I’m moderately in favor of randomly sampling members of legislative bodies from the represented population. The U.S. would only need a thousand citizens in Congress to have the national opinions and beliefs represented with the same accuracy as a Gallup poll. The period from November to January could just be a crash course in parliamentary procedure and the legal system.
They randomly selected from citizens, but not everyone in the city was a citizen. The qualifications for citizenship (essentially wealthy landowner) made it relatively likely that random citizens would have the skill to legislate.
Sortition—my experience in the past was that people inevitably respond to this with something similar to “But then there might be a Nazi in congress!” (U.S.; consider it at least a hint that politics isn’t about policy—or at the least that people don’t understand sampling, or seriously overestimate the proportion of the U.S. population that consists of Neo-nazis). There are (mostly unimplemented) systems that combine voting and sortition in clever ways; might be good for a seastead?
I’m moderately in favor of randomly sampling members of legislative bodies from the represented population. The U.S. would only need a thousand citizens in Congress to have the national opinions and beliefs represented with the same accuracy as a Gallup poll. The period from November to January could just be a crash course in parliamentary procedure and the legal system.
The Athenians tried something like that. I don’t know enough about ancient greek history to say how effective it was.
They randomly selected from citizens, but not everyone in the city was a citizen. The qualifications for citizenship (essentially wealthy landowner) made it relatively likely that random citizens would have the skill to legislate.
Might be sensible to gather up more than strictly needed and then have some further filtering criteria, as with jury duty.
Sortition—my experience in the past was that people inevitably respond to this with something similar to “But then there might be a Nazi in congress!” (U.S.; consider it at least a hint that politics isn’t about policy—or at the least that people don’t understand sampling, or seriously overestimate the proportion of the U.S. population that consists of Neo-nazis). There are (mostly unimplemented) systems that combine voting and sortition in clever ways; might be good for a seastead?