Legislature by Lot

Transformative Designs for Deliberative Governance

Erik Olin Wright, John Gastil

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781786635532
• eBook ISBN: 9781788736091
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civics & Citizenship
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Democracy means rule by the people, but in practice even the most robust democracies delegate most rule making to a political class. The gap between the public and its public officials might seem unbridgeable in the modern world, but Legislature by Lot presents a close examination of an inspiring solution: a legislature chosen through "sortition"-the random selection of lay citizens. It's a concept that has come to the attention of democratic reformers across the globe. Proposals for such bodies are being debated in Australia, Belgium, Iceland, the United Kingdom, and many other countries. Sortition promises to reduce corruption and create a truly representative legislature in one fell swoop.

In Legislature by Lot, John Gastil and Erik Olin Wright make the case for pairing a sortition body with an elected chamber within a bicameral legislature. Gastil is a leading deliberative democracy scholar, and Wright a distinguished sociologist and series editor of the Real Utopias books, of which this is a part. In this volume, they bring together critics and advocates of sortition who studied ancient Athens, deliberative polling, political theory, social movements, and civic innovation. The constellation of voices in this book lays out a wide variety of ideas for how to implement sortition, without obscuring its limitations, and examine its potential for reshaping modern politics.

Legislature by Lot includes sixteen essays that respond to Gastil and Wright's detailed proposal. Essays comparing it to contemporary reforms see it as a dramatic extension of deliberative "minipublics," which gather random samples of citizens to weight public policy dilemmas without being empowered to enact legislation. Another set of essays explores the democratic principles underlying sortition and elections and considers, for example, how a sortition body holds itself accountable to a public that did not elect it. The third set of essays consider alternative paths to democratic reform, which limit the powers of a sortition chamber or more quickly establish a pure sortition body.

Notes

1. Legislature by Lot: Envisioning Sortition Within a Bicameral System, Gastil and Wright

1. For more on these three solutions, see the following: Bruce Ackerman and Ian Ayers, Voting with Dollars: A New Paradigm for Campaign Finance (London: Yale University Press, 2004); a special issue of Representation (50:1, 2014) provides insight into how less conventional voting systems influence the strategic behavior of parties, candidates, and public officials; Bruce Ackerman and James S. Fishkin, Deliberation Day (London: Yale University Press, 2005).

2. Josiah Ober, “What the Ancient Greeks Can Tell Us About Democracy,” Annual Review of Political Science 11 (2008): 67–91.

3. Speech given in September at the 2017 New York Times Athens Democracy Forum.

4. Current reports are available at the Electoral Integrity Project website, www.electoralintegrityproject.com. Also see Terrill Bouricius, David Schecter, Campbell Wallace, and John Gastil, “Imagine a Democracy Built on Lotteries, Not Elections—Nexus,” Zócalo Public Square (April 5, 2016).

5. See, for example, Lawrence Lessig, Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2011).

6. For a deliberative critique of legislative elections in particular, see John Gastil, By Popular Demand: Revitalizing Representative Democracy Through Deliberative Elections (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

7. Direct evidence of candidate personality traits is hard to come by, but research suggests that they have a meaningful link to ideological orientation and behavior. See Bryce J. Dietrich, Scott Lasley, Jeffery J. Mondak, Megan L. Remmel, and Joel Turner, “Personality and Legislative Politics: The Big Five Trait Dimensions Among U.S. State Legislators,” Political Psychology 33 (2012): 195–210.

8. This problem is exacerbated for women: see Jennifer L. Lawless and Richard L. Fox, It Takes a Candidate: Why Women Don’t Run for Office (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

9. Mark Smith, American Business and Political Power: Public Opinion, Elections, and Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

10. Murray Edelman, Constructing the Political Spectacle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

11. Even in a political party with a working majority, a minority faction within the party might work with opposition members to thwart a victory for its own party leadership.

12. Current data are available at Gallup and Pew Research Center online.

13. See the 2017 online OECD report, Government at a Glance, available at www.oecd.org/gov/govataglance.htm. The figures for trust in parties refers to 2005–13, as reported in the 2013 edition of the OECD report.

14. For an accessible introduction to participatory budgeting, see Josh Lerner, Everyone Counts: Could “Participatory Budgeting” Change Democracy? (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014). On town meetings and how they could become more powerful, see Frank Bryan and John McClaughry, The Vermont Papers: Recreating Democracy on a Human Scale (Port Mills, VT: Chelsea Green, 1989).

15. This has been observed in a wide range of deliberative bodies using lay citizens. See, for instance, Kimmo Grönlund, André Bächtiger, and Maija Setälä, eds., Deliberative Mini-Publics: Involving Citizens in the Democratic Process (Colchester, UK: ECPR Press, 2014).

16. See, for example, the emergence of a concern about aboriginal political rights in a national deliberation on political reform held in Canberra; Lyn Carson, John Gastil, Janette Hartz-Karp, and Ron Lubensky, eds., The Australian Citizens’ Parliament and the Future of Deliberative Democracy (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013).

17. Robert A. Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).

18. Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics, goes farther with this requirement when a demos does more than make rules for its own members. When states make laws enforceable on noncitizens, for example, the inclusion principle requires a demos to “include all adults subject to the binding collective decisions of the association” (120). This goes beyond the scope of our proposal, but it’s interesting to conceive the ways such populations could be mixed into a sortition assembly, perhaps on a provisional basis in relation to specific legislative questions.

19. The Deliberative Poll is a trademark of the Stanford Center for Deliberative Democracy; however, the term is not capitalized in this volume. This method of polling, along with many deliberative processes such as citizens juries, have become so widely adopted and diverse in their designs that their names have become vernacular. Capitalization is reserved for specific instances of processes, such as the 2012–14 Irish Constitutional Convention, and legally designated institutions, such as the Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review.

20. For a review of recent evidence, see Heather Pincock, “Does Deliberation Make Better Citizens?,” in Democracy in Motion: Evaluating the Practice and Impact of Deliberative Civic Engagement, ed. Tina Nabatchi, John Gastil, Michael Weiksner, and Matt Leighninger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 135–62.

21. Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics, 112 (italics added for emphasis). The omitted text offers the qualifier, “within the time permitted by the need for a decision.” The time required for a small sortition legislature would be considerably less than for a mass public.

22. Figures provided by the CBO online, www.cbo.gov.

23. John Gastil and Peter Levine, eds., The Deliberative Democracy Handbook: Strategies for Effective Civic Engagement in the Twenty-First Century (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005).

24. John Gastil and Robert Richards, “Embracing Digital Democracy: A Call for Building an Online Civic Commons,” PS: Political Science and Politics 50 (2017): 758–63.

25. Michael A. Neblo, Deliberative Democracy Between Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

26. There are straightforward solutions to these problems; see Daron Shaw, Stephen Ansolabehere, and Charles Stewart, “A Brief yet Practical Guide to Reforming U.S. Voter Registration Systems,” Election Law Journal: Rules, Politics, and Policy 14 (2015): 26–31. The barrier to such reforms—and the impetus for counterproductive voting laws—is that broader participation would hurt the electoral fortunes of the Republican Party; see Wendy Weiser, “In 22 States, a Wave of New Voting Restrictions Threatens to Shift Outcomes in Tight Races,” The American Prospect (October 1, 2014).

27. There are risks in using strata in a sample to seek proportionate representation of minorities. Depending on the number of actual people this involves, the result can be that a few individuals from an oppressed group are thrust into the position of “representing the interests” of “their” group in the assembly. Since these individuals are themselves randomly chosen, the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• I. The Argument
• II. Contemporary Context
• III. Democratic Principles
• IV. Alternative Paths Toward Sortition
• V. Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• About the Authors
• Acknowledgments