Political equality in a large group

This post is aimed at being the first part in a long-delayed “attempt to embark on” “a methodical analysis of the set of possibilities for achieving political equality”.

Part 1: Optimal decision-making, group rationality

… in which it is argued that groups, in an ideal setting, can achieve rational decisions. Group decision making constrained by practical circumstances should therefore be designed so as to produce decisions that approximate the decisions that would have been made under ideal conditions.

It is sometimes asserted that groups cannot form good policy. When such notions are expressed by the less educated, they are are attributed to the authoritarian sentiments of the unsophisticated. When such ideas are proposed by the educated, they are considered evidence of hard-headed realism. Elite speakers often mention Arrow’s “impossibility theorem” (what Arrow called the ‘General Possibility Theorem’) and claim that it “shows” that group rationality is impossible.

Obama’s name recognition history

The case of Rudolph Guiliani suggests that mass media cannot dictate to the public who to vote for. However, since it is impossible to vote for a candidate one has never heard of, mass media cannot help but determine who the public will not vote for.

Senator Barack Obama announced his candidacy for president in January 2007, yet even by by February 2006 over 40% of the people heard enough about Obama to have an opinion about him.

For comparison, a different Democratic congressmember running for the nomination, Dennis Kucinich, never managed to have more than 35% name recognition, even during the height of the primary season.

(The points marked with ‘k’ show the proportion of people recognizing Kucinich.)

Data: pollingreport.com: Newsweek, NBC and Gallup series.

Implementation of democratic mass media

The aim of this post is to provide some particulars for the proposal for democratic media which I made:

Using public funds, “media sections” (TV and radio channels, newspapers, book publishers, etc.) are created and sustained. The media sections are controlled by citizen-editor boards, a role that would rotate within the entire population. Each citizen-editor board has a budget and complete control over a section – i.e., over a certain part of the public media – in the same way that present-day editors and media outlet owners have today.

The functions of mass media

When considering the form that democratic media could take, it is important to consider whether mass media – with its inherent potential for non-democratic effects – has any useful functions that are not anti-democratic. This question is akin to the question of whether government has any functions that are not oppressive. In an analogy to the anarchist position which claims that any governmental activity is necessarily oppressive, one could claim that the only functions of mass media are anti-democratic, i.e., those of allowing a privileged minority influence over the rest of the population. That position would claim that all mass media should be abolished (in the same way that the anarchists want to abolish government altogether) and people should rely exclusively on non-mass (or intimate) forms of media. In this view, the best that a democratic control structure over mass media could produce would be neutralizing those anti-democratic functions, leaving the entire organization useless.

A proposal for democratic media

The term “censorship” describes the act of suppressing certain ideas by those who control some distribution channels. Despite regular attempts by interested parties to limit the term to describe very restricted or extreme cases of suppression of ideas, the term is usually, and very reasonably, understood to cover any attempt at reducing the circulation of an idea, by any person or organization. The negative view, which most of the population, as well as official ideology, take of censorship therefore encompasses any such activity. According to this view, the desirable media system is democratic – i.e., one which allows all people an equal opportunity at presenting their ideas and having them considered by others.

The implicit universal rejection of censorship notwithstanding, much of the communication patterns that dominate Western society are inherently censoring activities. The members of the elite group that influences (to varying degrees) the content of wide circulation media – publishers, broadcasters, advertisers, editors and reporters – routinely make decisions that amount to suppressing some communications, containing certain ideas, in favor of other communications, containing different ideas. Those decisions, although usually purporting to reflect only objective accepted standards, are in reality almost completely subjective. They therefore reflect the ideas and biases of the very select and atypical group of people who make them.

Flyer 2008 elections

Lottery-Based Democracy: the Original and Still the Best

In our society elections and democracy are considered inseparable. In fact, this connection is far from clear. The ancient Greeks, for example, thought that elections are part and parcel of an oligarchy¹. It was oligarchical Sparta, rather than democratic Athens, that elected its government.

The Athenians had a very different system: political offices were distributed using a lottery. The lottery method – known as Sortition – could be implemented here. If Congresspeople were drawn at random from the U.S. citizenry Congress would not be an elite body made predominantly of rich, male, white, old lawyers. Rather, it would look like a statistical sample of the people: it would contain 50% women, 25% hispanics and blacks, rich and poor, young and old, straight and gay, and very few lawyers².

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More information on the sortition system can be found on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition, and other online resources. One such resource is A Citizen Legislature by Ernest Callenbach and Michael Phillips – a book with a specific proposal for using sortition to select the U.S. House of Representatives. The book is available at http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC11/Calnbach.htm.

Please contact me, Yoram Gat, with any comments at:

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Notes:

[1] “[T]he appointment of magistrates by lot is thought to be democratic, and the election of them oligarchical, democratic again when there is no property qualification, oligarchical when there is.” Aristotle, Politics, book IV, 9.

[2] Of the 535 members of the 109th Congress there were 71 (13%) blacks and hispanics, 82 (15%) women, and 228 (43%) lawyers. The average age in Congress was 57, vs. 37 in the population. Sources: http://www.c-span.org/congress/109congress.asp, 2006 population data – Statistical abstract of the U.S., 2008, Table 6, Table 7.

Censorship

The Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor and professor of law at Florida International University, in Miami, and dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Stanley Fish, writes in his New York Times blog about the difference between what he calls the “colloquial” sense of the term “censorship” and what he calls the “philosophical and legal” sense of that word.

According to Fish, according to the colloquial sense,

censorship occurs whenever we don’t say or write something because we fear adverse consequences, or because we feel that what we would like to say is inappropriate in the circumstances, or because we don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings. (This is often called self-censorship. I call it civilized behavior.)

while according to the “philosophical and legal” sense, censorship has the characteristics that

(1) it is the government that is criminalizing expression and (2) that the restrictions are blanket ones.

Fish’s entire basis for the post is the unexplained assumption that the latter sense is the correct one, while the former one is simply a mistake. This, of course, in itself, is a major flaw, since, accepting Fish’s premises, he is criticizing a speaker for using a word in its accepted sense.

Going beyond this point toward more substantial matters, much of Fish’s thinking is resting on false notions.

Plutoctomy

Economic equality may not be a necessary condition for a well-functioning democracy. In an eklogecracy, however, an economic advantage translates to a political advantage. While there are other attributes that confer political advantages in an eklogecracy (this is probably true to some extent in any system of government), large economic advantages are among the most effective ways to gain political power in an elections driven system.

Various devices have been proposed and implemented in an attempt to reduce the ways in which economic advantages can be translated to political power. The most widely adopted device is probably anti-bribery laws. Other, less universally accepted devices are various campaign finance rules. Undoubtedly, those devices have some effect in the intended direction, although, clearly, these devices are far from eliminating the advantages of wealth. It is also clear that eliminating those advantages altogether, or even diminishing them significantly goes against the intrinsic characteristics of eklogecracy and is therefore an unlikely prospect.

Nevertheless, experimentation with additional devices for diminishing the political power of wealth seems desirable. One possible type of devices involves conditioning the assumption of powerful government positions on a renunciation of wealth – a concept which may be termed “plutoctomy”. Under this rule, people running for powerful positions in government, or accepting nominations to such positions, agree in advance that in case they do win the position they will, from that point on and for the rest of their lives, limit their standard of living (as measured by, say, total yearly expenses, including gifts) to a pre-set level (e.g., no more than twice the median level among the citizens).

Delegation and rewards

In a previous comment I discussed the possible types of rewards that may collected by a re-elected delegate. These are the possible rewards that, according to the rewards-based theory of electoral delegation, may be motivating a delegate to be responsive to the interests of the electorate, by having the prospect of re-election available to those delegates whom the public perceives as having acted according to its wishes.

The notion that rewards are an effective way to motivate delegate responsiveness (of which, the rewards-based theory of electoral delegation is a special case) rests on the assumption that citizens can make accurate assessments of the quality of service rendered by delegates. This assumption is unrealistic in many cases – in particular, relying solely on reports in mass media seems like a very shaky foundation for forming an informed opinion on the performance of delegates. Nevertheless, it is interesting to examine what rewards-based mechanisms would be effective motivating factors in those cases where adequate assessment of performance of delegates is achievable.

Syndicalism, localism, atomism

Daniel Owen, a syndicalist, responded to my comments on the lack of a convincing syndicalist blueprint for the coordination of a large scale society. We then proceeded to discuss the matter on his blog, starting with his post, and continuing in the comments to the post.

Owen granted the need for some society-wide decision making body made of delegates from the small scale bodies – the local assemblies. His view is that the current version of such a body, i.e., the national legislature and courts, have encroached on what should be the powers of local, or intermediate level, bodies. Owen believes that once most of the business of government is handled at the appropriate, lower, level of aggregation (the local assemblies or aggregations of few local assemblies), the society-wide decision making body would handle only “[b]road ‘constitutional’ policy and foreign relations.”