Thanks; glad to know the name for this practice. It'd be a huge improvement over the popularity contest we have now.
In fact, it's probably the ideal way to promote anyone in any setting. I'd make a few small adjustments, however. Rather than random selection, I'd like the pool of candidates to be reviewed by their peers and scored for ability, creativity, fairness, leadership -- whatever skills are appropriate in their realm. Then I'd like to see some sort of weighting applied to the random choice that favors the "best and the brightest" over the bottom dwellers.
And it goes without saying... no campaigning or re-election.
It's easy to fall in love with a political system that's never been tested at the United State's scale. My guess is, if we implemented sortition, a few unsavory things would happen:
(1) The Republican and Democrat parties would just switch their efforts to getting people excluded from the random drawing, much as they currently aim to include or exclude people from voting.
(2) After selections, the losing party would attack the random selection process.
(3) Assuming the selection is allowed to go through without objection, the random person would be under the same duress that elected candidates have to accept bribes and kickbacks.
(4) It's possible that the average citizen would be more prone to reap their rewards during their short term in office, rather than someone who's mindful of their full career.
I'm guessing you're just being flippant out of cynicism against the current system, but I'm a little over that line of thinking.
Two-party systems are the inevitable product of a First-Past-The-Post voting in a democracy[1]. There would be no Democratic and Republican party under a sortition system.
Not quite. rdancer's saying that the options people have to choose amongst/between are a consequence of how their votes are counted. Proportional representation tends toward a larger number of parties; first-past-the-post tends toward two. And "tends toward" can be read as "definitely leads to" in the case of fpp.
Think it through to the logical conclusion: What is a political party? How did it come to be what it is now? What happens when a political party loses popular support?
My guess is, if we implemented sortition, a few unsavory things would happen:(1) The Republican and Democrat parties would just switch their efforts to getting people excluded from the random drawing, much as they currently aim to include or exclude people from voting.
Well, abolish the parties too then. It's just citizens.
If you pass a law forbidding them to have formal legal presence as an organization, you can. Social cliques are OK, it's the formalizing that makes it worse.
I'd abolish lobbies as official entities if it was up to me too.
They existed as social cliques before they became official entities and were just as problematic at that point. Political parties didn't really become a bipolar construct we have today until ~1791.
Comments
Thanks; glad to know the name for this practice. It'd be a huge improvement over the popularity contest we have now.
In fact, it's probably the ideal way to promote anyone in any setting. I'd make a few small adjustments, however. Rather than random selection, I'd like the pool of candidates to be reviewed by their peers and scored for ability, creativity, fairness, leadership -- whatever skills are appropriate in their realm. Then I'd like to see some sort of weighting applied to the random choice that favors the "best and the brightest" over the bottom dwellers.
And it goes without saying... no campaigning or re-election.
It's easy to fall in love with a political system that's never been tested at the United State's scale. My guess is, if we implemented sortition, a few unsavory things would happen:
(1) The Republican and Democrat parties would just switch their efforts to getting people excluded from the random drawing, much as they currently aim to include or exclude people from voting. (2) After selections, the losing party would attack the random selection process. (3) Assuming the selection is allowed to go through without objection, the random person would be under the same duress that elected candidates have to accept bribes and kickbacks. (4) It's possible that the average citizen would be more prone to reap their rewards during their short term in office, rather than someone who's mindful of their full career.
I'm guessing you're just being flippant out of cynicism against the current system, but I'm a little over that line of thinking.
Two-party systems are the inevitable product of a First-Past-The-Post voting in a democracy[1]. There would be no Democratic and Republican party under a sortition system.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo
Are you trying to say that people's political affiliations are a consequence of how their votes are counted?
Not quite. rdancer's saying that the options people have to choose amongst/between are a consequence of how their votes are counted. Proportional representation tends toward a larger number of parties; first-past-the-post tends toward two. And "tends toward" can be read as "definitely leads to" in the case of fpp.
Just because the party can't win elections doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Think it through to the logical conclusion: What is a political party? How did it come to be what it is now? What happens when a political party loses popular support?
Well, abolish the parties too then. It's just citizens.
The problem is you can't really "abolish" the parties. Social cliques will form regardless.
If you pass a law forbidding them to have formal legal presence as an organization, you can. Social cliques are OK, it's the formalizing that makes it worse.
I'd abolish lobbies as official entities if it was up to me too.
They existed as social cliques before they became official entities and were just as problematic at that point. Political parties didn't really become a bipolar construct we have today until ~1791.
Well, I think they've reached a level of depravity and institutionalization since that that was unknown in 1791.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_and_Sedition_Acts
Eh....not really. The problem these days is a disconnect from reality.