Political Potential of Sortition

Oliver Dowlen

Description

The central feature of every true lottery is that all rational evaluation is deliberately excluded. Once this principle is grasped, the author argues, we can begin to understand exactly what benefits sortition can bring to the political community. The book includes a study of the use of sortition in ancient Athens and in late medieval and renaissance Italy. It also includes commentary on the contributions to sortition made by Machiavelli, Guicciardini, Harrington and Paine; an account of the history of the randomly-selected jury; and new research into lesser-known examples from England, America and revolutionary France.

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 03 avril 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781845407032
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Political Potential of Sortition
A Study of the Random Selection of Citizens for Public Office
Oliver Dowlen
imprint-academic .com




2017 digital version converted and published by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
Copyright © Oliver Dowlen, 2008, 2017
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.
Imprint Academic PO Box 200, Exeter EX5 5YX, UK



Preface
The origins of this book lie back in 1994 in a proposal made by the Labour Committee for the Democratic Accountability of Secret Services, a grouping to which I then belonged. The proposal, which was not followed up with any organisational detail, was that secret services should be monitored for abuses of human rights, and that the monitors who undertook the task should be selected randomly. The idea was the brainchild of Dr Keith Nilsen whose general orientation was that the modern political arena was so dominated by covert factionalism that fundamental values such as truth and integrity were under serious threat. His solution lay in establishing institutions whose impartiality was not open to question.
While I understood the reasoning behind this and other similar projects advanced by Dr Nilsen, I felt that advocacy was not enough and that further investigation of the question of random selection was necessary to discover its full potential. Nor was I entirely happy with Dr Nilsen’s claim that the anti-factional capacity of sortition was a self-evident truth. [1] Truths can certainly be understood from practice, but in the case of a largely discontinued practice such as sortition they have to be argued for anew and evidence (old and new) presented in support of those arguments. My main motivation for this study lay in the idea that a broadly-based and open discourse on the potential of sortition was a good thing. Such a discourse, I felt, could be taken forward by a thorough exploration of how sortition had been used and a principled analysis of the properties of the lottery process.
In 2002 I was fortunate enough to study the subject for a doctorate at New College Oxford under the supervision of Mark Philp and, initially, Elizabeth Frazer. Through the internet group of scholars organised by Conall Boyle (aptly named the Kleroterians) my completed thesis then reached the attention of Keith Sutherland of Imprint Academic who was planning a series on sortition. I was delighted to be asked to be part of this exciting initiative and to be in the good company of other contributors to the subject, including, of course, Thomas Gataker.
This book is, in all essentials, a reworking of my doctoral thesis; but there are some important changes of emphasis that need to be noted. Extra emphasis is placed on the importance of the ‘active context’ and the ‘constitutional context’ of each application or proposed application of sortition. This is to help the reader to see how the level of detail advanced during the historical narratives links into the arguments about what sortition can bring to the political community . I have also added a glossary and a number of diagrams in order to help the less specialist reader to get a clearer idea of the schemes and contexts where lot was used or advocated. I have placed bibliographical notes at the end of every chapter save the last. These are designed to give the reader an overview of the main sources that I used in the research. They also give some indication of the selection of background literature that I used that would not otherwise be indicated in the footnotes. They also include details of the location of some primary documents.
In addition I have included a brief appendix on the decline of sortition. Because this question was not part of my original study plan I thought it best to make a clear separation between this short, somewhat speculative, section and the main body of the book.
I would like to acknowledge the role of Keith Nilsen in introducing me to the subject of sortition; the help of Mark Philp in keeping me on track during my thesis preparation; the help of Miriam Ronzoni and Tizziana Torresi in the translation of Guicciardini’s Del modo di eleggere...; and the help of Antoine Vergne in tracing the documentary evidence for the French split legislature proposal of 1793.
My thanks also go to Rachel Hammersley for pointing me in the direction of the Lesueur/Rutledges draft constitution of 1792, and to Dr O. Murray for indicating how lot was used for deciding inheritance in Ancient Athens. In addition I would like to thank my ( younger ) fellow students at the Politics Department of Oxford University for their enthusiasm and encouragement; Conall Boyle for bringing us students of sortition together; Keith Sutherland for his initiative in bringing out the series; Barbara Goodwin for editing this work; and my wife Berenice for her help and support.


1 Nilsen (2004). Nilsen also made proposals for the use of sortition in Iraq, details of which can be found in Nilsen (2007). He also founded the Society for Democracy including Random Selection in South London in 2000.



Introduction
This is the study of one particular aspect of government: the random selection of political officers by sortition or lot. Sortition was widely used in Ancient Athens and in the city republics of Italy in the late medieval and renaissance periods. There has therefore been a considerable investment in this form of selection during periods of great importance in the development of our political ideas and practices. With the notable exception of jury selection, however, it is largely absent from today’s electoral politics. Despite this there has been a recent revival of interest in sortition both from academic writers and from those involved in practical politics. Much of this has been a response to perceived problems with liberal democracy such as the growing gulf between citizen and professional politician and the exclusion of significant minority groups from the political process.
In the 1970s and 80s there was a growing interest in community politics and randomly-selected citizens’ juries were seen as a means of advancing the ideas of a truly participatory democracy. Although the citizens’ jury models of this period advocated lot as the means by which citizens were to be selected to serve, there was little attention given to the exact contribution that sortition was to make. From the later 1980s and 1990s, however, a number of more ambitious sortive schemes began to surface, some of which sought to find a closer match between the qualities of sortition and the purpose for which it was to be deployed. These included schemes for the selection of one or other chamber of the UK parliament by lot, [1] aproposal to elect a truly representative Citizen’s Legislature for the United States by drawing members randomly from the citizen body, [2] and a scheme for randomly selected monitors for secret services. [3] This coincided with a debate, mainly amongst political theorists and philosophers , which explored the proposition that the lotteries could provide a just means of distributing social goods. [4]
In 2007, however, the French presidential candidate Segolene Royal went to the polls with a manifesto that included setting up citizens ’ juries, selected by lot, to oversee the work of elected representatives . This indicates that sortition might be about to escape from the realms of theory and that very soon selection of citizens for public office by lot could once again become part of our day-to -day political practice.
While this book should be seen as a contribution to an expanding discourse on the subject, I do not advocate any particular scheme, nor, indeed, do I present arguments to persuade the reader that the modern reintroduction of lot would necessarily be a good thing. I am not entirely sure that we are ready for it - lotteries are not a regular part of our current political culture and we lack any practical knowledge of how lottery-based schemes could actually operate within the political arena. My contribution is accordingly based on the premise that a certain amount of theoretical and historical ground-clearing is required in order that a principled and informed framework for understanding the political value of sortition might be established. While I make some suggestions about how we could approach the modern application of sortition in my concluding chapter, I leave open the question of whether such a reintroduction is necessary.
I therefore set out with the straightforward aim of identifying what benefits the random selection of political officers could bring to the political community. This is simply defined by the book’s title The Political Potential of Sortition, but some aspects of this task are far from simple. By applying the term ‘potential’ to the project I address the idea that there is a special power or capacity inherent in the lottery that is absent from other forms of selection or decision-making . It also suggests that there are some circumstances, contexts or lottery schemes that will realise this and bring it to fruition, others that will not, and others that will do so only partially or incompletely. To investigate how this operates our starting point has to be the lottery procedure itself - or, to be more accurate, the relationship between lottery form (what a lottery is) and its function (what task it is being asked to perform). I attend to this analytical task in Chapter One where I identify the defining feature and chief operating characteristic of all lotteries as the ‘blind break’. This is the zone at the centre of the lottery from which all rational activity is del