The underlying assumption here seems to be that there is no or even negative value in someone actively specializing their labor into politics, and I just don't think that's true. To the extent we have to "do politics" at all [1], it's probably best handled by the people who have dedicated their lives to becoming politicians, the same way that getting your house wired is probably best done by someone who spent their life becoming an electrician.
In fact, if anything, this system seems like it would be even easier to game compared to the status quo. If you select truly at random from the population you're going to pull a lot of people with not a lot in the way of resources, making for a very easy to bribe block, even if you have to repeat the bribes every few years as people shuffle through. If you don't - if you select randomly from, say, only the group of people who got perfect scores on the SATs, or from white land owning males - you're practically begging for tacit collusion as they realize they have essentially the same power that HOAs do when it comes to what we'll do next. Democratically elected politicians at least have enough sense to understand they have to balance their short run desires with their long run interests in continuing to be democratically elected politicians.
[1]: Which I don't admit we should in the first place, cf https://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/papers/passivity.htm for one reason why.
> best handled by the people who have dedicated their lives to becoming politicians, the same way that getting your house wired is probably best done by someone who spent their life becoming an electrician
Being an electrician makes you good at wiring houses in ways that work, that pass code inspections, and that don't burn down. The feedback loop isn't perfect (you're likely to succeed for a while if you produce flawed work fast that looks good enough to your boss), but it's at least feeding back in the right direction.
Being a politician makes you good at different things - fundraising, advertising, speeches, getting your name in the news - which are totally unrelated or even opposed to creating and executing legislation that is good for society. Sortition says that this relationship is so bad that the outcome under a lottery (the 50th percentile, eliminating the 49% of the population who would be better than average at the job) results in better outcomes than career politicians.
This is an incredibly limited understanding of what "politics" entails and also seems to be primarily informed by the outcome of the US political system.
Most politicians outside the narrow world of US national (or otherwise high-profile) politics have very little contact with fundraising or advertising and few will ever give a speech to more than a handful of people. I.e. most parliamentarian democracies are chuck full of politicians that even most of their direct constituents couldn't name with a gun to their heads, even at the national level.
In these kind of systems, actual expertise is really important and political parties will cultivate subject-matter experts and provide them with secure seats or list positions without necessarily putting them into front-row politics. It's just the smart thing to do, if you actually want to have any effect after winning an election.
> If you select truly at random from the population you're going to pull a lot of people with not a lot in the way of resources, making for a very easy to bribe block, even if you have to repeat the bribes every few years as people shuffle through.
This is incorrect: elected politicians are much easier to bribe, because bribery of them is totally legal via campaign contributions. It's both expected and indeed necessary for politicians to ask for and take large amounts of money from others for their job.
Policing corruption of randomly selected citizens would be much easier, because the expectation is that none of them would be asking for money or accepting money for their jobs. With strict auditing, anything out of the ordinary would be pretty easy to spot. The problem with the current system is that vast transfers of money to legislators are perfectly ordinary.
Also, with random selection, the odds are higher of finding one or more inherently honest and ethical people who will blow the whistle if there's some kind of mass bribery scheme. But our current pay-to-play election system is a mass bribery scheme. Ask any politician how much time they spend fundraising: it's just a crazy % of their time. You may think politicians are lazy because they take so many breaks from legislating, but they're actually taking breaks to go out and fundraise.
Anyway, I think it's a misconception that poorer people are easier to bribe than richer people. It's also a misconception that richer people are "more successful". In my experience, richer people tend to be more obsessed with money. Many average people just want to be happy, have a family, have friends, enjoy life. They are satisfied with what they have. The only purpose of their job is to make it possible for them to go home from their job. Whereas people at the top never seem to be satisfied with what they have and always want more, more, more.
What does it mean to be "good at doing politics", though?
In a representative democracy, because of the very nature of the selection process at hand, it means "getting elected at all costs". Which is not all the same - and in many cases directly counter to - the desired goal of "governing well".
The French government and private interest groups alike attempted to manipulate the Citizens Convention for Climate back in 2019 and were not successful fwiw. When lobbyists tried to approach delegates outside the convention, they were quickly snitched on. Existing legal frameworks for preventing corruption among jurors and elected officials should suffice to protect assemblies from similar influence attempts.
Would you necessarily know if they were successful? Can you actually prove that not a single person in that convention accepted some kind of kickback for e.g. changing their vote?
Mechanisms that effectively prevent this do exist in the literature, to be clear, but I rarely hear of those ones actually getting implemented.
Well we mostly know what positions these groups were pushing for. It's possible that some influence went unnoticed.
That said, the US used to have quite a lot of juror bribery in the late 1800s and managed to successfully crack down on it with harsh penalties, sting operations, and other strategies. Attempting to bribe a juror can get you 15 years in federal prison in the US, it's not taken lightly.