Basically all bribes of politicians or civil servants are based on promises of jobs or consulting work after leaving the public sector. Look at how frequently politicians show up being paid inexplicably huge speaking fees at major banks despite having nothing to say, or how frequently regulators end up getting well paid jobs at the companies they were supervising immediately after leaving.
The issue is you can't prove these are bribes. There's no paper trail, no mysterious payments. Someone's expertise or worth to another is entirely arbitrary, you can't say someone's speaking fee is 'too large' or their experience isn't worth that much money, especially if they've had an unusually interesting position beforehand.
This is actually why bribes to randomly selected citizens would be easier to catch. After a maximum 1 year term, a randomly selected citizen would be expected to go back to their previous line of work. Whereas an elected professional politician who has spent years in "public service" might naturally be expected to take a politically relevant job afterward.
If a randomly selected citizen magically starts getting huge bank speaking fees afterwards, that's obviously a bribe.
How? You realize companies will have replaced employees who leave after a year, right? You can't just switch people's careers off and on again like that. What if they were self employed? Their company can easily have been destroyed, there's nothing for them to go back to.
There are various ways to handle this. I arbitrarily chose 1 year, but it could be shorter. It's not clear whether it needs to be a full-time job or just a part-time job. After all, our elected officials tend to spend a lot of time fundraising and campaigning rather than legislating. We could require that companies give unpaid leave, while the citizen legislator gets paid a salary by the government. There would of course be hardship exceptions to postpone serving.
As a society, we actually need to do more to make it the norm that people can temporarily switch their careers off and on again, for various reasons. Having a child is one crucial example.
let’s say you’re a farmer. you get selected to be a representative. then your term ends and a big company wants to hire you. so you take the job
how on earth are you going to legally differentiate this from a company simply hiring someone with experience in the political sphere? how are you going to prove that an after-dinner speech is proceeds from corrupt behaviour, and not just a speech from someone interesting that people may want to listen to? you’re going to ask a court to decide if someone is genuinely an interesting speaker?
there’s a good reason they're able to get away with this right now: it’s nearly impossible to legislate for. it’s very easy to spot, but without direct evidence of prior communication between the parties it’s extremely difficult to prove
my solution would be to give each of them a huge pension and ban them from ever working again. but that has its own problems
> how on earth are you going to legally differentiate this from a company simply hiring someone with experience in the political sphere?
Experience in the political sphere is no longer a thing when the entire government consists of 1 year lifetime term limited random selections. Experience only has value now because there are "career politicians", political parties, campaign fundraising, etc.
Also keep in mind that without elections, they are no longer "representatives" and don't have "constituents". Therefore, the legislators no longer have to take private meetings or phone calls with anyone. This doesn't mean they won't listen to anyone or take advice, it just means that this can all occur in public hearings and not in private where deals are made. Lobbyists as such should cease to exist.
none of this resolves how incredibly hard it would be to legislate against and convict for this
think about it like laws for drug paraphernalia. [1] no one is going to ban pipes and papers and lighters, because people use them for other things. obviously, when you see a weed pipe or papers designed for spliffs, you can tell that that’s what they’re for. but it’s extremely difficult to convict someone for possessing or selling them, because there are feasible alternative uses
this form of bribery is the same. obviously it’s very easy to spot someone bribed into a cushy job, but without actual evidence of collusion, are you going to get a conviction in a court of law operating under the principles of reasonable doubt? highly unlikely. it’s always going to be possible that that company simply liked how the representative did their job and hired them. or they like the PR of hiring ex-reps. or any number of reasons a lawyer could bring up in court
if it could be done safely and reasonably, it probably already would have in our current systems
>they are no longer “representatives”
they would be representatives. I chose that word deliberately. I think you’re confusing “representatives” with “elected representatives”. they would be representing the population at large
[1] yes throughout time and space there have been and are laws against weed and drug paraphernalia, but they’re widely seen as a bad idea, and easily side-stepped
> it’s always going to be possible that that company simply liked how the representative did their job and hired them
There's actually no reason why the voting record of a citizen legislator needs to be released to the public. They do it with elected officials, because if you're going to vote for someone, you want to know how they voted. But with unelected officials, it could be secret ballots, so nobody even knows how they did their job.
> they like the PR of hiring ex-reps.
There's no PR in hiring a randomly selected person who was only in office for 1 year. Nobody even knows the randos.
> or any number of reasons a lawyer could bring up in court
Which reasons? All of the reasons that exist now relate to politicians having long experience, connections, and other things that go along with having a "career" in politics. None of the reasons hold for what is essentially a temp job.
> I think you’re confusing “representatives” with “elected representatives”. they would be representing the population at large
No, I'm not confusing anything. Getting randomly selected from the public is not the same as representing the public. An elected representative is expected to get the opinion of and serve their constituency. There's no such expectation in sortition. Compare with juries. A juror is mostly randomly selected from the public but doesn't "represent" the public. A juror doesn't need to consult the public about the trial; to the contrary, jurors are not even allowed to consult outsiders about the trial. A juror simply decides the case base on its merits and nothing else. There's no representation.
I think you're underestimating the inherent corruption of the current political system. By the time a politician takes office they're usually a "known quantity", because (1) they have to run an election campaign to introduce themselves to the public, and (2) in order to finance such a campaign, they have to raise money, which mostly involves going around begging wealthy interests for money. So such interests can already develop a relationship with the candidate before they get elected, by contributing money to their election campaign. Running for election is inherently corrupting in that way. Whereas government officials randomly selected from the public are wild cards. You can't just go around bribing a thousand unknown random people, because while some may take the bribe, the chances are decent that you'll run into a honest, ethical person who won't take the bribe but rather turn you into the authorities, and then you'll go to jail, because bribing a government official is a felony. All it takes is one honest randomly selected citizen to blow up the entire bribery scheme. So it would be massively dangerous for the briber. It's difficult to build "trusting" relationships with such short-term unknown legislators. This is why most political bribery takes the form of legal campaign contributions, which pose no danger to the contributor and are quite effective at getting results. Eliminate election campaigns, and you've eliminated the primary source of corruption.
We have to compare sortition against the current system, not against some ideal of perfection. If sortition is simply less corrupt that the current system, it's a win. You can always think of ways to game any system, but our current system is practically designed for corruption.
you’re repeatedly sidestepping the core of what I’m saying. we are talking about the practicalities of trying to legislate against this one specific kind of corruption
no sane court of law is going to convict representatives for getting a good job post hoc. there is far too much possibility for reasonable doubt. unless you fundamentally change the way the justice system works, that is not going to change
>which reasons?
do I really have to come up with these reasons? bear in mind that they don’t have to be rock solid, they just have to introduce reasonable doubt. since you almost certainly have no other evidence, “perhaps that could be true rather than collusion” is enough.
“their term made us aware of them and they seemed competent”; “they’re famous now and that’s good for sales”; “they made connections that could prove useful to the company”; “they look good to foreign investors/trading partners”; “patriotism!”; “we feel we have a duty to support our ex-reps!”; etc etc etc. there are a million reasons that any lawyer could come up with and sell to a jury
also, please don’t specifically try and defeat each thing I say. just address the central issue. I say that just like you can’t convict people for using drugs because they possesa drug paraphernalia, properly functioning courts will struggle to meet the burden of proof to convict this kind of bribery
> please don’t specifically try and defeat each thing I say
Heh, this is an interesting request.
> properly functioning courts will struggle to meet the burden of proof to convict this kind of bribery
I think this frames the issue in entirely the wrong way. My claim is that you can't safely offer bribes to a randomly selected citizen legislature.
Suppose the legislature has 1000 members, and they serve 1 year terms, maximum 1 term per lifetime. So as a wealthy interest attempting to trade jobs for political favors, you start out with 1000 complete strangers. They're unknown to you, and you're unknown to them. Moreover, they don't need to take meetings or phone calls with you, because you didn't vote for them (nobody did), you didn't finance their campaigns, they don't represent you, and they're not running for reelection, because they aren't elected, and they can't serve another term. Indeed, these legislators are likely to be suspicious of unsolicited inquiries, and rightly so. They probably don't even have time for your crap. Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to somehow meet them, gain their trust, and offer them a bribe in less than 1 year, all while avoiding the honest citizen who responds to your offer by calling the cops. The burden of proof is pretty easy when the person bribed testifies against the briber.
I request that as your style seems to be to attack details, which goes nowhere as each reply gets longer and less relevant until every reply is a marathon and you’ve lost sight of the actual issue being discussed
speaking of that, you’ve moved the goalposts. you said that it would be easy to catch the people taking this style of bribe because of the more abrupt job change. I said that it’s almost impossible to legislate against that
now you’re trying to argue a separate issue: whether reps will take these bribes at all
however, your initial comment assumes that they might take these bribes, and my reply is based on that assumption. when you abandon that assumption, you’re not actually responding to me
if you’d like, you can reread our original two comments, but I’ve laid out the bones of it here:
your claim: easier to catch takers
my disputation: yes easier to catch but impossible to convict
your response: but takers wouldn’t take in the first place
Each gets longer and more detailed, as I defend my position. If length and details are a problem for you, then we'd better end the discussion here.
me: "This is actually why bribes to randomly selected citizens would be easier to catch."
you: "you said that it would be easy to catch the people taking this style of bribe"
I said easier. You misquoted me as saying easy. Easier != easy. We're comparing sortition to the current electoral system. Sortition just has to be better, it doesn't have to be perfect. Moreover, I said, "Many elected politicians have been criminally convicted of corruption", so it's not in fact impossible.
> now you’re trying to argue a separate issue: whether reps will take these bribes at all
> however, your initial comment assumes that they might take these bribes, and my reply is based on that assumption. when you abandon that assumption, you’re not actually responding to me
This is a misunderstanding. Of course some legislators (I won't call them "reps") might accept bribes. The problem is when some don't. When you're trying to bribe a bunch of random strangers, the number who don't accept bribes, even if the number is small, will blow up the whole bribery system and will send the bribers to jail.
Even if there's some level of bribery in sortition — which I believe can't be high, for reasons explained earlier — it would be vastly better than the current electoral system, which is legalized bribery via campaign contributions.
yet again you're trying to argue multiple points irrelevant to the initial discussion: the semantics of easy vs easier; whether it's easier to bribe in the first place; whether sortitioning is better or worse than the current system. this is called the Gish gallop[1], and it is not conducive to good debate
stop trying to move the goalposts
it is difficult to prosecute someone who has taken this kind of bribe, even in a system of sortitioning. do you have a refutation to this argument?
This is pointless, because you seem to lack the capacity to follow a complex argument, and I disagree with you about what's relevant and irrelevant to the discussion. I'm done here.
if you had a refutation, you would have said it by now. as it is, you’ve tried a gish gallop, then thrown your toys out of the pram when it’s been pointed out to you
did you really think I was going to engage you in an exponentially growing series of piecemeal arguments growing less and less relevant with each iteration?
let’s close this by saying that you completely failed - and even resolutely avoided - giving any evidence or arguments that it would be even remotely possible to convict anyone for this, and then tried to prove yourself right in some alternative discussions about: sortitioning as a whole, the word “representative”, easy vs easier, the difficulty of bribing a representative, whether they have constituents, whether I have a correct grasp of corruption as a whole, etc etc etc etc, not a single one of which mattered to the central question of “would you be able to convict an ex-rep for having a sudden upwards change in job?” to which the answer is a resounding and unchallenged: no
> the central question of “would you be able to convict an ex-rep for having a sudden upwards change in job?”
I think the problem here is that you believe it's the central question, whereas I don't. It's a minor issue in the larger question of whether sortition is better than elections.
yes, there is an overall question of whether sortitioning is better or worse, but did I say to you: "the current system is better than sortitioning"? no I didn't. we were never talking about that. if you'd like to discuss that separately, we can, and I suspect we'd agree, but I did not sign up for that discussion, so surely you can see why I only want to talk about the only issue I've ever even mentioned?
what I said was that it would be extremely hard to convict someone for this specific corruption, you disagreed, and we proceeded. if you don't have an argument to back up your disagreement, you misspoke, or misread, or jumped to a conclusion, that's fine, but you're just ignoring it and talking about other things as if you were right. does that seem to you like a rational mode of thought?
>these links:
this is the same thing again. we're not talking about general convictions for corruption, we're talking about convictions for this very specific kind of type of bribery, where your only evidence is a change of jobs
the comment said words to the effect of “get caught taking a bribe”. you’re deliberately misunderstanding my words. if you read my comment history, you’ll see that I said the exact same thing you’re saying about 3 minutes before I posted this comment
Or we could cut their hands off, sentence them to house arrest for life, brand them with a scarlet letter, banish them to an island, etc. there are options other than just shrugging and accepting it as inevitable.
It's also hard to build relationships with future members of the legislature when there's a pool of 10 million to choose from, rather than the 5000 or so career politicians we have in the current system.
campaign donations aren't such a big deal in the UK, so the main form of legal bribery is "do us a favour and we'll give you a cushy non-executive directorship for the rest of your natural life". this would still be an issue with sortitioning, possibly even more than in the current system, as the representatives are less likely to be rich in the first place
I still like the idea, but something would need to be done about this. a fat pension perhaps. or anonymity. but that leads to its own issues
The current system forces our politicians to spend a third to a half their time fundraising. We basically force politicians to sell out to keep their jobs.
Sortition would remove the structural incentives towards corruption that exist today so our efforts to combat corruption should become easier.
1) make the sortition group big enough, say 1000 or 10000 people, so the required number of people bribed goes up, which increases bribery cost as well as chances of getting caught
2) make a bounty program to help put a lower bound on the cost to bribe
i wouldn't mind sortition as long as there was a way to at least "unelect" the person in the case that someone really turned out bad for whatever reason
Ancient India has several instances where the next ruler was selected by the royal elephant. Of course, it was not meant to be random, as the elephant would pick a righteous person capable of steering the kingdom at that time.
> Thus the process for electing the Doge, as of 1268 (when it was employed for the election of Lorenzo Tiepolo), had reached this amazing almost-final form [Lane p.111; also described by Lines p.156]:
> - Choose 30 of the Great Council members (of whom there were 1000-to-1500, typically; all male) by a random process;
> - Reduce them to 9 by random processes;
> - The 9 name 40 nominees;
> - The 40 are reduced to 12 by a random process;
> - the 12 name 25 nominees;
> - Reduce them to 9 by random processes;
> - The 9 name 45 nominees;
> - Reduce them to 11 by random processes;
> - The 11 named 41 (all of whom had to be age≥40 years);
> - The 41 elected the Doge (from among nominees they chose; any of the 41 could write a name on a slip of paper, and from then onward, that name was a candidate) by range3 voting!
> - This choice theoretically was subject to approval or veto by the mass of the people (assembly) but I am unaware of any instance in which that veto was exercised. This perhaps meant this step was a mere formality with the People not really having any power. But another interpretation is that the threat of a veto kept the Grand Council honest in its choice – they refused to risk the embarrassment of a veto.
Iirc, the electoral college and representatives were put in place because the [rich] founders knew the Demos can not be trusted to fairly govern itself. Election by lottery is not better because it's the same people with the same foibles.
When the Greeks did sortition, it wasn't perfect either. Laws ended up favoring the richest landowners, and the richest landowners tended to have a higher representation (in the boule anyway). They tried various means to engineer the problems away, but they persisted. This is because it's nigh-impossible to prevent human beings from figuring out a way to exploit a system when they are committed to the task.
Another way to have a superior political body is to make it superior and hold it to a standard. Rather than select average people, there should be basic requirements of intelligence, ethics, acts of good will, and the abandonment of luxuries, rewards and favors, in exchange for the support of the state. The state should support the education of the populous toward this end. In addition, the judgment over matters of serious concern should be presided over by experts. No decision of serious concern should be made without a meta-study, to root out bias and find the best possible solution.
Basically, we should hold ourselves and our political process to the highest standards, rather than the easiest ones. Let the noblest and wisest lead us in a structure designed for reason and fairness.
> Basically, we should hold ourselves and our political process to the highest standards, rather than the easiest ones.
It sounds like you're describing Plato's philosopher kings.
A key component of both sortition and Plato's Republic is that they're selecting leaders who aren't actively seeking power, in contrast to elections. (According to Plato, philosophers seek truth, not power, and must be forced to rule for the benefit of the community.)
More like representative egalitarian scientist philosophers. They would not have total power, but they would have large influence. Think of an alternative governmental body, like the house and senate. You could even still have sortition as a separate body (a la Assembly). But this wise body would determine what was technically and logistically the best outcome, rather than purely moral. You could reject what the wise impartial person found through analysis, but it would be a difficult argument, because everyone would trust in impartiality and correctness, the same way we do in science. We could prefer what the whole body agreed upon, as it would be the most widely accepted scientific findings.
"In addition, the judgment over matters of serious concern should be presided over by experts. No decision of serious concern should be made without a meta-study, to root out bias and find the best possible solution."
That's the system we have now and it fails all the time, because the "experts" would rather give any answer than no answer, even if their data or understanding is insufficient to yield an accurate prediction.
I suggest to rediscover from the Condorcet paradox to the classic renaissance Italian city-states structure to the classic Athens demagogues: any system can be abused.
Then try finding an old book and a very old story: "The Science of Government Founded on Natural Law" by Clinton Roosevelt a relative of the much better known Franklin Delano and one of the scammers of the NY bank who became the FED years later [1] or the blatant explanation that all society develop a kind of hierarchy who is not at all democratic (nor meritocratic) who drive and (ab)use the others not differently than a shepherd with the flock. Sometimes the shepherd is soft and hidden enough that the flock do not revolt, sometimes it's not and get assaulted by the flock, sometimes it have to create a bit of theater, like wrestling, pushing the flock to think there are different ideas into play, they decide etc. The modern version of ancient Greeks theater where the orator start to plead a cause, convincing spectators who acclaim, than start to plead the exact opposite, in equally convincing manners. Those who understand applaud, those who not think he/she made fun of them and try to assault physically...
While random choice has some merit, it ignores some basic requirements of legislation: Legislation is interfacing with the executive and judicial branches (and you definitely don't want to randomly select your judges and governors). This interface works through legalese and other techniques. So someone with a certain experience or training in these techniques will be able to write better laws. Also, legislation necessarily works through specialization and work in committees. That's another thing people can learn to do better. That's where political parties are actually useful.
Finally, this whole thing reeks of identity politics. Representation as a proxy of good decision making or even just good intent. But think about what this would do to minorities. It would be quite unlikely to chose, e.g., transsexuals or people with rare illnesses. Also, people have many different identies at the same time but but cannot represent them all equally well, anyways. So some aspects of society wouldn't be represented at all during a legislative period because everyone is supposed to represent their own identities, not someone else's.
So unless we create a legislative assembly that's so large that it borders on direct democracy, I don't see the benefit. And in that case, let's just have direct democracy. If necessary with a legal requirement to vote.
> So someone with a certain experience or training in these techniques will be able to write better laws. Also, legislation necessarily works through specialization and work in committees.
Lawmakers today rarely write the legislation they vote on. They have support staff and experts who assist them in drafting legislation. Nothing prevents providing similar infrastructure to representatives selected by sortition rather than elections.
> Finally, this whole thing reeks of identity politics. Representation as a proxy of good decision making or even just good intent. But think about what this would do to minorities. It would be quite unlikely to chose, e.g., transsexuals or people with rare illnesses.
Um... What? Minorities would unequivocally be better represented under sortition than under elections. Poor people would be better represented, women would be better represented, young people would be better represented. The primary group that would loser it's massive overrepresentation is the old rich white lawyers who dominate our current house and senate. Your argument here makes no sense.
I think democracy by lottery may be a good idea provided that the outcome of the lottery can be trusted. It could be done through a cryptographically-verifiable (e.g. blockchain-based) random number generator.
The average citizen is more principled and less prone to corruption than the average modern politician. I don't think it would be a problem if politicians ended up more naive as a result. Just having well-meaning politicians would be a significant step up.
That said, I think we should rely less on government intervention in the economy. We need to fix the monetary system to provide a level playing field, then once that's done, we need to trim back regulations. The way to solve the corporate monopolization problem is through increased competition. The government's primary role should be to promote maximum decentralization.
The government should not concern itself with equality of outcomes; it should only concern itself with equality of opportunities. It should not think about efficiency; it should trust the free market to take care of that.
> The average citizen is more principled and less prone to corruption than the average modern politician.
This claim needs some back up. I don't think there's an innate difference between an "average citizen" and an "average modern politician". What separates them is the opportunity, and having a system in place that works to keep people honest. I'm watching my fellow citizens litter and help themselves to "free stuff", and the behavior of freshly minted "politicians" who get voted in by disgruntled voters of formerly fringe parties (or formerly fringe wings of established parties).
I'd like to hear how you propose to keep the "average citizen" principled in the face of increased access to opportunity and power.
>I don't think there's an innate difference between an "average citizen" and an "average modern politician"
That's silly. The politician is completing in a race that they are trying to win. The citizen is just trying to live, and takes time out of their life to vote and pick someone who might (might!) have a shot at fixing some of the things that annoy them without breaking some of the things that actually work. The politician is goal-oriented, the citizen is existence-oriented.
Yes, so the politician is at least trying to understand and represent other people's views. They've made the decision to take the heat and are psychologically prepared for it.
Choosing people at random is not going to work well. Look at what happens with juries - lots of people find creative ways to get out of jury duty and that's for a way smaller commitment of time than a political term. The randomly chosen person won't want to be in government at all. Their life has just been totally up-ended through no fault of their own. Now no matter what they do, they're going to be wildly famous and wildly unpopular with huge segments of the population. All they wanted was to do their job and take care of their family, now they're getting harassed on the street by political enemies, having to go on TV, having to justify their decisions to journalists. Presumably some of the really unlucky ones will have to become ministers, but how do they even get picked?
No, the randomly chosen person has no reason to give a single damn about anything or anyone except themselves in that position. Heck half of them will be thinking: if I just refuse to turn up to work, maybe there'll be a recall and a new person will be randomly chosen.
Then take into account all the exceptions and justifiable reasons why people will be able to get out of this duty (e.g. because they're sick, because they're caregivers, because they're non-citizens, because they're mothers, because their company testifies that person is critical to their operations, etc). The ones you'll end up with are the ones who have nothing better to do. Expect the terminally unemployed to be over-represented.
So, I actually responded purely about your narrow claim, and not about picking citizens at random. I don't really have an opinion about that. Although I would point out that right now we're selecting for a certain type of person who wants to win and can take heat and craft messaging and analyze options in terms of communications spending. But narcissism, more than anything, seems required. What else drives someone to become a politician? Precious few politicians seem like they were "called" to do that work, despite wanting a more humble, quieter life. Maybe someone like Jimmy Carter? I'd say its an intriguing idea, one worth trying on a more local scale, like for mayor or city counsel. See if things fall apart. If not, try at a higher scale, and repeat.
I think quite a lot of the politicians I've interacted with (in the UK) actually do seem to believe in public service. They certainly aren't all narcissists.
Exactly. In the current system, a candidate requires substantial funding in order to run. Who has that kind of money to spend on politics? Big corporations! What sort of people would these corporations want in government?
The most valuable trait in a politician from the perspective of a big corporate donor is corruptibility (their eagerness to cater to the needs of big financial interests). They are literally put forward on that basis. If the selection process was random, then political candidates would only be as corrupt as the average person; which would not be too bad.
> I don't think there's an innate difference between an "average citizen" and an "average modern politician".
There is a difference: politicians actively seek power. This already raises suspicions about a person, in my opinion.
Also, running for office takes money, so the average modern politician needs to raise a lot of money. How do you raise a lot of money? Make friends with rich people and do favors for them, obviously.
I don't know, it's of course very popular to bash on politicians, no one likes them. Me neither.
But at least in my country and city, if decisions were made by the average citizen, we would be living as in the 80s. Every time they remove a parking spot to make room for a bike lane or a wider sidewalk, people complain (even if in the long term, many end up seeing the benefits). Maybe it depends on the country, but at least in my place the average citizen is very, very reactionary. They want everything as it always was.
Politicians, with all their failures (we have plenty of corrupt ones here), tend to have more long-term thinking that Joe Sixpack.
Unfortunately I don't see how that would stop big industries just turning up on day two with their lobbying for the outcomes they want, and we end up in a very similar world anyway.
make it like jury duty. randomly select taxpayers to represent people for short terms. i'd prefer a random concerned citizen making decisions for a month over 2/4 years of a corruptible do-nothing elitist. keep the representation constantly rotating. more people is more ideas, more consensus, and closer to reality for most of us <---
Have you ever served on a jury? My three times were eye opening. Very few of my fellow jurors had the slightest ability to perform critical thinking. Most paid no attention to the jury instructions and simply voted their biases. I can't imagine how bad they would be as civil leaders.
2. They're not totally random. The attorneys are allowed to eliminate members of the pool.
3. The jury doesn't actually run the trial. Nor do they run the police department, for that matter. The trial is run by the judge and the attorneys. The jury is mostly passive listeners. They're spoon-fed info at the trial and not even allowed to know all the facts.
4. Jury terms are too short. Contrary to what the previous commenter suggested, it's not ideal to have short terms. Citizen legislators should probably serve 1 or 2 year times. They need time to learn how to do the job. They probably need preparation before they take the job.
I don't think anyone is saying these people would be competent. Just on average more competent than a career politician. If you're baffled by the average jury, you should see what the politicians are like!
If you simply align jury pay scales with pay scales for skilled labor in the work force, you'd expect to find basically only people who can't even hold a job. The 'pay' for jury duty in most areas is actually below minimum wage.
The point of a jury isn't competence, but independence. A judge may be afraid to convict a powerful defendant or acquit an unpopular one, because he has his career to think about. A jury has no such issue.
This is what they did at times in ancient Athens. One positive was that the average citizen was much more aware of the concerns of the city than would occur if only a select few were running things.
Oh come on. We already have a working system: direct democracy. An entire well-developed country works like this: Switzerland (and quite successfully). I absolutely do not understand why it is not adopted elsewhere (except politicians egos, of course, and this is quite a strong force to overcome).
Switzerland is never a good example. A homogenous small nation that’s immensely gifted resource wise, is rich by any measure of that word, and is immune and protected from damn near anything, can make any system work. Most nations are not like that.
“Immensely gifted resource-wise”? In what world? Also, it speaks four languages, and more than a quarter of its population are immigrants — not what I’d call “homogeneous”. Switzerland is an exception (and a rich one) _because_ it is a direct democracy, I’d argue.
There are more languages spoken in individual provinces in india. Language is not a source of heterogeneity. Pretty much all heterogeneity in the world was invented and entrenched due to colonial rule, so you can hopefully understand what I mean by not heterogenous.
Switzerland's been exceptional for many decades. They managed to remain genuinely neutral during both World Wars even as the world melted down right outside their borders, remain one of the few governments not dominated by the copyright cartel (for instance personal use copyright infringement is legal in Switzerland), and of course their direct democracy system. They do their own system, and they do it in a very social and capable fashion. But how long will this last? By contrast over there was an interesting recent poll: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33454449 The majority of Americans now support new stimulus checks to combat inflation.
I'm increasingly persuaded by Plato's 5 Regime's view. In a nutshell, each system has its own virtue which taken to extremes becomes its vice and leads to its downfall and transition into the next system. The 5 regimes being Aristocracy, Timocracy (an implicitly anti-materialist government driven by systems of honor - think Spartans or Klingons - the Wiki page on this topic is simply wrong), Oligarchy, Democracy, and Tyranny.
Do we need complex legislation for complex issues? There was a discussion here on HN a few days ago where some people argued that maybe it's better to legislate just for the simpler, common cases, and exceptions will always have to be exceptions and judged case by case in court.
We need councils running everything, democratically elected councils whose members are instantly recallable upon a vote. That will ensure they are responsive to the needs of people.
Surely if they were instantly recallable it would incentive extremely short term thinking as opposed to long term strategic plans which may involve some difficulty in the short term?
The problem is how limited peoples power really is. Voting every four years for a “representative “ is not enough. Look for Swiss style direct democracy
A country like America has too many needs and responsibilities for direct democracy. Having full-time representatives handle these responsibilities gives me comfort; I don't want and can't afford the responsibility of learning the ins and outs of every aspect of American government. I don't have the time or energy for that, so if I were told to vote on all of those issues I'd either be voting at random or in the manner the media told me to. And where is the value of that? No, I want representatives to do most of it for me. Public referendums on some social policy issues are generally good, and I've voted in a few of those, but please do not make me responsible for all of it.
Besides, handing nukes over to a plebiscite is a bone-chillingly awful idea. In the days following 9/11 I think we probably would have voted to start a nuclear war. The public, save the Dixie Chicks, were even more blood thirsty than the US Government.
> In the days following 9/11 I think we probably would have voted to start a nuclear war. The public, save the Dixie Chicks, were even more blood thirsty than the US Government.
The US government used 9/11 as an excuse to invade two countries.
Iraq was not involved in 9/11 at all, despite allegations, and it didn't have WMD either, despite allegations.
And we invaded Afghanistan, but bin Laden was eventually found in Pakistan, our "ally".
The US public might have voted to invade Saudi Arabia, which actually would have made more sense than Afghanistan or Iraq.
I'm well aware. I also recall a shockingly large portion of the population thinking that the US government was being too restrained and that every Muslim country should have been nuked. If nothing else, I think the other nuclear powers would be a lot more nervous if the American public were in direct control of those nukes. It simply isn't safe.
If we had been under a direct democracy at that time, the inter-personal pressure to conform would have been even greater. As it stands, the opinions of your fellow citizen are relatively low stakes because they aren't the ones actually calling the shots, and they know you aren't either. This indirect nature of representative democracy is conducive to political tolerance at the inter-personal level.
> I also recall a shockingly large portion of the population thinking that the US government was being too restrained and that every Muslim country should have been nuked.
I don't recall this. Citation?
> I think the other nuclear powers would be a lot more nervous if the American public were in direct control of those nukes. It simply isn't safe.
Do you think the Trump is safer?
An elected US President (Truman) was the only one to ever use a nuclear weapon. Without consulting the public first.
I don’t believe it.
A core concept of the Swiss democracy is how every decision (in theory) is made locally. It works primarily on three levels - Gemeinde, Canton and Federal. I don’t see why it couldn’t work the same in the US.
FWIW, I pay most of my taxes to the Gemeinde and Canton. About 3% goes to the Federal state, which I assume is mostly to the (compulsory) military.
It seems to me as a foreigner that a large part of the U.S. problems(and indeed the world) is the concentration of power to the U.S. federal state.
It pains me greatly to not be sarcastic about this but I cannot help but think this article would not be making it to the front page of HN a day after the Democrats clinched the Senate majority, had the midterm elections favored the Republican party as everyone expected.
it arrived on hacker news front page today, is what I am referring towards.
Here's an idea, let's try first having PG give YCombinator funding to startups based on a random lottery, rather than actually picking them. When that's successful, then we can talk.
> it arrived on hacker news front page today, is what I am referring towards.
It arrived on the front page today because it was submitted today, and because it's an interesting and relevant article, regardless of the election result.
You'll have to ask the submitter haakonhr about the timing, but 6 days is a reasonable amount of time to discover, read, and submit an article from the Boston Review.
“They constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.
But the man that is will shadow
The man that pretends to be.”
It may work in local elections but nation wide elections require the popular mandate. Humans like to believe that they have a stake in the system, however small.
Easy enough hybrid fix; those people that are judged to perform well in direct sortition local area politics who also wish to further that work are in the pool for a combination draw|election for state roles .. and then tier upwards to national.
The general public get to know their national candidates first at the local and then state level, and those candidates are judged as "better than a head of lettuce" by their peers in office.
The political wing of government is essentially (ideally) just about debating policy - it's the civil service, military, and judicial wings that get tasked with making things happen (subject to checks and balances).
When distribution is equal or in your favor, the obvious gambit here is to propose abhorrent legislation to the opposition. They will be forced to spend more votes to stop it. Leaving you with enough votes to strong arm any legislation you want.
Any minority of power no matter the margin would be effectively silenced.
Maybe it’s different with multiple parties in play but if we could stabilize a more than two party system then that changes the calculus of the status quo too.
It might sound good on paper but I think in practice you would have various ways of exploiting the system or the system breaks down (what if say the left party has spent all its points fighting against tax cuts so now it doesn't have enough points to increase welfare and Healthcare programs or vice versa with the right party).
That’s not a disadvantage, that’s a feature. That the way it’s meant to work.
It’s precisely intended that if a party wants to spend all its its capital opposing, then it does that at the cost of being able to advance its own policies.
If it costs me two votes to oppose your legislation, but only one vote to introduce superseding legislation (which could supersede multiple of your legislative items), this seems like a much less stable system than today.
Chaos in law-making is probably worse than the disaster of two-party first-past-the-post.
You have invented direct democracy (except that we don’t need parties as middlemen, the votes can be spent directly on legislations — the role of parties is limited to helping drafting legislations and recommending how to vote — and these recommendations can be ignored, of course).
Not quite. It would be direct democracy if the “currency” was zeroed/refreshed for every ballot issue. As stated the inter-issue strategy makes this a different game.
As proposed, that seems sure to result in a series of unattractive-to-one-side legislation backed by 1 vote requiring the other side to use 2 votes to stop.
You could 2:1 amplify the power of your votes by creating a bullshit generator and the side with the most voluminous BS would end up with the only votes left.
How swiftly the meme has changed from "If we don't win, democracy dies!" to "Since we didn't win, let's get rid of elections!" See also "Our candidate didn't win because of the electoral college, so let's get rid of that" and "Let's make people vote on Brexit again, since they voted wrong the last time."
These people are almost charmingly shameless. Rather than do better, they just want to put the fix in for the next time.
Supporters of sortition have been pushing it a lot longer than the current election cycle.
Rather than dismissing "these people", perhaps you would benefit from engaging intellectually with the idea. If you did, you would probably find that the supporters of this idea are very different from what you are imagining.
The implication was clearly that the article was posted by people unhappy with the results of the election...which doesn't make sense given that it was published before hand.
It seems fairly safe to presume it was posted in anticipation of being upset with the results. And there is no "conspiracy", the author conspired with... who?
> And there is no "conspiracy", the author conspired with... who?
> However, it is a trap to engage with the disingenuous.
I agree that there was clearly no conspiracy. However, the implication that was made is that the left is disingenuously conspiring in the support of this article / attitude.
> It seems fairly safe to presume it was posted in anticipation of being upset with the results
Doesn't seem like a safe presumption to me. This is a congressional election and congress is not very popular with either partisan electorate. The simplest explanation is that this is a journalist capitalizing on popular sentiment and a hot topic with an article.
However the issue is that the party members are a small proportion of the general public.
Thus a small group is enough to win the vote in the party, This tends in a two party system to make the winner more extreme and less likely to be liked by the general public.
See Liz Truss as a good example here (as well as Trump)
This is _such_ a US centric view. Guys, you have way a worst problem than elections.
You have a party strongly pursuing getting rid of democratic results altogether.
Beyond the stated (That G word) the republican party is STRONGLY preparing the landscape to not recognize the results of the next election (Or the next one after that).
I actually have a bet with a friend about when the last democratic election is going to happen, and my money is on this last midterms being the ones (Gotta reckon, I wasn't expecting Gen-Z, and I'm gladly surprised I might be wrong).
Take for instance the last election in Brazil, where Lula beat Bolzonaro by the bare minimum: 51% to 49%. What would had been the results of such an election in the US? In 2016, Clinton won the popular vote by 2.1%, and _still_ Trump won the presidential race. In 2020, even thought Biden wan the popular vote by a large margin, the results were still down to a handful of votes [1]
The problem, as I see it, is that you have a democratic system that allows for suppressing democracy.
I see you've been getting downvoted but no one is replying with why you might be wrong. From the outside-in (I don't live in the US either) what you've written certainly seems to be the case.
You've literally got republican candidates (I think actually voted in now) saying unless they win the election was false/stolen. There is something very wrong with that.
Since I've spent over a decade this thinking about this, and think it clearly the best way to solve the problem of election, perhaps you'd care to enlighten me on why it seems like nonsense?
I am not OP, but it seems to me that there is an obvious problem with it. If you select a truly random set of citizens to rule a country, there are no guarantees that you will get a representative sample of the citizenry. That's simply not how statistics work. Without any further selection, you will eventually (and sooner than you would expect) put terrible or incompetent people in power. Now, if the randomly selected citizens must go through a selection process or be moderated by experts, then the actual power is in the selection process and moderation, and there is nothing democratic about it.
For what it is worth, I am French, and my country recently made a sortition experiment[1] that I found less than convincing. This was in response to the yellow vest movement. I did not feel represented by that 'citizens convention'. I do not know what part of their propositions come from them, and what part come from the experts advising them. Some of their propositions (like putting a more stringent speed limit on highways) were not implemented because, ironically, they were impopular. The whole thing felt like a failed experiment to me.
> If you select a truly random set of citizens to rule a country, there are no guarantees that you will get a representative sample of the citizenry.
Not sure that's the goal as such. The goal is to have a selection system that's incorruptible.
> Without any further selection, you will eventually (and sooner than you would expect) put terrible or incompetent people in power.
Well, we have that already. I like the odds of random selection a lot better. With the current system, we're practically guaranteed of getting terrible or incompetent people in power.
> I am French, and my country recently made a sortition experiment[1]
150 people seems pretty small. The US House of Representatives has over 500 members.
Democracy by lottery is a very ancient idea, one that was tried in Athens and quickly abandoned because it resulted in disastrous consequences for the city. The consequences were so bad that the idea was never seriously considered again until now.
Among the consequences:
- The lot was usually determined by birth, so it tended to perpetuate privilege.
- People who didn't want to serve often found ways to get out of it, so the people who ended up serving were often the ones who didn't want to.
- It resulted in a lot of incompetent people in positions of power.
- And perhaps worst of all, it tended to breed a culture of resentment and envy, since the people who were chosen by lot often felt that they didn't deserve it and the people who weren't chosen often felt that they did.
The idea that democracy by lottery is a good idea is simply absurd.
> Democracy by lottery is a very ancient idea, one that was tried in Athens
Yes, the article covers this.
> and quickly abandoned because it resulted in disastrous consequences for the city.
You're gonna need a citation for this.
> The consequences were so bad that the idea was never seriously considered again until now.
This is not factually accurate. The article mentions that sortition was seriously considered by some founders. It has also been used in various forms throughout the world. Several of those examples are discussed throughout this thread.
The biggest problem in the US is the electorial system that leads to two parties with each close to 50%. Elections are so close that it is essentially meaningless. Is a party with 50.1% really more legitimized to rule than the one with 49.9%?
Step one to fix democracy would be to get rid of the winner-takes-all system. Not only would this make more than two parties viable. You would also fix that most of the country's vote doesn't contribute at all (since people live in "safe" counties where they have little influence on the outcome.)
Then, when elections are won with clear margins, yes, you could abolish elections, and replace them by representative polls! The benefit is that polls are much cheaper, you can do them much more frequently, and the people can change bad policy quicker. It might be controversial, but I like that you can also apply "reweighting" to polls to make them more representative.