Random Selection in Politics is a book by Professor Lyn Carson and Professor Brian Martin. Here’s an excerpt from the book’s introduction.
“Government
by elected representatives is taught in schools and presented in the media as the natural way of doing things. Powerfully
legitimized by the ideas of mandate and merit, representatives elected under this system consider that the electorate has
given them a mandate to govern, while bureaucrats consider that merit and expertise justify their role in a powerful decision-making
elite. Representative government obviously is a great improvement over previous systems of rule, such as feudalism, autocracy,
and dictatorship; but nevertheless it is a system of rule in which citizens have relatively little impact on a day-to-day
basis.”
“Representative government has its limitations. It concentrates power in a parliament or congress, and the elected
representatives can become vulnerable to vested interests. The voters are given responsibility only for opinion formation,
not decision-making, and the representatives who make the decisions have low accountability. These and other problems are
inevitable in representative government because it is a system in which a small number of people — politicians and high-level
bureaucrats — have a great deal of power that can be exercised to serve powerful interests, including their own interests.”
“Most
people attribute problems with representative government to individual politicians and specific policies. A standard assumption
is that if the right people could be elected and the correct policies implemented, then everything would be okay. But the
problems go much deeper.”
“We want to step aside from a belief in the ideas of mandate and merit as rationales for governance, since they are
used to stymie efforts to foster greater citizen participation. We suggest instead a different foundation for fostering participation
and diffusing power: random selection.”
“The assumption behind random selection in politics is that just about anyone
who wishes to be involved in decision making is capable of making a useful contribution, and that the fairest way to ensure
that everyone has such an opportunity is to give them an equal chance to be involved. Random selection worked in ancient Athens.
It works today to select juries and has proved, through many practical experiments, that it can work well to deal with policy
issues.”
“Random selection can be used to promote both small-scale and large-scale political participation, from a tiny exercise
in street improvement to a national electoral system. Like election, it needs to be used sensibly, with appropriate controls
to ensure best operation.”
Let’s Toss for It: A Surprising Curb on Political Greed is a research paper by Sigmund Knag. Here’s an excerpt.
“Nowadays elections are almost universally regarded
as the keystone of political affairs. Besides paying taxes and perhaps serving in the military, average citizens participate
in political life mainly by voting. Although people disagree about election procedures and often feel disgust with election
outcomes, hardly anyone today doubts that elections provide the only way to establish, legitimize, and control a government.
Historically, however, general elections have been the exception rather than the rule for selecting and guiding governments.
Alternatives include various autocratic or despotic systems and processes and, in more democratic systems, methods that supplement
or substitute for elections. Among the latter is lot-drawing, also known as sortition (from the Latin root sort, meaning ‘lot’).
This procedure has intriguing characteristics and effects as well as potential for present-day utility. In this article, I
discuss its history and nature and consider some possible applications in the American political system.”
Sortition is an on-line article in the open source encyclopedia Wikipedia. Here's an excerpt.
“Sortition (also
known as allotment) is a fair method of selection by some form of lottery such as drawing coloured pebbles from a bag. It
is used particularly to allot decision makers. In ancient Athenian democracy, sortition was the primary method for appointing officials, a system that was thought to be one of the principal characteristics
of democracy. It is today commonly used to select jurors in Anglo-Saxon based legal systems.”
“Fairness &
Equality. Sortition is inherently fair in that it ensures all citizens have an equal chance of entering office irrespective
of any bias in society and implies an equal society where there is no meaningful difference between all the members of the
society, which would make one more suitable than another.”
“Democratic. Almost all Greek writers who mention
democracy (including Aristotle, Plato, and Herodotus) both emphasize the role of selection by lot or state outright that being
allotted is more democratic than elections. For example, Aristotle says: ‘It is thought to be democratic for the offices
to be assigned by lot, for them to be elected is oligarchic.’ We see the same idea in the 18th century after the re-emergence
of democracy in the writings of Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu: ‘The suffrage by lot is natural to democracy,
as that by choice is to aristocracy.’”
“Less corruptible than elections because processes can be developed
to ensure that selection is completely fair. For example, Athenians used complex allotment procedures with complicated machine
to allot officers. Like Athenian democrats, critics of electoral politics in the 21st century argue that the process
of election by vote is subject to manipulation by money and other powerful forces; and because legislative elections give
power to a few powerful groups they are believed to be less democratic system than selection by lot from amongst the population.”
Casting and Drawing Lots: A Time Honoured Way of Dealing
with Uncertainty and for Ensuring Fairness is a research paper by William A. Silverman and Iain Chalmers. It’s posted on the internet and it’s available
as a free pdf download. Here's an excerpt.
“The lot causeth disputes to cease, and it decideth between the mighty.
–
Proverbs 18:18."
“Casting lots for Divination. The Hebrew bible makes a number of references to lots. For
example, Jonah declared ‘Let us cast lots, that we may know for whose cause this evil is upon us’; and the whole
book of Esther is the story of Purim, which means ‘lots.’ Although the masses were forbidden by Jewish law to
cast lots for divination — which was the prerogative of the priests — God’s authorities on earth were allowed
to use lottery devices to guide judgements. Thus the chief priest carried sacred stones inside his breastplate, through which
he sensed divine intentions. The stones gave God’s answer, determined when the ‘Yes’ or the ‘No’
stone was drawn out. King David consulted this oracular medium before going into battle: when the ‘Yes’
stone appeared, forecasting his victory over the Philistines, he set off on the warpath. Although the early fathers of the
Christian church were vigorously opposed to divination by lots, sometimes excommunicating those who practised it, this did
not stop the Church itself using this method for decision-making. For example, in 782 CE, when the bishops of Poitiers, Autun,
and Arras all claimed the body of St. Leger, lots were cast, with the result that the saintly remains were handed over to
the Bishop of Poitiers.”
“Lottery Versus Authority and Fallible Human Judgement. In the past, the results of drawing lots were considered
to reflect divine guidance. Today the results are more likely to be regarded as reflecting the play of chance. Lotteries to
decide which citizens shall risk their lives in defence of their countries have been accepted as a fair, democratic solution
to a problem of difficult choices. Lots for the 1917 military draft in the United States were drawn in public, in the presence
of the President and other dignitaries, by a blindfolded Secretary of State. The words of the US Secretary of the War Department
capture its essence: ‘This is an occasion of great dignity and some solemnity. It represents the
first application of a principle believed by many of us to be thoroughly democratic, equal, and fair in selecting soldiers
to defend the national honor abroad and at home.’”
“Drawing Lots to Ensure Fairness. Whether or
not divine intervention is invoked as the mechanism through which the casting of lots leads to decisions, the method has been
recognised for millennia as a way of ensuring fairness in deciding difficult matters. Thus, the land of Canaan was distributed
among the tribes of Israel by lots (‘And ye shall inherit the land by lot according to your families.’ –
Numbers 33.54). Sometimes lots have been used to deal with particularly dire circumstances. When it became apparent in 73
CE that the zealot Jewish soldiers at Masada could not survive, they drew lots to select the ten men who would carry out the
mass suicide. The immediate survivors of shipwrecks have also had to take life or death decisions in attempts to ensure that
at least some of them would able to return home alive.”
A Citizen Legislature is a book by Ernest Callenbach and Michael Phillips. Its text is posted
on the internet. Here’s its description followed by an excerpt.
“Americans are worried about Congress,
and they are right to worry. The founding fathers intended Congress to be representative of all Americans — ‘a
portrait of the people in miniature.’ But today 95% of its members are still white, male, property-owners, almost half
of them lawyers. Congressmembers receive over $300,000,000 in campaign contributions, and their votes follow the demands of
the wealthy sources that provide these funds. As one observer in Washington puts it, we now live in a ‘special interest
state.’ Congress is not doing the job it was established to do. Many reformers recognize this threat, but solutions
that only deal with campaign spending have failed to reach the root of the problem. Now there is a scientific way to select
legislators so they will be truly representative. This process worked for the ancient Greeks over more than two centuries.
We can make it work in our society today. We can vote it in, using the people’s initiative powers on the state level
as a start. This book tells how our new system will operate, how it will fit into the existing American governmental
structure, and how it will restore a direct, powerful voice in Washington to the whole of America.”
“It
happens that there is an easy and even inexpensive way to choose representatives for a legislative body so that they would
in fact be a ‘transcript’ of the whole society: sortition, or selection by lottery, which was
used by the Athenians to choose representatives for two centuries. The time has come to examine this type of direct representation
as a possible way to bring the whole people’s voice to Washington. We have changed our notions of what constitutes proper
representation many times in American history. Voting rights in the original thirteen states could be exercised only by free,
white, propertied men; it was not until 1860 that property requirements were generally struck down, and in the form of poll
taxes they persisted in some states until 1965. Freed black slaves theoretically received the vote in 1870. Women were not
given the right to vote until 1920. The Voting Rights Act, which provided effective access to the ballot for blacks, came
only in 1965. Eighteen-year-olds have voted only since 1971. It is well within the power of the American people, acting either
through the amendment process or through a constitutional convention (especially if one should be called to consider the proposed
balanced budget amendment) to revise our method of selecting representatives.”
