There is an interesting example of random selection of leadership from the Bible when the apostles replaced Judas. The criteria were agreed upon and then lots drawn.
Acts 1:21-26 Therefore it is necessary to choose one of the men who have been with us the whole time the Lord Jesus was living among us, beginning from John’s baptism to the time when Jesus was taken up from us. For one of these must become a witness with us of his resurrection.” So they nominated two men: Joseph called Barsabbas (also known as Justus) and Matthias. Then they prayed, “Lord, you know everyone’s heart. Show us which of these two you have chosen to take over this apostolic ministry, which Judas left to go where he belongs.” Then they cast lots, and the lot fell to Matthias; so he was added to the eleven apostles.
Can you imagine this practice replacing the Papal conclave? Or, pastor selection at your favorite Protestant group?
Interesting point! One interpretation of this passage suggests Peter is actually rushing this appointment. In typical Peter fashion, he makes choices before fulling thinking them through (this seems to change post Pentecost). Matthias is never mentioned again in the Bible; we aren't sure what becomes of him. Canonically, he is the 12th but traditionally, it is Paul who is sometimes considered the true 12th disciple (you can find this depicted in EO iconography).
So, the random selection mentioned here may have actually been a fault of Peter's and not something the Bible is endorsing as a means to choose leadership; possibly quite the opposite in this case.
That's an interesting interpretation but a quick search didn't turn up the first version of that until 1861, so it seem rather late to have influenced EO iconography. Perhaps you are familiar with earlier examples of that interpretation?
Impetuous or not, Peter was likely influenced by the many decisions made by lots in the Hebrew Scriptures. e.g., picking a scapegoat (Leviticus 16:7-10), assigning priestly duties (1 Chronicles 24), dividing land (1 Chronicles 6:54), etc. Furthermore, Proverbs 16:33 & 18:18 indicates the outcome of lots is from God and reduces conflict.
Anyway, ascribing random processes to the divine for decision making, particularly political situations seems to have strong textual support within the Judeo-Christian tradition. I'm curious about parallels in Islam and other offshoots.
You see paul because paul was a great letter writter and Luke followed Paul for some years (likely converted in Pauls misson). however read between the lines and Paul was rarely in the consoles. Even Peter doesn't seem to have been a leader - the sent him away to some visibal missons not kept him with the leaders.
My partner, who was raised conservative Mennonite, tells me this is exactly how pastors are chosen today. About three men are nominated, then they draw lots.
"Lottery, past a reasonable post," is highly underrated. The randomness is there to account for the uncertainty of the objective criteria chosen ("Is it the right criteria?" "Did we measure correctly?"). Work in an escape clause in case things go horribly wrong with the ultimate "choice".
I strongly believe that this is how you solve elections, admissions, and recruitment (or, at least, get closer to an ideal solution).
> New regulations for the elections of the doge introduced in 1268 remained in force until the end of the republic in 1797. Their intention was to minimize the influence of individual great families, and this was effected by a complex electoral machinery. Thirty members of the Great Council, chosen by lot, were reduced by lot to nine; the nine chose forty and the forty were reduced by lot to twelve, who chose twenty-five. The twenty-five were reduced by lot to nine, and the nine elected forty-five. These forty-five were once more reduced by lot to eleven, and the eleven finally chose the forty-one who elected the doge.
Isn't Florence at this time famous for choosing their leader randomly by lot, but for some reason it always ended up one of the early Medici's that kept being chosen?
> Juries, widely trusted to impartially deliver justice, are the most familiar instance.
Trusted by those that have not looked into whether this is actually the case. The first prime minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, was famously against trial by jury, because of how easily lawyers can abuse biases in multiracial societies, based on his first-hand experience [1].
A UK study found his experience is the norm, not the exception - Black and minority ethnic (BME) jurors vote guilty 73% of the time against White defendants, but only 24% of the time against BME defendants [2]. (White jurors vote 39% and 32% for convicting White and BME defendants, respectively. You read that correctly - Whites are also biased against other Whites, but to a much lesser degree)
Edit: To answer what is the alternative to juries: Not all countries use juries, in some the decision is up to the judge, and in some, like France, they use a mixed system of judges and jurors on a panel [3]. The French system would be my personal preference, with the classic jury system coming in second, despite my jury-critical post. Like democracy, it's perhaps the least bad system that we have, but we shouldn't be under any illusions about how impartial and perceptive a group of 12 people selected at random is.
That statistic could also be the result of excessive prosecution against black/minorities and not necessarily just jury bias. (Which would also explain the white bias against whites)
A universal counterargument that works on any data. But unlikely to be true, given that the UK sentenced a BME perpetrator to a short 2 years for one-punch-killing an 82-year-old veteran [1], while "threatening gestures" at police and chanting "who the f- is Allah" earn the White perpetrator 18 months in prison [2], and merely being present at a protest, while not engaging in any violence, earns 32 months in prison [3].
We also have to ask - if the biases in that study were flipped, if White jurors were far more likely to convict BME defendants, and pardon White defendants, and BME jurors were the more even-handed ones, would this not be trumpeted as conclusive evidence of racism?
If you're curious about this topic, I'd recommend you look up interviews with the jurors in the OJ Simpson trial. Many were black and by their own admission made their decision about OJ's guilt-based entirely on a feeling of racial justice. They considered it “payback.”
> (White jurors vote 39% and 32% for convicting White and BME defendants, respectively. You read that correctly - Whites are also biased against other Whites, but to a much lesser degree)
This assumes that Whites and BMEs going to trial are equally likely to be guilty.
Shouldn't we assume there would be some hidden delta?
One possibility would be to use juries to just decide facts, then a panel of judges applies the law to those facts.
If there are many factual disputes in a case maybe use multiple juries with each jury only deciding on a subset of the facts, chosen so that no jury sees the entire case. They are less likely to be biased if they don't see the entire case.
And it usually isn't a single judge. There is a panel of judges or en banc.
And juries aren't universal either. Lots of other countries don't have juries but they have a fair and equitable justice system. Look up civil law vs common law.
The technical term is sortition. And it is my pet unorthodox political position. The legislature should be replaced with an assembly of citizens picked by lottery.
Ireland has a Citizens Assembly, which is selected by sortition. Ordinary citizens take time out of their lives to participate when assemblies are formed to examine issues of the day. The assembly receives expert and political testimony and evidence, and then votes and makes recommendations that often lead to country-wide referendums.
The process has been very successful at neutralizing contentious topics. The assembly on abortion showed that a healthy majority consensus could emerge, and led to abortion being legalized in Ireland after a constitutional amendment. The political parties generally support the process because it keeps socially divisive topics out of the main political sphere. Ireland also has relatively little money in politics, limits on donations, a standards in public office commission, independent constituency boundary commissions, a multi-seat proportional representation system, limits on media ownership, and the highest percentage of University educated citizens of any country. All in all it's helped Ireland come a long way from the 80s and 90s, when Ireland was much worse on corruption indexes.
> Ireland has a Citizens Assembly, which is selected by sortition.
Ireland occasionally has a Citizen’s Assembly when the elected politicians feel it is best to do so. The members are supposed to be selected by sortition but this has not always been adhered to. “ Seven replacements joining in January 2018 were removed the following month when it emerged they were recruited via acquaintances of a Red C employee, who was then suspended, rather than via random selection.”
> The process has been very successful at neutralizing contentious topics. The assembly on abortion showed that a healthy majority consensus could emerge, and led to abortion being legalized in Ireland after a constitutional amendment.
You have to give the secretariat their due. They were excellent at getting the right facilitators, who would ensure the Assembly came to the conclusion the government wanted them to. Eventually they messed up and pushed so hard against public opinion that they got the Assembly to vote in favour of deleting mothers from the constitution and in favour of a meaningless expression of respect for carers. Both were then roundly defeated but the Assembly has been great as a way for governments to build consensus by putting their thumb on the scales.
> The political parties generally support the process because it keeps socially divisive topics out of the main political sphere.
Contemptible. If politicians don’t want to deal with socially divisive topics they should be doing something else with their lives.
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.
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).
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
They don’t make law. It’s purely advisory. The two main purposes are for politicians to try to avoid responsibility for making decisions and consensus laundering. The secretariat has been really great at picking facilitators that will get the right recommendations through though they put their thumb on the scales too hard with the last referendums to amend the constitution and two proposals were defeated.
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.
The idea in this that appeals to me is that the institutions cannot afford to have poorly-educated citizens.
But I don't see how this fixes the problem currently plaguing US politics which is that elected representatives are passing bulls designed by lobbyists that the representatives don't understand well.
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?
I saw someone on HN suggest the Supreme Court should just be randomly selected sets of federal judges on a case by case basis. Less opportunity for bribery and political games.
It's an interesting idea, I've kicked something similar around with politically-minded friends for years. I don't know that a completely random group is the answer, but a hybrid approach might solve some critical problems:
- A largely unrecognized problem with our legislature here in the US is vote inflation: the number of representatives in Congress has fallen way behind the population growth, so that one rep is shared by a much larger group of constituents, devaluing the individual vote of each constituent and making it less likely that a given voter has a personal connection with their legislator.
- The increasing partisanship has reduced the number moderate and independent voices in the legislature.
We could increase the number of representatives in Congress by tripling the number of reps from each district, which would bring the rep-to-voter ratio back more in line with where it was when it was essentially frozen in 1929. Then one of those new reps would be chosen at random from a pool. Since the distribution of moderates in the general population is much higher than in Congress, this should have the effect of moderating partisanship.
In politics, sure. The way the headline is framed you can draw a similar parallel to genetic competition as well though. There are elements of both biodiversity and randomness required for successful genetic evolution
I’m worried that sort of thing ends up like Jury Duty where anyone actually qualified to think deeply about the case is doing everything in their power specifically to not be selected and waste their time. The pay is shockingly low and it can be a huge disrupter if you run your own small business.
> The legislature should be replaced with an assembly of citizens picked by lottery.
that sounds like jury duty selection, in the US anyway, and juries are famously dysfunctional at times, with a single member ignoring the rules and trial and just voting politically.
That would be less of a problem in a legislature, where you don't need unanimity and there aren't any comparable rules about how you are supposed to vote.
Do members have right to vote according to their conscience?
If yes - why is that a problem? They stick to the overarching rule, and you should argue the rules must be amended.
If not - that's a huge problem IMO and can be summarised with "why pretend jury has any say If they must not stray from the way the case is presented and defended (knowing very well how awful public defense is and how dishonest sometimes police and prosecution can be)" and not replace it with just a judge?
My pet unorthodox position is also sortition, with an added (possibly transitionary) twist: hold elections and do it for non-voters, for a non-voter share of seats.
You can decide to vote, in which case you're removed from the sortition candidate pool. If you don't vote you're in the pool. A common representative body is formed at respective percentages.
This basically makes it so politicians have to race against "some random schmuck". If they can convince people they can do better, nice. Otherwise... too bad.
Of course some people will vote just to get out of the pool, but I think that's fine too.
It would probably make sense to start with a new new "house" or something.
Might even make sense to have some quotas (at least 50% women etc.), so the whole things doesn't have to get to Chinese government size to reflect the populus.
That or pepple would have to be replaced with high frequency
I would argue that sortition is Democracy. From a purely technical point of view to be anti-sortition is to be anti-democracy, which is fine I guess but begs a lot of questions.
From a practical point of view the selection process is a bit of a red herring though. The current controls break down because the feedback loop is simply way too long to meaningfully affect the process.
While I personally subscribe to the idea that sortition is a superior way of electing representatives I don't see people considering it seriously. However what everyone can understand is using the same process but with sampling with a higher frequency.
This could realistically incur the same issue as term limits, where you end up moving power and know how away from visible (no matter how flawed) and (somewhat) accountable elected official to the staff and interest groups that are not subject to such limits
I do like sortition for certain scenarios (definitely favour that over a referendum for instance), but I think it'd work better as something that either has to veto some piece of law or can offer amendments or the likes
With a little back-of-the-envelope math, this would mean that congress would contain:
> 9 members with IQs under 70 (i.e. mentally handicapped)
> 52 members with IQs under 85
> 217 members at or under an IQ of 100
> 370 members with an IQ below the (presumptive) current congressional average of ~115
Congress is terrible, but it's hard to imagine it could be improved by making it less intelligent.
If you could incorporate the OP's point about limited eligibility and "directly select candidates at random for positions from an eligibility pool", then a "random" process would likely be superior to elections.
If you have fifty bright and highly competent people, I'm skeptical that adding fifty idiots is going to make much of a difference. Most idiots will accept meritocratic authority if they can be convinced that their needs are taken into account (which they should). Some will obstruct, but probably not enough to significantly derail anything, and the good-faith idiots will bring information and perspectives that wouldn't be considered if they weren't there, so they aren't exactly useless.
In fact, I would argue that idiots in elected bodies are a lot more likely to do damage than random idiots, because they are more likely to be narcissists, and being elected boosts their sense of self-worth. And of course, the most damage is often caused by the most intelligent of them, because the main problem is acting in bad faith, not a lack of wits.
Ballot propositions have a number of shortcomings that sortition-based legislatures won't necessarily fall into:
- Most people filling out their ballots aren't spending very much time on each prop -- they'll typically either vote based on their gut reaction to the title of the prop, follow a voter guide from an advocacy group they want to align with, or just vote based on whose advertising campaign was most influential.
- Ballot props, at least in CA, are pretty much directly pay-to-play. There's a price tag for getting a prop onto the ballot, because signature gathering companies charge per signature. (Though at least in SF, conservative ballot props cost more per signature because there aren't as many conservatives to sign. This implies there's _some_ correlation between the cost and the popularity of a particular proposition.)
- Ballot props are both high-latency and low-bandwidth. Coupled with the fact that they often cannot be overridden except by another ballot prop, and we're basically stuck with any flaw in the bill that passes (unless it's egregious enough that someone's willing to foot the bill for another round of signature gathering and advertising, which will cost about as much as it did for the original bill.)
- Ballot props don't go through several rounds of amendment before being passed, nor do they really have any debate; there's just a single round of "should this be on the ballot" followed by a single round of "should this be law". This means flawed bills are more likely to end up on the ballot. Because of the high latency mentioned above, voters are often stuck with a choice between a bad solution and no solution to whatever problem the ballot prop is trying to solve.
If we assume it works sorta like jury duty, a sortition-based legislator would have their schedule forcibly cleared, so they'd have all day to think about laws. (Presumably for some sufficiently-long term, like 6mo to 2yr.) Campaign finance-based lobbying (i.e. legalized bribery) would cease to exist, though you'd definitely still have paid lobbyists -- people who are good at influencing the members of the legislature. Bribery would almost certainly happen, but at least it would be illegal so hopefully less common than it is now. The legislature could still have committees and debates and proposed amendments, allowing for refinement of bills before they make it to a vote.
i've always thought a jury should be used instead of a supreme court. if the law people had their chance and couldn't settle an issue, kick it to the people.
As I got older, I've leaned more and more into meritocracy.
If we did something like this in the US, we'd have quite a religious/irrational group of leaders. Whereas with a meritocracy, you have at least some filter. The status quo requires politicians to have a bit of an understanding of human nature. Its not flawless, I've seen inferior people beat superiors by using biases, but these were relatively equal races. I've also seen idiots run for office and never catch steam.
We can also look at history and see that society's that did anything with such equal democratic distribution were less efficient than those who had some sort of merit.
But the current metric of merit is "ability to win elections". That gives us representatives who are not there to make things better, but to set themselves up to win the next election. This sometimes means, for example, prolonging the problem that they got elected to solve, because they can use that problem to win the next election.
The fundamental problem with any purportedly meritocratic arrangement is that you need someone to define the evaluation criteria for what "merit" is, and then someone else to administer the examination. Both are vulnerabilities in the system that lead to formation of a "merit caste" (which sets and enforces standards that favor its members) in the long run, as evidenced by historical examples of states that tried explicit meritocracy.
This perspective under-appreciates the role of a leader's charisma when it comes to attracting staff that will actually execute the ideas of that leader.
Anyone who has worked in a presidential administration (or a congressional office) can tell you that a leader is effective if and only if they have staff that believes in their message and agenda, and that is willing and able to execute on that agenda.
The practical reality here is that charisma isn't just a way of gaming the "getting elected" part of the job, it's also a requirement to be effective at the job.
I think you didn't get to the part of how it would work in practice. It's not that the leader is selected randomly, it is that the people that select positions are randomly chosen. Also, your criticism only is valid if everyone through that being able to sell an idea is critical for the leader. The leader role is to manage the resources to accomplish the goal of the team, what the goal of the team is, is up to the team to decide.
Yes, especially as prime minister or president, you need to be the face of the country. For everyone: not just your party. And while listening to the public is an important part of the job, sometimes you also need to explain things to the public. Same with ministers, to a slightly lesser degree.
I feel one downside of a district-based system like in the US is that it's harder to build up a healthy mix of representatives, where some are more on the charismatic side and others more on the technical "policy wonk" side. Everyone needs to win their own elections, so it's biased too much towards the charismatic side.
Besides the curious absence of the word 'sortition'. Their historical examples are mostly totally wrong or missing key bits of nuance. Their example of picking the Doge of Venice misses that the convoluted process of "randomly" picking the doge isn't that random. They randomly choose electors only from the great families and randomly choose candidates from the great families and then choose. This is like if we chose the President my randomly choosing electors amongst the Senate, Governor, and the House, who would then choose candidates from amongst that same group, then randomly choose electors to decide amongst the candidates. Their example of hereditary monarchy assumes that murder and killing off competitors was common, however in European history that was pretty rare (instead putting them in the church was the way to thin the herd). If anything switch from gavelkind (all sons get a claim and split the lands between them) and going to a pure primogeniture succession greatly reduced said murdering and warring by reducing claimants.
My experience with KPIs also doesn't match the poster. KPIs are mostly ignored and it ends up going back to relationships and who has a better "deck" of accomplishments each year.
The person just never says the word sortition. Its ends up feeling strange because it means either the person is trying to make this concept seem more their own, or they are that unaware.
I think they're trying to keep it readable to people who don't know the terms.
I can say "sortition" and "ranked choice voting" and "LVT" and you'd understand what I mean, but to get a broad audience it pays to break it down into concrete ideas like "Random elections" and "More than two political parties" and "Why are we paying landlords to speculate on empty lots?"
* Campbell's Law (a variant of Goodhart's Law) states that the more a metric is used for social decision-making, the more it will be subject to corruption which distorts and corrupts not only the metric itself, but the very social processes it was meant to measure *
I just had a friend complain to me about LeetCode, saying that it's meaningless since everyone just mindlessly grinds the problem sets.
I pointed out to him that it's called studying for the test.
I did k-12 in the NYC Board of Education system (public school.) Some higher-end public high schools schools did randomized entry, which was a positive in my mind. The only selection was self selection into the lottery, where like-minded and ambitious students/families applied.
Unfortunately even that gets abused. I dont know how my process went, but I sure know how my kids' experience was. The school wont give you an application, or send you to the head office to apply (even though you can also apply in-school), or they will do the residency screening the last Friday of the application period (too bad if you happen not to be home on the day they visit.) They will sometimes ask you for original deeds or birth certificates (but your friends will tell you they werent asked for it.)
The randomness can be theatre to show public fairness, but in reality it is anything but random.
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.
> 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.
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.
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".
Readit News
Acts 1:21-26 Therefore it is necessary to choose one of the men who have been with us the whole time the Lord Jesus was living among us, beginning from John’s baptism to the time when Jesus was taken up from us. For one of these must become a witness with us of his resurrection.” So they nominated two men: Joseph called Barsabbas (also known as Justus) and Matthias. Then they prayed, “Lord, you know everyone’s heart. Show us which of these two you have chosen to take over this apostolic ministry, which Judas left to go where he belongs.” Then they cast lots, and the lot fell to Matthias; so he was added to the eleven apostles.
Can you imagine this practice replacing the Papal conclave? Or, pastor selection at your favorite Protestant group?
So, the random selection mentioned here may have actually been a fault of Peter's and not something the Bible is endorsing as a means to choose leadership; possibly quite the opposite in this case.
Impetuous or not, Peter was likely influenced by the many decisions made by lots in the Hebrew Scriptures. e.g., picking a scapegoat (Leviticus 16:7-10), assigning priestly duties (1 Chronicles 24), dividing land (1 Chronicles 6:54), etc. Furthermore, Proverbs 16:33 & 18:18 indicates the outcome of lots is from God and reduces conflict.
Anyway, ascribing random processes to the divine for decision making, particularly political situations seems to have strong textual support within the Judeo-Christian tradition. I'm curious about parallels in Islam and other offshoots.
I strongly believe that this is how you solve elections, admissions, and recruitment (or, at least, get closer to an ideal solution).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doge_of_Venice#Selection_of_th...
> New regulations for the elections of the doge introduced in 1268 remained in force until the end of the republic in 1797. Their intention was to minimize the influence of individual great families, and this was effected by a complex electoral machinery. Thirty members of the Great Council, chosen by lot, were reduced by lot to nine; the nine chose forty and the forty were reduced by lot to twelve, who chose twenty-five. The twenty-five were reduced by lot to nine, and the nine elected forty-five. These forty-five were once more reduced by lot to eleven, and the eleven finally chose the forty-one who elected the doge.
The Copts still pick their pope by lot. Of course only from three preselected candidates but still.
Trusted by those that have not looked into whether this is actually the case. The first prime minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, was famously against trial by jury, because of how easily lawyers can abuse biases in multiracial societies, based on his first-hand experience [1].
A UK study found his experience is the norm, not the exception - Black and minority ethnic (BME) jurors vote guilty 73% of the time against White defendants, but only 24% of the time against BME defendants [2]. (White jurors vote 39% and 32% for convicting White and BME defendants, respectively. You read that correctly - Whites are also biased against other Whites, but to a much lesser degree)
Edit: To answer what is the alternative to juries: Not all countries use juries, in some the decision is up to the judge, and in some, like France, they use a mixed system of judges and jurors on a panel [3]. The French system would be my personal preference, with the classic jury system coming in second, despite my jury-critical post. Like democracy, it's perhaps the least bad system that we have, but we shouldn't be under any illusions about how impartial and perceptive a group of 12 people selected at random is.
[1] https://postcolonialweb.org/singapore/government/leekuanyew/...
[2] https://www.ucl.ac.uk/judicial-institute/sites/judicial-inst... - page 165 (182 by pdf reader numbering), figure 6.4
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury
We also have to ask - if the biases in that study were flipped, if White jurors were far more likely to convict BME defendants, and pardon White defendants, and BME jurors were the more even-handed ones, would this not be trumpeted as conclusive evidence of racism?
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-derbyshire-66959198
[2] https://www.newhamrecorder.co.uk/news/24515551.london-disord...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/aug/08/pens...
https://youtu.be/BUJCLdmNzAA?feature=shared
BME = black and minority ethnic
This assumes that Whites and BMEs going to trial are equally likely to be guilty.
Shouldn't we assume there would be some hidden delta?
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If there are many factual disputes in a case maybe use multiple juries with each jury only deciding on a subset of the facts, chosen so that no jury sees the entire case. They are less likely to be biased if they don't see the entire case.
And it usually isn't a single judge. There is a panel of judges or en banc.
And juries aren't universal either. Lots of other countries don't have juries but they have a fair and equitable justice system. Look up civil law vs common law.
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The process has been very successful at neutralizing contentious topics. The assembly on abortion showed that a healthy majority consensus could emerge, and led to abortion being legalized in Ireland after a constitutional amendment. The political parties generally support the process because it keeps socially divisive topics out of the main political sphere. Ireland also has relatively little money in politics, limits on donations, a standards in public office commission, independent constituency boundary commissions, a multi-seat proportional representation system, limits on media ownership, and the highest percentage of University educated citizens of any country. All in all it's helped Ireland come a long way from the 80s and 90s, when Ireland was much worse on corruption indexes.
Ireland occasionally has a Citizen’s Assembly when the elected politicians feel it is best to do so. The members are supposed to be selected by sortition but this has not always been adhered to. “ Seven replacements joining in January 2018 were removed the following month when it emerged they were recruited via acquaintances of a Red C employee, who was then suspended, rather than via random selection.”
> The process has been very successful at neutralizing contentious topics. The assembly on abortion showed that a healthy majority consensus could emerge, and led to abortion being legalized in Ireland after a constitutional amendment.
You have to give the secretariat their due. They were excellent at getting the right facilitators, who would ensure the Assembly came to the conclusion the government wanted them to. Eventually they messed up and pushed so hard against public opinion that they got the Assembly to vote in favour of deleting mothers from the constitution and in favour of a meaningless expression of respect for carers. Both were then roundly defeated but the Assembly has been great as a way for governments to build consensus by putting their thumb on the scales.
> The political parties generally support the process because it keeps socially divisive topics out of the main political sphere.
Contemptible. If politicians don’t want to deal with socially divisive topics they should be doing something else with their lives.
There are a crazy amount of NGOs in Ireland, 1 for every 155 people, many pushing forward their own political policies and views.
https://unherd.com/newsroom/in-ireland-its-progressives-who-...
Now, the idea of electing a few thousand representatives and having sortition determine who is actually selected is something I could feasibly get behind.
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.
- 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).
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.
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...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
But I don't see how this fixes the problem currently plaguing US politics which is that elected representatives are passing bulls designed by lobbyists that the representatives don't understand well.
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?
- A largely unrecognized problem with our legislature here in the US is vote inflation: the number of representatives in Congress has fallen way behind the population growth, so that one rep is shared by a much larger group of constituents, devaluing the individual vote of each constituent and making it less likely that a given voter has a personal connection with their legislator.
- The increasing partisanship has reduced the number moderate and independent voices in the legislature.
We could increase the number of representatives in Congress by tripling the number of reps from each district, which would bring the rep-to-voter ratio back more in line with where it was when it was essentially frozen in 1929. Then one of those new reps would be chosen at random from a pool. Since the distribution of moderates in the general population is much higher than in Congress, this should have the effect of moderating partisanship.
that sounds like jury duty selection, in the US anyway, and juries are famously dysfunctional at times, with a single member ignoring the rules and trial and just voting politically.
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If yes - why is that a problem? They stick to the overarching rule, and you should argue the rules must be amended.
If not - that's a huge problem IMO and can be summarised with "why pretend jury has any say If they must not stray from the way the case is presented and defended (knowing very well how awful public defense is and how dishonest sometimes police and prosecution can be)" and not replace it with just a judge?
You can decide to vote, in which case you're removed from the sortition candidate pool. If you don't vote you're in the pool. A common representative body is formed at respective percentages.
This basically makes it so politicians have to race against "some random schmuck". If they can convince people they can do better, nice. Otherwise... too bad.
Of course some people will vote just to get out of the pool, but I think that's fine too.
It would probably make sense to start with a new new "house" or something.
Might even make sense to have some quotas (at least 50% women etc.), so the whole things doesn't have to get to Chinese government size to reflect the populus.
That or pepple would have to be replaced with high frequency
If it comes out 10% female every sortition cohort, you know some funny business is going on.
From a practical point of view the selection process is a bit of a red herring though. The current controls break down because the feedback loop is simply way too long to meaningfully affect the process.
While I personally subscribe to the idea that sortition is a superior way of electing representatives I don't see people considering it seriously. However what everyone can understand is using the same process but with sampling with a higher frequency.
I do like sortition for certain scenarios (definitely favour that over a referendum for instance), but I think it'd work better as something that either has to veto some piece of law or can offer amendments or the likes
> 9 members with IQs under 70 (i.e. mentally handicapped) > 52 members with IQs under 85 > 217 members at or under an IQ of 100 > 370 members with an IQ below the (presumptive) current congressional average of ~115
Congress is terrible, but it's hard to imagine it could be improved by making it less intelligent.
If you could incorporate the OP's point about limited eligibility and "directly select candidates at random for positions from an eligibility pool", then a "random" process would likely be superior to elections.
In fact, I would argue that idiots in elected bodies are a lot more likely to do damage than random idiots, because they are more likely to be narcissists, and being elected boosts their sense of self-worth. And of course, the most damage is often caused by the most intelligent of them, because the main problem is acting in bad faith, not a lack of wits.
]Further, by eliding deliberation, the initiative process is the worst kind of direct democracy. Except for mob rule, of course.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_democracy
The OP narrowly focuses on the calculus (?) of how randomly choosing reps actually promotes meritocracy.
This wiki article is a good overview of the whole burrito.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens'_assembly
Citizens' assembly makes policy. But then who implements it?
I (currently) believe that we'd still need executives, still need some kind of balance of powers.
So I'm okay w/ electing mayors, sheriffs, governors, etc. Perhaps even multi-seat roles; something between a council and a mayor.
Assuming, of course, we use approval voting for execs, PR for councils.
As I got older, I've leaned more and more into meritocracy.
If we did something like this in the US, we'd have quite a religious/irrational group of leaders. Whereas with a meritocracy, you have at least some filter. The status quo requires politicians to have a bit of an understanding of human nature. Its not flawless, I've seen inferior people beat superiors by using biases, but these were relatively equal races. I've also seen idiots run for office and never catch steam.
We can also look at history and see that society's that did anything with such equal democratic distribution were less efficient than those who had some sort of merit.
But that's not to say that wouldn't also be the case otherwise.
Sad thing is, that it's impossible.
Anyone who has worked in a presidential administration (or a congressional office) can tell you that a leader is effective if and only if they have staff that believes in their message and agenda, and that is willing and able to execute on that agenda.
The practical reality here is that charisma isn't just a way of gaming the "getting elected" part of the job, it's also a requirement to be effective at the job.
I feel one downside of a district-based system like in the US is that it's harder to build up a healthy mix of representatives, where some are more on the charismatic side and others more on the technical "policy wonk" side. Everyone needs to win their own elections, so it's biased too much towards the charismatic side.
My experience with KPIs also doesn't match the poster. KPIs are mostly ignored and it ends up going back to relationships and who has a better "deck" of accomplishments each year.
Do you mean in common use? Wikipedia has a nice page on that [1]. There are also many papers on that [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
[2] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=sort...
I can say "sortition" and "ranked choice voting" and "LVT" and you'd understand what I mean, but to get a broad audience it pays to break it down into concrete ideas like "Random elections" and "More than two political parties" and "Why are we paying landlords to speculate on empty lots?"
I just had a friend complain to me about LeetCode, saying that it's meaningless since everyone just mindlessly grinds the problem sets.
I pointed out to him that it's called studying for the test.
Unfortunately even that gets abused. I dont know how my process went, but I sure know how my kids' experience was. The school wont give you an application, or send you to the head office to apply (even though you can also apply in-school), or they will do the residency screening the last Friday of the application period (too bad if you happen not to be home on the day they visit.) They will sometimes ask you for original deeds or birth certificates (but your friends will tell you they werent asked for it.)
The randomness can be theatre to show public fairness, but in reality it is anything but random.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Mechanisms that effectively prevent this do exist in the literature, to be clear, but I rarely hear of those ones actually getting implemented.
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".