[EM] Qualified, wise, representative and egotistical legislators

Thu Sep 11 06:30:22 PDT 2008

I think this is definitely on-topic. This is also a good challenge on  
how to improve the current political systems. The identified problem  
is real and better approaches could be found.

It is natural that people have many kind of motivation to climb up  
the ladders of the political system. Some may aim at improving the  
society for the benefit of all. Some may do it for the money or the  
fame or just to be better than others or to prove to others that they  
are worth something. There are also many combinations of different  
motivations (this is not black and white).

The representatives should be representative. Pure lottery may be in  
many aspects better than current commonly used methods. On the other  
hand pure lottery may not be ideal in the sense that we may want the  
representatives to be wise and competent rather than just random  
people with maybe no interest and no special skills for the job.  
(Legislative work could be demanding. Or it could be simply common  
sense evaluation of proposals made by civil servants.)

The current political systems do to some extent produce clever and  
competent representatives since climbing the ladders up (maybe  
fighting one's way up) does require some type of talent. Maybe also  
some ruthlessness etc. We can assume that some of the best potential  
representatives will not feel comfortable in this environment and  
will never climb high.

So, how can we improve the quality of the representatives then.

1) If one starts form sortition, then one could try to introduce  
components that aim at electing better representatives (if basic  
lottery is not considered good enough). One could use weighted  
lottery where voters are first allowed to vote for any citizens  
(=give weight to) and only then one would do the lottery. Or one  
could allow each person to name any other citizen in their ballot and  
then there would be a lottery among the ballots. Some of the elected  
persons would refuse => we could get more motivated representatives  
by electing someone else instead.

2) If one starts from the traditional democratic systems, then one  
could try to increase the level of understanding of the personality  
of each representative (nowadays they typically are far away and  
always just smile when in TV). Maybe the fellow representatives and  
other people that work close to them could evaluate them. This should  
be done in a balanced way, avoiding giving bad scores to competing  
political groupings. Maybe it would be enough to see the relative  
merits when compared to other representatives of the same party. This  
approach should maybe cover also the lower layers of the ladders to  
help lifting the best people up. Also encouragement votes to regular  
citizens could be used (maybe all citizens are candidates, maybe one  
could have an additional encouragement vote that has no weight in the  
actual election except its encouragement value).

3) There have been also many proxy style proposals where regular  
people give their support on the next layer above them etc. This is a  
bottom-up approach that also aims at keeping the contacts between  
people of adjacent layers strong and elections based on really  
knowing the qualities of the elected people (instead of basing one's  
voting decisions on smiling faces in the TV and carefully formulated  
positive and negative campaigning (often made by professionals  
instead of the candidates themselves)).

4) Direct democracy allows people to make decisions themselves.  
Modern technologies give more possibilities to use this approach too.  
One could use also some intermediate approach and elect some very  
large number of representatives (using lottery, proxies, local  
elections,...). This would keep the ladders low (easy to climb and  
not so tempting to people with "wrong motivations"). Of course some  
executive level (government etc.) would be needed also in this case.  
(Some proxy style proposals also allow anyone to vote personally when  
they want.)

The current political systems could certainly be improved to elect  
better representatives. There are many ways to approach this goal.  
Better keep working and we may see also results some day (not just a  
reform but also better representatives and better decisions).

Juho

On Sep 10, 2008, at 0:00 , Terry Bouricius wrote:

> Although it may be off-topic for a VOTING method list, I have long
> advocated a greater use of sortition (the selection by lot) to select
> legislators (perhaps one chamber of a bicameral legislature?) Having
> served ten years as a state legislator in Vermont, USA, I can  
> assure you
> all that legislators are not more qualified, nor wiser, as Burke  
> hoped,
> but rather simply less-representative and more egotistical, than  
> average
> people. The experience and excellent work of the Citizen Assembly
> established by the provincial parliament in British Columbia a few  
> years
> ago is compelling evidence that elections may not be the key to  
> genuinely
> representative democracy.
>
> Terry Bouricius
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Fred Gohlke" <fredgohlke at verizon.net>
> To: <election-methods at lists.electorama.com>
> Sent: Tuesday, September 09, 2008 4:10 PM
> Subject: Re: [EM] language/framing quibble
>
>
> Whoops!
>
> It was your entire post of Mon Sep 8 03:44:51 PDT 2008
>
> I didn't cite it because I was responding to the entire post, which
> follows:
>
> (clip)
> One option is to select the legislature at random.  Stratified random
> sampling would yield a highly representative legislature.  The
> population would be split into N groups, such that each group is
> reasonably homogeneous and then 1 person picked from each group.  This
> also reduces the benefit from corrupting the random process.  Also,
> corrupting the stratification just increases the random variance, it
> doesn't actually change the expect result.  Corrupting both means that
> you get to pick the legislature.
>
> This has the advantage that it eliminates the point in campaigning.
> Every 5 years, a group of people get a mail in the post informing them
> that they have been selected for 'legislature duty' .. though unlike
> Juries they would presumably be paid.
>
> The disadvantage (or advantage depending on your viewpoint) is that it
> leads to a legislature made up of average people.
>
> I have suggested that a way around it is to have a multi-stage  
> process.
>   The people picked at random are asked to select the 'person they  
> know
> who they would most respect to hold office' and that generates a  
> second
> group.  The rule would require that the person picked is somehow
> connected to them, say friends or family members.  After a few stages,
> say 10, the final group becomes the legislature.
>
> This should result in a reasonably competent legislature (assuming  
> each
> person picks someone more competent than themselves) and the rule that
> you must pick a friend/family members for each link means that
> campaigning is pointless.
>
> This resulting legislature would then appoint the PM (or nominate 2
> candidates for President) and approve any cabinet posts.
>
> The big disadvantage is that it is unlikely that a person would be
> re-elected.  This could lead to short term thinking.  OTOH, each
> legislator would know that he will have to live in the country  
> after his
> term ends, so he won't want to mess up to badly.
> (clip)
> ----
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