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

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

Raph Frank wrote:
> Sorry, pressed reply instead of reply to all
> 
> On 9/11/08, Aaron Armitage <eutychus_slept at yahoo.com> wrote:
>  > It doesn't follow from the fact we choose representatives for ourselves
>  >  that we would lose nothing by being stripped of the means of political
>  >  action. We would lose our citizenship, because citizenship means precisely
>  >  having a share of the right to rule. Registering for a lottery doesn't
>  >  count.
> 
> 
> So, any form of randomness is not acceptable?  What about one of the
>  the proposed random ballot rules, where if there is consensus, a
>  specific candidate wins.  However, if that doesn't work, the winner is
>  random.

There's probably a tradeoff here. A completely random legislature would 
have no direct link to the people, except by the people, as a mass, 
changing their opinions. An elected legislature is at the other end of 
the scale: the people can directly influence its composition by 
declining to vote for some candidates and supporting others.

The relative isolation from direct influence is both a random assembly's 
strength and a weakness. It's a strength because, if campaign men can 
influence voters in the wrong direction, then the assembly remains 
impervious to this attack. It's a weakness for the reasons Aaron gives, 
that it severely weakens the voter-representative link.

A random assembly also resists the attack where one corrupts candidates, 
simply because it's not clear who the candidates are going to be. I 
don't know if randomness, or more generally, a weak voter-representative 
link is required for this resistance. It might be, for a single given 
representative, but a method where voters elect groups and some subset 
of each group is taken could also be resistant to this, if it's not 
obvious beforehand which subset is taken.