‘On Poachers and Gamekeepers’ – Response to Review Article

The following is a response to 'On Poachers and Gamekeepers', by Keith Sutherland, a review of the book Democracy Without Politicians: Government by the People by Terry Bouricius that has been published online and will appear in print in the forthcomig issue of the Journal of Sortition. You can read the review here.

Ethan McCutchen is the Co-founder of Sortition NYC.

The Journal of Sortition's review of Terry Bouricius’s important book, Democracy Without Politicians: Government by the People provides a thoughtful summary and contextualization of Bouricius’s chapters on Athenian democracy, representation, neuro-politics, and competitive electoralism. But I found the critique of his multi-body sortition designs less even-handed.

Like the reviewer, I was long a skeptic of sortition-only polity designs. While I still espouse incremental experimentation, Bouricius’s arguments have persuaded me both that elections will continue to fail to produce wise policy and that a well-designed sortition system could succeed.

The richness of Bouricius’s system design is masked by the reviewer’s characterization of all bodies beyond the Policy Jury as “a hierarchy of small demarchic committees.” Each word slightly misleads. The design centers complementarity, not hierarchy. Agenda Councils and Review Panels each gather over 100 deliberators – quite large by mini-public standards. Interest Panels, open to all comers (because the best ideas may come from those neither elected nor selected) are not demarchic. And contrary to the connotations of “committee,” each body is self-standing.

What distinguishes Bouricius’s proposal is the systemic integration of these diverse bodies. Each features design decisions (size, duration, selection, etc) based on its role in the whole. For example, the primary policy engine rests in the dynamic of two large sortition bodies with complementary strengths. The Review Panels, selected by stratified random selection, engage in long-term learning and group deliberation, opening the door to the kinds of collectively intelligent win-win solutions the review rightly promotes. The even-larger quasi-mandatory short-term Policy Juries “deliberate” only as individuals to offer a balancing wisdom-of-the-crowds dynamic as they approve or reject the Review Panels’ proposals. So the critique that Policy Juries don’t invite win-win compromise – a need well addressed in a more appropriate part of the system – seems to condemn the tires for a failure to honk.

The reviewer laments the system’s “Byzantine complexity” despite the fact that its scalability would make it possible for policymaking delegated by low-bandwidth legislatures to obscure agencies to return to the aegis of the legislative branch, thus increasing accountability and reducing system complexity on the whole. Meanwhile, a major design feature goes unmentioned: the abundance of bodies creates an abundance of opportunities to participate. In many sortition proposals, only a small portion of the population could ever hope to serve. But if Bouricius’ design were adopted at all levels of government, everyone in society would have many opportunities to take part. A new democratic legitimacy would stem from, in Aristotle’s terms, the chance to rule and be ruled in turn.

The system’s rich mix confounds both of the review’s bullet objections; there’s no one magic and no one head. Popular elections will likely long play a role in governance, but any design incorporating elections should address Bouricius’s too-thoughtful-for-swift-dismissal enumeration of their flaws. The putatively “obvious” notion, for example, that elections should be used for agenda setting would need to account for elections’ egregious agenda-setting shortcomings to date. At a time of overlapping international crises of war, debt, climate, and technological risk, for example, U.S. election campaigns have elevated transgendered athletes as a top item on the national agenda. None can say what a sortition-selected Agenda Council would prioritize, but surely it would do a better job than our electoral system of representing – not just descriptively but also symbolically and substantively – the demos.