Posted on February 26, 2021 by Alex Kovner
In my new post, I argue that parliamentary procedures can be eliminated with the adoption of the superminority method. The advantages of this are enormous, since legislatures are widely ridiculed for the way rules can be manipulated to advantage. Instead, the superminority rule reinforces two main principles:
- Procedural inevitability – Agenda items are guaranteed to reach a conclusion.
- Substantive uncertainty – The outcome of all agenda items is genuinely unknown when proposals are written.
Once these principles are followed, legislative politics becomes painless to the general public. Democracy just works.
Filed under: Juries | Tagged: citizen juries, superminority | 25 Comments »
Posted on February 3, 2021 by Alex Kovner
In a new post, I argue that traditional political philosophy has been too concerned with building notions of justice and government from the individual up, and not focused enough on accepting the state as a fact and working down from there. While starting with the individual and trying to re-imagine the state has an intuitive appeal, it actually causes political philosophers to avoid applying real controls over the state in all of its contingent glory. Because of this, starting with the state as the first premise actually increases the protection afforded to individuals, by more carefully avoiding things that can go wrong with state intrusion into those freedoms.
Filed under: Juries | Tagged: citizen juries | 1 Comment »
Posted on November 4, 2020 by Alex Kovner
In an election day post, I discuss how traditional voting and sortition can be viewed as aspects of the same right. Unifying both is the need to reverse the burden of action: while voting requires citizens to decide to vote, sortition requires proper authorities to find participants. Instead, voting in democracies now should require electoral authorities to obtain a valid vote from everyone who is eligible. At that point, calling random juries and assemblies will be a breeze.
Filed under: Distribution by lot, Elections, Sortition | Tagged: citizen juries | 2 Comments »
Posted on October 28, 2020 by Alex Kovner
In an opinion piece in The New York Times, Yale law student Melody Wang lays out an extremely cogent argument for random selection in choosing cases. She emphasizes the power of random selection to prevent corrupt practices, and to focus advocates on directing their arguments to the general good, rather than to specific decision makers.
Filed under: Academia, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 7 Comments »
Posted on October 23, 2020 by Alex Kovner
My latest post discusses citizen juries from the perspective cognitive science. Starting with the argumentative theory of reason, I argue that final decision makers must be insulated from any requirement of justifying their decisions. This is precisely what juries do in trials: they apply a community standard, one that is inscrutable to advocates within the system, who operate on the basis of rules. The lack of such a function in democratic systems is an existential flaw that sortition must aim to correct.
Filed under: Deliberation | Tagged: argumentative theory, blind break, citizen juries | 4 Comments »
Posted on October 14, 2020 by Alex Kovner
In part 4 of my legislative series, I propose a new definition of democracy, one that revolves around the blind break. The blind break is, of course, an information control mechanism, and has not usually been treated as so essential to the political project. While concepts like representation and delegation have historically been treated as essential to political theory, information flow has been treated as secondary.
In this post, I aim to correct this mistake. Political systems are information flows at their very core. We must treat constraints on those flows as central to the entire political project, right up there with separation of powers, equality under the law, and other traditional notions of political theory.
Filed under: Juries | Tagged: blind break, citizen juries, citizens' jury, sortition | 1 Comment »
Posted on September 27, 2020 by Alex Kovner
In the third post in my executive series, I explore how a pluralistic executive deals with conflict among independent office holders. While this apparatus might seem like a waste of resources, what is the cost of authoritarianism? I think it is much better to ask the question: Can’t a pluralistic executive just get along with itself?
Filed under: Juries | Tagged: citizen juries, executive branch | 5 Comments »
Posted on September 15, 2020 by Alex Kovner
In my latest post on the legislative branch, I look at what happens after a set of concrete proposals are made and published. This is the most transformative aspect of the proposal-jury model. It engages every aspect of a polity, from intellectual and business elites, to the news media, to ordinary citizens. And it is the closest that any large, modern society can come to experiencing direct democracy.
Filed under: Juries | Tagged: citizen juries, Citizen Legislature, citizens' jury, legislative_juries, legislature | 15 Comments »
Posted on September 10, 2020 by Alex Kovner
I don’t think we pay enough attention to the executive branch on this blog, nor do we pay enough attention to the careers of executive branch officials. There’s nothing theoretically fun about it, but when democracies give way to dictatorships, it’s usually through some group of executive branch officials who commandeer the system for their personal benefit.
In part 2 of my never-ending series on the executive branch, I explore ways to create a more professional corps of executive officers. Perhaps one day a force organized along these lines will be able to steer the ship of state with no chance of crashing into the rocks of authoritarianism or running aground on the shoals of dysfunction.
Filed under: Proposals, Sortition | Tagged: citizens' jury, executive branch, proposal, public service, sortition | 15 Comments »
Posted on September 7, 2020 by Alex Kovner
Consensus-based legislatures favor bad faith actors. Just getting to a final vote on any measure is a herculean undertaking. This fact makes obstructionist tactics highly successful, so much so that legislatures are largely viewed as dysfunctional throughout the democratic world.
In part 2 of my legislative series, I introduce the superminority, a way of producing laws more pluralistically. It not only introduces a regular pattern for introducing citizen juries, but eliminates most of the tactics that make legislative politics so toxic.
Filed under: Proposals | Tagged: legislative_juries, legislature | 7 Comments »