- Joined
- May 14, 2019
What if we had government by sortition?
Historically sortition was used for certain offices in Athens and for legislators (confined to the merchant aristocracy) in Venice. Sortition refers to the granting of political offices by random selection (such as a lottery).
The upside to sortition is that randomness prevents political factionalism (in the absence of lottery fraud, of course) from dominating the selection process, and introduces more "normal" politicians who may have advantages in character, personality, or preferences over the sort of people who self-select into political careers. Essentially, it allows democratic representation by sampling the population without actually implementing government by referendum.
The downside to sortition is that since there is NO selection there is no relationship of skills/qualification to the job, which if the sortition pool is limited to certain types of people (like, say, people with sufficient accounting or banking experience for Secretary of the Treasury) is not as bad of an issue but as you broaden the pool the chances of getting an Average Joe (somebody with NO specialized skills, could easily improve of) increase dramatically.
An economist (working in public choice theory) demonstrated that you can construct a model which has an ideal, non-zero level of sortition for legislatures, but his model was stupid poo-poo and I don't like it.
Historically sortition was used for certain offices in Athens and for legislators (confined to the merchant aristocracy) in Venice. Sortition refers to the granting of political offices by random selection (such as a lottery).
The upside to sortition is that randomness prevents political factionalism (in the absence of lottery fraud, of course) from dominating the selection process, and introduces more "normal" politicians who may have advantages in character, personality, or preferences over the sort of people who self-select into political careers. Essentially, it allows democratic representation by sampling the population without actually implementing government by referendum.
The downside to sortition is that since there is NO selection there is no relationship of skills/qualification to the job, which if the sortition pool is limited to certain types of people (like, say, people with sufficient accounting or banking experience for Secretary of the Treasury) is not as bad of an issue but as you broaden the pool the chances of getting an Average Joe (somebody with NO specialized skills, could easily improve of) increase dramatically.
An economist (working in public choice theory) demonstrated that you can construct a model which has an ideal, non-zero level of sortition for legislatures, but his model was stupid poo-poo and I don't like it.
