Because our political leaders do not remotely reflect the diversity of the wider population, some propose that we instead choose leaders by lottery. This process called “sortition” essentially relies on the claim that if decision-makers are descriptively (i.e. statistically) representative of a population, then whatever decisions they come to will therefore be representative of that population. Without defending the serious unrepresentativeness of our current system, or diminishing the importance of descriptive representativeness in decision-makers, I would like to point out the fundamental error in equating descriptive representativeness of decision-makers with representativeness of decisions.
Any group decisions are not merely the aggregate of individual individual views, but express the synthesis of views embodied in a compromise between competing coalitions (themselves representing internal compromise and synthesis). This is true regardless of whether the system is formally authoritarian or democratic. What changes between systems is who “counts” within these coalitions (i.e. whose support is needed or useful to advance any given cause) and what mechanisms are available to each actor to make their interests/views count.
In our electoral systems, our formal mechanisms of coalition building and contest include most notably political parties and elections, but for every decision taken, a constant shifting of different competing coalitions is in play (e.g. advocates, media, public servants, businesses, etc.). Our formal rules clearly work to give advantages to those with money and clearly favour certain kinds of individuals in occupying decision-making positions (i.e. older white men from professional backgrounds). But fundamentally, to get and hold positions, politicians must actively engage in the art of internal and public coalition building. It is the very act of having to do this which is supposed to result in the representativeness of the decisions they arrive at.
In a sortition model decision-makers are completed insulated from the need to build a coalition to arrive in or maintain their position. This isolates the decision-makers from noxious and disproportionate influences. It also isolates them from any accountability to the wider population and therefore any imperative to actively try to synthesize external views. Sortition therefore relies on the assumption that the fact of the sample’s personal characteristics being statistically representative combined with the need for internal compromise within that group should produce a representative synthesis. It’s not entirely insulated from the outside world as external individuals and groups can of course make submissions to the decision-makers, but there is no imperative to listen other than for those who hold some moral notion about their decision-making role or are incentivized by some benefit they might obtain after leaving office.
To put it simply, sortition substitutes for a politician’s professional interest in preserving their role, the personal views of randomly selected citizens. It’s telling that when this was actually experimented with in BC, the citizen’s assembly chose an electoral system (single transferable vote) that then failed in a wider referendum twice. This is not to second guess the wisdom of their choice. But it is to point out that decision-makers represent their constituents not as mere proxies (for that is impossible as constituents inevitably hold conflicting views) but by virtue of their dependence on their constituents. Viewed from this perspective, sortition is helpful because it helps to isolate exactly what is wrong with our political systems, namely, that most decisions can be made entirely independent of the support of the wider community more broadly and those they most directly effect in particular.
In short, the fundamental problem of sortition is reminiscent of James Madison’s observation that eliminating the liberty to form factions (or in this case, the need to form them) in order to eliminate the genuine violence of factions, is like eliminating air in order to avoid the risk of fire.
Half a Maven 