Choosing Politicians by Lottery: An Option for the Future? For many people today, democracy (“rule of the people”) has become equal to elections to a system of representation and political parties where ordinary citizens are only engaged in politics at election day once every four or five years. Recently, however, voter participation has decreased, new technologies have challenged the old system, and the established democracies have experienced what has been called a crisis of political parties. Elections as the only means by which people can select who is going to govern are no longer taken for granted. In many corners of the world, new ways to achieve rule of the people are being discussed. Why not use direct, Internet-based discussions? Or lottery? The ideas are not as unusual as they may seem. There is nothing new about selecting politicians and civil servants by lot. In Classical Athens, lot was used to select most secular officials, from members of the Executive Council to port authorities. Some key positions were rotated daily to prevent people from abusing power. The arguments for the use of the lot are highly valid today. The lot was used to prevent the cementation of political elites and thus allow larger segments of the population to take an active part in the governing of society; it guaranteed a balanced representation between the tribes and groups in society and it was believed to protect the equality of the citizens and allow them an opportunity to experience how to govern as well as be governed. The selection by lot also distributed the duty and responsibilities of running the state among all citizens. The ideas from ancient Athens have, together with the development of new technologies, lead to a wave of experimentation with citizen juries and other forms of involving people in the governance of democratic countries. During the last two decades, programmes in Germany, Denmark, the United States and Britain, for example, have tried to find ways to gather more or less randomly chosen citizens to discuss political issues in an environment where they can get their questions answered and their opinions heard and respected. The first of these projects is called “Policy Juries” at the Jefferson Center for New Democratic Processes. In this case a highquality telephone survey is conducted to randomly selected individuals in a given community (a city, organization, county, state, nation, etc.). Survey respondents who show an interest in participating are entered into the jury pool, where they are coded for certain demographic information such as age, gender, geographic location, and so on. The final jury of about twenty-four citizens is then selected to reflect the general public. Over several days, the jurors are provided with information from expert witnesses regarding all sides of the issue (ranging from public health and the federal budget to US peacemaking in Central America), and the results of the jury are issued in a public forum. In the German “planning cell” project, twenty-five people are selected at random through the official registration offices. Their task is to evaluate problems or solutions, preparing new laws or planning local projects. The jurors sit in small groups of five discussing the issues for a limited time before the membership in the groups is rotated at random. The idea is that the jurors should be faced with four new group members six times a day to be confronted with a variety of opinions and knowledge. Another interesting project is the “citizen juries” of the Institute for Public Policy Research in the United Kingdom, a project built on the idea from the U.S. Policy Juries, but with one important distinction; the results of the citizen jury are binding for the government or administration that ordered the jury. If it does not want to implement the results of the jury, it has to give a press conference to present its reasons for not doing so. idea.int/index.cfm
Posted on: Tue, 27 Aug 2013 12:06:36 +0000
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