We Should Let a Lottery Decide Our Government (2019)
thewalrus.ca
thewalrus.ca
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens%27_Assembly_(Ireland)
The idea behind Citizens Assembly isn't very controversial. Randomly select a large pool of citizens, have them discuss a topic in great detail with plenty of testimony from experts, and then vote on their recommendations.
In concept, this is very similar to how courtroom juries operate. We don't just let millions of people vote on whether a defendant is innocent or guilty. We instead pick a smaller pool of jurors, force them to sit through weeks of expert testimony and arguments from both sides, after which they cast their votes. Hence why there is a movement to similarly have courtroom juries elect our political representatives as well
If you take away the little power people have to influence the government, why not at least do it without adding another layer of indirection?
The idea of a representative is flawed from the start to begin with. There is probably no single person in my country who agrees with me on everything. Therefore any person I choose to represent myself is only an approximation of what I really want.
I increasingly feel like the belief that people need to be ruled by powerful individuals (or worse, i single individual) comes from some primitive need that evolved back when combat ability was your group's primary predictor of survival.
Doesn't work as well as a proxy in the modern age with our level of technology though I suppose.
I agree that the extreme, though, where a jury elects a monarch, would be excessive. I would be interested in a system where separate juries elect government ministers (e.g. Defence, Education, Housing, etc), so that there would be a better chance that average people’s opinions could be taken into account in the running of each of the government agencies, instead of having all of them run by the same ideology because they’re all appointed by one party or president.
(Would you rather higher taxes or lower? Lower, of course. Higher state pensions or lower? Higher, of course. Stronger or weaker military? Stronger, of course. Better or worse infrastructure? Better, of course. More teachers or fewer? More, of course. More national debt or less? Less, of course. Etc.)
This doesn't require any individual person to be irrational or forgetful or anything, although in fact people frequently are.
Also, whoever selects just which things get voted on has a great deal of power, more than most elected representatives have. If those people are elected then you've effectively got a representative democracy after all; if not, then arguably you've effectively not got a democracy at all.
Representative government as such doesn't solve this problem, but in practice it means that a candidate or party proposes a whole basket of policies to get judged collectively, and between when they get into power and when the electorate decides whether they did a good enough job to elect them again there's enough time for a wide variety of those different interacting things all to have happened and either worked well or not.
I don't want to claim that this works particularly well. But it feels to me like any sort of direct democracy would likely work much worse.
(Maybe there's scope for a hybrid system: elections every few years for representatives who are then obliged to put various classes of major decision to a national vote.)
That means a well working democratic country with a working welfare and social net will eventually degrade into some random authoritarian shithole. That scares me.
"Ignorant men raise questions that wise men answered a thousand years ago."
A bigger problem to me is that so many stopped questioning.
By and large, if you give a “Regular Person” a “Solemn Important Duty”, they rise to it and give it their best. We should seek to cultivate institutions that do this far more often.
He has some interesting ideas about how to structure a modern government with sortition - it wouldn't just be replacing the House and Senate with randomly selected representatives, but, instead: having more smaller bodies with more limited scope (ex. a body for defining the rules of bodies), and spinning out a new group for every major law proposal.
My favorite discovery on this topic (mentioned in the book), were letters between the Founding Fathers of the US where they explicitly discussed not having "democracy" in the United States, because it would give too much power to the people, and so they purposefully chose an election based system because it allowed for elites to retain control by using money to run campaigns (note also: "democracy" at the time referred exclusively to Athenian style democracy).
https://democracycreative.substack.com/p/the-trouble-with-el...
I guess there's a sizeable contingent of HN readers who don't want anything having anything to do with politics on HN, but I think some politics-related things -- including this -- fall into the category of "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity".
can you say whether there have been any interference operations by nation-state adversaries to subtly prune content? I wonder whether HN's monitoring tools are robust to detect such things
When I see this being downvoted, it's a field I know well, and it's considered by many to be the best response to the neo-reactionary movement and radical progressive left's division of the political conversation, and perhaps the best hope for unifying a shattered US democratic system.
I can't help but be suspicious of in whose interest it would be to suppress these conversations and ideas.
In any case it is an example of some randomness in the political process and in my opinion probably better than non-hereditary peerage where the peer has bought their position from the sitting government. Though that is a rather low bar.
With regards to historical lotteries if I remember my history class from decades ago the various great families didn’t want the role of governance because they had to act in the national interest instead of their house interest, and the randomness of the lottery meant that if they ruled in their own favor they’d be open to reprisal after their tenure was completed.
Did you know you can just apply to be a peer? Like, literally, anyone can do this: https://lordsappointments.independent.gov.uk/how-to-apply-2
It's deeply flawed how the PM can appoint, and there isn't enough diversity, but they can pause legislation (if not actually stop it), to cause a rethink. That's happened most recently on the assisted dying bill. Many are glad it's happened because it's improved the outcome, albeit at the cost of a delay.
I do think there is a better way than the current system, but I'm not entirely sure I can describe it, yet.
The more obvious "cash for peerage" cases have resulted in peers that wanted the title, but don't ever actually contribute to debates or appear in the chamber. As Lords have to sign in to get paid, if there are people who paid a huge amount of money to get the title who then don't get paid, well, I'm not sure it's an urgent problem of corruption.
Of the group who are signing it but that perhaps shouldn't (very elderly, peers who sign in to get paid and then bugger off, and so on), there are explicit reforms coming to change that behaviour.
Let me ask you though, what would you prefer? What do you think the upper chamber should look like? The Billy Bragg system where a single vote is FPTP for the lower chamber and proportional for the upper chamber? Something else?
As mentioned I've already voted with my feet - so I consider the problem solved. If the UK somehow manages to become an attractive place to live then I might consider living there. As someone with options there really are much nicer places to live.
> New regulations for the elections of the doge introduced in 1268 remained in force until the end of the republic in 1797. Their intention was to minimize the influence of individual great families, and this was effected by a complex electoral machinery. Thirty members of the Great Council, chosen by lot, were reduced by lot to nine; the nine chose forty and the forty were reduced by lot to twelve, who chose twenty-five. The twenty-five were reduced by lot to nine, and the nine elected forty-five. These forty-five were once more reduced by lot to eleven, and the eleven finally chose the forty-one who elected the doge.[31] > --wikipedia
Once a person has achieved a certain level of demonstrated competence and responsibility, they are entered into the pool. The criteria might include a college degree, certain military rank, level of business responsibility, running a charity of a certain size and success level, etc.
The willing must also pass a series of tests, e.g., the standard security clearance, citizenship test, knowledge of humanitites, science, technology, history, finance, and law, and be vetted with a background check filtering out criminal behavior, tax evasion, etc. Once in the pool, it is like Jury Duty; your number comes up, you get a quick screen for the office, exemptions for hardship (so the alternate is picked) and that will be your job for the term.
To mitigate the problem of everyone in govt being newbies, once in office, any official can stand for a confidence/no-confidence vote for re-election for one or two terms (depending on the office).
The pay would be the greater of the 75th percentile earnings or 100% of the officials documented income for the previous three years.
Obviously, this is a mere headline sketch and needs many more details and suggestions to work, but it seems it would improve on the current situation.
Thoughts?
Who would remain ? What would be the incentive to train for this, besides money ?
Merely sufficient familiarity with the STEM, History, etc. to be able to pass undergrad distributive requirements. In this age, if you do not have a clue about how the scientific process actually works and basic concepts, and you don't understand the basics of how and why the country and it's constitution are built, you do not have any business writing the laws of the country. Too many current congress people couldn't pass these tests and it shows.
If we cannot, among a country of ~330 million, with 90+million with college education or above [0], find less then 20,000 [1] qualified and willing to fill state and national offices, we are pretty much doomed as a nation.
Even if we do something like include all 500k local offices, and then require prior local or state service to fill a national office, it should be a good selection.
OFC, if there is a problem, you can always increase the incentives (good idea) or lower the standards (bad idea). Since it is a temporary office, making the pay even more attractive than I mentioned above would be good -make it 95th-percentile or 115% of previous income to compensate for any inconvenience (e.g., a business owner who must vacate their position for 2yrs will likely have costs)
[0] https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2022/demo/educational-att...
[1] https://poliengine.com/blog/how-many-politicians-are-there-i...
> whose parents were both citizens
Something does not compute here for me.
Okay, hold it right there: any proposal for reform that doesn’t begin with throwing all of those people straight into the ocean is a nonstarter for me.
Available on Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/20058/20058-h/20058-h.htm
It's unfortunate their justification for this is racist, ageist and anti-success though. It's easy to see how 300-400 randomly selected citizens would probably do a better job than career politicians at spending a given pot of money, they would just be much worse at deciding how big the pot of government money should be due to the preference to take from the successful and enrich oneself and one's group.
Currently there are incentives against representatives acting too much like assholes - they would lose the support of their political party, effectively ending their career.
Randomly chosen people have no such incentive. Take the loudest, most obnoxious people and put them in our congress? Nothing would get done, they’d just be grand standing all day, taking selfies, or breaking various rules.
I’m sure most people chosen would be fine, but it only takes a few bad apples to ruin the batch / process.
Trying to corrupt a set of random Americans who weren't selected by "being good at politics" would be like a game of Russian Roulette. Some people would go for it but sooner or later you'd be looking at the barrel of a gun or get the police called on you or something.
And when we look at amateur politicians (smaller elections, smaller electoral pools, first time candidates) then we see this happen.. more. Much, much more.
Government by lotto would dramatically increase corruption.
It's a known fact that smaller governments are more corrupt, but that's due to low levels of infrastructure for oversight, not because of some equivalence in corruptability of the career political players vs small/amateur players. [1]
Small outsider players with similar oversight as federal politics would surely be less corruptible in the ways we normally track
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_local_government
> Nothing would get done, they’d just be grand standing all day, taking selfies, or breaking various rules.
Yeah, that sounds very much like the current Congress...
You'd probably have to have a hardship opt-out for people who honestly couldn't do it for personal reasons. But as long as it wasn't too strenuous--and there's no reason it should be--most would be willing to do it, just like jury duty. It's a great idea, very democratic.
If the prosecutor tries to baffle the jury the jury won’t convict.
If something happens similar with “legislative juries” where they’d refuse to pass a complicated law they didn’t understand.
How do you explain to someone who doesn't understand high school level writing, let alone math, that "No, you can't just say Pi is 4, it doesn't work like that" in a way that they will agree in the end, rather than just calling you an elitist shithead who is patronizing them?
Today, legislation isn't written by legislators.[1] It's written by lobbyists and special interest groups, then massaged into its final form by legislative staff, who then provide a summary to the figurehead who will be voting on it. Since it's impossible for those legislating to really know what's in the bill, those creating it have no reason not to obfuscate it as much as possible, and every incentive to do so.
[1] https://publicintegrity.org/politics/state-politics/copy-pas...
You want to have 1000-page monstrosities? Knock yourself out. But you're going to have to actually read all 1000 pages. And you're going to have to persuade everyone else to also read all of it.
While I'm dreaming, I have a second dream change: Congress cannot exempt members of Congress from the effect of laws. Hey, Representative So-and-so, you want to change Social Security? You're changing your retirement, too. You want to change healthcare? You're changing your own healthcare, too.
If you've ever written code that wasn't clear and obvious and necessary to the dumbest script kiddie, it's bad code, right? I'm sure you love those PR bots that sass you for "function getting long" right? They are never wrong, right?
Why do we continue to insist, as the world gets ever more complicated, that non-experts not understanding expert things is a problem with the experts?
Most adults don't understand relativity, so it can't possibly be correct.
You would have to work out corruption of the common Joe here. Employers hold massive sway over their employees, and by nature of employing lots of people would have a pretty good chance of employing some fraction of the government. It would need to be possible for these randomly-selected individuals to enact policies that work counter to the interests of their employers without them fearing for their livelihood after their term. Otherwise, we just make lobbying cheap or free: “all of you—vote for this or else.” I think, at minimum, companies should be unable to terminate such individuals for some cooldown period after their term.
What I think we should do, is if the votes are close to unanimous as a matter of policy we report them only as "close to unanimous" without going into numbers. So for example if we have 100 delegates, and 95 voted for, and 5 against we just say "the vote was close to unanimous". And we do the same thing if the true vote was 100/0. All which would get published is that "the vote was close to unanimous", and the actual tally would get destroyed.
Maybe the threshold could be 10 people. So if the vote was 89/11 we would still publish that, but anything more one sided would just get reported as "close to unanimous" up to and including real unanimous votes.
It would still communicate the same thing: an overwhelming majority of delegates agreed on the thing being voted on. But would keep a fig-leaf of deniability for those who might otherwise be pressured.
That being said. I don't think people would vote unanimously on raising the minimum wage. Especially if the number of delegates is high (100 or above). You would get some people who either own a small business, or worry about the economy.
It filters for people who possess the ability to lie very convincingly, tell people what they want to hear, disregard their own failings, and high levels of superficial charm and a overwhelmingly strong desire for social status and access to power.
Also in the last 75 years or so, due to the way party politics dominate election choices and the nature of internal politics there has been a rise in the 'professionalization' of the political class. Decades ago representatives were often people with professional expertise and notority outside of politics who are more or less amateurs. Now the vast majority of politicians are people who have dedicated their entire lives to it.
However it is a profession with no professional standards, no training, no monitoring body, no certification system, and is largely unaccountable.
All of these are very bad things to have in a representational democracy because having a dedicated class of managers it is not representational at all.
Where as a lotto system solves all these problems.
Now take a representative body with 100 members. You get, say, five extremists on the left and seven on the right. The other 88 members basically leave those 12 extremists on the margins, and the extremists become irrelevant.
Now, if extremists (total of all flavors) exceed 50% of your population, you're in trouble. But you were probably in trouble in a democracy, too...
I'm sure statisticians could give a better answer than I can about where the line should be. I think it is basically a statistical question.
But for a one-person executive? No, probably not a good idea.
For senators and representatives there still is a little randomness, but when I look at many presidents that have been elected in recent years in various countries, it is more than obvious that any randomly chosen individual would have been almost certainly a less bad human and more suitable for the presidential position.
After a president is chosen by lottery, there should be a rejection procedure, to eliminate any really inappropriate candidate, but then a new candidate should be chosen by lottery to replace the rejected one, until no reasons for rejection can be found.
First, people talking about the Athenian system - it was limited to "Free men" of Athens. The discrimination might be something you feel we could counter today - all men and women could be selected - but what about convicted felons? Would they have a right to participate? Today, one is President of the USA (yes, I know, many think that's a sham, but legally he is). What about gay people? 50 years ago they almost certainly wouldn't have been allowed in. 150 years ago black people wouldn't. What about today's political third rail populations? Would communists or socialists or anarchists be allowed in? What about trans? Or people not born in the USA?
There will always be a group some part of the spectrum wants to other and exclude, but today there is a democratic short circuit: an Austrian can be voted into being the Governor of California; a convicted felon can be voted into the position of President; a transgender woman can be voted into Congress by her Delaware constituents.
Balloting - almost like voting today - will get systematic tinkering. Voting isn't perfect. Gerrymandering in the US is out of control and a more neutral system like the UK's needs creating, and yeah, donations are a mess...
... but choosing people at random is never really random, and there is no easy way to short circuit the orthodoxy. Minorities will get better representation at first, but they'll always be minorities and if the majority wants rid, they'll be locked out forever, just the same way women and slaves were in Athens.
If you trust the general population to vote a marginalized person into office in order to push legislation which benefits that marginalized community, why wouldn't you trust the general population to pass that legislation directly?
The only explanation I can think of is that you think that professional political representatives will have better ideas than the general population.
You cite the UK as an example, but it's even less representative than the US. Parties often win majorities in parliament with only ~35% of the vote.
Sortition meanwhile, takes a representative sample of the public and offers them the time and resources to carefully research and deliberate. It's much closer to the democratic ideal of direct rule by the demos.