Sortition

Gil Delannoi

Description

This volume reflects the up-and-coming academic interest in sortition. It is based on contributions to the first international conference dedicated to the subject held at the University of Political Science (Sciences-Po) in Paris in November 2008.The papers explore important theoretical questions such as how we should recognise and define differing lottery forms; the relationship between sortition and different aspects and forms of democracy; and its potential benefits to current political and commercial practice.Contributors include: Hubertus Buchstein, Gil Delannoi, Oliver Dowlen, Gerhard Goehler, Barbara Goodwin, Michael Hein, Yves Sintomer, Peter Stone and Antoine Vergne.

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 05 octobre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781845406998
• Langue: English

Extrait

Sortition
Theory and Practice
Edited by Gil Delannoi and Oliver Dowlen
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2016 digital version converted and published by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
This collection copyright © Gil Delannoi and Oliver Dowlen 2010, 2016
Individual contributions copyright © respective authors, 2010, 2016
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism and discussion.
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Notes on contributors
Hubertus Buchstein , Professor of Political Theory at Greifswald University . Research areas: Modern Democratic Theory, the history of Political Science and the history of Political Thought.
Gil Delannoi , Research Director at Sciences-Po Paris (Centre de recherches politiques) is a philosopher and an historian. At the present time his main activity as a professor is the history and theory of democracy . His research fields are democracy, evolution of political forms and regimes, and the history and conceptualisation of relativity.
Oliver Dowlen is an independent scholar who works primarily in the area of random selection and its capacity to produce democratic regeneration and political consolidation. During the 1980s and 1990s he was extensively involved in practical political work and was a founder member of the Society for Democracy including Random Selection (SDRS). During this time he also studied Marx’s concept of alienation for a part-time MPhil. In 2002–6 he took a full time doctorate in politics at New College, Oxford for which he explored the political potential of sortition.
Gerhard Göhler is a Professor Emeritus and taught political theory and the history of political ideas at the Free University, Berlin, until 2006. He is currently co-ordinating ‘Governance in Areas of Limited Statehood’, a research project on power and soft control at the Berlin Research Centre. His research interests include the theory of political institutions, theories of power and control, the history of political ideas in modernity and the history and theory of political science. He is co-editor of the collected works of Ernst Fraenkel, one of the founding fathers of German political science after 1945 (6 volumes, 1999–2008). He has written on the early Hegel, Marx’s dialectic, liberalism and conservatism in the nineteenth century and institutional theory (‘Institution Power Representation: What Institutions Stand For and How They Work’, 1997). Email: [e-mail].
Barbara Goodwin is Professor of Politics at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. Her research interests include ideologies, social justice, utopianism and moral responsibility. Recent publications include The Politics of Utopia (with Keith Taylor, 2nd edition, 2009), Using Political Ideas (5th edition, 2007). She is General Editor of the Imprint Academic series ‘Sortition and Public Policy’.
Michael Hein , research assistant at the Chair for Political Theory at Greifswald University. Research areas: politics in South Eastern Europe, European Integration, Constitutional Politics, and Systems Theory.
Yves Sintomer is Professor of Political Sociology at Paris 8 University, and Invited Researcher at Neuchâtel and Lausanne Universities. He is a Doctor of Political and Social Sciences (European University Institute, Florence) and has a Habilitation to direct research (Paris 5 University). He has also studied at Paris 8, Paris 10, Frankfurt/Main, and Harvard Universities . He has been Deputy-Director of the Marc Bloch Center (Berlin) and he has written various books and articles on participatory and deliberative democracy, most recently, Les budgets participatifs en Europe , La Découverte (Paris, 2008, English translation forthcoming).
Peter Stone is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University . His articles have appeared in such journals as the Journal of Political Philosophy , the Journal of Theoretical Politics , Political Theory , Rationality and Society , and Social Theory and Practice . His book on lotteries, The Luck of the Draw , forthcoming with Oxford University Press. He has a website at www.stanford.edu/~pstone
Antoine Vergne is a PhD candidate at the Freie Universität (Berlin, Germany ) and the Institut d’Études Politiques (Paris, France). He works on the theory and application of sortition in politics. He has specialised in the development and practice of the Planungszelle - the Citizens’ Jury model - in international contexts and has observed and assessed participatory democracy in projects in France and Germany. He has published several papers on this topic.



Introduction
Oliver Dowlen - The Modern Revival of an Old Idea
The group of international scholars of sortition who met in Paris in November 2008 share one thing in common. This is the intuition that our subject, the use of random selection or sortition in the public or political arena to choose people or allocate goods, is something special. But just what is so special about sortition that so engages those who study it?
To begin with it promises to bring something new to today’s political landscape, something of potentially world-changing significance. For those in the west who are aware of the deficiencies of the current liberal, representative, paradigm of government it offers to make up for what is perceived to be a democratic deficit. The modern use of sortition opens the prospect of creating practical equality between citizens in respect to public office and the possibility of bridging the gap between the citizens and what is too often seen as a detached political elite. It could also help to create more impartial institutions in a political arena too often dominated by partisan intrigues and pressures. For those in developing democracies it promises to inhibit the canker of corruption and to help to bring rival factions into a stable, unified political process. As a possible new addition to modern politics its introduction would fit comfortably onto the agenda of those advocating a more participatory model of democracy. Likewise it could appeal to those promoting greater citizen responsibility, those of an egalitarian persuasion or those demanding greater political transparency and accountability in public affairs. Above all it could serve to strengthen the hand of those seeking social progress through greater political engagement.
In this respect, therefore, the primary task of the modern explorer of sortition would consist of demonstrating in advance, in theory, what practical benefits sortition could bring to the modern polity. The fact that members of the political community are now openly advocating citizen’s jury schemes makes this need for clarity and understanding that much more urgent. As schemes get up and running, moreover, they would also need to be critically evaluated so as to inform further initiatives. The role of theory would therefore be to ease the passage of sortition into practice.
One of the complications of this vision, and another special quality of sortition, is that it is not just a new idea. It may be new to today’s politics but was systematically used in Ancient Athens and in late medieval Italy - two formative periods in the development of what we know as politics or the political process - and in many other places besides. This tells us, in the first instance, that sortition is not an untried mechanism: there is a considerable body of practice to inform modern theory.
But while this body of practice is a valuable resource for the modern advocate, it does not come without difficulties. Although sortition survives in the important institution of the randomly-selected jury, the last republic in which it was extensively used in the central organs of government - the Second Florentine Republic - fell in 1530. In the face of this discontinuity, all evaluation has to come through the prism of history. In order to make the historical precedent relevant to any possible modern application, therefore, the modern researcher has to be acutely aware of the differences and similarities between the lot-based polities of the past and our own political landscape. Moreover this situation is further complicated by the fact that remarkably little theoretical writing on sortition exists from these periods. It is as if the successful use of sortition in practice meant that commitment to theory was thought of as unnecessary - the use of lotteries was just a matter of common sense.
In these circumstances the symbiotic relationship between theory and practice takes on another twist. It is inevitable that those looking to past practice will do so from the viewpoint of the present - and I see no problem with this if it is done intelligently. There is thus a sense that we need some sort of view of what constitutes political progress and a thorough understanding of what a lottery process actually does before we can interpret what was actually happening in those somewhat distant republics. The more consciously articulated these views become, I would suggest, the more they can tell us about why sortition was valuable then, and why it could be valuable now. There is a sense, therefore, that as well as looking towards the future, today’s scholars of sortition, are, in fact, writing the theory that will help us to unravel the past practice of sortition.
This is not to suggest that looking back to past practice is the only way forward, but I would claim that this ‘discontinuous’ nature is a very special feature of the practice of sortition which helps makes it a particularly all-sided and rich arena of study. Unlike completely new devices, sortition has played a part in our political inhe