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Academic Matheson Russell explores different models for democracy in action. His focus? Sortition. (A highlight from Auckland University's Raising the Bar Home Edition)
From the discussion
Innovations like Oregon’s systems review, the Irish Citizens’ Assembly and the Icelandic constitutional redrafting project really show how narrow our imagination of democracy can be. It has inspired political scientists and theorists to think again about what democracy should look like and whether the existing models of democracy are really fit for purpose.
The Yale political scientist Helene Landemore writes in her recent book Open Democracy that “the Icelandic example emboldened me to conclude that the limits of our current systems, as well as the changes brought about by globalisation and the digital revolution, call for a radically different approach to the question of the best regime, one that interrogates the very institutional principles of democracy as we practice it today”
So, let’s reflect upon these examples. We need to think about them critically. What do we learn from these experiments in citizen-led policy development?
The first thing is that ordinary people are perfectly competent to make complex decisions if they’re given the opportunity, the context and the resources to do it. There’s now quite a large body of empirical evidence that when participants are presented with information, with arguments on all sides, and they have the to discuss this with each other, they’re perfectly capable of making competent decisions on very complex issues.
And in fact, there has been some scholarly analysis of the arguments made in some of these mini-publics, and they often contain more depth and nuance than you typically find in parliament or even parliamentary committees.
People are able to judge trade-offs, weighing up competing goals. On some issues where there are quite polarised views, you find actually quite strong bipartisan consensus. The longer that people have a chance to think and learn together, the stronger that consensus can become.
And another observation made by the scholars of these experiments is that often the values of participants overlap more than you might think.
So that’s the first thing that we learned, that ordinary citizens like you and me are perfectly competent to make complex political decisions.
The second observation that I’d make is that sortition, a process involving random selection, can be used to create a really clever division of democratic labour. Sortition means that only a few citizens are involved in the decision-making process on behalf of everyone.
A Melbourne protest by Extinction Rebellion in solidarity with the French Citizens Assembly on Climate. Its recommendations were rejected by President Emmanuel Macron. Photo: Matt Hrkac / Wikimedia Commons
When we use sortition we delegate democrat decisions to a subcommittee of the whole – a group of 20 to 100 people. What that means is that rather than many of us engaging in a shallow way in a political decision, a few of us can engage in-depth and in a much more effective way. As the participants know that their work is consequential, that promotes a sense of responsibility and conscientiousness when it comes to the hard work of considering evidence and weighing up practical decisions.
Furthermore, a carefully managed process of sortition can ensure that a diverse and representative group of citizens is included. Let me pause for a moment to explain how the sortition process will typically work in a modern process, in a modern mini-public.
First, a large number of invitations are sent out to a random sample of citizens inviting them to participate in the mini public.
From those invitations, only a subset will respond by saying that they’re willing to participate. An algorithm is used to randomly select a group of individuals from that set who meet certain criteria for demographic representativeness. You might need to ensure that you have a balance of genders, a spread of education levels, ages, ethnicity, geographical locations and so forth. And so the participants come together.
And what they themselves report is that in a well-organised assembly or citizens’ jury, they find that it’s possible to have respectful and productive dialogue with fellow citizens who hold very different views from their own. Reducing a hyper-partisan context turns out not surprisingly to be conducive to more collaborative and reasonable decision-making.
And finally, random selection insulates political decision making from the corrupting influence of money, threats or inducements that are sometimes faced by elected officials. Participants are free of concerns about re-election, and in fact, some observers see the anti-corruption potential of sortition as its key strength.
So, in conclusion, there are some surprisingly positive and exciting aspects sortition in its modern form.
Can these kinds of innovations be scaled up? Can concepts of rotation be used to imagine a genuinely citizen-led system of political institutions in a complex modern society such as our own? Not surprisingly, democratic theorists have been following these real-world developments with great interest, and it’s sparked new conversations about what our democratic institutions could look like in future.
About the speaker
Matheson Russell
Photo: University of Auckland
Dr Matheson Russell is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Auckland. He teaches courses on justice, power and democracy. His current research is in democratic theory and focuses on reimagining the institutions of democracy so that they are fit for purpose in the 21st century.
Raising the Bar is presented in association with the University of Auckland
Photo: University of Auckland
