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.