Scorecard: Sortition
This post on Best Of A Great Lot is a part of a series on the subject of designing a new form of governance. Each piece aims to stand alone, but fits together on the Table of Contents.
This is a scorecard for Sortition. Scorecards are a shorthand summation of the arguments for and against. Scores out of 5. Arrows compare to Presidential Democracy.
% of citizens who have a representative they prefer: ↓↓↓0/51
Representatives accountable to the people: ↓↓↓0/52
Bundled Governance: ↑2.5/53
Justifiable Governance: No Change
Dilution of Representation: No Change4
Independence of Evaluation: No Change
Effectiveness of Governance: ↓1.5/55
Legitimacy of Governance: ↓2/56
Self-governance: ↑↑5/57
Sortition advocates argue that we can hardly have worse than our current representatives. You say that, but think about the people you work with and imagine the worst of them getting randomly chosen to be your representative, and my best guess is that we’d be deeply disappointed in our fellow citizens.
How do you vote the bastards out when they were randomly selected? Does it even matter to them?
Assuming we truly are random, we should expect a broader array of experiences and knowledge within the randomly selected representatives, which may slightly improve our current bundling problem, which tends to favor lawyers.
We could propose an increase in the number of representatives (and might need to, to counteract all the duds), but that would be a separate change.
Some argue that random representatives will do better than ours, because they’re more representative. I have trouble believing that for policy issues with serious moneyed interested behind them. But I can certainly believe that they’d do worse, as they’d have little real accountability or training, and they’d have little reason to push back against the well-paid lobbyists who came to them.
We do derive some of our sense of legitimacy of governance from the performance of voting.
This guarantees more representativeness in our representatives, which I think argues for more self in our self-governance.