Lottocracy: Democracy Without Elections
lottocracy.org
lottocracy.org
This is the same issue with term limits (which to be clear, I'm in favor of, but we have to go in with our eyes open), which is that e.g. the congressional staffers gain power, especially if they persist across the end of the term limit.
In these kinds of cases, you almost need term limits for staff, which feels pretty cruel and arbitrary - "Thank you for making a career in public service but you are now legally barred from your chosen career"
Term limits are like so many populist ideas: they sound great until you think at all about the consequences.
Effective government requires people with a long tenure. That's how you learn how the system operates, that's how you build the relationships that allow you to get things done, and that's how you build the reputation that allows you to get people to believe in what you say and accomplish things.
The fundamental problem is that governing is boring, complicated, and unfulfilling to most people. The most impactful elections to citizens' day-to-day lives (i.e., local offices, state legislatures, and primaries for those) have absolutely abysmal participation rates, even in states that bend over backwards with voter accessibility.
I'm really starting to think Thomas Jefferson was right and every 20 years we should just burn Washington to the ground, rip up the Constitution, hang every politician and start over, and make the new blood walk through the corpses on their way to work just to keep the fear of God fresh in their hearts.
FFS, Hillary Clinton had the long tenure. She had experience - implicitly as first lady, and explicitly as governor and secretary of state. She campaigned on policy. She lost to a buffoon conman sex pest with no political experience whose reputation hitherto was playing himself on tv.
Am I saying Hillary Clinton was a better person than Donald Trump? No. I'm not even saying she would have been a particularly good President. But I'm just pointing out how little "reputation" actually matters to American voters, because she was obviously vastly more qualified for the job, and if that mattered it wouldn't have been a contest at all. But the one thing Americans hate more than an experienced politician is an experienced legacy politician. FFS the most popular American President in recent history was an actor who had Alzheimers in office, and got advice from his wife's astrologer.
What he have is already an absolute catastrophe, an utter circus. The competent, well-meaning civic minded politicians you're referring to don't exist, nor does the educated, discerning voter base necessary to put them into office. People voted for Donald Trump the second time because they thought he could control the price of eggs. Like there was a fucking knob somewhere and Joe Biden just didn't want to turn it.
The least we can do is try to minimize the damage any specific idiot (in the voting booth or in office) might cause.
Just like, say, banning GMO bananas. But such regulation is a whole text which may need to define or refer to definitions of "GMO" and "banana", specify what's banned, exemptions, enforcement authority, penalties, and so on. Maybe 10 pages of legalese. It requires time, expertise, research. But it's still just a ban on GMO bananas.
Or a programmed UI button to show a message. Simple. The specifics of the execution are a separate matter.
It's not "indescribable", but no one will describe it to you ad hoc and expecting it is silly.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with lobbying, it is an essential part of the government and can not be legislated away, without crippling the entire country.
a) trade organizations (we're all the onion farmers in Nebraska and want to make sure the Nebraska legislature doesn't pass laws that negatively impact us and promote laws that help us)
and
b) activist organizations (we're a coalition of organizations that protect water usage in the Mississippi delta and want to pass laws that promote conservation in those states)
Those groups often choose to retain professional lobbyists but will also send groups of interested parties to lobby who are not professional lobbyists.
Do you also ban trade organizations and activist organizations in this case? Do you carve out exceptions for them and just ban the "freelance" lobbyists? Most lobbying is meeting with legislators and talking with them about issues, educating them. How do you ban that without making legislators effectively useless (or if you're cynical, even more useless)?
What we actually are angry about is the presence of money in politics. American political campaigns burn money like nothing else, which is akin to being in a government meeting where everyone is shouting over one another, like to the point where people are bringing in loudspeakers and megaphones. If that example were a real situation, it would be entirely legal to go and have police officers take away the megaphones, and tell people to quiet down and take their turn.
But because money is involved, SCOTUS says that, no, shouting over everyone else with a big pile of cash is TOTALLY protected speech. Any money at all that is to effect political speech is inherently protected. And so we have campaign seasons that burn billions of dollars, and people who are basically not listened to, because all the anti-bribery law that was supposed to stop the election fundraising arms race got thrown out over a decade ago.
[0] A citizen-led plan to reactivate Salt Lake City's historic train station and reroute our regional rail service over to it.
[1] Laws that would make it easier to purchase repair parts for broken electronics and prohibit the use of digital locks to prevent the repair of said electronics.
Yes, that's a variation of : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_state
A freshman senator might be intimidated by an aide who knows DC like the back of their hand after forty years in the office back room, but when they're back for their second, let alone third term, that old hack doesn't know the first thing about the actual job, that aide isn't in those meetings hashing out a 2am compromise with the White House, and they're not in a town hall back home trying to explain to some fellow who has never left Kentucky why we need to spend so much money on a Navy they've never seen.
Another alternative, which existing American politicians will hate but too bad, is age limits. For example the UK's Supreme Court all have to retire by age 75. I can't imagine a lot of the oldest senators are effective legislators, they'd rather be in bed than get stuff done. So, age them out.
Term limits are a bad hack trying to fix the problem that the status quo electoral system presents (1) too few meaningful choices, and (2) largely as a consequence of #1 and relatively stable local ideological mixes, features very strong incumbency preferences.
Fix the electoral system to resolve that (lots of ways to do that), and the broken idea of term limits stops being an attractive way to pretend that you are doing something without actually fixing the problems.
The book proposes financial incentives as a way to address this reluctance, such as paying the person 1.5 times their current salary. But that seems like it will lead to representatives who are only doing it for the money, not because they care about doing a good job.
And then, of course, there's always a chance that you end up in a "Napoleon of Notting Hill" situation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Napoleon_of_Notting_Hill
Part of me wonders what would happen if a lottery were used not to select representatives from among the population at large, but from among the candidates who have won their parties' respective primaries. Of course, then you'd have to decide whether to use weighted selections (which would strongly favor the entrenched parties) or non-weighted (which would give a strong edge to minor parties).
But realistically, sensible term limits seem like they would help achieve a lot of what the proposed lottocracy system would achieve.
The system would then morph into a variant of representative democracy. Instead of millions voting for, say, around a thousand of various level representatives, you get a random thousand "voting" for "consultants".
These consultants would be directly hired by the random thousand to do the work for them. They would predicably have marketing campaigns to make themselves seem the right pick. They might even offer their services for free. Demagoguery and corporate sponsorship as usual.
In the end 1000 people would hire, say, 1-1000 consultants to represent them. Thus emulating the original process, or worse. The only difference is the tiny electorate, which increases volatility.
If you'd like to regulate it to prevent this, you'd have to expend an effort and fight similar pressures as with doing it in any other system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
Having said that, it doesn't seem obvious to me that elected power is actually all that powerful, compared to unelected powers like corporations. I think you could use the same reasoning as pro-sortition arguments, but to argue for more democracy and elections, not less. Or at least that a state/citizen-focused theory of power is inadequate. (Raymond Geuss talks more about this.)
It’s all sorts of rubbish and not conducive to solving problems decisively but seems to be the only system where power doesn’t get monopolized
If you want effective rulers, you need Roman democracy. Each position is held only for a year, and you either win election to the next rank, or you’re out.
Corbyns and Bernies can’t just sit in the same seat for 50 years without ever doing anything. Morons can’t get to be ruler. Every step is an intense competition, encouraging boldness in public service.
They also had an amazing system for war declarations… only those eligible to fight were eligible to vote whether to declare war. The old and the weak were not allowed to vote in those specific ballots.
In each case, people came up with relatively "popular" solutions (one of them is still in progress)
In each case, the elected officials all but ignored the output, on the ground that the body had not been elected, was manipulated by experts, had no responsibility and accountability, etc...
Anyone who solves this will indeed have found an improvement over elective democracy.
In the case of the US, a lower hanging fruit would be getting out of "elections that can easily be bought by corporations with litteral money".
In fact, it does work, and it is already implemented! Here in Germany we also have the concept of „Bürgerräte“, and we have similar problems as in France (no political power to implement their solutions).
However, one takeaway was that people vastly underestimated how carefully the participants would try to understand the topic at hand. People that would usually just regurgitate angry propaganda were forced to form their own opinion and they did!
IMHO it’s this is a great tool for democracy that is yet underused.
What's worst is that, at least in France, there was an elegant solution to the problem : just ask the general population to approve or reject the proposals in a referendum. Even if the referendum was consultative, and even if the lawmakers were to make the law in the end, it would have massively made it harder to ignore the result.
And I would have loved to see the "popular jury" campaign for or against the measures.
I worked in tech, and after some formative experiences, shifted to working on helping ensuring ensure that tech's impact on society can serve the public interest. But that leaves the question of what "what is the public interest"?
Sortitition / lottocracy / deliberative democracy / mini-publics all roughly refer to the same way to answer that question — providing a representative microcosm with the space to deeply examine an issue, and come to a set of recommendations and decisions on it. Unlike with electoral democracy, it's faster to spin up and experiment with, and it's harder for bad actors to entrench power (elections can be useful, but they're one of many tools in the democratic toolbelt).
That thinking lead to https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/towards-platform-de... . That basic approach, has been somewhat picked up by Meta (https://www.wired.com/story/meta-ran-a-giant-experiment-in-g...) and Open AI (https://aligned.substack.com/p/a-proposal-for-importing-soci..., ~ leading to their democratic inputs and collective alignment work).
I've now started an organization focusing on applying this and other democratic paradigms to decision-making about AI (https://aidemocracyfoundation.org/) as a way to solve a variety of challenging governance problems across the AI stack. If you're curious about it, our ICML paper goes into more detail: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.09222 .
approval voting is great. i co-founded a major non-profit that got it adopted in fargo and st louis. for election by jury i'd advocate score voting, since higher resolution is more valuable with small groups.
Most western democracies already have a two-chamber system (commons/lords, congress/senate etc), but those two chambers are elected in very similar ways. Instead, we could make one of them elected by sortition, while keeping the other one a traditional democracy.
I'd personally split the sortition part into per-area committees. There'd be a main committee with members taken from the general populace, whose only job would be to create the rules of who can be chosen for which committee (e.g. only qualified doctors for medicine). That main committee would also manage inter-committee disputes, in cases where it's not obvious whether a particular committee should be given the right to vote on a particular bill.
“I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University.” -- William F. Buckley.
We should put more pressure on elected politicians around competence and integrity, sure, but it doesn’t mean random person is going to be better.
In the original comparison second category of people have much higher intellect than average.
I think that intellect may sometimes be weakly and unreliably associated with some kinds of competence, but not with integrity, which is as important. I think power seekers are self-selecting to be more self-serving.
We need to optimize for less self serving and more integrity but we should strive for smarter people up there too.
Not it's raining should I wear galoshes but, should I wear blue or red pants? Not should I buy a sports car or an SUV but do I want to do the things you can do with a sports car or the things you can do with an SUV?
It can get confusing because experts can help inform value judgments but they don't have anymore weight on making them then any other person.
When it comes to those choices having a random selection of a large group instead of a small selection of a group of "experts" is at least an arguable point of view.
That being said:
1: I think some aspect of randomly choosing legislative bodies helps avoid leaders who are power-seeking.
2: I think "Breaking the Two Party Doom Loop" speaks a lot more about how to fix the issues with elections. https://leedrutman.org/breaking-the-two-party-doom-loop
I think they're acknowledging as much.
The linked page makes it very clear that this is an old idea.
The Swiss do this. They are one of the populations most satisfied with their government. Referendums work.
Social media is the problem. We weren't this polarized until after the Bush admin, right as everyone on the planet got online.
Politics used to be civil. Republicans and Democrats in Congress used to go out to lunch together. Hyper online discourse and algorithms that boost rage ended that.
We're all being taught to foam at the mouth to increase screen time.
Rush Limbaugh was amping up the polarization in the late 1980's.
The US set up means that both of these parties are in power at some level and can never be removed.
It explains the problem with primaries. To summarize: In order to make it through your primary, you need to be ultra-conservative or ultra-liberal, and even support policies that don't make sense in a general election.
When I read his memoir, he didn't come across as polarized, but more naive about polarization in the media. He did mention that he regretted not having a better media presence.
Social media has exacerbated things in some ways, but in others, it's imposed an artificial civility as people get settled into their bubbles and vent online instead of taking action.
Just look at all the political violence in each decade of the 20th century in the US. Look at all the bombings, arson, murder, riots since 1950.
The dynamics have changed, but it'll be decades or more before humanity is anywhere near culturally settled down with the internet and instant global communication. It's already a net good, but massive online platforms and entrenched power players manipulating narratives and so on still need to be calibrated in policy.
The civility you remember might simply have been that all the violence wasn't being reported and headlining in major outlets 24/7. The threshold for newsworthy events and the willing participation of news outlets in managing perception created a very sterile and civil seeming facade over what's been more or less constant chaos.
Civility serves those taking an ever-growing fraction of the country's wealth generation.
The best we can hope for is that those with the most power have our interests at heart.
1) There are very few prerequisites for electoral candidates, mostly just age minimums (with no maximums). In some but not all cases there's a residency requirement, and in the case of the POTUS, a birthright citizenship requirement. Otherwise, there is no specific requirement for intelligence, knowledge, experience, ethics, etc. Basically, any random citizen who's old enough can run, and win, as long as they can somehow convince enough other people to vote for them. And there are some incredible dumbasses who get elected; I'll mention my own Senator Ron Johnson as particularly noteworthy in that department, but the list is quite long IMO.
2) The random voters who are so distrusted by critics of sortition are the very same people who are entrusted with voting for the candidates in elections that are supposedly superior to sortition. How exactly is that supposed to work, where that outcome, election outcomes, are magically better than the outcomes of voters deliberating among themselves?
What I like about sortition is that I think the odds are a lot better to select honest, good-intentioned, non-corrupt people by lot than by election. The latter tends to pick out the power-hungry, and in a political system where campaigns are privately financed, elections also tend to pick out the financially corrupt.
The situation would be a lot different if for example we had stringent standardized tests as prerequisites for political office, but we don't. Ironically, you have to pass the bar to be a lawyer, but you don't have to pass the bar to be a lawmaker.
The word I think they are looking for is sortition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-party_system
Maybe Americans should question why new parties cannot be formed that actually represent their people instead of looking to replace democracy entirely with...a lottery? I can't comment further because I am not American.
However, NZ has a proportional voting system that leads to coalitions forming governments. This is considered a good thing, but can lead to…interesting outcomes. The current government is very much the dog being wagged by a couple of nasty tails. Current PM is a weak “I've run a company so can run a country” type.
Hopefully a successful company, that is.
His management experience at Air NZ has not correlated with strong leadership. Compare him with the previous PM (Jacinda Ardern) and most Kiwis, even the right, would agree she handled things better. A few lefties like myself think she could have done more (especially wrt to housing policy) with the immense political capital she had just before Covid, but oh well.
You didn't ask for any of that sorry!
Denmark seems to be pretty solidly Venstre vs the Social Democrats since the mid nineties with many other parties.
Israel is genuinely multiparty, with a rule that Benjamin Netanyahu must be returned every few years.
Germany is multiparty on paper like Ireland but is dominated by the Christian Democrats and the SPD at federal level. Every Bundeskanzler of West Germany and post-reunification Germany comes from these two. Ditto every president except Gauck.
In mamy countries, there is a level of nepotism with close relatives of former political figures taking charge. Canada, the USA, India, Greece and Thailand have all had this, with some of the same names repeating over the course of generations.
the problem with most politicians is that they're the sort of people who want to be politicians
But the sortition-based systems are in general quite terrible exactly because they lack the feedback loops that keep societies stable. The main problem with the current administration, for example, is its disdain for these checks and balances and desire to move fast and break all the written and unwritten traditions.
There are also examples of failed sortition-based systems. I can give you the Soviet Union as one example. On paper, it was ruled by the Supreme Council ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Soviet_of_the_Soviet_U... ). Its delegates were chosen mostly randomly from workers and then approved by a public vote. Yet it was a complete rubber-stamp organization with zero actual power.
Sortition made sure of that, people couldn't form reliable alliances and power-hungry people who could initiate real reforms almost never actually got chosen.
At some point you need adults in the room(in mind, not age). Our system is obviously not great, but this is a way to make it much worse.
But this is a fun thought experiment so lets .... move on.
Why *exactly* is democracy the absolute best form of govt known to mankind? You just kinda slip that in there which is a massive assumption. And exactly which democracy is best aside from the one proposed?
For that matter exactly WHO? and I do mean WHO says that democracies aren't working? Who the fuck has the balls to say that horseshit premise?
No one is saying that. Not seriously, anywhere. No one. That ultimately is the fatal flaw for this thought experiment.
There are fundamentally different value judgments from "European" "Democracies" vs US vs Asian as examples.
Lottery based is an interesting system but not really doable the way this site lays out.
3 years is too short to do anything; unless there is a relief value where a certain percentage (by lottery) of that year's cohort can do something critical in any representative form of govt. Incumbency.
You do in fact need a slowly revolving core of representatives who can do proper work over 2-5 terms max. Otherwise its a constant nut house with nothing getting done and not near enough permanence for medium to long term solutions over time.
At the end of the day for me -- I do not think the people behind this thought this through and it shows. There isnt serious skull sweat in this thing and I think it undermines an interesting concept. I also think just because you are frustrated in democratic processes -- you are the problem.
Apathy is a choice. Ignorance is a choice. Frustration is a choice.
If you do not like your form of govt -- move, make peace with it or roll up them sleeves and get busy participating.
I get that Yarvin is an icky fascist bigot, but just read the political thinkers he got his ideas from. The idea that the elected representatives, much less the method by which representatives are chosen, have any meaningful impact on politics is just laughable.
How do we prove non-evil?
Also the exam part brings to mind the Chinese imperial exams for civil service.
I don't know whether that's good or bad, it didn't work out well for them.
Non-evilness would be shown by answering questions designed to test basic empathy, and also by the lack of recent recorded crimes or misdemenours.