What if your side hustle is being in Congress?
The future of democracy is direct, online, and doesn't require politicians.
This essay is by
for CITY STATE, a collection of seven writers exploring autonomous governance. You can support the project by collecting the digital or print edition here 👇🏻
Your alarm wakes you at 7:00 am and you groggily rise from your uncomfortable hotel bed. The date is October 21st, 2073. You brush your teeth and dress promptly as you prepare for jury duty. The assembly where you will meet your peers is a mere block away, so you can afford to grab an apple in the lobby before you leave. Though it's called jury duty, you aren’t there to decide whether a party is guilty or not guilty in some mundane contractual dispute. Instead, you and 499 randomly selected individuals have a much heftier responsibility; to govern the city you call home.
Today, when we think of “democracy,” most imagine a system where the people govern indirectly through elected representatives. Most agree, however, that Western-style representative democracy has lost its way. It was once hailed as a superior, perhaps even the “final” form of government, straddling the delicate balance between anarchic chaos and rigid authoritarianism. Economic stagnation in much of the West and the consequent return to a “zero-sum” vision of the world have enabled populist leaders to pit the people against their own governments. Where this new populist path takes us is uncertain, but it has never been clearer that many people, correctly or not, believe that representative democracy is failing us.
What alternative is there?
In his book, 10 Percent Less Democracy, author Garett Jones argues that there is an ‘optimal’ amount of democracy; too little can be just as problematic as too much. Elected representatives, for example, behave differently when they are up for reelection, often leading to poor policy choices. They choose what is “popular” with their constituents in the short term over what is better for the nation in the long run. Senators in America, for example, tend to support counterproductive protectionist policies when up for reelection.
Some government roles require unpopular decisions and those appear best left to unelected experts. Central bankers, for example, have the unenviable task of controlling the money supply to balance the business cycle—the data shows that independent central bankers average 4% lower inflation, yet maintain about the same unemployment and economic growth rates as captive bankers. Similarly, cities with elected treasurers pay higher interest rates than those with appointed experts. Interest rates are a good indicator of financial health; high rates mean lenders feel less confident lending to you.
Jones argues that highly technical exercises are best left to appointed experts. Take tax policy, for instance, the US has a highly convoluted tax code that runs tens of thousands of pages in length. Part of the reason for this complexity is that elected officials had to fill it with loopholes, carve-outs, exemptions, and deductions for their donors and constituents. The final product exacerbates wealth inequality and depresses growth. Jones proposes the creation of a “Federal Tax Board” comprised of economists and experts to write the law instead. The legislature's role would be to draft a charter of general aims, and the experts would find the best way to implement them.
Jones acknowledges the importance of democratically elected representatives, who typically occupy the “lower house” of the legislature, but suggests they be balanced by an upper house of “wisdom,” which he calls the Sapientum. This upper house would require substantially higher levels of education to join and may allocate some seats to bondholders who hold the nation’s debt. The goal, he says, is still democracy, just less of it. While the West holds Denmark up as the ‘gold standard’ for good governance, Jones says we should instead look to Singapore. Singapore is a semi-democratic city-state with a strong rule of law and an independent judiciary. Since independence in 1960, Singapore went from a relatively poor backwater to surpassing Denmark in just about every metric of well-being, including having an 80 percent higher GDP per capita.
On the other hand, political scientist Helen Landemore comes to a different conclusion. In her book, Open Democracy, she argues that modern governments' problems are not too much democracy, but too little. The process of selecting candidates through the filters of parties, fundraising, and campaigning, has created an “enclosure of power” around wealthy and connected elites. Representative democracies, she writes, are better described as “elected oligarchies.” A true democracy would maximize representation through cognitive diversity in Parliament or Congress.
The best way to achieve this is to remove the “filter” of the election system and return to the ancient Athenian method of sortition. Sortition, where laypeople are randomly selected for office, has its merits. We could build parliaments that are more reflective of the people. Officeholders could rotate frequently, would not need to campaign or fundraise, would lack any “tribal” party affiliation, and therefore would be much harder for special interests to influence. Direct democracy through sortition would result in a truly “Epistemic democracy” that gives the people the power to set the agenda and deliberate.
I do not view Landemore and Jones’s thinking as mutually exclusive. They both agree, for example, that influence from special interest groups can be corrosive and often leads to poor policymaking. They both also acknowledge the value of expert advice. Landemore promotes direct democracy but carefully notes that this does not mean that experts have no role to play, she recommends that experts serve in an advisory capacity. Jones, of course, also calls for an “upper” house of wisdom, which plays a similar role.
Perhaps the ideal city-state government fuses more democracy with less; a system where members are selected via sortition, empowered to set the agenda, and with the advice of experts, to pass laws.
The goal of any government should be to leverage the “wisdom of the crowd” as much as possible. The simplest demonstration of the “wisdom of the crowd” can be found in the classic “jelly beans in a jar” guessing contest. When asked to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar, individual answers tend to be inaccurate. However, when all guesses are averaged, the signal is teased from the noise; the average is often fairly close to the correct number. When finance professor Jack Treynor ran a similar contest in his class, he found that only a single vote outperformed the collective average. In another experiment, conducted by Michael Mauboussin in 2007, the average error of any particular vote was 62 percent, but the error rate of the collective average was just 3 percent. It seems that we all possess fragmented data about the volume of jellybeans and space within a jar, too incomplete to ascertain the number on our own, but very accurate when combined with the fragmented data of others.
Once we accept that our perception is but the tiniest sliver of reality, we can understand how important it is to lend our ears to viewpoints beyond our own, especially those that do not align or even conflict with our individual “truths.” Often, these perspectives are the most valuable, even if they are also the most uncomfortable to hear. Too often, however, modern democracies are plagued by people talking past each other, not absorbing, but deflecting conflicting data. How will sortition-selected people vote on the issues? How can we best tease the signal from the noise?
One intriguing approach to sortition, suggested by Terrill G. Bouricius, is multi-body sortition. He suggests a separation of powers, with one body setting the agenda, another drafting proposals, and another empowered to pass them. The agenda-setting counsel, for example, would be a “meta legislative body” similar in function to the Athenian Council of 500. The agenda council could be petitioned by outsiders and/or have issues raised by its members, and would set the agenda but would not have the power to draft or pass any measures. For example, imagine that a petition to reform healthcare is submitted to the council. Filled with laypeople who use the same healthcare system, the council is sympathetic to the cause, and votes to make healthcare reform agenda item one.
Agenda-setting is easy, the challenge with sortition comes when drafting laws; large groups of people cannot effectively coordinate and laypeople may lack sufficient knowledge and skill to opine on policy matters. Bouricius’s solution is the creation of various “interest panels,” tasked with tackling a single agenda item, in this case, healthcare. Each panel would consist of roughly a dozen volunteers willing to lend their insights and draft proposals. To maintain the separation of powers, volunteers could not come from the agenda council.
These individuals would be a self-selecting group; presumably, they would have an active interest in and above-average knowledge of the agenda topic. Interest panels could be assembled in many ways, but to prevent groupthink and ensure maximum cognitive diversity, I suggest that for each agenda item, individuals be selected from the volunteer group and randomly assigned to five or more panels.
Each interest panel would draft a proposal in competition with the others. In my spin on this idea, I would invite the interest panels to seek outside expert advice as they work to draft their proposals. They would be encouraged to hear from economists, government bondholders, lawyers…etc whomever can provide advice and guidance. The aim is to optimize policy design by leveraging the knowledge of experts with the fragmented data of randomly selected, albeit highly motivated, laypeople. Further, because the interest panels know that their proposal is in direct competition with many others, we have a built-in “filter” that should keep extremist ideas from reaching the floor.
Collectively, the interest panels form a kind of liquid “upper house” of the legislature, drafting competing approaches to the same problem. One panel, for example, might recommend a single-payer healthcare system, the other, a “managed competition system,” another a fully privatized system…etc.
Finally, a separate sortition selected “citizen jury” of ~500 laypeople would listen to the pros and cons of the various proposals delivered to them by the interest panels. This would resemble a large “jury trial” but with 500 members, we have a representative sample of the demos (the people), achieving true cognitive diversity. Perhaps after listening to the proposals, they vote for the single-payer system and this becomes the law of the land.
Note that the number of people, or “sample size,” we would need to represent a population is dictated by the law of large numbers and does not grow linearly with population size. At a 95% confidence level, we would need only 385 randomly selected individuals to represent a population of 500 million. Unlike a jury trial, however, voting would commence without debate and via secret ballot. This is intended to maximize the “wisdom of the crowd,” to allow people to vote entirely free from outside coercion. Indeed, research from James Fishkin’s experiments with deliberative polling found that, in contrast to elected representatives who feel compelled to vote for “popular” decisions, “sortition-selected” individuals are more inclined to favor long-term and community interests than their elected counterparts.
Finally, I also envision a third branch, a smaller “Revision Council,” loosely modeled after the Nomothetai in ancient Athens, which was tasked with reviewing and editing law. Via this third branch, anyone could challenge an existing law, take it before a ‘court’ of appointed experts and laymen, and make their case about why it should be abolished or revised. The third branch would not be empowered to undertake these edits or deletions, but only to make recommendations and punt them back to the agenda council. This third branch would pair nicely with my earlier suggestion that all laws and regulations come with automatic sunset provisions. The aim is to build a government that defaults to subtraction rather than addition, to minimal coercion and maximal effectiveness.
This multi-body sortition approach achieves several objectives. First, there is a separation of powers that prevents abuse of authority, but because there are no elections, there is no fracture in legitimacy. Second, we leverage the knowledge of expert advice with the wisdom of laypeople. Third, through sortition, we achieve maximum cognitive diversity; a demos that truly reflects the public’s will. Fourth, we have a built-in mechanism to delete or revise laws, defaulting to subtraction instead of ceaseless expansion of rules and regulations. Fifth, we have built a scaleable system that operates equally well at the national, state/province, and local levels, allowing for maximum adherence to the subsidiarity principle.
The final question we must answer, however, is how will the citizen jury select from the various proposals in front of them. The obvious answer is whichever policy gets the most votes, or a plurality vote (PV), but that may not be optimal. Despite widespread usage in the US and elsewhere, PV is perhaps the crudest method of aggregating the collective wisdom of the people. With PV, for example, candidates can win elections despite strong opposition from most voters. PV is also vulnerable to vote splitting, where two ideologically similar candidates split the vote, leaving a less popular candidate as the winner. This can be intentionally engineered too, where the opposition sets up a ghost candidate to siphon votes away from a competitor.
Other voting methods attempt to remedy the failures of PV. For example, Ranked Choice Voting (RCV), often called Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), is a popular alternative. With RCV, voters rank their preferences relative to one another. During vote tabulation, the first-ranked choices are counted. Should no ballot option achieve a majority, the candidate with the lowest number of first-preference votes is eliminated and voters who chose the eliminated candidate have their votes redistributed according to their next preference. Voting is tabulated until an option breaches 50 percent. With RCV, the winner is often acceptable, if not the first choice, for most voters. RCV can ameliorate polarization and the vote-splitting problem that plagues PV. However, new research found that in extremely polarized elections, RCV leads voters to even more extreme outcomes.
Approval voting appears to be a superior option to RCV. With approval voting, voters select which candidates they approve of, and leave the remainder blank. The votes are then tallied and the candidate with the most votes wins. Approval voting reduces the “spoiler effect” where, as in PV, voters avoid voting their preference for fear of splitting votes. Additionally, approval voting discourages polarization since voters can express support for more than one ballot option. Approval voting has been used successfully in local elections in Fargo, North Carolina, and St. Louis, Missouri.
SCORE voting also looks promising, which attempts to capture not only the relative ranking of preferences but also their intensity. With SCORE voting, voters are given a scale, most often 0-5 or 0-9, where they must assign points to ballot options. Zero points indicate strong disfavor and 9 indicates strong favorability. The candidate with the highest overall “score” wins. The problem with this method is that respondents tend to choose scores at the extremes or the middle (0, 5, 9…etc). A variation of this method, known as STAR (Score Then Automatic Runoff) voting, attempts to mitigate this problem with an automatic “runoff” where the two highest-scoring finalists win by comparing which of those two got higher scores on more ballots. With the STAR method, if candidates have the same rating it counts as an abstention; the runoff mechanism adds an incentive to use intermediate rankings.
Comparing the effectiveness and efficacy of voting systems is difficult. Most comparison criteria list out undesirable outcomes and attempt to rank voting systems by how often those outcomes occur. No voting system, however, can meet all desirable criteria (see Arrow’s theorem). For this reason, researchers like Jameson Quinn have instead turned to an alternate measure of efficacy like Voter Satisfaction Efficiency (VSE). A VSE of 100% would represent a voting system that always picks the candidate leading to the highest average satisfaction. A VSE of 0% would represent a system that chooses a candidate at random. This is related to another comparison method known as “Bayesian regret,” which quantifies the expected loss (regret) when a voting system fails to select the candidate who would maximize overall satisfaction.
We can view poor election decision quality as a “tax” on society that compounds each election cycle, leading to disillusionment and perhaps even poor economic performance. Plurality voting performs better than monarchy or randomly selected candidates but still produces unsatisfactory results nearly 30 percent of the time. RCV/IRV performs better, producing an unsatisfactory result about 20 percent of the time. Approval and SCORE voting get this ratio down to 15 percent. STAR voting comes out on top, producing an unsatisfactory result only 10 percent of the time. STAR voting, therefore, is perhaps the best method through which a citizen jury can select which interest panel proposal they like best.
After a few days of hearing competing policy ideas and voting, your jury duty has come to an end. As you sit on the bus on your return home, the screens embedded in your glasses flash news of new city initiatives; the jury results are now published. Scrolling through the results, you are somewhat disappointed to learn that none of your preferred policy choices were selected. Nevertheless, in most cases, your second preference was selected and the options you disliked the most did not come close to passing. Unlike the days when you would have cast a single vote for a representative who would proceed to vote in their own interest, you were directly informed of policy pros and cons, and your voice was directly heard. You take comfort in knowing that the decisions were made by the people of your city, free of party politics, free from the distortions of campaign finance or special interest lobbying. Most importantly, you are satisfied with the outcome and some day may be called upon to serve again.
This article is by
, author of . It is part of CITY STATE, a collection of seven writers exploring autonomous governance through an online series and print pamphlet.
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This essay is excellent. You’ve processed lots of material from political theorists and others to arrive at what seems to me to outline a workable governmental system that would win the hearts of citizens, as our first Constitution did.
I have a few random observations before getting into what I admire most about your proposal.
Jones’ bicameral legislature combined with Bouricius’s lower chamber with its up-or-down vote reminds me of Harrington’s model, with its upper chamber made up of the “natural aristocracy” and the lower chamber as the democratic chamber with an up-or down vote.
I wonder if a “venire” of the prospective members of the interest panels could be randomly drawn from the community to avoid a reprise of lobbyists pushing “special” interests.
It would be interesting to discuss how an executive branch (would we need one?) and a judicial branch would fit into this. There’s so much balance here already to avoid the dangers of populism (the people’s reaction when “representative democracy” proves itself undemocratic) and bureaucracy (perhaps with the exception of Jones).
I’m with Landemore on representative democracies amounting to elected oligarchies. I’m with her on the merits of sortition and rotation over election. Finally, I’m with her on experts serving in an explicitly advisory role. I love the idea of this kind of jury. I don’t know much about how ancient Athens handled its 1,500-or-more-member juries from a procedural standpoint, but I wonder if the citizens learned through practice both the worth of experts (if they were recognized as such) and their inherent advisory capacity in a democracy. I hasten to add that I knew nothing about Landemore or Jones before you compared and then synthesized their approaches.
Your synthesis of their approaches is excellent. When you add in Athens’s Nomothetai, Bouricius on multi-body sortition, and improvements to up-or-down voting in the revision council (my favorite is approval voting), I’m sold. I hope you become the James Madison of our nation’s long-delayed second constitutional convention.
I love most of these ideas as it clearly demonstrates there are many better political systems and voting choices available which will mostly eliminate the corruption of money, extremism, political parties, and the insane focus on re-election which have come to dominate our governance at the expense of common sense and the desires of the middle electorate (60-80% of us by definition). How do we make them happen?!