Raph Frank wrote:
Sorry, pressed reply instead of reply to all
On 9/11/08, Aaron Armitage <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> It doesn't follow from the fact we choose representatives for ourselves
> that we would lose nothing by being stripped of the means of political
> action. We would lose our citizenship, because citizenship means precisely
> having a share of the right to rule. Registering for a lottery doesn't
> count.
So, any form of randomness is not acceptable? What about one of the
the proposed random ballot rules, where if there is consensus, a
specific candidate wins. However, if that doesn't work, the winner is
random.
There's probably a tradeoff here. A completely random legislature would
have no direct link to the people, except by the people, as a mass,
changing their opinions. An elected legislature is at the other end of
the scale: the people can directly influence its composition by
declining to vote for some candidates and supporting others.
The relative isolation from direct influence is both a random assembly's
strength and a weakness. It's a strength because, if campaign men can
influence voters in the wrong direction, then the assembly remains
impervious to this attack. It's a weakness for the reasons Aaron gives,
that it severely weakens the voter-representative link.
A random assembly also resists the attack where one corrupts candidates,
simply because it's not clear who the candidates are going to be. I
don't know if randomness, or more generally, a weak voter-representative
link is required for this resistance. It might be, for a single given
representative, but a method where voters elect groups and some subset
of each group is taken could also be resistant to this, if it's not
obvious beforehand which subset is taken.
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