[EM] sortition/random legislature Was: Re: language/framing quibble

[Raph Frank]

On Tue, Sep 9, 2008 at 11:23 PM, Aaron Armitage
<eutychus_slept at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I see a real philosophical problem with this. The whole point of having a
> republic is so that the people can make public decisions in common. Any
> chamber which is not subject to popular control is therefore
> anti-republican, even if it is more demotic than the chamber the people
> would have chosen for themselves. That it is only one of two chambers
> doesn't help much; it's certainly more representative in a statistical
> sense than a House of Lords would be, but is just as unrepresentative in the sense that the community the members legislate for never made a choice to authorize them to represent it.

If you picked 1000 people, then the odds of them voting differently
from the general population is small (around 3%).  If the legislature
is 100 people, then the margin of error is around 10%.  I think that
most real legislatures have an even greater error between the vote
percentages in the legislature and the vote percentages of the general
public.

If you are afraid that they would become corrupted, then the same
problem occurs for legislators who are elected (and more so as they
must campaign for re-election).  If they aren't corrupted, then they
are much more representative of the popular will than a legislator.

What is different is the abolition of the ability to punish candidates
for acting badly.  You can't vote out a random legislator as they
can't be re-elected anyway.

What about this:

1) Country is split into districts.

- Legislators must be resident within the boundaries of their district
prior to the update, or are considered to be retiring at the end of
the term.
- Districts are updated such that any non-retiring legislator's
residence remains in his district
- Districts are updated to keep population balance but should be
minimally changed.

2) Every N years, there is a vote of confidence held in each district
and each voter can vote.  If the legislator loses, his seat is
considered vacated.

3) All unfilled seats are filled randomly from the citizens who live
in the district.

This gets the benefit that it isn't possible to campaign for office,
but allows the voters to punish a wayward legislator.

The legislator himself would probably campaign in the run up to the
vote of confidence.  However, he just needs to show that he is better
than average.  The fact that he is the only candidate means that he
shouldn't need much resources to run his campaign.

It also removes the de facto 1 term term limit.

Combined with a PR-STV House, this would seem pretty reasonable.

One issue is that it is centrist favouring.  If you are an extremist,
then you are likely to lose the motion of confidence.

Multi-seat districts could be used to help with that.  It could be
PR-STV, with a rule that you must reach the quota.

"Rank all candidates you have confidence in, in order of your choice"

The legislators for that district would all stand.  In effect, there
would be say 5 candidates standing for a 5 seat constituency.

Unfilled seats would be filled randomly.  This still semi-favours
centrists, but less so than before.  Extremists would tend to be of
lower 'quality' as if they are removed, they are likely replaced with
a centrist.  This means that their supporters may be more reluctant to
vote them out.

It also causes campaigning as each legislator tries to convince voters
to vote for him and/or give transfers.