Democracy without Elections:
Is electoral accountability essential for democracy?
Felix Gerlsbeck
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DRAFT VERSION, PLEASE DO NOT CITE WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION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 (scrap the intervention, revise it, or retain it provisionally).
This method of experimental inquiry therefore – among other things – requires three essential functions (adapted from Axelrod & Cohen 1999):
1. Identification of problems and agenda-setting: there has to be a reliable mechanism to transmit the need for a decision (to notify them of a problem) to decision-making authorities and force them to take account of the problem. 2. Intelligent generation of interventions: a mechanism providing the creative generation of “informed guesses” based on the limited available evidence - hypotheses of what may work to address the problem, and how that may be implemented given the tools available (acknowledging that certainty about these hypotheses is not available). 3. Feedback: A mechanism through which the outcome (the success or failure) of the decision has a causal effect on the support for the underlying hypothesis, and directly leads to appropriate adaptation of the decision strategy.
There are several features of democratic institutions that lend themselves to the thought that they may be very good at these particular functions. Open decision systems
10 See for instance Knight & Johnson 2011; Anderson 2009; Sabel & Zeitlin 2011; Dorf & Sabel 1998; Ansell 2012.
5 in which everyone can potentially exercise political influence and everyone has the opportunity to speak up, organize, stand for office, or otherwise offer up their problems and proposals for consideration, could be good at the first task. The fact that (at least ideally), the groups taking political decisions within democratic systems (in parliaments, councils, parliamentary committees) are composed of a diversity of people – different parties, different economic sectors, different ideological orientations etc. – together again with the openness of the system to diverse interest groups should be conducive to producing a variety of hypotheses and potential solutions to the problems identified by the process in step one. Finally, the fact that these decision-making bodies are periodically subject to re-election, and individual deciders are liable to being replaced by others at regular intervals suggests that the results of experimentation can have the necessary feedback effect: those whose policies have not worked out are replaced with others who are willing to try something else (unless they change their minds in time), while those whose attempts have been successful retain their jobs. In other words, the threat of individual accountability, or so it seems, helps to move the process of inquiry forward.
So we should expect democratic regimes the world over to be more experimental than non-democratic ones. However, it is striking that at first glance, this connection does not seem so entirely obvious. There are prominent examples of highly experimental non- democratic institutions, like the governments and bureaucracies of China and Singapore, or the regulatory agency structure of the European Union, which – despite unelected – often tend to approach practical political issues (within a limited set of issues, to be sure) with a highly experimental mindset.11 On the other hand, some common institutional forms of democracy that require consensus across many agents for any decision to be made, seem particularly unsuited to experimentation. In decision-making systems with many veto players there may be a tendency to institutional gridlock which prevents either flexibility of the political agenda or creativity in the design of new policies. In electoral systems with high barriers to entry (such as in the United Kingdom) or in which the election and campaign rules decisively favor the incumbents, on the other hand, the
11 For an account of the Chinese example, see Heilmann & Perry 2011. For the EU, see Sabel & Zeitlin 2012.
6 feedback function may also not be working properly.12 Therefore it is well worth looking deeper into the nature of democratic institutions themselves, to find out which aspects of it preclude experimental problem-solving.
3. Electoral Accountability
In this paper I suggest that there is a particular aspect of how democratic systems typically are institutionally realized standing in the way of it becoming an effective system of collective experimental inquiry: electoral accountability. Institutions of accountability, such as periodic elections, are supposed to ensure responsiveness: that those elected act in the interest of the electorate – if they do, they are rewarded with re- election, and if they do not, they are punished. By extension, then, we may think that since political experimentation is actually in the interest of the electorate, a system of accountability would lead decision-makers to pursue an experimental, adaptive strategy themselves.
Of course, in any given instance of democratic decision-making, we may well question whether the mechanism works appropriately. Critics have pointed out that several features of existing democratic systems prevent elections from producing such responsiveness, some of which possibly may be addressed through institutional reform.13
However, from the experimental perspective, these accountability mechanisms have the fatal flaw that they can set the wrong incentives for decision-makers. Consider the following simple model with a single decision-maker: Assume that deciders care only about being in office (i.e. their expected utility Ui is equal to their probability of re- election), and assume they are judged only on the one decision they take (not other circumstantial factors). Let us further assume that when faced with a political problem,
12 In the recent 2015 UK general election, a relatively new party, UKIP, received 12.7% of the vote, but only one seat, or 0.2% percent of seats. Whatever one may think of UKIP (in this case the distortion of the electoral vote may have been a good thing), it is clear that the electoral system makes it exceedingly difficult for new challengers to enter, possibly undermining both the problem-identification and feedback functions. 13 For a summary account of problems with electoral accountability, see Guerrero 2014.
7 they have two choices – they can either do nothing or enact an experimental policy that can either succeed or fail. Normalizing utility of re-election at 1, and the utility of losing the election at zero, we can imagine the following scenarios:
a) If they do nothing and the situation remains at the status quo, they will be re- elected with some fixed probability P:
Ui(nothing) = Pi b) If they experiment with a new policy with a success probability of S, they will be guaranteed to be re-elected in case the experiment succeeds and guaranteed to be voted out of office if not. The expected payoff would simply be equal to S:
Ui(experiment) = S
From this, we can immediately see that our decision-maker i only takes the experimental option when the expected probability of success S is higher than the expected probability of re-election in the status quo P; Ei(S) > Ei(P). The question is now what determines the expected probabilities of S or P.
S cannot be influenced by the decision-maker herself, as it is a feature of the policy at hand. Furthermore, S is unknown, such that expected utility calculations are impossible. Ei(S) therefore depends entirely on i’s subjective assessment of the success probability of S.
P, on the other hand, depends on a variety of factors: on how the problem in the status quo is perceived by the electorate, on who gets blamed for the status quo, and on how alternative candidates look (whether the public judges that they will do a better job with respect to the problem at hand. The worse the status quo, the lower P; the less blame for the status quo attaches to the incumbent, the higher P; and the less feasible the alternative candidates are, the higher P. So P can be described as a function of these three factors.
Crucially, i can influence some of these factors through what we call campaigning or public communication (or “spin”). With respect to the first two factors, this can take the form of downplaying the problem at hand, shifting the blame for the status quo on
8 someone else (the vagaries of the economy, global or local; international corporations, the previous officeholders) or on the universe (“there is nothing we can do”); arguing away problems (including “massaging” statistics); stalling for time (“the issue is being looked at”) while hoping things get better on their own); and in general appealing to voters’ risk-aversion and conservative tendencies. With respect to alternative candidates, of course, incumbent i can employ negative campaigning (“the other candidate will be even worse”), or otherwise try to shift the political debate onto other, more emotionally salient issues.
The expected P, Ei(P), therefore depends on i’s perception of how well she can, through campaigning, increase this likelihood. In other words, the incumbent will experiment only if she believes that the unknown risk of failure of the policy is lower than she can bring the public’s perceptions that enter P.
We can also see immediately that there are situations where i will experiment despite the unknown risks. If the status quo is irretrievably bad (if there is a genuine crisis) for instance, experimentation seems attractive in comparison. This may explain Franklin Roosevelt’s approach to highly experimental policy in the days after taking office in the midst of the Great Depression. In general, this pattern of democratic governments trying and stall and shift blame while remaining inactive, until things come to a point in a genuine crisis, upon which hectic activity ensues, has been aptly described by David Runciman (2014).
Similarly, if i cannot avoid being blamed for the failure to do something (if she ran on a platform promising action, perhaps), or if the alternative candidate is polling very strongly, we may think she would bite the bullet and enact the uncertain policy as well.
We may also think that we could ameliorate this problem through transparency requirements: by reducing the ability of officeholders to affect P altogether, which is a strategy emphasized by many democratic theorists appealing to the importance of
9 transparency, candor, an independent media, and generally reducing politicians’ ability to “spin” issues in their favor.14
I will not dispute that it may be possible to address the problem in this way. However, this paper will consider an alternative way to go: doing away with accountability in democratic politics. This may sound dangerous at first glance. However, it may seem less so once we realize there is of course an element of this in every existing democratic system. If there are term limits (such as on the American presidency), the officeholder is not subject to accountability in her last term. Similarly, if the officeholder decides to retire or gets an attractive exit option, she is no longer subject to the constraints of accountability – which leads to the troubling situation in which outside interests (interest groups, the car industry, lobbying firms, etc.) can offer the officeholder a job sufficiently attractive that she decides not to seek re-election, which in turn frees her from the constraint of acting in the interest of the electors (and, one may suspect, instead in the interest of the agent offering the outside option).
A further observation often made by political commentators may also support this view: that in every period between elections there is a “window” in which great policy initiatives can be made, namely the time sufficiently far removed from the next elections such that actions taken will not influence the outcome. In other words, there is a period in which action can be taken without fear of being held accountable, since voters are liable to forget about it by the time the next election comes along. For instance, if we can assume that people are myopic such that they tend to base their voting decision on what happened in, say, the last two years, then a four-year election cycle would open a “window” of two years in which accountability is reduced and experimentation can be taken.15
Thus, one may think that one way to get rid of the conservative incentives and thereby improve the experimental functionality of democracy would be to get rid of the possibility of re-election. In our simple model above, the expected payoff of doing anything would be simply zero, because the possibility of re-election is zero. One way
14 See for instance, Green 2010 15 On the size and relevance of voter myopia see for instance Healy & Malhotra 2013; Hellwig & Marinova 2014.
10 would be to only allow single terms in office to our representatives. Historically, this has been the standard rule governing elective offices from the ancient Athenian and Roman republics (e.g. tribunes and consuls) to the Italian city-states. In such a system candidates would be elected, but their incentive structure is greatly changed: they are chosen by “the people”, but would be free to experiment, since the success or failure of experimentation is not tied to their re-election probability (which, of course is zero either way).
However, while this system would get rid of individual accountability, it would not get rid of party accountability. Assuming that candidates for office are likely to be members of parties or even informal reciprocal groupings seeking political power together (e.g. interest groups, ethnic groups; patricians and plebeians), they would care that their behavior does not damage the re-election prospects for other members of their group. Assuming that people care that members of their own party are in power, and assuming that the likelihood that their party is re-elected depends on some form of P, we are back with the problem sketched above.
At this point, one may object that this is predicated on the assumption that voters actually penalize failed policies, or rather, that they penalize good faith attempts at experimentally solving political problems if they turn out not to work. Perhaps, one may think, if politician A explains convincingly and sincerely that there is uncertainty surrounding his policy, and if voters understand the complexity of many political issues, citizens will re-elect him even if the policy goes wrong. If re-election probability is tied directly to what the candidate attempts, not whether what he does is successful in the end, then indeed the incentives definitely favor experimentation. While it does not seem to be the case that contemporary voters tend to generally value failed good faith efforts, it may be possible that preferences could be this way in the future. Note, however, that this would to some extent undermine the feedback function of democratic elections: if things go bad, but the incumbent is re-elected, ought this to be interpreted as a sign that things are not actually bad, or as a sign that voters value her experimental spirit?
Therefore, in this paper I explore what we may call the “Athenian” solution for democracy without accountability: staffing decision-making bodies with randomly chosen stratified samples of the entire population, who then bring forward problems,
11 deliberate on solutions, and then decide by some voting rule on binding policy. Periodically, these boulés, councils of 500, citizen juries, mini-publics, or deliberative polls – however you want to call them – are then replaced by a new randomly selected, or if necessary stratified, sample of the population. Hence, they cannot be re-elected, and indeed, their actions in office will have no influence whatsoever on the composition of the next legislature.
Admittedly, to do away with elections may be a utopian proposal. However, in describing the Athenian alternative, this model makes explicit – depending on the reader’s predilections – the controversial assumptions underlying the electoral model, and the implications of understanding the project of political decision-making as a mode of collective experimental inquiry.
4. Randomized Regimes - Proposals
The proposal to have the legislative function be taken over by randomly selected – rather than elected – assemblies has to be distinguished from the proposals by either Saunders or Lopez-Guerra, 16 both of whom have proposed variants of democratic decision-making that involve elements of sortition, but who retain accountability mechanisms. In Saunders’ proposal, lottery voting, voting (for candidates or proposals) proceeds as normal, with everyone casting a vote for their preferred choice, but then instead of majority or plurality rule, a single vote is drawn randomly from all votes cast, and only this vote determines the final decision. This ensures that every single voter has an equal chance of being effective (decisive) in determining public policy. Arguably, this is a better interpretation of the principle of political equality than majority rule, since it addresses the problem of permanent minorities. However, of course, while this proposal may excel in terms of its procedural fairness, from the perspective of the required functionality of experimental politics, it is probably not to be preferred.
16 Saunders 2012; López-Guerra 2011
12 In Lopez-Guerra’s proposal, on the other hand – the enfranchisement lottery – the electorate is restricted to a random sample of the population, who then go through a “competence-building process,” and subsequently cast their votes for an elected parliament. This proposal mainly addresses the twin problems of voter ignorance and low turnout (which in turn is disproportionally concentrated among certain social groups)s, by ensuring that the electorate is both representative and well-informed when choosing candidates.
Both proposals have a number of things speaking for them. Probably the most important advantage is that they address the problem of rational ignorance. This denotes the problem that since in a typical democracy the effect of a single vote on the aggregate outcome is so infinitesimally small that for the individual voter it is in no way worth the effort to become informed about politics. Since the outcome of the election is the same regardless of one’s own voting choice, it would not be rational to expend cognitive energy to gather political evidence or indeed, consider any opinion not already one’s own. This logic holds even if voters have sociotropic or altruistic preferences, i.e. if they sincerely care about and want to advance the common good. Even in such a situation, given that the effect of a single vote is effectively zero, the time necessary to become informed about politics could be better spent promoting the common good in some other, more direct way.17
In randomly selected electorates like in Lopez-Guerra’s model, on the other hand, the causal relevance of a single vote is much greater. Whether voters are self-interested or altruistic, their vote has a measurable effect on the outcome and therefore on the environment in which they are going to live. Therefore they would have an incentive to become informed such that their vote corresponds to their preferences over precisely this environment. At the same time, for a smaller electorate it is possible to actually make them informed, or at least to provide the resources needed for voters to inform themselves. In Saunders’ proposal, equally, any vote I cast for a specific option increases the probability that it will be chosen by a non-zero amount – because even non-majority opinions have a chance of being selected.
17 The classic source is Downs 1957.
13 These sortition processes also share the general advantages of these procedures, such as the prevention of electoral dynasties, of entrenched corruption, and countering the inherently “aristocratic” effects of elections (i.e. the tendency of voters to choose candidates exhibiting specific familiar traits – or names – considered desirable). Random assemblies are by definition microcosms of the population and – given a large enough sample – as such as close to descriptively representative as possible. They also potentially increase the quality of deliberation. Since members do not have to pander to constituencies at home, they can engage in argumentation and change their minds, and the increased diversity of the assembly might lead to a higher level of cognitive diversity and thus to better epistemic quality of deliberation. These are some of the reasons why a possibility of re-election (let alone for an indeterminate number of times!) struck many ancient and pre-modern republican observers as in conflict with the notion of political equality. Since the main interest of this paper is the connection between political accountability and political experimentation, however, I will not go further into these other potential advantages.
As already discussed above, neither Saunders’ (in so far as the votes are cast for candidates, not proposals) nor Lopez-Guerra’s proposals, however, get rid of individual accountability – it is merely the case that the group to which decision-makers are accountable is different.
In the sortition model, on the other hand, there is no voting at all. The aspects that are important for the following discussion are these: Legislatures are randomly selected stratified samples, they bring with them their agenda, and have a specified period of time to deliberate and decide which policies to enact – during which time they can avail themselves of expertise and/or the wisdom of interest group representatives or delegate tasks to non-elected agencies, and at the end of their tenure they are replaced by a new sample of the population, which is free to set a new agenda and, if need be, reverse the decisions of their predecessors.
Strictly speaking, this is close to, but not exactly like the model of the Athenian democracy. There, the randomly composed, highly diverse Boulé was tasked with agenda-setting and the development of proposals for political actions, but the final up-or-
14 down vote was taken in the assembly of all the (eligible) citizens after some public debate. For reasons of practicality in contemporary society, however, in the model offered in this paper proposals are not regularly submitted to referendum for approval. The only reason is that this seems to me to be impossible in modern complex societies, and if convinced of the opposite I would be happy to consider this solution as well.
Another possible variation to the model would be not to replace the entire assembly periodically, but in a staggered fashion. For example, we may want to replace a quarter of the assembly every year. Running it this way may increase the sense of continuity of subsequent assemblies and potentially increase the feeling of responsibility of individual legislators. The drawback would be that complete reversals of policies that happen to turn out badly is made a lot harder.18
5. The motivation of citizen legislators
So it remains to be shown that the sortition model can be expected better to perform the three functions of successful experimental problem-solving than an electoral democracy. Before looking into the three functions separately, let us briefly consider the motivations of the individual legislator in our “democracy without accountability.”
As discussed above, in an elected assembly the legislator subject to accountability wants to be re-elected and chooses what to do on this basis. Her utility is determined by the expected probability of re-election for each of her actions. This way of putting it glossed over the fact that she may have other motivations. She may also have fixed independent preferences over policy that go beyond her desire to ensure her re-election – she may be “intrinsically” motivated to get a specific policy enacted. We have to be clear, however, that whatever that intrinsic motivation will be, the electoral accountability mechanism may work in an opposite direction. To the extent, then, that she acts on her intrinsic motivation, it has to be despite the electoral accountability. This is exacerbated when we assume that the intrinsically motivated legislator also wants to remain in office
18 For a more specific proposal, see Guerrero 2014.
15 as long as possible in order to further the agenda that motivates her in this way across several legislative sessions. In any case, we may hold intrinsic motivation constant across both models for the purposes of this analysis, since that will vary independently of other incentives.
Now in randomly composed assemblies without the possibility of re-election, the possibility of re-election is of course zero. Legislators do not care about remaining in power, since they cannot. But what could be their motivation if not that? The first motivating force is the fixed preference for certain policies over others, which is a constant element in both models. The second, variable part of her motivation, however, is the individual reward she can get out of participating. What could that be, and how does it depend on the actions she takes?
Since the pay received for being part of the decision body is not dependent on success or failure in this model (by assumption), the only way her policy decisions can have an effect on her utility is if she manages to change policy in such as way as to benefit her directly. These benefits, we may assume, accrue mainly during the period after her tenure (we assume she is on leave from her job during the time in office; furthermore, with the exception of very old citizens, they will spend more time outside of office after their tenure than within).
In other words, she would be motivated during her time in office to act such that once she leaves office, she is better off than, or at least as well off as before she was selected. In order to simplify the model, I will exclude the possibility of outright corruption (i.e. that officeholders receive direct payment for certain decisions), which is of course also a constant across both models, and that decisions by the random assembly must be reasonably general (i.e. “Jane Smith shall receive a million dollars” is not a valid law).
The most likely scenario therefore is that the legislator would try to enact policy that benefits broadly speaking the “class” of which she will be a member upon leaving office (which, typically, would be the class she had been before – barring certain celebrity effects such as her becoming a TV personality). Thus, postal workers, for instance, may call for legislation that raises wages in their sector. Entrepreneurs and
16 business owners may call for lower wages, increased financial incentives, or a reduction of regulation. Families will want more child support, and scientists will call for more research funding (or permanent academic positions). One may already observe that this is not terribly much different from what goes on in an ideal elected parliament (i.e. one that is actually representative), in which just such claims are being negotiated. The expectation, therefore, might be that assembled random sample of self-interested actors will end up with a compromise solution that offers benefits to most of the groups (however defined) that are represented. Depending on the voting rule in the assembly, the circle of those standing to benefit will be larger or smaller.
However, things are even more complicated: there are three limiting factors to material-self interest being the sole motivating factor. First, there is what we may call “shame-avoidance”: the desire not to be seen in socially undesirable ways by one’s fellow citizens. Since after one’s term in office, one is returned to one’s previous social circles, this also takes the form of trying to avoid future social stigmatization after exiting the legislature. This desire should motivate deciders to frame their actions in a way that is socially acceptable. To the extent that purely self-interested arguments will not be acceptable, they will try to avoid them, and frame their actions in publicly acceptable, generalizable language.
Nevertheless, of course, as reality television shows, this desire to feel avoid shame can vary quite strongly across individuals, and given that decision-makers do not depend on re-election, the extent to which shame limits their self-interest depends on their tolerance for it. Another issue may be that certain groups in society actually value anti-social behavior, and would demand the same from their representatives. The degree to which these phenomena reduce the attractiveness of the model depends therefore on empirical circumstances to some extent.
Note that this incentive exists just as much in elected assemblies, but that there is the added incentive given by the accountability mechanism. They may work in the same direction, but as discussed above, they also may not. By getting rid of accountability, we may think that the importance of this factor becomes correspondingly greater.
17 Second, the citizen legislator may be genuinely be motivated by pride: by the desire to achieve something of which she is proud given the tasks set for her, and for which people will remember her. As opposed to shame-avoidance, this is a more private desire and does not depend on the presence of an audience. Importantly, she may desire to enact a law or a policy decision which remains in force for a long time and is not immediately reversed. Again, this desire may vary across different personalities, but we should probably not underestimate its motivating force.
Third, and finally, there is the problem that in a foreseeable time a different set of people will come in to legislate. This means that even if the legislator succeeds in getting some outrageous law that benefits herself enormously through the deliberation-and- decision process, it can be reversed by the next incoming assembly, about the membership of which she has no idea. Therefore, she has an incentive to operate within the limits of a more general acceptability. This limit on self-seeking behavior is greatly reduced, by the way, in situations in which it the composition of future assemblies is more predictable and laws can be tailored accordingly. This is a situation in which uncertainty on part of the legislators works in everyone’s favor.
These three motivations can work together to limit purely self-interested strategies: If the legislator is motivated by shame-avoidance, she will attempt to do what seems to be in the public interest, if she is motivated by pride, she wants her decisions to endure, which means she has to enact policy that won’t be reversed by incoming assemblies – it must in principle be acceptable to them.
Now we can look at the three functions of political experimentalism, and analyze how such a random assembly may differ from an elective one.
Agenda-setting: The idea behind this is that in the normal course of social life in pluralist societies, political problems will inevitably arise. People will differ in what they want out of a collective endeavor such as an economy, their value commitments clash over certain behaviors, norms, and laws, and their expectations may come to be threatened by social developments. Therefore, whenever such a problem arises, it must be reliably transmitted onto the political agenda such that a political solution can be developed and an experimental process of inquiry into that issue can get started. It is
18 important that this is an impartial process, meaning that grievances of any group within society can be brought onto the agenda. Small, unpopular, or relatively powerless groups must also enjoy some agenda access for a procedure to properly be called experimental.
In an elected assembly, the transmission of new political problems works via the electoral mechanism. Here there are several paths: first, existing candidates may take on issues they perceive in the population (or which are brought to them through interactions with interest groups) because they feel moved, or because they want to win the votes of those who suffer from the problem. Furthermore, if existing candidates are unwilling to change their minds, they may be replaced by new challengers who are interested in addressing the problem. The rise of single-issue parties (e.g. Green parties) may be an example of this phenomenon. Environmental problems are perceived by a part of the population, but not yet reflected in parliamentary policy. Then a new party forms around this issue, competes for election, and eventually wins some seats, thus bringing the issue onto the agenda.
We can also see right away how this process could break down in an electoral system. Small or unpopular groups (i.e. those with non-mainstream views) may not be able to convince enough voters to win a seat in parliament. The entry requirements for new parties are high, in formal, monetary and organizational terms. Disadvantaged groups – such as the disabled, the marginally employed, or the elderly poor – may have neither the resources to form new single-issue parties, nor the electoral clout to make it worth their while for established candidates to take their concerns on board.
Furthermore, electoral systems may disproportionately favor incumbents for various reasons: for instance, the US Senate (with some historical exceptions) typically has re-election rates of around 80 percent, a rate which has in recent years risen to over 90 percent. 19 Barring the explanation that everyone is exceedingly happy with the existing composition of Congress (which is somewhat implausible given the typical current approval rating in the 14-20 percent range20), this means that citizen interests are not properly translated onto the political agenda because of strong incumbency advantage.
19 https://www.opensecrets.org/bigpicture/reelect.php 20 http://www.gallup.com/poll/1600/congress-public.aspx
19 There is a variety of explanations for this, including more campaign resources being available to incumbents (including media access), or the general status quo bias of the electorate.
Under the sortition model, on the other hand, given a large enough sample, it is more likely that members of disadvantaged groups (or their representatives) will at some point become part of the assembly and enjoy a degree of agenda access. This likelihood, importantly, does not depend on resources, but purely on statistical chance. It is true that very small groups may still not be represented in every assembly, but across several of them, the likelihood that at least one member is present rises quickly. Furthermore, members that are randomly selected to participate can of course invite members of those very small disadvantaged groups to hearings and can take their interests into account. Given that legislators need not fear accountability, they may, if sufficiently empathetic and internally motivated, even try to put the issues of those groups onto the agenda.
Once legislators are selected, the motivational factors discussed above can become effective: if they are themselves from a group that suffers from a political problem, they will of course attempt to resolve this problem purely out of the self-interest category. The fact that they operate under the shadow of future reversal, as well as the psychological factors, mean that it is unlikely that solutions will merely be conflictual periodic back-and-forths of the status quo (such that a group that has suffered will now inflict suffering, and so on).
Generation of hypotheses: The key problem here is that decision-makers must sincerely try to analyze and address the problems on the agenda, and try to develop proposals based on the available evidence, proposals that have a chance of succeeding, even if it is unknown. They should ideally not decide purely on the basis of ideological preference, but be ready to try out promising solutions in practice, they should become pragmatic.
In electoral systems there are three key problems: the first is that of self-selection. Those people standing for election are by definition people who actively seek political power, and in most systems they are members of parties with a defined program, agenda and manifesto. Barring purely self-interested motives, this also means that they are likely
20 to be driven to participate because they have strong convictions, which run contrary to an experimental model of seeking policy solutions.
Second, elected representatives face bad incentives, as explained above in the introduction. Unless the likelihood of success of an experimental policy is higher than the likelihood of re-election in the status quo, the incentives point them to do nothing, especially not to objectively and dispassionately consider the problems on the agenda.
Third, it has been suggested that the generation of new hypotheses may require a degree of cognitive diversity.21 That is, the assembly should contain people who “think differently” about problems; people who have different socio-economic, racial or ethnic backgrounds, and who can shift perspectives on old dichotomies, aiding in possibly overcoming those problems. Elected assemblies, however, produce cognitive diversity only under exceptional circumstances, namely if – in a single-member district system – constituencies are internally homogenous but externally diverse (i.e. the members of one district are internally as similar as possible, but districts are very different from each other), or – in a party-based proportional representation system – party lists are internally diverse. Since, however, it is likely that people of the same cognitive disposition make it onto party lists and onto the candidate roster for a constituency election (diplomatic, ambitious, charismatic, full of convictions), the resulting assembly will be more homogenous than the ideal demands. Indeed, there is evidence that elected assemblies in industrialized democracies are hardly representative of the general population.
In random assemblies, on the other hand, the problems of self-selection and cognitive homogeneity do not apply, by design. It is more difficult to make a positive case for why randomly selected legislators would rely on impartiality and dispassionate analysis of problems. One aspect may be that people who do not actively desire political power may be more open to pragmatic solutions, either for personal reasons (they may just not care enough about specific ideologies), or for external ones (they have not staked their career on promoting a specific ideological stance). Furthermore, here we may again recur to the basic psychological motivations of actors in the Athenian model. To the extent that shame-avoidance and pride are effective factors, they may combine with a
21 Landemore 2012; Hong & Page 2004
21 generally lower level of ideological convictions (given the absence of the self-selection factor) to set the right incentives for an experimental strategy of problem-solving.
Feedback and Adaptation: This is probably the trickiest aspect for the advocate of the Athenian model. The way elections are supposed to serve the feedback function is clear. One mechanism works through replacement: those whose experiments have failed are replaced, and those whose experiments have worked retain their seats, which sends the right informational signal. New governments can remedy the failures of the old, while retaining their successful decisions (and claiming credit for them wherever possible). The second mechanism works through incentive-setting: even between elections, agents whose experiment has failed will notice the popular discontent resulting from this failure and – since they want to do what people like – adapt their views and policies accordingly.
Problems with this model are immediately apparent: first, it depends on very clear assignations of responsibility for specific policies by voters. It must be clear which legislator (or party) has done which intervention such that those who failed can be removed or punished. In complex parliamentary systems, it is all but impossible to trace this kind of responsibility Single-member district systems like the UK, it should also be clear, make such a model also very difficult, since the capacity to punish representatives is limited to punishing the one representative of one’s own district. Furthermore, the single preference vote (in which voters are allowed only to state their most preferred choice) does not provide sufficient information that we could infer anything much about the success or failure of specific policies, or indeed about what the people intend to express in the first place.22
Second, this function depends on the presence of sufficiently attractive alternatives to the present legislators. In electoral systems one can only express dissatisfaction with what happens only if there is something better on the menu that has an effective chance of getting into power. In two-party systems, systems in which entry of new contenders is difficult, or in party constellations in which the same centrist coalition will win regardless of the election result, this is not a given.
22 there are some ideas to remedy this inadequacy of the preference vote, see Balinski & Laraki 2010.
22 Third, the focus on re-election introduces an extreme short-term bias into legislators preferences. Since it is very difficult to re-enter office once voted out, the next election is usually a make-or-break situation for candidates, and they cannot afford to take any longer-term perspective at the expense of short-term unpopularity. All they do must be considered a success by the time the next election comes around, or is not worth doing at all.
However, even given these problems, how could there be feedback and responsiveness without accountability? How could the success or failure of policy interventions cause adaptation through a feedback loop if there is no active sending of information by the voters? The answer is actually simple enough: the entire legislature is replaced at regular intervals, and the new legislature can simply undo anything the previous one did. Since the new legislature is a representative sample of the population, it is likely that people who have experienced a specific policy initiative as problematic would be in the new assembly, ready to advance the case for policy reversal. If a specific policy initiative is a success, there is no reason to challenge it (not even to score political points).
There are three advantages to this method of sending feedback: first, none of the members of the new assembly have a vested interest in any existing policy (since none of their political careers is tied to it), so in principle any policy is subject to reconsideration. Second, if a specific policy harms only a small group, their success in contesting it does not depend on the vagaries of mass party politics. Rather, their representative can contest it face-to-face in the new assembly giving good reasons, a method that should much more promising to supporters of deliberative democracy. Third, short-termism is less of an issue in the Athenian model. Since they do not depend on re-election, legislators can truly address what they believe to be important in the long term (after all, they will have to live in the society for which they have made laws). It is true that it remains a problem that incoming assemblies may reverse policies that have short-term bad effects but would have had long-term beneficial ones. However, this is only a problem if the incoming assembly itself has a short-term focus. Given the argumentation for the long term policy by the previous assembly, the new assembly may agree to let it play out for a while longer (they have no incentive to pander to the public’s short-term preferences). This is
23 of course not a perfect safeguard, but there is just an inherent tension between combating short-termism and limiting terms in office.
In the sortition model, the adaptation function, as it were, is internalized into the assembly. In the electoral model, the public is supposed to realize the success or failure of policies, then to infer which one of the self-interested agents was responsible for either, and hold them accountable accordingly. The random assembly model relies on the incoming assembly taking over this function of identifying what has worked and what has not (through a contested deliberative process), and directly fixing it, without holding anyone accountable at all.
6. Objections
In this section I will address and rebut four strong objections to the Athenian model. In either case, it is possible to show either that the electoral system suffers from the same problem at least as much, or that it can be easily fixed institutionally.
The objection I will not address in detail here is the charge of utopianism: that this would not work in practice, perhaps because ordinary citizens will not trust the randomness of the sampling procedure or the quality of decision-making. What citizens do or do not trust is heavily dependent on what they are used to (they apparently have no problem with trusting that the vote count in a typical election is accurate, even though that is a highly complex procedure involving thousands of people, and is very impractical to verify), and is not necessarily a guide to what ought to be done in the future. Furthermore, people’s trust in elected legislatures in the West could hardly be any lower (as mentioned above), so almost anything would be an improvement. Nevertheless, let us consider four other objections.
a) Without accountability, legislators will abuse their power and become corrupt.
24 It is true that legislators in the sortition model are not subject to punishment by non-re-election in case they abuse their power. However, three mechanisms should counteract this possibility. The first is the fact that they will remain in office for a fixed period, after which they will rejoin their peers in society. This gives them an incentive not to do things that would make them become ostracized by fellow citizens following the election. Second, a random assembly is of course still an assembly, which means that they would have to convince many others to accept their corrupt policies. The possibility of abuse therefore depends on a large proportion of an assembly to become corrupt at the same time and to band together in a cartel – trusting each other to support each other’s abuses and not to defect. Needless to say, in a diverse group of people this is difficult to achieve, especially given the very short time period in which such trust must be established. The establishment of cartels depends on frequent interactions over a long period of time, which is exactly what the sortition model is there to counteract. And third, of course, anything corrupt that one assembly does can be undone by the next assembly once it becomes clear that power has really been abused.
Finally, one may of course still retain the possibility of impeachment procedures through the judicial system, meaning that gross abuse of power may disqualify legislators from continuing in their position. There is nothing in the account I have given so far that precludes a constitutional court of some kind to safeguard basic rights and structures of the political system.
b) Without accountability, legislators will become lazy and expend zero effort.
This is a hard problem for the Athenian model. Perhaps people who are uninterested in political power will resent serving their duty as legislator, and therefore expend the smallest amount of effort they can get away with. Problems they perceive may go unsolved since they don’t make the time to address them. I concede that an assembly of zealots may be more productive than one staffed by literally random people. However, there are three reasons we may think this problem is alleviated in practice: first, as opposed to electoral politicians, citizen legislators have no other countervailing
25 political tasks – they do not need to campaign, they do not need to hold office hours in their local constituency, etc. They will have distractions in their family life, their family firm, or things like that, but at least there is nothing in their position as legislator that would prevent them from focusing on problem-solving. Furthermore, they could be paid a very high salary, perhaps up to $500,000 per year, without the process becoming any more expensive that the U.S. electoral process (Guerrero 2014).
Second, there are the public scrutiny factors already mentioned above: people are unwilling to be seen to publicly engage in anti-social behavior, and being lazy is of course one of those. This “civilizing force of hypocrisy” may go some lengths to alleviate the problem. Finally, in the sortition model, delegation is explicitly allowed. If the assembly decides to let some complex problem be worked out by specialist staff, which then reports back with their proposal, there is nothing that would discourage such behavior.
c) Politics requires the selection of excellent or competent people. The membership of random assemblies will, literally, be mediocre.
The answer to this problem can be similar to the point made in response to the last one. The assembly will be an average sample of the population, but of course the support staff they can draw on need not be. It is true that electoral assemblies tend to be selected according to some criterion of excellence, but which criterion is used by the population when voting is open, variable, and in fact impossible to regulate.23 Furthermore, the complexity of social life in contemporary societies means that the difference in overall competence between an elected politician and the average person is probably minimal. Both groups rely almost completely on the epistemic input by experts – and even their knowledge is not entirely reliable given brute uncertainty, which was the point necessitating an experimental approach in the first place.
23 See for instance Manin 1997.
26 Therefore, the random assembly is free to delegate complex tasks to experts, commission inquiries or hearings, or command whatever cognitive support they may need. Again, the random composition of the assembly may even incentivize this behavior, since the phenomenon of commissioned research: of tailoring the use of expertise to one’s pre-existing political position, would cease.
The real question therefore is whether a random or an elected assembly would be better at identifying true experts, as well as situations which actually call for expertise. Findings such as the Dunning-Kruger effect may suggest that the less competent a person is, the less likely they are to question their own perceived competence. This may mean that an assembly of incompetents will not even be aware of their own incompetence, thus failing to delegate where it would be beneficial. However, once again, the gap between the average citizen and the average elected representative may actually be small – and secondly, in this area the laziness of the randomly selected legislators (see (b) above) may actually work in our favor.
d) A sequence of random assemblies will make politics highly unstable and unpredictable.
This final issue is probably the most problematic for the sortition model. It is true that breaking up long tenures of legislators may cause a lot more policy volatility, which for many reasons is undesirable (the markets may disapprove, people need to form stable expectations about their lives, constantly changing complicated laws may overload people’s cognitive capacities, lawyers would stand to benefit even more than they already do from the resulting policy complexity).
Here I can do no more than suggest two replies to this problem. First, it seems to me partly an empirical issue how much added volatility would be caused in the sortition model. Given incentives that draw in opposite directions, this is exceedingly hard to answer in the abstract: legislators may feel less bound by previous decisions than presently, but on the other hand, they feel less need to score points for their own party by
27 attacking whatever the others did. Therefore, one may perhaps recur to the “we’ll cross that bridge when we get there” defense.
Finally, of course, a little more volatility is exactly what we want when calling for an experimental system. In a situation that is so highly imperfect that many groups suffer from structural disadvantage and oppression, and in which the status quo has become so precarious for many persons, calling for policy stability amounts to denying their claims that something has to change altogether. So, for those reasons, one may actually welcome making policy change a little easier.
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