How to Make Democracy Smarter

Are voters just bad at voting?

As another election comes and goes, we are left with half of the public deeply upset at the results.

The other side of course is just plain ignorant. Yet unfortunately it’s not just the other side that is ignorant, I’ll go ahead and claim that the entire public is just bad at voting.

Unfortunately, a large body of work exists illustrating the lack of capability of voters. In Democracy for Realists by Achen and Bartels, the authors suggest that voters practice blind retrospection. "Real voters often have only a vague understanding of the connections (if any) between incumbent politicians' actions and their own well-being. Even professional observers of politics often struggle to understand the consequences of government policies. Politics and policy are complex. As a result, retrospective voting¹ is likely to produce consistently misguided patterns of electoral reward and punishment" [pp 144]. In other words, voters lack competence in making decisions based on the past performance of administrations.

Bryan Caplan's The Myth of the Rational Voter popularized the term "rational irrationality" for the behavior of voters. Caplan argues that the marginal cost of holding an erroneous political belief is low, due to the low probability of influencing the outcome of any election. Voters instead may vote due to the psychological benefits of supporting policies that feel good. These good feelings therefore outweigh the real harm of a policy, when factored with the unlikelihood of influencing the outcome. 

As Alexander Guerrero claims [9], electoral representation can bring about responsive and good  outcomes only if the public can hold their representatives meaningfully accountable. From my understanding of the available evidence, the literature overwhelmingly suggests that voters are not able to hold politicians accountable except in the most dire and obvious of economic disasters - for example, when the public is experiencing a famine [9] and therefore practices retrospective voting to remove incumbents. 

The Alternative

So the Churchill saying goes, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried.” Yet exactly is democracy? It’s not merely election. There are a variety of democratic tools. Elections is one tool. Others include referendum, town hall meetings, jury duty. And a final neglected tool is called “sortition”, where people are chosen by lottery to make decisions. How can this tool be used to create a smarter democracy?

The Benefits of Sortition

A Deliberating Public

Using sortition, citizens are selected by lottery to join what is often called a Citizens’ Assembly (CA). With this Citizens’ Assembly in place, citizens can now deliberate with one another to produce smarter decisions.

Experiments with deliberative democracy have generated empirical research that “refutes many of the more pessimistic claims about the citizenry’s ability to make sound judgments…. Ordinary people are capable of high-quality deliberation, especially when deliberative processes are well-arranged: when they include the provision of balanced information, expert testimony, and oversight by a facilitator” [1], according to the latest research in social science.

Even more compelling, democratic deliberation can overcome polarization, echo chambers, and extremism by promoting the considered judgment of the people. “The communicative echo chambers that intensify cultural cognition, identity reaffirmation, and polarization do not operate in deliberative conditions, even in groups of like-minded partisans. In deliberative conditions, the group becomes less extreme” [1].  

How Deliberation Works

A deliberating Citizens' Assembly is usually conducted with the following steps:

1. Selection Phase: An assembly of normal citizens is constructed using statistical random sampling. For various assemblies, samples have ranged from 20 to 1000 in size. These citizens are called upon to resolve a political question. Citizens are typically compensated for their service. Amenities such as free child or elderly care are provided.

2. Learning Phase:  Educational materials are provided to help inform the selected deliberators. This may be in the form of expert panels, Q&A sessions, interactive lectures, presentations, reading materials, etc. Following each presentation, the Assembly then breaks into small, facilitated discussion groups to further increase understanding of the learning materials.

3. Listening Phase: Stakeholders, NGO's, and other interested members of the public are invited to testify.

4. Deliberation Phase: Facilitated discussions are held in both large and small group format. A final decision is made through voting. 

What has the Public Decided?

In deliberative polls conducted by America in One Room [2], a representative sample of 600 Americans were chosen to deliberate together for a weekend. Researchers found that “Republicans often moved significantly towards initially Democrat positions”, and “Democrats sometimes moved just as substantially toward initially Republican positions.” 

For example, only 30% of Republicans initially supported access to voter registration online, which moved to majority support after deliberation. Republicans also moved towards support for voting rights for felons dramatically, from 35 to 58%. On the other side, only 44% of Democrats initially supported a Republican proposal to require voting jurisdictions to conduct an audit of a random sample of ballots "to ensure that the votes are accurately counted". After deliberation, Democrat support increased to 58%. 

In terms of issues like climate change, the 2021 “America in One Room: Climate and Energy” deliberative poll found a 23-point increase from Texas residents in support for achieving net-zero after deliberation. Californians moved 15 points in support for building new-generation nuclear plants [3]. Participants also moved 15 points in favor of a carbon pricing system [6]. These changes in policy support were achieved in only 2-4 days of deliberation. 

Time and time again, normal citizens are able to make highly informed decisions that weaker-willed politicians cannot. In a 2004 Citizens’ Assembly in Canada, the assembly nearly unanimously recommended implementing an advanced election system called “Single Transferable Vote” (that was then rejected by the ignorant public in the following referendums). In Ireland, Citizens’ Assemblies played a pivotal role in recommending the legalization of gay marriage and abortion (In contrast, their elected politicians were too afraid of special interests to make the same decision). In France, 150 French citizens formed the Citizens’ Convention for Climate. The Convention recommended radical proposals to fight against climate change (including criminalization of ecocide, aviation taxes, and expansion of high speed rail). These proposals were unfortunately significantly weakened by the elected French Parliament. 

The Achilles heel of Deliberative Democracy is, how can we scale this process? Deliberative participation of the entire public is logistically impossible. However the scaling question has already been answered with every sample drawn by lottery. Deliberative democracy can only be scaled using sortition. The entire public does not need to participate; a smaller sample is sufficient to statistically represent the public.

Lottocratic Efficiency

Sortition is a powerful tool for making efficient democratic decisions. By selecting a smaller sample to represent the public, only a fraction of the whole is required to participate in otherwise time (and therefore cost) intensive decisions. 

Imagine a referendum of 1 million citizens. Imagine that it takes at least 1 hour for each citizen to at least understand the referendum proposal (let alone understanding the consequences and pro’s and con’s of the proposal). Assuming a wage of about $15 per hour, the social cost of this uninformed decision is about $15 million. 

In contrast imagine 500 citizens selected by lottery tasked to make a decision, using four weeks of time, or 160 hours per citizen. Let’s imagine the state compensates these citizens at the rate of $100 per hour. The cost of this informed collective decision is then $8 million. 

Sortition produces an informed 160-hour decision at the cost of $8 million, while referendum produces an uninformed 1-hour decision at the cost of $16 million. Election fares hardly any better. With the same logic, elections produce an uninformed 1-hour hiring decision, while sortition produces an informed 160-hour hiring decision. In other words, sortition is highly efficient at producing informed democratic decisions, compared to any alternative.

Example Sortition Models

This section will briefly review some possibilities on how sortition could be used. 

Review Panel for Elected Officials

One way to address the politicians' lack of accountability is to use sortition as an allotted review panel to assess and penalize elected officials at more frequent intervals - for example, an annual review. "The concept is similar to a criminal jury trial: the panel hears the case for and against the official having the standard of leadership expected of them, and based on that, can commend them, declare them adequate, or dismiss and/or fine them for falling short, with the option of barring them from holding public office again" [7]. 

An Allotted Electoral College

In a more radical model, sortition can be used to completely cut out the general election. Executive and advisory leadership would be selected by an electoral college of citizens selected by lottery. Political leadership would be selected, reviewed, and held accountable using democratic deliberation.

With sortition, a fully-fledged leadership hiring process could be implemented. That means a system to review hundreds/thousands of resumes. Then a process to select dozens of candidates for interviews. A final selection process. Then like with the Review Panel, regular performance reviews.  

Sortition allows for the complete elimination of the marketing/propaganda circus that is the modern political election and campaign (including the billions of dollars needed to facilitate elections participated by  millions of people, and the billions of dollars spent in advertising), in favor of deliberative leadership selection. 

Hybrid Bicameral Sortition

Philosophers and academics such as Arash Abizadeh, John Gastil, and Erik Olin Wright advocate for a bicameral legislature where an elected chamber is paired with an assembly selected by lottery. In the typical proposal, legislation is initiated by the elected chamber and is reviewed, approved, or rejected by the allotted chamber. Abizadeh justifies the continuation of elections as a mechanism to disincentivize political violence, "on the fact that competitive elections furnish, to forces currently shut out of government, the prospect of taking political power by contesting and winning future elections, without incurring the costs of civil war" [8].  

Alex Kovner and Keith Sutherland offer an alternative bicameral legislature  [10]. In their proposal, legislation initiated from the elected chamber only requires a minority (say, only 1/6th of elected representatives) to pass for review from the allotted sortition chamber. 

Multi-Body Sortition

Terril Bouricius envisions a six-chambered decision making system, powered by sortition, designed to maximize descriptive representation and increase resistance to corruption and domination of special interests [13]. These chambers are:

• The Agenda Council - Sets the agenda, topics for legislation. 

• Interest Panels - Propose legislation for topics under consideration

• Review Panels - Draft bills on the basis of interest panels and experts

• Policy Jury - Votes on bills by secret ballot

• Rules Council - Decides the rules and procedures of the legislative work

• Oversight Council - Controls the legislative process, handles complaints. 

Yes, the ignorant voter can be remade into the informed deliberating citizen

The evidence is overwhelming that ignorant voters can be made anew into better informed, more efficient decision makers. We cannot afford to continue to make foolish decisions as we move through the 21st century. That is why I support the use of sortition to improve local, state, and federal decision making.

Unfortunately, advocacy of sortition is in its infancy. If you find my arguments compelling, I ask for your aid by supporting the organizations linked below.

A list of Sortition Advocacy Organizations

• https://democracywithoutelections.org/

• https://www.sortitionfoundation.org/

• https://www.demnext.org/

• https://insa.site/

References

1. J Dryzek et al. The Crisis of Democracy and the Science of Deliberation. Science, 2019.

2. J Fishkin, L Diamond. Can deliberation cure our divisions about democracy? Boston Globe, August 2023.

3. Tyson, Mendoca. The American Climate Consensus. Project Syndicate, Dec 2021.

4. J Fishkin, A Siu, L Diamond, N Bradburn. Is Deliberation an Antidote to Extreme Partisan Polarization? Reflections on "America in One Room". American Political Science Review, 2021.

5. Citizens' Assembly. https://participedia.net/method/citizens-assembly. Accessed 2024 Oct-19.

6. America in One Room: Climate and Energy. Participants at T1 v T2. https://deliberation.stanford.edu/news/america-one-room-climate-and-energy. Accessed 2024 Oct 19.

7. O Milne, T Bouricius, G Flint, A Massicot. Sortition for Radicals. Citizens' Assemblies and Beyond. International Network of Sortition Advocates, 2024.

8. A Abizadeh. Representation, Bicameralism, Political Equality, and Sortition: Reconstituting the Second Chamber as a Randomly Selected Assembly. Perspectives on Politics, 2020.

9. A Guerrero. Against Elections: The Lottocratic Alternative. Philosophy & Public Affairs 42, no 2, 2014.

10. A Kovner, K Sutherland. Isegoria and Isonomia: Election by Lot and the Democratic Diarchy, 2020.

11. S Pek, Drawing Out Democracy: The role of sortition in preventing and overcoming organizational degeneration in worker-owned firms, Journal of Management Inquiry, 2019. 

12. T Malleson. Should Democracy work through elections or sortition? Politics & Society 2018, Vol. 46(3) 401-417. 

13. TG Bouricious - Democracy through multi-body sortition: Athenian lessons for the modern day. Journal of Public Deliberation, 2013. 

1. Retrospective voting is a concept in political science where voters base electoral decisions on the past performance of a candidate, political party, or administration rather than their future promises or policy proposals.