Author: Emma McInnes

  • Sortition and Sociopathy: Commentary on Spada and Peixoto’s Critical Analysis of Democratic Minipublics

    Written by Alex Kovner

    We can broadly classify the justifications for sortition into two categories: (a) positive justifications that focus on the virtues of sortition irrespective of other mechanisms, and (b) negative justifications that focus on how sortition can mitigate or eliminate undesirable features of electoral democracy. Positive justifications can be emotionally appealing and often come packaged with uplifting slogans; popular books such as Hélène Landemore’s Open Democracy and James Fishkin’s When the People Speak come to mind. (more…)

  • Leviathan as a manifesto for popular sovereignty

    Given a measure of hermeneutic charity, Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan could be taken to acknowledge the validity of decision making by citizen jury:

    “if the representative consist of many men, the voyce of the greater number, must be considered as the voyce of them all.”  (Leviathan, Part 1, chapter 16)

    The Leviathan frontispiece is composed of several hundred figures (which happens to be the minimum for a statistically-representative sample). So long as there are “many men” that’s all that matters – alteration of the numbers only affects the descriptive fidelity of the representation. Note that in the 1651 manuscript drawing, the heads are facing outwards towards the reader . . .

    (more…)

  • Popular Rule without Popular Sovereignty

    admin

    Abstract: Hélène Landemore’s Open Democracy (2020) offers both a normative conception of popular rule and an institutional schema intended to advance it. This schema is grounded in a normative conception of popular rule that associates democracy with the values of inclusion and equality. But this association misses a historically important dimension of popular rule—popular sovereignty—which requires the people as a whole to play a critical part in decision making. Landemore’s dismissal of popular sovereignty informs her institutional schema, which relies upon both sortition and self-selection. It leaves no significant room for the people as a whole to act, either directly (via referenda) or indirectly (via election). Landemore never explicitly defends this dismissal of popular sovereignty from her conception of popular rule. Given the historical importance of this dimension of popular rule, and its continuing intuitive appeal, any such dismissal requires careful justification.

    (more…)