The Case for Democratic Lottery in Effective Altruism.

1.0 Executive Summary

Improved decision making is one of the top priority world problems according to 80,000 Hours. This issue is extremely neglected^[1].  I propose the funding of research and small-scale randomly controlled trials of a potential remedy called “sortition”. In sortition, a democratic lottery is used to choose representatives. I claim that sortition has incredible promise in creating more informed, more deliberative, more efficient, and even more democratic democracy. I also claim that sortition would be more aligned with Effective Altruist (EA) goals than other regimes.

Although campaigning for political reform is exorbitantly expensive, smaller-scale tests are a feasible and tractable short-term goal. Even with the high cost of political reform, the return on investment is potentially high. Sortition therefore may deserve high priority attention from the EA community. 

2.0 Background

Worldwide, incompetent electoral government decision making wastes money, creates moral hazards, and further exacerbates top priority world problems. All the top priority world problems - AI risk, catastrophic pandemics, nuclear weapons, great power conflict, and factory farming are exacerbated by poor government decision making. 

Bad decisions made at the ballot box are a large contributor to incompetent decision making. As political scientist Richard Lau states, “Five decades of behavioral research in political science have left no doubt…. Interest in politics is generally weak, discussion is rare, political knowledge on the average is pitifully low, and few people actively participate in politics beyond voting” ^[2]. 

3.0 Sortition as a Potential Solution

What exactly is democracy? It oftentimes involves

• Elections
• Referenda
• Town hall meetings

But there is a final democratic technique often neglected in liberal democracies - sortition. Sortition uses a democratic lottery to select a representative sample of the people. Sortition facilitates the possibility of a deliberative democracy, and the construction of “Citizens’ Assemblies.” With a Citizens’ Assembly in place, citizens can deliberate with one another to produce smarter decisions.

Experiments with deliberative democracy have generated empirical research that “refutes many of the more pessimistic claims about the citizenry’s ability to make sound judgments…. Ordinary people are capable of high-quality deliberation, especially when deliberative processes are well-arranged: when they include the provision of balanced information, expert testimony, and oversight by a facilitator” ^[3], according to a review published in Science. 

Even more compelling, democratic deliberation can overcome polarization, echo chambers, and extremism. “The communicative echo chambers that intensify cultural cognition, identity reaffirmation, and polarization do not operate in deliberative conditions, even in groups of like-minded partisans. In deliberative conditions, the group becomes less extreme… Deliberation promotes considered judgment and counteracts populism” ^[3]. 

A deliberating Citizens’ Assembly is usually conducted with the following steps:

1. Selection Phase: An assembly of normal citizens is constructed using statistical random sampling. For various assemblies, samples have ranged from 20 to 1000 in size. These citizens are called upon to resolve a political question. Citizens are typically compensated for their service. Amenities such as free child or elderly care are provided.
2. Learning Phase:  Educational materials are provided to help inform the selected deliberators. This may be in the form of expert panels, Q&A sessions, interactive lectures, presentations, reading materials, etc. Following each presentation, the Assembly then breaks into small, facilitated discussion groups to further increase understanding of the learning materials.
3. Listening Phase: Stakeholders, NGO's, and other interested members of the public are invited to testify.
4. Deliberation Phase: Facilitated discussions are held in both large and small group format. A final decision is made through voting.

In deliberative polls conducted by America in One Room^[4], a representative sample of 600 Americans were chosen to deliberate together for a weekend. Researchers found that “Republicans often moved significantly towards initially Democrat positions”, and “Democrats sometimes moved just as substantially toward initially Republican positions.” 

For example, only 30% of Republicans initially supported access to voter registration online, which moved to majority support after deliberation. Republicans also moved towards support for voting rights for felons dramatically, from 35 to 58%. On the other side, only 44% of Democrats initially supported a Republican proposal to require voting jurisdictions to conduct an audit of a random sample of ballots "to ensure that the votes are accurately counted". After deliberation, Democrat support increased to 58%. 

In terms of issues like climate change, the 2021 “America in One Room: Climate and Energy” deliberative poll found a 23-point increase from Texas residents in support for achieving net-zero after deliberation. Californians moved 15 points in support for building new-generation nuclear plants [5]. Participants also moved 15 points in favor of a carbon pricing system [6]. These changes in policy support were achieved in only 2-4 days of deliberation. Additional samples of deliberation results are shown in Table 1, 2, and 3. 

Normal citizens are often able to make highly informed decisions that politicians cannot. In a 2004 Citizens’ Assembly in Canada, the assembly nearly unanimously recommended implementing an advanced election system called “Single Transferable Vote” (that was then rejected by the ignorant public in the following referendums). In Ireland, Citizens’ Assemblies played a pivotal role in recommending the legalization of gay marriage and abortion (In contrast, their elected politicians were too afraid of special interests to make the same decision). Irish Citizens’ Assemblies on Climate also recommended taxes on carbon, agriculture, and meat. In France, 150 French citizens formed the Citizens’ Convention for Climate. The Convention recommended radical proposals to fight against climate change (including criminalization of ecocide, aviation taxes, and expansion of high speed rail). These proposals were unfortunately significantly weakened by the elected French Parliament.

 Scaling Democracy with Lottocratic Efficiency

Sortition is a powerful tool for making efficient democratic decisions. By selecting a smaller sample to represent the public, only a fraction of the whole is required to participate in otherwise time (and therefore cost) intensive decisions.

Imagine a referendum of 1 million citizens. Imagine that it takes at least 1 hour for each citizen to at least understand the referendum proposal (let alone understanding the consequences and pro’s and con’s of the proposal). Assuming a wage of about $15 per hour, the social cost of this uninformed decision is about $15 million. 

In contrast imagine 500 citizens selected by lottery tasked to make a decision, using four weeks of time, or 160 hours per citizen. Let’s imagine the state compensates these citizens at the rate of $100 per hour. The cost of this informed collective decision is then $8 million. 

Sortition produces an informed 160-hour decision at the cost of $8 million, while referendum produces an uninformed 1-hour decision at the cost of $16 million. Election fares hardly any better. With the same logic, elections produce an uninformed 1-hour hiring decision, while sortition produces an informed 160-hour hiring decision. In other words, sortition is highly efficient at producing informed decisions compared to any alternative. As a decision making process, sortition is more efficient than referendum. As a leadership selection process, sortition is more efficient than election. 

What exactly does 160-hours buy? It buys iterative improvement of proposals through debates, deliberation, amendments, votes, and revotes. It buys the capacity to call on expert testimony. It buys the capacity to demand further research before making a decision. In contrast with the 1-hour referendum decision, voters are forced to choose between binary or fixed choices, pre-proposed through undemocratic means. They have little to no resources to arrive at an informed understanding of what the proposal entails. They may not even know the exact text of the law voted on. They are reliant on rough heuristics and news media, whether it be Fox News or MSNBC or a Facebook algorithm, to form an opinion. 

3.2 Example Sortition Models

This section will briefly review some possibilities on how sortition could be used. 

Review Panel for Elected Officials

One way to address the politicians' lack of accountability is to use sortition as an allotted review panel to assess and penalize elected officials at more frequent intervals - for example, an annual review. "The concept is similar to a criminal jury trial: the panel hears the case for and against the official having the standard of leadership expected of them, and based on that, can commend them, declare them adequate, or dismiss and/or fine them for falling short, with the option of barring them from holding public office again" [7]. 

An Allotted Electoral College

Sortition can be used to completely cut out the general election. Executive and advisory leadership would be selected by an electoral college of citizens selected by lottery. Political leadership would be selected, reviewed, and held accountable using democratic deliberation.

With sortition, a fully-fledged leadership hiring process could be implemented. That means a system to review hundreds/thousands of resumes. Then a process to select dozens of candidates for interviews. A final selection process. Then like with the Review Panel, regular performance reviews.  

Sortition allows for the complete elimination of the marketing/propaganda circus that is the modern political election and campaign (including the billions of dollars needed to facilitate elections participated by millions of people, and the billions of dollars spent in advertising), in favor of deliberative leadership selection. 

Hybrid Bicameral Sortition

Philosophers and academics such as Arash Abizadeh, John Gastil, and Erik Olin Wright advocate for a bicameral legislature where an elected chamber is paired with an assembly selected by lottery. In the typical proposal, legislation is initiated by the elected chamber and is reviewed, approved, or rejected by the allotted chamber. Abizadeh justifies the continuation of elections as a mechanism to disincentivize political violence, "on the fact that competitive elections furnish, to forces currently shut out of government, the prospect of taking political power by contesting and winning future elections, without incurring the costs of civil war" [8].  

Alex Kovner and Keith Sutherland offer an alternative bicameral legislature [10]. In their proposal, legislation initiated from the elected chamber only requires a minority (say, only 1/6th of elected representatives) to pass for review from the allotted sortition chamber. 

Multi-Body Sortition

Terril Bouricius envisions a six-chambered decision making system, powered by sortition, designed to maximize descriptive representation and increase resistance to corruption and domination of special interests [13]. These chambers are:

• The Agenda Council - Sets the agenda, topics for legislation.
• Interest Panels - Propose legislation for topics under consideration
• Review Panels - Draft bills on the basis of interest panels and experts
• Policy Jury - Votes on bills by secret ballot
• Rules Council - Decides the rules and procedures of the legislative work
• Oversight Council - Controls the legislative process, handles complaints.

4.0 Using Sortition within Effective Altruism

Sortition facilitates scalable, deliberative, democratic decisions. This capability could be applied to charitable giving. As Effective Altruists (EA) understand, the computation of utility maximizing decisions is no easy task. Sortition presents a method of reducing cognitive load for practitioners. Imagining 1000 EA practitioners, 50 practitioners could be selected by lottery to serve a finite term in an EA Assembly. The 50 practitioners could then be tasked with intense research, fact finding, deliberation with one another, and hiring staff or advisors, to produce guidelines on what charities and issues to support. This EA Assembly thereby reduces the cognitive load of the other 950 practitioners. With regular lottocratic rotation (With perhaps about ⅓ of the EA Assembly rotated out each period), new assembly members can review the work of the past to facilitate some accountability that EA objectives are being met.

Moreover democratic decision making better aligns EA values to aggregated collective interests. A sortition-controlled EA charity is more likely to represent your moral values compared to a nondemocratic EA charity. 

This arrangement will be more effective than an elected assembly. Elections in contrast require fact-finding and monitoring from 1000 EA practitioners to evaluate the performance of the elected assembly. EA practitioners that make monitoring sacrifices for good reasons (for example to devote more time towards productivity and maximizing the contributions given) may inadvertently make incompetent electoral decisions.

5.0 Reasons to Doubt Sortition

In this section, I will summarize what I think are the best arguments made against sortition and attempt to rebut. In my opinion the best way to settle these disputes is with experimentation and implementation. Without empirical evidence for or against, these arguments and rebuttals remain speculative. 

5.1 Accountability and Corruption

Landa and Pevnick^[20] argue that sortition is unable to provide a formal tool of accountability of allotted representatives due to the lack of regular elections. Landa and Pevnick predict that therefore, there will be significant incentives for well-funded outside groups to influence the views of allotted representatives through lobbying or outright bribery. 

Landa and Pevnick further argue that the results of advisory-only Citizens’ Assemblies and mini-publics are not predictive of actual decisions made by sortition. If sortition was given real power, interested parties will have more incentives to manipulate decision making. 

I agree that corruption remains a concern in sortition, as it is in electoral regimes. I think Landa and Pevnick are incorrect that there is no accountability mechanism. The mechanism of accountability is rotation. When lottocrats are rotated out of office, they lose their powers and are then rendered helpless from investigations from both past and future lottocrats. The threat and uncertainty of punishments from the future may have the ability to mitigate corruption in sortition regimes. Past lottocrats can also construct institutions that monitor, regulate, and punish corruption. Lottocrats have incentives to create these institutions, if they are sure to transform back into disempowered normal citizens. A sortition regime therefore must be carefully designed with institutional checks and balances to ensure that lottocrats become disempowered after service. 

Modern day politicians in contrast keep themselves unaccountable by staying in office whilst being supported by incompetent voters. Government powers are then used to stymie investigations and prevent prosecution. 

A blog poster on equalitybylot.com Andre Sauzeau also makes a rebutting observation. “Allotted juries have power in criminal trials involving wealthy persons or in civil trials involving huge financial interests…. are instances of juror corruption really numerous?” In recent memory, American juries (juries practice a degenerate form of sortition) convicted both Donald Trump and Hunter Biden despite the huge capacity for bribery or influence by the defendants. American juries regularly hand down large rewards against powerful corporations. 

Guererro elaborates [9], that electoral representation tends to bring about outcomes that are good and responsive, only if voters have the capacity to hold representatives meaningfully accountable. Guerrero cites evidence that elections are able to prevent famines. It is not complicated for voters to understand that they are starving, and then decide to vote out the incumbent. For this class of problem, voters have sufficient capacity. For more complex problems, such as long-termist problems, or even evaluating political graft, voters may not have the capacity to hold their politicians accountable. 

I would be interested in what additional mechanisms could be used to prevent corruption. For example, imagine a multi-state federation. Lottocratic bodies from member states could form independent review panels. Referendums could also activate independent criminal investigation. 

The exploration of the potential and mitigation of corruption should be a core goal in field or laboratory experimentation. 

5.2 Expertise 

James Fishkin recalls a typical criticism against sortition - that lottocrats lack technical expertise^[21]. Modern legislatures, due to the complexity of legislation, often become captured and dependent on staff and lobbyists. Random selection could greatly exacerbate this capture. In addition, Citizens’ Assemblies compared to modern legislatures are slow moving, and may require a year or more to produce a single piece of legislation, as was the experience with the Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform in British Columbia. 

I agree that staff capture is a likely problem in sortition. Yet compared to elections, because of the power of lottocratic efficiency, lottocrats will always be better capable of monitoring and evaluating staff, compared to citizens evaluating elected politicians. Comparatively then, I think sortition remains the better option. 

I also disagree that the slow moving nature of Citizens’ Assemblies would be a significant problem. One power of sortition is its ability to create more Citizens’ Assemblies if more democratic labor is required. Alex Guerrero for example imagines twenty “Single Issue Lottoratic Legislatures” operating simultaneously to divide up the democratic labor^[22]. Even more could be put temporarily in operation at times of legislative crisis. Sortition then offers the ability for multiple sortition-assemblies to work on problems in parallel. Elected representatives emulate parallelism by offloading the burden of legislation on staff and lobbyists, which leads to the problem of capture. So if the power of parallelism is considered, I think there is a strong case that Citizens’ Assemblies could be more capable than elected representatives. 

6.0 The Path Towards Experimentation and Implementation

Ultimately, lottery-based assemblies can only be empirically tested and evaluated by giving them political or economic power. 

I propose a path towards experimentation implementation with three components:

• Small scale randomly controlled trials
• EA alignment experimentation and validation
• Pro-sortition campaigning

6.1 Randomly Controlled Trials

Field experiments on sortition can potentially be performed on small organizations such as labor unions, Homeowner Associations (HOAs), worker cooperatives, housing cooperatives, student government, student organizations, Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs), credit unions, and even philanthropic organizations in the form as described in Section 4. Potential political targets may include small towns.

Small organizations are less efficient at using sortition than large organizations, as the ratio of the sample size to population size is higher. Small organizations may still derive benefits from lottocratic efficiency, just less so. Organizations could be persuaded to participate in a randomly controlled trial with the lure of a financial reward. To measure effectiveness, deliberative polling could be conducted on either organization members or outside observers with before-and-after surveys. Participant organizations can also be monitored on whether they decide to remain as a sortition-based regime.

6.2 Global Development

Randomly controlled trials could also be deployed as a global development program. Rather than send individuals cash payments, payments could be sent to collective groups. For example, instead of sending 500 individuals of a village $100 each, $50,000 could be sent to the village. Then, the village would be asked to form a decision making body to spend the money. This decision making body could use direct democracy, elected representation, or sortition. Even if these experiments demonstrate that direct cash transfer to individuals is superior, it could still establish the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of sortition over election. 

6.3 Transformative Politics and its Cost-Benefit

If experiments demonstrate that sortition is effective, it is possibly cost effective to campaign for sortition. However there is wild uncertainty. It is outside my personal abilities to make any reliable predictions on cost benefit. Yet if a Wild-Ass-Guess is still needed to make an order-of-magnitude calculation, I present some results here. 

I discuss two cost-benefit goals of sortition:

• Goal 1: Increase the utility of the population implementing sortition.
• Goal 2: Direct more government funding towards EA causes. 

In terms of Goal 1, let us imagine that sortition is able to increase the utility of government expenditures by a meager 1%. With US federal government spending estimated to be around $10 trillion annually [14], the annual public benefit of a 1% improvement is $100 billion dollars, an insane amount of money. 

Let us imagine the cost of a successful federal sortition campaign. Let us imagine that it ultimately takes four times the cost of total federal campaigning of a presidential year, including spending from both political parties ($14.4 billion per Open Secrets ^[15] in 2020). Then the total sortition campaign would cost $58 billion. Despite the ridiculous price tag, the recovered annual benefit of a 1% improvement in utility would pay for itself in a single year. 

Let us now move to the more difficult goal, that a sortition-regime would be more sympathetic to EA. Deliberative polls do show that deliberating Citizens are more concerned about EA sympathetic issues such as climate change and immigration (Admittedly, it seems that most citizens are far more favorable to reduction in human suffering rather than animal suffering, from a review conducted by Neil Dullaghan on the EA forum ^[23]). EA alignment could lead to EA-spending on the order of the size of NASA, or $20 billion per year (0.2% of federal budget). In this hypothetical, a sortition campaign would break even in only three years and yield $20 billion in annual returns to EA thereafter. Though my numbers here are speculative, EA sympathy can be measured using Citizens’ Assemblies before committing to an enormous campaign cost. 

It is also possible that these costs and benefits can scale for local, state, and international politics. Improving the lives of relatively well-off American citizens does not seem to be a priority EA goal. However, sortition could be deployed internationally for similar benefits for the rest of humanity.

6.4 A Citizens’ Assembly to Measure EA Alignment

With the power of deliberative minipublics, EA sympathy of a potential sortition regime can be measured before deploying the reform. EA organizations can fund an advisory-only Citizens’ Assembly to model a deliberative sortition-based government. This Citizens’ Assembly could be asked to evaluate EA causes. Or, the Citizens’ Assembly could be asked to set their own agenda. 

The differences in decisions made by Citizens’ Assembly can be compared to the status quo to evaluate EA alignment of sortition-based regimes. Pre-and-post deliberation can also be compared to evaluate EA alignment through knowledge gains and deliberation. 

Therefore, we can make predictions on EA-alignment of a sortition-based regime before campaigning for such a regime. 

7.0 Conclusions

Sortition is a highly neglected solution to improving political decision making. Sortition produces cost efficient democratic decisions. Statistical sampling is used to reduce the participants of any democratic decision. Reduction in quantity then facilitates an increase in quality, by giving lottery-chosen participants more time, money, and resources to come to better deliberated decisions. 

A deliberating democracy is also a remarkable aid in democratic stability. Participants in deliberation become less extreme. Echo chambers are eliminated. Polarization is diminished. The creation of deliberating democracies may become a powerful tool in fighting democratic backsliding and authoritarian takeovers.

Testing and validating sortition with small-scale randomly controlled trials is highly tractable. Political implementation is much more difficult yet may yield high returns on investment. 

Appendix

A.1 Is Voting Rational? 

Jason Brennan elaborates on the simple economics of voting by asking, “Is voting rational?”^[16] The expected value of voting can be calculated by a simple formula:

U_v is the expected value of your vote, p is the probability your vote is decisive, V(D) - V(R) is the difference in expected value between two candidates, and C is the cost of voting. For a federal election, the probability p of being a decisive vote is on the order of 1 in 10 million.

Imagine a fantastic scenario where we can decisively know that voting for one candidate will gain us $100,000. Imagine that the opportunity cost of voting is only $15, or about 2-hours of minimum wage. The expected value of that vote is then still negative, at -$14.90. Even if voting for one candidate can give us $100,000, it is still unprofitable to vote because the probability of decisiveness is so low. Therefore in many elections voters remain rationally ignorant - voters refrain from acquiring knowledge when the cost of knowledge exceeds the potential benefits. Bryan Caplan takes this concept one step further, that many voters vote through rational irrationality - If the marginal cost of holding an erroneous political belief is low, voters may then vote due to the psychological benefits of supporting policies that feel good ^[17]. 

A.2 Is Sortition Actually Democratic? 

Sortition has close associations to democratic regimes for millennia. Sortition was heavily used in ancient Athens. The Council of 500, or the Boule, were 500 citizens chosen by lottery. This council developed legislative proposals and organized the People’s Assembly. Lottery was also used to select members of the People’s Court, which acted as Athens’s Supreme Court by checking the legality of decisions made by the People’s Assembly. Most government officials were also chosen by lottery. Another key component to Athenian democracy was the compensation of its participants. Sortition’s association with democracy was so strong that ancient philosopher Aristotle states, “The appointment of magistrates by lot is thought to be democratic, and the election of them oligarchic.”^[18]

Contemporary academics such as Arash Abizadeh, Alexander Guerrero, John Gastil, and Helene Landemore claim that sortition is democratic. Others such as Christina Lafont claim that sortition is undemocratic. 

Eric Shoemaker makes the case that sortition is democratic in his PhD thesis^[19]. Shoemaker defines democracy to be “The rule of the people, collectively and coequally”. Shoemaker argues that “choosing legislators by random selection treats citizens as equal in the distribution of legislative powers and duties.” Shoemaker continues, “By distributing power… to random citizens, in small parcels, for short periods of time - we can ensure that no subgroup meaningfully distinct from the broader citizenry ever wields entrenched legislative power.” 

References

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