This may show that I'm biased, but the idea of a randomized group of citizens making the law of the land scares the heck out of me. There is a non-trivial amount of nuance and compromise that goes in lawmaking.
Now, the idea of electing a few thousand representatives and having sortition determine who is actually selected is something I could feasibly get behind.
> There is a non-trivial amount of nuance and compromise that goes in lawmaking.
We just passed that "big beautiful bill" and it was quite clear nobody knew or cared what was in it, beyond it being "trump's bill he wants". I'm guessing staffers and lobbyists had a far more detailed understanding of their portions than any elected official did.
It's a reasonable guess that 100 randos would actually write a better bill.
For what it is worth they probably wouldn't write the bill, just vote on it.
If they wouldn't write or read the bill, they'd be like modern day politicians. Or I guess politicians in general.
“Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.” Mark Twain
But the status quo is considered anomalous by most of the world, so I would not use it as a benchmark.
I'm all in for some continuous improvement experiments for democracy:
- modest proposal: yes, have X random people in government, but have a Y-month paid training period before they serve for Z years; ALSO ensure their families want for nothing (read, a decent non-luxurious lifestyle), but prohibit receiving money from lobbyists, PACs, gifts, etc... AND, ensure they get reintegrated into society in a nonpolitical field (with some exceptions) by also offering Y-month long paid training in different fields.
The corruption costs reduction would significantly outweigh any increase in payroll and training.
"Simple" remedies for American democracy:
Technically totally feasible, just impossible due to the current owners.Also
* Expand the Supreme Court
I'd add:
* Expand the House (and make provisions that keep it updated with each census).
* Statehood for US territories.
The systemic problems with our democracy seem pretty clear, really.
> Expand the House (and make provisions that keep it updated with each census).
Interesting. Looking in from a country with a smaller lower house, I think members in the US are already so numerous they seem to fade to the background and their survival becomes mostly about party politics not making a good impression on their district. It's not like most of them could make a good speech while most members are present and listening. Only senators seem individually important enough to make a name for themselves (with the exception of the speaker etc).
But I've never lived and voted in the US so maybe I'm missing something important here.
I absolutely agree. You are just moving the lack of representation to the next level if you increase the size of the house. House members need to know each others and works with each others to be effective. And this is where math says things turn ugly, the size of the graph connecting all house members grows exponentially, until at a certain size (which I believe we have already reached) it is simply unmanageable. the solution might be to add yet another layer in the system. Naively, it seems that democracy is hard to scale (this does not mean that we should no try though). But last time I tried to bring up that concern on HN it did not go well...
Members of the House of Representatives’ first obligation to my view is knowing their constituents. Knowing each other may not help as much as you may think unless you’re on a committee. As the population increases, members of the House were meant to increase. This increasing size has been arrested.
That is a hack which would be last in line. First and foremost, there should be no "legal bribery" of any justice -- up the salaries and fluff up the goodies (housing, etc), but otherwise zero outside income, with a blind trust for all assets.
One very thorny issue is the fact that our system of government is built on respect for the law and the institutions, but the current regime has learned they can just do whatever they want with virtual impunity. They brought tanks, drones and nukes to a knife fight, and the other side is completely unarmed and trying to talk them out of the fight.
We are so fucked.
Anomalies cause extinction events.
Well, it's our benchmark, because it's our status quo. That is, you measure any proposed change for here against the way it currently works here, not the way it works in country X.
It is anomalous in the historical context of the same country.
Otoh, the degradation of democracy into oligarchy and then tyranny was called by Socrates...
Actually, "right wing government gets elected and gets a huge omnibus bill passed that the parliament didn't even read" has been a worldwide trend for some years now. Closest example that comes to mind is probably Argentina, which managed to pass its own controversial right-wing omnibus bill in June last year [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Bases_and_Starting_Poin...
There are many proposed models for how to incorporate sortition into governance. Some examples:
- A randomly selected lower house with an elected upper house (or the reverse)
- policy juries which deliberate only on one specific piece of legislation, which then must be approved by a separate oversight jury before taking effect
- election by jury, where candidates are chosen by "elector juries" who interview and vet the candidates before selecting one
- multi-layer representative selection based on the Venetian model where randomly selected bodies elect representatives, of whom a random subset are chosen to then appoint officials
Right now the lottocratic/sortition-based bodies that exist are purely advisory, though in some places like Paris and Belgium they have gained a good amount of soft power.
It wouldn't be that hard to implement a conservative version of one of these in certain US states though. For example, add "elect by jury" to the ballot, where if it wins the plurality, a grand jury is convened to select the winner (counties in Georgia already use grand juries to appoint their boards of equalization, so there is precedent).
> Now, the idea of electing a few thousand representatives and having sortition determine who is actually selected is something I could feasibly get behind.
Since the linked article is to a substack called “Assemble America” I feel I should point out that if the apportionment House of Representatives had not been capped at 435 reps, the House would indeed be several thousand strong by now.
That's what bicameral legislatures[1] were meant to address.
Ideally, the lower house are representatives elected from the common people, and the upper house are the career politicians that understand how the government works.
In the U.S., the 17th amendment[2] changed that, for better or worse (probably both).
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventeenth_Amendment_to_the_U...
Ideally, the upper house is gradually stripped of its powers, as it's undemocratic by design.
IIRC it's actually somewhat rare to have a bicameral legislature where both houses have roughly symmetrical powers.
"Undemocratic by design" applies to the whole Constitution, since everything in it requires supermajorities to change. A legislature is undemocratic in that it restricts voting to representatives. Due process is another constraint on democracy. This is to say that "undemocratic" is not necessarily a bug, since pure democracy is rule by the whim of the mob.
> the idea of a randomized group of citizens making the law of the land scares the heck out of me.
Here in the US, we use randomized groups of citizens to determine who gets locked away potentially for life or executed. Does a jury of peers also scare the heck out of you?
> Does a jury of peers also scare the heck out of you?
Honestly, yes. In the case of criminal culpability, it just happens to be the least scary of the available options of who gets to send someone to jail.
For lawmaking, this isn't the case: the work for lawmakers is much more detailed and gameable than a binary question of guilt.
> Does a jury of peers also scare the heck out of you?
Those are screened.
Someone like https://youtu.be/00q5cax96yU?t=60 could be selected without some additional constraints than plain sortition. Ofc then those constraints are politicized.
Regardless of how the average person may feel about it on a surface level, I think it's absolutely critical that congress has so many lawyers elected. These people write laws, we need people who actually understand the way law works doing that job.
Elected representatives do not write laws. Their legislative aides write the laws. While some state governments have highly professionalized legislative aides, in the federal government, such positions are typically poorly paid stepping stone jobs filled by people in their late 20s/early 30s who have little domain expertise.
Not true.
The majority of the bills are written by lobbyists. Most of the bills introduced are so called "copycat" bills.
USA TODAY and the Republic found at least 10,000 bills almost entirely copied from model legislation were introduced nationwide in the past eight years, and more than 2,100 of those bills were signed into law.
Special interests sometimes work to create the illusion of expert endorsements, public consensus or grassroots support. One man testified as an expert in 13 states to support a bill that makes it more difficult to sue for asbestos exposure. In several states, lawmakers weren’t told that he was a member of the organization that wrote the model legislation on behalf of the asbestos industry, the American Legislative Exchange Council.
https://publicintegrity.org/politics/state-politics/copy-pas...
That is good for the form, OTOH the content (objet of the law, which is almost more important, one can argue) is more often that not, not related to the field where lawyers are experts (from sociology to engineering, through economics and medicine) that is typically handled by expert’s consultants, comities, etc.
So bottom line, I’m not so sure is so important that representatives are laywers. Maybe a good mix should be ok?
Maybe it is time to change how laws work if you need trained experts to understand them. Seems extremely harmful to everyone else who is not lawyer.
Any adversarial system that exists for a long time has such issues. Go pull up the rulebook for any professional sport.
Ambiguities get adjudicated and then built into the next version of the rulebook and so it goes with laws. Terms are given specific meaning over time by court decision and are used as boilerplate.
In practice it creates a very strong incentive to write laws in a way that reinforces the "rule of lawyers", creating an exclusionary positive feedback loop.
Given that legalese is still commonly prone to interpretation. I‘d rather have more Mathematics and Computer science people to ensure proper logic in the texts ;-)
might as well throw in some "red team" types to propose potential loopholes/grey areas.
Aren't most of those lawyers the select few that can afford to go into politics?
Our elected reps neither write nor even read the laws that are passed. Laws are written by lobbyists and aides, if we're lucky with direction from the representatives.
Have you ever really paid attention to the members of the US House of Representatives?
There are some strong outliers but most are way below the bar of random selection. Do-nothing political nepo babies who are nothing but loud and in a gerrymandered district.
That's due to politics being a team sport, and everyone, including the voters, understanding that it's a team sport.
Getting your team control of a branch of government is way more important than having a 'good' rep in your district, because if you don't, they won't have any ability to do anything for it anyways.
If you couldn't get someone you wanted in the primaries, you just have to hold your nose, close your eyes, lie back, and vote for whomever made it through.
Whether this results in long term problems is a bit of an academic question, given that every election in the past decade is one where you either get to vote for the status quo, or an insane cult of personality.
Alberta has been struggling with this lately, the province on the whole keeps voting in 90% or more Conservative MPs, but Canada on the whole puts the Liberal party in charge. And so Albertans get frustrated that they don't feel like they've got any voice in things.
Little do they realize that a more proportional system that would have them elect reps from the "bad" party in order to get them reps in the ruling party to advocate internally for Alberta does have benefits...
1. Canadian elections outside of Alberta have a different dynamic because they are a three/four horse race - and in certain election cycles, they have a lot of strategic voting (this last one was a good example of it).
2. Canadian Liberals aren't US MAGA, when they win an election they don't spend six months in caucus to figure out how they can do their best to punish the provinces and people that didn't vote for them.
There's a lot of far-right propaganda in Alberta that implies #2 is happening, but it's not actually factual. Its oil & gas sector has reached record output under the Trudeau government, and Carney is not exactly looking to kill it, either.
Transfer payments are really the only legitimate grievance Alberta should have with the federal government. All of its other problems are either imagined, self-inflicted, are caused by other provinces, or are caused by the US.
> All of its other problems are... caused by other provinces
I'm going to gently push back on that one a bit. Partially, yes, but also in part due to the federal government deferring to provinces in cases where it actually has the constitutional authority to override them.
>> because if you don't, they won't have any ability to do anything for it anyways.
Well seems even the "home team" cant do anything either, so why not go for better candidates.
When I was in 4th grade, we struggled with public education, healthcare, etc. Now I have 4th graders of my own and they struggle with the same issues. No progress in a generation.
I think it could work well if you added two things:
1. A filtering mechanism after the selection process. E.g., basic civics questions like how many states are there, a background check, and so on. To make sure you don't pick anyone that's compromised or incapable of serving.
2. A training program that acclimates new members to the system. If terms are say, six years long, then the first year can be entirely devoted to training.
> A training program that acclimates new members to the system. If terms are say, six years long, then the first year can be entirely devoted to training.
A more organic version of this would be to select at random from people who already served at a lower level. Pick random citizens for city council, then for state you pick from the pool of people who have been city councillors in the past, then for country you pick from people who have already served at the state level. You could, in addition, add past picks to a "veteran pool" to ensure a small percentage of the legislature has been there before and can suffuse their experience.
> 1. A filtering mechanism after the selection process. E.g., basic civics questions like how many states are there, a background check, and so on. To make sure you don't pick anyone that's compromised or incapable of serving.
This is a famously bad idea for U.S. politics.
Like, if you started a grass roots organization with this as your #1 idea, you'd have to eventually dismantle the entire edifice as 100% of your time would be spent answering questions about how this is different than tactics of the Jim Crow era. You'd also make yourself radioactive to any future grassroots efforts: e.g., "Citizens for an Educated Congress: wait a sec, is this that Jim Crow Guy again?" :)
I don’t see any need for that. There are enough weirdos in politics today that the weirdo rate might even go down when selecting people at random.
This training thingy sounds sensible. But who controls the contents of the training? That body will have quite some power.
Could just make it as a public-based majority referendum type thing, and keep it extremely simple. I don't think it would need to be very complicated. You just want to filter out the truly insane people.
The actually dangerous people are not the obviously insane, but the machiavellian dark triad types. Those will pass your test.
I think the current political system probably selects more for that type of person than my proposed randomized one, in which they are far less likely to be chosen vs. an average well-adjusted person.
Yep, I can get behind sortition between qualified candidates.
I disagree with your example, but things like deciding supreme court justices over the population of judges or department heads over the population of professors seem quite ok.
For lawmaking in particular, it looks like a bad idea. There will be lots of people trying to con the uninformed representatives into behaving badly.
I've long been in favor of sortition, but with (as suggested in the article) a set of qualifying criteria.
Not selecting absolute random people, but people who have established their ability to intelligently handle responsibility, and avoid breaking the law. E.g., once you have achieved a certain level of educational attainment (3.0+ at well-ranked college, managerial-level at established biz, certain mil leadership rank, etc.), pass security clearance, pass citizenship test, etc., you are in the qualified pool, and may be called upon to serve in a legislature. The always-a-newbie problem could be solved by allowing legislators to serve 2nd or maybe 3rd terms by re-election/confidence vote. Same for POTUS, possibly selected by sortition out of the existing legislators who pass a confidence vote.
There is no way a reasonably and responsibly selected random group of achieving responsible people would do worse than a corrupt or craven group, especially worse than the selected-for-corruption — i.e., selected for loyalty-to-leader — currently seated.
What you're proposing would be swiftly corrupted by the people in power deciding what qualifies as "educated enough" or "security clearance".
Accept anyone from Jebus University with its miraculous 100% graduation rate, exclude anyone with a record of "Disrespecting an Officer", and the pool is quickly skewed, a reinforcing feedback-loop in favor of the groups doing the skewing.
True, you cannot start sortition as a good means of re-distributing power in an already centralized system.
It is a method to help maintain a balanced distributon of power, not created it when already gone awry.
In democracies, the branches of govt, legislative, executive, & judicial, and the institutions of society including the press, academia, industry, finance, sport, religion, etc. are all independent and serve to distribute and balance power. In autocracies, all of those are corrupted and/or coerced to serve the whims of the executive.
So, of course, an already-powerful centralized executive would be able to corrupt it as you describe.
But it seems much more difficult to make it happen in a well-balanced system, particularly when some have the responsibility to ensure ongoing fairness.
Do you have a better solution?
I feel that adding qualifying criteria is an attempt to solve a problem that hasn't been demonstrated to exist, in a way that hasn't been demonstrated to work. The main threat to a well-functioning society are people acting in bad faith. We will never be able to test effectively for those, and they will try to game any criteria we set up. Besides, uneducated people may not be very effective in coming up with solutions, but their presence is important to remind educated people of their existence.
If we want to be very careful about a reform like this, we should test it at a smaller scale, such as a city for instance. We can start without any criteria and see if that works well enough. If it does, no need to overcomplicate things.
>>adding qualifying criteria
It is not merely adding qualifying criteria, it is setting qualifications AND sortition to select legislators and executives.
>>solve a problem that hasn't been demonstrated to exist ...The main threat to a well-functioning society are people acting in bad faith.
Your second sentence there is entirely correct, and specifically disproves the first. We have a problem
>>we should test it at a smaller scale, such as a city for instance
100% agree, we should test and adjust any changes before scaling up
>>start without any criteria and see if that works well enough
We've pretty much demonstrated that it doesn't
>>uneducated people may not be very effective in coming up with solutions, but their presence is important to remind educated people of their existence.
We do not need to hand uneducated people the keys to power to be reminded of their existence, any more than we should give loaded handguns to toddlers to be reminded of their existence. Intelligent people suitable for leadership can remember the existence of both just fine, thank you. Moreover, with qualified sortition, the selection is random so it is highly likely that qualified, educated, accomplished people who are adjacent to people with issues will be p[ut in power and able to do something for them
But you can't evaluate it in a vacuum. It needs to be compared to the current state of affairs, and to other realistic alternatives.
Our political system effectively selects for sociopathic con men. So would you prefer your laws to be written by those people vs a random group?
Two relevant quotes from writers who could not be more different:
“I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 faculty members of Harvard University.” - William F Buckley Jr
“Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.” - Douglas Adams
The US system is biased towards rural areas and swing states because of the electoral college. Randomness would average out to the will of the people. Like unbiased path tracing, you know?