[MUSIC] The Lottocracy. Hi, welcome back. In this segment I will introduce a kind of political system that would use representatives. But representatives not chosen through elections. But through random selection. Through the use of a lottery in which all adult citizens are included, and any might be chosen for political office. So it's worth nothing that there's some historical precedent for this kind of method, referred to also as sortition or demarchy. For example, in ancient Athens, lottery selection was used to select political actors in several of the major governmental institutions. Aristotle, in his classic work Politics, writes the appointment of magistrates by lot is thought to be democratic, and the election of them oligarchic. So this used to be the common understanding of democracy, or at least part of the core of democracy. Both the brevia and the scrutiny, which were employed in late medieval and early renaissance Italy, incorporated selection by law. And more recently citizens' assemblies in which citizens were chosen at random to serve on the assembly. In which citizens heard from experts prior to coming up with their own proposals. These were used in Canada, in the provinces of British Columbia and Ontario, to reform election law. Oliver Dowlen, in his fantastic work, the political potential of sortition, goes through much of this history in great detail. So just as a kind of side note, I prefer the words Lottocracy or Lottocratic over Sortition, the other word people use in this context. Because the noun for the system is easier and because sortition I think, echoes to the unfortunate combination of sorted and sedition. And I think the meaning of the word is more evident from the familiar lot route. We all talk about lotteries and heard about lotteries. But you can find people about lottery selection and politics under these other headings, too. So it's worth noting at the outset that there's a more ambitious and a more modest way of introducing Lottocratic elements. So one might have them supplement the existing legislative institutions. Or one might have them replace those institutions entirely. They can be used just for a few select kinds of political problems. Perhaps only after some general triggering conditions were satisfied. So maybe only after there was legislative stalemate through the normal political process. Or maybe only if they were called by a special referendum vote or something like this. Perhaps we could use lottocratic elements to address problems that had certain criteria, such as being particularly complex or particularly susceptible to capture. Or we could use lottocratic elements as part of the permanent political structure. Or, as one off institutions, perhaps used only to implement significant political reforms. Additionally, they could be used just as a kind of oversight mechanism charged only with making recommendations regarding legislation. Or with having some level of veto power over traditional legislative processes. So these are all sort of relatively more modest ways of introducing the use of lottery selection of political officials. So in this segment, I'll discuss the possibility of a full legislative replacement. So imagine taking something like the United States Congress and just removing it and replacing it with what I'm talking about. But, I do this as a kind of thought experiment to sort of get a test case for the advantages and disadvantages of lottocratic institutions in full view, not because I think it's obviously the way to go. So the three distinctive features of the full lottocratic system as I envision it as a complete, sort of, legislative replacement. Are these. So first, that the legislative function is fulfilled by many different single-issue legislatures. So each one focusing just on, for example, agriculture or health care or trade or immigration, rather than by a single generalist legislature like we have now. So that's one feature, the single-issue focus. Second feature, that the members of these single-issue legislatures will be chosen by lottery from the relevant political jurisdiction. So that's the lottery component. And then the final component. Third, that the members of the single-issue legislatures will hear from a variety of experts on the relevant topic. At the beginning of each legislative session, during something we might call a learning phase. So somewhat more concretely, imagine that each of these single issue legislatures consists of 300 people chosen via random lottery from the adult citizens of the jurisdiction. Each person chosen would serve for a three year term. We could make it some other length of time, but let's just work with three years. Terms would be staggered so that each year 100 new people would be chosen, and 100 people would finish their terms and leave. All adult citizens in the political jurisdiction would be eligible to be selected. People would not be legally required to serve if selected. At least that's one way of doing it. Give people an option. But we can make the financial incentives considerable. So, given how expensive it is to run Congress, for example, you could easily pay each randomly selected person $1 million a year for their service. At least in a context like the United States. And we could make efforts to accommodate family and work schedules. Including providing relocation expenses and legal protections. So that individuals or their families won't be penalized professionally or otherwise for serving in this role. And we might need to develop the civic culture in the background so that say, unlike jury duty in some places. Serving on one of these single issue legislatures would be seen as one of the more significant civic duties, and a kind of honor. Okay, so that's a kind of concrete picture of how we might see something like this. Then each Single-issue Lottery-selected Legislature. So Single-issue Lottery-selected Legislature, so we'll call these SILL's as the acronym. Each SILL would meet for two legislative sessions each calendar year and the structure for each session would be something like this. There'd be an agenda setting stage, a learning phase where there'd be expert presentations, a period of community consultation where people would go from the sort of central assembly that they've been chosen to serve on on the SILL. Back to wherever they were from. Talking about the issues and what they'd learned so far and getting input from the community. And then a deliberation and discussion phase and then a period of drafting and revising, maybe more community consultation. And finally voting. So before discussing these stages, I could say a lot more about them of course. I'll say a little bit about them. Let me say a bit more about two aspects of the lottocratic system as I envision it. So first there's this use of single issue legislative institutions. And then second there's a question of how the randomly chosen members of the SILL's should conceive of their roles. Cause they'll in some sense, be representatives but a very different kind of thing than an elected representative. So as noted above, rather than a multi-issue legislature that legislates over an entire range of policy issues. The SILL system would be set up so that there was no body that dealt with all of the policy issues, but instead, the policy issues space would be divided into some small number of policy-specific areas. So Agriculture, Consumer Protection, Education. Who knows how exactly we'll define them. Can talk more about that. So each of these would then have a distinct legislative institution devoted to creating law within that policy area. So the main reason to prefer single issue focus for this kind of lottery selected body, is that it will allow for greater learning and engagement with the particular problem. This is going to be important, given the range of backgrounds that these randomly selected people would bring to the institutions. And given the fact that these individuals would be basically amateurs at the particular task of creating legislation. So the single issue focus is motivated both by epistemic concerns and by practical concerns. All right so then there's a question of how the randomly chosen individuals should think of their roles. Your, your picked to serve on one of these. How should you think about what you should do? So a lottocratic system's not a normal representative system, although there is a way in which some of it's value comes from it's representativeness. The thought behind the lottocratic system is that members of the SILL's will be, at least over a long enough run of time broadly, descriptively and proportionally representative of the political community. Simply because they've been chosen at random. So these randomly chosen people won't have in mind the idea that they're to represent some particular constituency. Instead it's more the idea that an individual member of the SILL might come to have a certain view about an issue after hearing from experts and engaging in consultation and deliberation. And the fact that that person's come to this kind of view is a kind of evidence that members of the political community who share certain kinds of relevantly salient characteristics with that individual would also have come to have those views had they gone through the same experience. So you see somebody who's from your neighborhood or from your religion or from your occupation. You see that they'd been chosen and they're serving this role. They go through this experience, come to have these views. And then you can say oh, that person's kind of like me in these ways. I bet if I'd gone through that, learned what they learned, I might well have come to the same views. So in that sense there'll be a kind of representation that goes on. But it's not like representing someone where you try to think about what would be good for them, and then try to do that. You just think about what you think is the best thing to do. Now let me say something brief about a few of the different stages. So there's many questions about how to structure them or whether to have these stages or to combine them or add others. And my hope here is not to provide a definitive structure, it's very hard to do. But to give some sense what stages might be required and in one way in which those stages might be organized. Okay. So first the agenda setting phase. So within each policy area. So let's imagine agriculture. There are many things a SILL might do in a particular legislative session. From relatively small board changes to existing law. Or to introducing a significant legislative overhaul. So the SILL's will decide what to work on on the next session by a process of agenda-setting. Where a wide range of possible options, things you might work on, are going to be narrowed to a manageable few. And that process will have some balance of input from those already involved with the issue. So experts, stakeholders, activists, in addition to the general public. Perhaps there's some kind of sophisticated polling mechanism. So you get all this input into the SILL. And then the members of the SILL will take this combination of in-person proposals and polling information, and then vote for those items to have on the agenda for the next legislative session. So it won't happen right away. There can also be a process for merging two legislative sessions in the event that more time was required or if there are issues that straddle, say, agriculture and environmental regulation. There could be a vote to combine those two SILL's for the purpose of a particular legislative session. So the reason for the vote to set the agenda for the next legislative session is that you want there to be time to inform and involve experts and community members, around that issue. So everyone can know, this is what we're going to work on, this is what we're going to talk about changing in the next, legislative session. Okay. So the next phase would involve expert presentations to the SILL. So for each item on the agenda, the SILL will hear from experts, who will provide general background and specific information relevant to the question under discussion. So as an example. This was done in the British Columbia Citizens' Assembly. There was a learning phase there, where experts made presentations about different kinds of electoral systems. And a textbook on electoral systems was assigned as background reading. Additionally advanced graduate students in Political Science from nearby universities such as the University of British Columbia were trained to facilitate small group discussions. So obviously if you're going to use experts there'll need to be a process by which a person is allowed to speak to a SILL as an expert. And this requires a process to determine whether a person counts as an expert. We can call this the qualification assessment process. And a process to determine which of the many qualified experts who meet that threshold are going to actually be given an opportunity to speak. So that's the expert selection process. So the point of having expert presentations is to have lawmaking by these people who don't come in knowing anything. Have that kind of lawmaking informed by the best available knowledge. Relevant to the policy area at issue. So one of the comparative advantages of this kind of system is that hopefully it'll blend the virtues of policymaking by ordinary people with policy making based on expertise. And the hope is that by acquiring experts to explain complex ideas to non experts this will allow for a kind of general comprehension, authorization and endorsement of policy in technical areas that won't be present if experts are simply empowered to decide directly. So if we had a kind of technocracy where the experts got to rule. While, at the same time, having policy that's made through epistemically responsible procedures. So it's a well-known problem with what have been called technocratic or epistocratic forms of government ruled by the knowers, ruled by the experts. That, for many political questions, who counts as an expert? Who counts as a knower? Is precisely what's at issue. So there are going to be other problems. Such as David Estlund's, you might be right but who made you boss problem. But given the smaller role that experts play in the lottocratic system. This'll be less of a concern. They're not getting political power directly. But here because whether an individual's an expert or not. Doesn't bear on whether they have political power. The stakes involved in determining whether someone counts as an expert are going to be a little bit lessened. So we're not giving them power directly. Still the importance of the details of the qualification assessments should be clear. So for many issues that might be relatively uncontroversial whether someone counts as an expert. For other issues it might be controversial, whether there are experts in that area or what the basis of expertise might be. So expertise might be recognized based on advanced degrees, years of professional experience, formal professional credentials from institutions with national or international accreditation, publication of research and independent peer-reviewed journals, and so on. These might be some ways of gauging expertise. That's already used in a lot of legal systems. Another kind of important expertise is the expertise that comes from experience, including occupational experience or lived experience. Such as the experience of being a disabled person, particularly in the context of making policy that primarily affects disabled people. So whatever process is used, experts will need to explain the basis of their expertise, describe their credentials, if relevant. And disclose any actual or possible conflicts of interest due to sources of funding or employment. So a full defence of using this kind of lottocratic institution would have to do a lot more to specify the details to the qualification assessment process. And there's significant concerns about the possibility of expert capture. Talk more about those in the next segment. After hearing from experts, SILL members will begin the process of developing and deciding upon legislative proposals and possibility eventually enacting a proposal. So the details of this process are going to be really important but I don't want to have them detain us here. I just want to highlight a few key elements of the system as I would envision it. So first for many issues I think there should be a community consultation phase. So there's the agenda setting phase then the expert phase where people learn a lot. Then there's a community consultation phase. Where that would include consultation with non members. Either virtually online, or something like that, or through having the members return to the geographic area from which they came. And there hold sort of town hall style meetings, in which individual members or multi-member panels will talk through the items on the agenda, talk about what the experts told them, what they feel like they've learned from the experts. And solicit questions and comments from those in attendance. So there's two main purposes to all of this, and the first is to inform non-members about the issues and proposals under discussion. And the second is to gather information from members of the community, people who might have a stake or might have information. So second, having heard from experts and engage with nonmembers in this community consultation phase, then the members of the SILL will convene for deliberation and discussion. It's worth stressing that unlike some who embrace deliberative democracy, something we talked about earlier in the course, which is often accompanied by norms of consensus decision making. I'm not particularly committed to group deliberation as normatively essential or distinctively important. So group deliberation might be important for some issues on epistemic grounds. But the empirical evidence about using deliberation in this kind of context is really mixed. And in some cases you might get biases introduced during the deliberative phase in a way that would make sense to restrict or eliminate. The kinds of group deliberation that take place. So this is all something that would need to be worked out in the detail for different issues. Finally, after discussing various questions and proposals the SILL members will work together to draft the proposals. And then eventually having drafted those in some detail perhaps with the help of people who are experts on drafting legislation. As we see in current legislative bodies. Then you'll have people, having done this drafting, come up with proposals for a vote. So you'd need some people who had assist in all of this and should be dealing with amateurs, but we see this currently in Congress and other places where there's a lot of people helping with the details of drafting. But, that's a key place where we'd want to look at how it's going to work in practice. Okay, so that gets the main parts of the lottocratic system, this kind of SILL network system in view. In the next segment, I'll talk about some of the promise of lottocracy, some of the potential advantages, as well as some of the concerns about lottocracy.
