What if we replaced politicians with randomly selected people Brett Hennig
I want to talk about
one of the big questions,
perhaps the biggest question:
How should we live together?
How should a group of people,
who perhaps live in a city
or in the continent
or even the whole globe,
share and manage common resources?
How should we make
the rules that govern us?
This has always been
an important question.
And today, I think
it’s even more important than ever
if we want to address rising inequality,
climate change, the refugee crisis,
just to name a few major issues.
It’s also a very old question.
Humans have been asking
themselves this question
ever since we lived
in organized societies.
Like this guy, Plato.
He thought we needed benevolent guardians
who could make decisions
for the greater good of everyone.
Kings and queens thought
they could be those guardians,
but during various revolutions,
they tended to lose their heads.
And this guy, you probably know.
Here in Hungary, you lived for many years
under one attempt to implement
his answer of how to live together.
His answer was brutal, cruel and inhumane.
But a different answer,
a different kind of answer,
which went more or less
into hibernation for 2,000 years,
has had profound recent success.
That answer is, of course, democracy.
If we take a quick look
at the modern history of democracy,
it goes something like this.
Along here, we’re going
to put the last 200 years.
Up here, we’re going to put
the number of democracies.
And the graph does this,
the important point of which,
is this extraordinary increase over time,
which is why the 20th century
has been called the century
of democracy’s triumph,
and why, as Francis Fukuyama said in 1989,
some believe that we have reached
the end of history,
that the question of how to live together
has been answered,
and that answer is liberal democracy.
Let’s explore that assertion, though.
I want to find out what you think.
So I’m going to ask you two questions,
and I want you to put your hands up
if you agree.
The first question is: Who thinks
living in a democracy is a good thing?
Who likes democracy?
If you can think of a better system,
keep your hands down.
Don’t worry about those
who didn’t raise their hands,
I’m sure they mean very well.
The second question is:
Who thinks our democracies
are functioning well?
Come on, there must be one politician
in the audience somewhere.
(Laughter)
No.
But my point is, if liberal democracy
is the end of history,
then there’s a massive paradox
or contradiction here.
Why is that?
Well, the first question
is about the ideal of democracy,
and all these qualities
are very appealing.
But in practice, it’s not working.
And that’s the second question.
Our politics is broken,
our politicians aren’t trusted,
and the political system is distorted
by powerful vested interests.
I think there’s two ways
to resolve this paradox.
One is to give up on democracy;
it doesn’t work.
Let’s elect a populist demagogue
who will ignore democratic norms,
trample on liberal freedoms
and just get things done.
The other option, I think,
is to fix this broken system,
to bring the practice closer to the ideal
and put the diverse voices of society
in our parliaments
and get them to make considered,
evidence-based laws
for the long-term good of everyone.
Which brings me to my epiphany,
my moment of enlightenment.
And I want you to get critical.
I want you to ask yourselves,
“Why wouldn’t this work?”
And then come and talk to me
afterwards about it.
Its technical name is “sortition.”
But its common name is “random selection.”
And the idea is actually very simple:
we randomly select people
and put them in parliament.
(Laughter)
Let’s think about that
for a few more minutes, shall we?
Imagine we chose you and you
and you and you and you down there
and a bunch of other random people,
and we put you in our parliament
for the next couple of years.
Of course, we could stratify the selection
to make sure that it matched
the socioeconomic and demographic
profile of the country
and was a truly representative
sample of people.
Fifty percent of them would be women.
Many of them would be young,
some would be old,
a few would be rich,
but most of them would be
ordinary people like you and me.
This would be a microcosm of society.
And this microcosm would simulate
how we would all think,
if we had the time, the information
and a good process to come to
the moral crux of political decisions.
And although you may not be in that group,
someone of your age,
someone of your gender,
someone from your location
and someone with your background
would be in that room.
The decisions made by these people
would build on the wisdom of crowds.
They would become more
than the sum of their parts.
They would become critical thinkers
with access to experts,
who would be on tap but not on top.
And they could prove
that diversity can trump ability
when confronting the wide array
of societal questions and problems.
It would not be government
by public opinion poll.
It would not be government by referendum.
These informed, deliberating people
would move beyond public opinion
to the making of public judgments.
However, there would be
one major side effect:
if we replaced elections with sortition
and made our parliament
truly representative of society,
it would mean the end of politicians.
And I’m sure we’d all be
pretty sad to see that.
(Laughter)
Very interestingly,
random selection was a key part
of how democracy was done
in ancient Athens.
This machine, this device,
is called a kleroteria.
It’s an ancient Athenian
random-selection device.
The ancient Athenians
randomly selected citizens
to fill the vast majority
of their political posts.
They knew that elections
were aristocratic devices.
They knew that career politicians
were a thing to be avoided.
And I think we know these things as well.
But more interesting than
the ancient use of random selection
is its modern resurgence.
The rediscovery of the legitimacy
of random selection in politics
has become so common lately,
that there’s simply
too many examples to talk about.
Of course, I’m very aware
that it’s going to be difficult
to institute this in our parliaments.
Try this – say to your friend,
“I think we should populate our parliament
with randomly selected people.”
“Are you joking?
What if my neighbor gets chosen?
The fool can’t even
separate his recycling.”
But the perhaps surprising
but overwhelming and compelling evidence
from all these modern examples
is that it does work.
If you give people responsibility,
they act responsibly.
Don’t get me wrong – it’s not a panacea.
The question is not:
Would this be perfect?
Of course not.
People are fallibly human,
and distorting influences
will continue to exist.
The question is: Would it be better?
And the answer to that question,
to me at least, is obviously yes.
Which gets us back
to our original question:
How should we live together?
And now we have an answer:
with a parliament that uses sortition.
But how would we get from here to there?
How could we fix our broken system
and remake democracy for the 21st century?
Well, there are several
things that we can do,
and that are, in fact,
happening right now.
We can experiment with sortition.
We can introduce it to schools
and workplaces and other institutions,
like Democracy In Practice
is doing in Bolivia.
We can hold policy juries
and citizens' assemblies,
like the newDemocracy Foundation
is doing in Australia,
like the Jefferson Center
is doing in the US
and like the Irish government
is doing right now.
We could build a social movement
demanding change,
which is what the Sortition Foundation
is doing in the UK.
And at some point, we should institute it.
Perhaps the first step would be
a second chamber in our parliament,
full of randomly selected people –
a citizens' senate, if you will.
There’s a campaign
for a citizens' senate in France
and another campaign in Scotland,
and it could, of course, be done
right here in Hungary.
That would be kind of like a Trojan horse
right into the heart of government.
And then, when it becomes impossible
to patch over the cracks
in the current system,
we must step up and replace
elections with sortition.
I have hope.
Here in Hungary,
systems have been created,
and systems have been
torn down and replaced
in the past.
Change can and does happen.
It’s just a matter of when and how.
Thank you.
(Hungarian) Thank you.
(Applause)