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Democracy Without Elections Mainz Democracy without Elections: Is electoral accountability essential for democracy? Felix Gerlsbeck [email protected] Paper prepared for the workshop “Democratic Anxiety. Democratic Resilience.” Mainz, 15-17 June 2017 DRAFT VERSION, PLEASE DO NOT CITE WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 1. Introduction The idea of choosing political decision-makers by sortition, that is, choosing them randomly from a pool of the entire population or from some qualified subset, through some form of lottery or other randomizing procedure, is familiar to democrats at least since ancient Athens. Apart from the selection of trial juries, however, sortition has all but disappeared from official decision-making procedures within contemporary democratic systems, and free, equal, and regular election through voting by the entire qualified population of candidates who put themselves forward for political office, has taken its place. Nevertheless, there has been renewed interest in the idea of reviving sortition-based elements within modern democratic systems over the last years: a number of democratic theorists see great promise in complementing elected decision-making institutions with those selected randomly. These proposals variously go under the names mini-publics, citizen juries, citizen assemblies, lottocracy, enfranchisement lottery, and even Machiavellian Democracy.1 The roots of this practice go back to ancient Athens. During the 5th century Athenian democracy, the equivalent of the parliamentary body tasked with deliberating 1 See for instance, Guerrero 2014; Fishkin 2009; Warren & Gastil 2015; Ryan & Smith 2014; Saunders 2012; López-Guerra 2014; López-Guerra 2011; McCormick 2011. 1 and drafting policy proposals, the boule, was chosen by lot from the citizens of Athens through a complex system of randomization. The equivalent of the executive, the prytany, was also chosen on a rotating basis from the boule.2 The concrete differences between these proposals need not detain us for the moment. In the following I will use the term sortition to refer to the general idea that substantive political decisions are made by randomly selected assemblies of ordinary citizens, and that the sample within the assembly, taken from the population, approximately descriptively represents the population from which it is taken.3 As its proponents point out, sortition has a number of weighty advantages over election. Compared to electoral representation, it is very likely that the assemblies making policy decisions would be more representative of the general population, for instance.4 They would also very likely be more cognitively diverse, making the finding of creative solutions to common problems much more likely.5 From an intrinsic perspective, having an equal chance of being selected also arguably better reflects the underlying democratic ideal of political equality, as under sortition, every citizen’s chance of decisively participating in policy-making is strictly equal, whereas in electoral systems the magnitude of this chance depends on a whole host of other circumstantial and arguably morally irrelevant factors, like charisma, independent wealth, or networking abilities.6 The quality of deliberation in randomly selected assemblies may also be better than in elected ones, partly because of the added cognitive and ideological diversity which may combat group dynamics such as polarization or information cascades, and partly because a sample of ordinary citizens will not be pre-sorted into hierarchically organized party blocs that have programmatic agendas. Hence, one can expect them to be more ready to change their minds in response to good reasons and take proposals from 2 See Hansen 1991; Ober 2008 3 Purely random selection will ensure representativeness over time, but there is a possibility that any given assembly may not be perfectly representative. Increasing the sample size will reduce this possibility, but if that is not an option, stratification of the sample may be necessary. For the latter, see Fishkin 2009. 4 López-Guerra 2014; Fishkin 2009 5 Landemore 2012 6 Saunders 2010 2 the “other side” seriously. Finally, compared to direct-democratic systems, it is likely that the decisions made will be based on better information, as “citizen jurors” will have more time, resources as well as incentives to seek out relevant information before deliberating and settling on a decision.7 There is, however, one aspect that is usually considered a decisive, if not conclusive flaw with sortition systems: the fact that decision-makers are not accountable for their actions to their electorate within a system of sortition. This could be one of the reasons why advocates of sortition-based institutions usually propose them as complements to elected institutions, rather than as replacements. In this paper, however, I will argue that the lack of accountability is actually a feature, not a bug.8 In other words, I argue here systems of sortition are preferable because they lack formalized accountability, because they are a form of “democracy without accountability.” This may seem highly counterintuitive, since holding political decision-makers accountable is typically held to be essential to guarantee that they will act in the population’s interest: let us call this notion responsiveness. This is arguably the key intended function of elections, of course: if politicians depend on the public’s approval for re-election, they will try to please the public (or at least a majority of them) in what they do. If everything works out, if it is not, they will attempt to bring policy in line with the public’s preferences, i.e. they will be responsive to the public’s preferences. There are a number of issues with this notion, not least the difficulty of defining what the “public’s” preferences actually are, give a diversity of values, beliefs and opinions among contemporary societies. 9 Aside from these issues, however, this argument from responsiveness is not as straightforward as it may seem. Consider the following line of thought: policy-making in the interest of citizens requires taking risky 7 See for instance López-Guerra 2014. 8 To be entirely clear, it is not true that citizen representatives are unaccountable in every sense of the word. They may for instance face social or private economic sanctions for their actions (e.g. they may be shunned by their compatriots, or they may be fired from their job), and one may consider this a form of accountability. More on this idea will be discussed below. I use the concept accountability in a more narrow sense here, meaning that their formal ability to exercise political power does not depend on what they do in office. 9 Social choice theory of course has already decisively damaged this notion of a unique, identifiable “public preference. 3 and uncertain decisions. Systems with accountability mechanisms, however, strongly discourage the taking of risks. The basic idea is that a successful navigation of political uncertainties requires a degree of experimentation. However, if I will be held personally accountable for the failure of something I do, and if I have only little control over or knowledge of the probabilities of failure of my actions, then I am incentivized not to do it. The idea that being shielded from accountability should encourage innovation, experimentation, or the taking on of risks is one of the reasons behind, for instance, the creation of the limited liability company: entrepreneurs will only invest in risky new ventures if their personal wealth beyond their share in the investment is (to some extent) protected in case of a failure of the company. It is also of course the raison d’être behind academic tenure: generating new knowledge is inherently a risky endeavor, and whether any given research project will pay off is ex ante uncertain: if academics were to be held accountable for their failures, however, this would encourage conformity and a focus exclusively on “safe” areas of research. In the following, therefore, I will first outline the positive case for democracy without accountability, based on the requirements of policy-making as decision-making under uncertainty. Second, I will argue that sortition would be a good way to implement this idea, and finally, I will argue that sortition without accountability can withstand most of the criticisms that can be leveled against it. 2. Experiments Experimental accounts of democratic decision-making, which analyze collective political decision-procedures primarily from the viewpoint of collective problem-solving under uncertainty, and stress the creative and adaptive nature of democratic institutions. Experimentation, in this view, is the appropriate response to find out which policy will 4 serve the collective ends when precisely what those ends are is in dispute, and how to reach any given end is highly uncertain.10 What exactly a commitment to political experimentalism implies differs somewhat across accounts, and requires more analysis than is possible here. Nevertheless, the key idea is that when faced with the need to take a decision in a situation where the consequences of action (and inaction) are uncertain, we ought to follow what is basically scientific method of inquiry: form a hypothesis about the effects of certain actions, design an intervention on the basis of this hypothesis (e.g. a new policy), observe and record the effects of the intervention, appropriately adapt our hypothesis to the observed effect (did it work?), and adapt our action plans accordingly
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