Political parties and institutions in Australia and the US are increasingly dominated by interest groups representing the few, leading to a large policy-induced increase in inequality in recent decades and a long raft of new policies favouring the few by giving them the tax receipts of the many. One hypothesised solution to the problem of having these coalitions strangle the public interest is to make more use of sortition, ie to have randomly selected citizens decide more things in public life.
Currently, citizen juries are used in criminal cases, but one can in principle use sortition to select ‘policy juries’, to select members of parliament, to select local councillors and mayors, etc. It was quite normal in ancient Athens to do so, hence we know it can work in some circumstances.
The general pros and cons of sortition have been debated ad infinitum over the centuries, with the main recognised advantage that one gets more involvement of the citizenry and less coalitions within the set of the governors. The main disadvantage is that you get people deciding on things they are fairly ignorant about, which is a problem when long-experience and knowledge is called for. The ancient Athenians knew this tradeoff too: whilst they selected their councillors randomly, they were more picky when it came to their war leaders.
I want to think out loud just what is likely to happen to the problem of special interests in Australia in two different scenarios: if we’d select our MPs randomly, or if we’d decide on mayor policies via citizen juries.
The short answer is that the problems are likely to be worse with sortition. The long answer is over the fold.
Random members of parliament.
Technically speaking, we could easily fill our parliaments with random citizens, subject to some minimal screening such that people who don’t want to do it or are incapable of doing it don’t have to. Random MPs would kill off the system of political parties we have at present and it would prevent special interests from having influence on whom enters parliament: when they come in, they would come in all eager and idealistic. But that is just step 1 of what would happen.
Since parliament selects the government, we’d hence have 150 random individuals having to decide who amongst them will be the PM and the ministers. Even if the citizens are well-intentioned, that will lead to a lot of bickering and lots of votes of no-confidence! But perhaps we’d re-jig those rules to make it harder for MPs to change their minds about who would form the cabinet. Still, the 150 selected MPs would quickly realise that they are competing with each other for desirable jobs. Step 2.
Since the members of parliament are by design one-term members, their interests in doing the best for the country versus doing the best for just themselves would be relatively low: at least long-run political parties have an incentive to keep up their brand-name, and individual MPs currently can hope to get back into parliament in future periods if their electorate approves of them. One-term MPs who are random members of the citizenry don’t have such constraints and should normally be expected to sell their votes to the highest bidder. This would also go for members of the Senate. Step 3.
The special interest group, meanwhile, still have the same interests and the same deep pockets as before. In stead of being able to intertwine with political parties wherein they form coalitions and beliefs that support them, they now face a different landscape, one where every sortition cycle they face a new batch of individuals with tremendous power, normal wealth levels, and no incentive to be honest.
Hence, given that parliaments decide on the allocation of roughly 400 billion dollars of tax-payer money per year, that is the amount that these one-off parliamentarians could make off with and allocate to the highest bidders. They surely wouldn’t steal all of it, but a large chunk should be expected to be allocated to the special interest groups, much like they are at present.
Why was this not a problem in ancient Athens? Well, for one, the ancient Athenians had nowhere to run with ill-gotten money. Other places didn’t have their language or culture, nor was the idea of tax havens widespread, so life wasn’t that pleasant if one outstayed one’s welcome in Athens. Perhaps more importantly though, there weren’t that many Athenians. Maybe 30,000 male citizens. That is small enough for a lot of social control to be present, i.e. for the individual ‘lucky’ citizen who finds himself temporarily in power to have a relatively large group of friends and family looking over their shoulders who will have had an incentive to keep the lucky boy in line.
Neither of these social control mechanisms are relevant in Australia today: given the fantastical amount of taxes to steal and the ubiquitous use of English and banking secrecy in other parts of the world, the constraints on random members of the public in parliament to stay honest are pretty low.
So in truth, I don’t think a parliament consisting of random members of the public is more likely to do the bidding of the population: their willingness to sell out to the organised interests would be even higher than members of long-standing political parties, since those parties have at least some incentive to keep the wheeling-and-dealing of their current members to an acceptable minimum.
Surely, having randomly allotted MPs would move many other factors, such as the relation between politicians and ministries, and the relation between media and politics. It is hard to know how all that would pan out, but the basic point remains: if you temporarily give a lot of power to randomly chosen individuals, they have even less incentive to do the right thing than individuals from within long-lived clubs who depend on a brand-name with the population.
Random policy juries
What about random citizens being asked to adjudicate on particular policies then?
First off, it is far less clear how to actually do this than to have a random selection of MPs: for which policies would one form citizen juries and for which not? Would decisions to go to war be subject to 20 random citizens? How about levels of taxation or the nitty-gritty of health-and-safety laws? There is no easy rule on this in sight, nor is it clear who would have the final say on what things to pass onto a citizen’s jury. After all, why would, say, parliament or government assist to give some of its own powers to citizen juries? And if government and parliament is not going to decide which policies to pass on to citizen juries, who then?
So right from the get-go, the idea of citizen juries for particular types of policies seems a dead duck from an organisational point of view.
However, let’s plough on and suppose that we manage to embed the idea of citizen juries into ministerial and parliamentary decision making: suppose we manage to have citizen juries formed only for the specific job of deciding yes/no on policies already voted upon by parliament, as a kind of additional check on the system (perhaps in lieu of the Senate).
Since the jury is temporary and facing the full glare of the nation, you’d probably have quite motivated individuals and they would be hard to bribe because it wouldn’t be so easy to get to them and offer them a bribe in the short time they have to convene. So Step 1 is, once again, looking bright from an anti-corruption point of view.
Then the question of course is who is going to feed that jury the information needed to make decisions. On anything as complicated as laws and policies, which often involve hundreds of pages of legislation and tens of thousands of pages of background legislation and documentation, the question of who gets to feed the citizen juries their summaries will be crucial: whomever gets to whisper the ‘soundbite version’ to the citizen jury effectively controls them. That is the crucial Step 2.
In the best-case, it would be a job for ministries to feed the citizen juries the information they ‘need’ in order to make a decision, much like courts currently oversee what information reaches juries. In turn, this makes the ministry more powerful than before. Crucially, though, the ministry itself is doing the bidding of the politicians.
So, would citizen juries be harder to co-opt for those special interest groups? No! It would add another hoop to their task, for sure, but not one that seems awfully high or narrow: since the special interest groups must already co-opt the top of ministries and of politics in order to get their way currently, feeding their preferred slant to a citizen jury via the ministry wouldn’t take much additional effort at all.
How about other means of feeding them information, such as just leaving it up to the jury to gather their own information? Well, for one, the longer the jury can roam about, the easier it is to get to them and bribe them. But more fundamentally, legislation and policies are very particular tasks on which most of the expertise is by design in the state system that has lead to legislation and policies. So I expect these juries to trust the system on which they rely for most of their information, rather than the millions of punters disagreeing with each other outside of that system.
Again, citizen juries would change the nature of the game in many directions that are hard to foresee, but, again, the basic point that they are amateurs relying on the information fed to them by a state machinery means that their presumed independence is fake.
I used to be quite charmed of the idea of citizen juries for policies and even for deciding on who would be in parliament. It sounded so democratic, such an elegant solution to the problem of special interest groups worming their way into our democratic institutions. It seemed like a magic solution for hard problems.
On reflection though, I find myself on the side of Edmund Burke and Socrates, who both denounced the idea as silly and unworkable. I agree with them: it is hard to see what use small random groups of citizens would be for policy-making in modern Western institutions.