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Comment by Afforess | Hacker News Reader

The best quote of the paper (pg 23):

>Interestingly, the reason we uncover such striking misperceptions does not appear to be that politicians are reluctant to admit a belief that public opinion is not on their side – many do. Rather, it seems that the reality of where the public stands on these issues has such a weak influence on politicians’ perceptions of public opinion that two candidates coming to judgments about the same constituents largely fail to have much more in common than would two candidates picked entirely at random

Basically, it is not that politicians intentionally mis-believe what their constituents support (willful ignorance, etc), the problem is that politicians are a poor representation of their constituents in general.

I've long maintained congress would be much more representative if eligible citizens were randomly selected for 1 congressional term, like jurors are in juries.

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Following the juror model...

  Step 1 - From the district lists randomly select a small number of electors. 

  Step 2 - Sequester the electors.

  Step 3 - The candidates present their proposals, background, arguments, counter arguments.

  Step 4 - Electors listen, meditate and cast a secret vote.

  Step 5 - Eliminate the candidate with the lowest number of votes.
 
  Step 6 - Repeat from Step 3 until one candidate has more than 51%.

  Step 7 - Dismiss the electors.

Some advantages:

  - No need for expensive campaigns. Takes money out of politics.

  - The "Trial" can be televised. People would get involved on what is going on.

  - It reduces the need for tactical voting. Electors can vote for their first-choice candidate without fear of wasting their vote.

  - Lesser-known candidates would have better odds of winning.

Slightly better, and works well in practice[0], replace step 6 with "Repeat from step 3 until one candidate has more than 2/3 the votes, and possibly chage step 5 to cut candidate list down more quickly (imagine how long it would take to eliminate 1 at a time with 100 candidates). If after 2 candidates remain neither gets more than 2/3 the vote, flip a coin.

[0] Search "AA 3d Legacy Election"

>I've long maintained congress would be much more representative if eligible citizens were randomly selected for 1 term.

This is the way government worked in ancient Greece (or rather, Athens, but other Greece city-states copied the model).

I'm not too well educated on their gov'ts, but how effective was it? Any signs or indicators that it worked out for the better?

Call me intolerant or ignorant, but I personally fear seeing what the general populus would try to get passed in America if such a system were established. Perhaps a naive` worry, but a worry nonetheless.

Disclaimer, my knowledge on this subject consists of an undergraduate course on world history.

It worked relatively well. The role of government was considerably smaller than it is today. Also, during their term, serving on the council was a citizens full time job [0]. Additionally, their were still career politicians who advised the council; they just did not get a vote. Notably, among the politicians were generals, who were elected and did not have term limits. In addition to being influential with military and foreign policy, they tended to be influential for domestic matters as well.

[0] Rather, It was their full-time job for one month out of their one year term. For the rest of their term, they attended monthly meetings.

>I've long maintained congress would be much more representative if eligible citizens were randomly selected for 1 congressional term, like jurors are in juries.

I think electing unqualified, easily-persuaded people into office is not a good idea. Jurors are the weakest part of our judicial system -- why do we pay professionals to convince unpaid non-professionals about the law? Wouldn't it be more efficient to just pay professionals to argue about it?

> I've long maintained congress would be much more representative if eligible citizens were randomly selected for 1 congressional term, like jurors are in juries.

And like jurors in juries, wouldn't we then be governed by people not smart enough to get out of their congressional term?

> > I've long maintained congress would be much more representative if eligible citizens were randomly selected for 1 congressional term, like jurors are in juries.

> And like jurors in juries, wouldn't we then be governed by people not smart enough to get out of their congressional term?

Now, I think that a by-lot Congress is a really bad idea for a variety of reasons, but that's a moderately stupid argument when it comes to juries (given that it assumes that everyone is actively seeking to avoid jury service, so the only people who actual serve are those who fail), and its even stupider applied to Congress -- its relatively common for people to want to have a say in the government of their country (to the point where already wealthy people will sometimes spend many times the salary a member of Congress earns per term on a campaign out of their own money), and shifting from an elected to a by-lot Congress would reduce the political power of voters as voters, increasing the delta represented by serving in Congress.

And that's even before considering that members of Congress are paid substantially more than most workers; changing nothing besides the selection method would make being selected for Congress not much different than winning the lottery for most citizens -- only those who are both already wealthy and politically disinterested would have rational, self-interested reason to avoid service.

> that's a moderately stupid argument when it comes to juries (given that it assumes that everyone is actively seeking to avoid jury service, so the only people who actual serve are those who fail)

Overall, the problem is that the system bends to accommodate the judges and lawyers, who get paid very well to be there, and abuses the jurors, who do not. Why do I have get up at 6:00 AM just to sit around for three days while you idiots figure out if you need me or not? This isn't rocket science, and you all already have scheduled dockets.

The bigger problem with jury selection is that everything is trying to screen out people who bring in outside knowledge. This actively screens for the ignorant. I don't know if this is a good or bad thing, though. I suspect that it's a good thing overall as the number of times you get someone smart who recognizes a fault is probably far exceeded by the ignorant who think they know something false.

"Why do I have get up at 6:00 AM just to sit around for three days while you idiots figure out if you need me or not?"

My wife was called for jury duty a couple years back. It was a drunk driving case. During the preceding 12 months, she'd lost family in one accident involving a drunk driver, and a close friend of hers was hit (thankfully, not terribly injured) by a drunk driver in a separate accident. There was no way they were going to let her on that jury - they were dismissing people for far less. And she had to go back three days.

Neither she nor I try to get out of jury duty - we view it as important and want to do our part - but yeah it can get abusive in pretty stupid ways.

Agree that it's a pretty naive argument. There's probably a lot more to be said about how it would give even more influence to lobbyists and staffers that would stick around in DC for years and be far more knowledgeable about how to get things done.

Easy potential fix: make the pay reasonably attractive (say 150% of median wage), and allow people to buy themselves out of it by paying their replacement's salary (and if the first 100 people picked all opt out to pay, then that's about 99x pure government profit).

Make it pay really well and people won't try to get out of it.

It does pay really well.

Interestingly? Seems this undermines the entire paper, because it's not that they don't know, but rather that they don't care.

Most don't serve us anymore- they serve the people that put them there.

This is my personal favorite interpretation of our results -- they could know if they cared to know, and so the fact that they don't know suggests that they don't care. With that said, this paper is at odds with that: https://www3.nd.edu/~dnickers/files/papers/Butler_Nickerson....

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