Civic Power

Rahman, K. Sabeel; Gilman, Hollie Russon

doi:10.1017/9781108380744

Cited by 11 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 160 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…To the extent that citizen oversight bodies can protect the public character of the robust government institutions required to pursue these goals, therefore, they can contribute meaningfully to the advancement of democracy. By creating spaces within the state where countervailing experts and organized groups can contest the outsized influence of powerful interests, meanwhile, they could even facilitate oppositional collective action that stretches beyond the state as well (Bagg 2021; Rahman 2016; Rahman and Gilman 2019). Although it certainly cannot save democracy on its own, then, sortition as anti‐corruption ought to be a major part of any broader democratizing agenda.…”

Section: The Prospects Of Sortition‐based Reforms: Weighing Risks And...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Sortition as Anti‐Corruption: Popular Oversight against Elite Capture

Bagg

2022

American J Political Sci

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Random selection for political office-or "sortition"-is increasingly seen as a promising tool for democratic renewal. Critics worry, however, that replacing elected and appointed officials with randomly selected citizens would only exacerbate elite manipulation of political processes. This article argues that sortition can contribute to democratic renewal, but that its genuine promise is obscured by the excessive ambition and misplaced focus of prevailing models. Casting random selection as a route to accurate representation of the popular will, most contemporary proposals require randomly selected citizens to perform legislative tasks, whose open-endedness grants substantial discretion to elite agenda setters and facilitators. The real democratic promise of sortition-based reforms, I argue, lies in obstructing elite capture at critical junctures: a narrower task of oversight that creates fewer opportunities for elite manipulation. In such contexts, the benefits of empowering ordinary people-resulting from their immunity to certain distorting influences on career officials-plausibly outweigh the risks.A mid declining faith in familiar democratic institutions, the premodern practice of random selection for public office-or "sortition"-has attracted growing attention from scholars and reformers, as a powerful corrective for elite domination of political processes (Gastil and Wright 2019; Guerrero 2014; Landemore 2020). Yet others doubt sortition-based reforms could effectively confront contemporary democratic crises (e.g., Lafont 2019), and some suspect they would make matters worse (Landa and Pevnick 2021; Umbers 2021). Weighing concerns on all sides, this article argues that sortition does have a unique and important role to play in enhancing democracy, but that its potential is obscured by the excessively ambitious models favored by contemporary proponents. It therefore advances a revisionist account of the real but limited promise of lotteries as a tool for democratic reform: sortition as anti-corruption.As advocates of sortition have long pointed out, conventional methods for choosing public officials exhibit several pervasive pathologies that could be mitigated with random selection. First, wealthy elites and other powerful private actors can often ensure that officials chosen through election or appointment are sympathetic to their interests. Second, career officials are susceptible to certain distinctive incentives, which wealthy and powerful interests can use to pressure them after they are selected. Third, the class of political elites from which officials are drawn also exhibits pervasive biases and blind spots. By insulating policy processes from all three forms of capture, random selection of officials can substantially advance democracy.Given the risks of entrusting key political decisions entirely to ordinary citizens with little experience or expertise, however, we must also be careful not to overstate the democratic potential of sortition. As I demonstrate, more specifically, politically inexperien...

show abstract

Section: The Prospects Of Sortition‐based Reforms: Weighing Risks And...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Sortition as Anti‐Corruption: Popular Oversight against Elite Capture

Bagg

2022

American J Political Sci

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

A Moral Political Economy

Carugati¹,

Levi²

2021

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Errors and biases are earning algorithms increasingly malignant reputations in society. A central challenge is that algorithms must bridge the gap between high-level policy and on-the-ground decisions, making inferences in novel situations where the policy or training data do not readily apply. In this paper, we draw on the theory of street-level bureaucracies, how human bureaucrats such as police and judges interpret policy to make on-the-ground decisions. We present by analogy a theory of street-level algorithms, the algorithms that bridge the gaps between policy and decisions about people in a socio-technical system. We argue that unlike street-level bureaucrats, who re exively re ne their decision criteria as they reason through a novel situation, street-level algorithms at best re ne their criteria only after the decision is made. This loop-and-a-half delay results in illogical decisions when handling new or extenuating circumstances. This theory suggests designs for street-level algorithms that draw on historical design patterns for streetlevel bureaucracies, including mechanisms for self-policing and recourse in the case of error.

show abstract

Silence and democratic institutional design

Gray

2020

Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosoph

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Civic Power

Cited by 11 publications

References 160 publications

Sortition as Anti‐Corruption: Popular Oversight against Elite Capture

Sortition as Anti‐Corruption: Popular Oversight against Elite Capture

A Moral Political Economy

Silence and democratic institutional design

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About