User:Superb Owl/sandbox/governance

WP:BLPGroup

Need updating to be similar to BLP?

Jury

Jury makes better decisions

"...judges and juries have disparate incentives and biases. Among other things, judges have reasons to rule in certain ways for promotion or re-election, while juries do not hold these same monetary or status-related motivations...Possessing some characteristics similar to the judiciary, the executive and the legislature also are vulnerable to prejudices to which the jury is not subject. These differences between the jury and the traditional actors support the jury's restoration in America and the further growth of lay participation in other countries."^188-189

"Although results between judges and juries may be similar, judges and juries can disagree. If a choice must be made between a judge or a jury deciding, the diversity, availability of deliberations, the requirement for consensus, the lack of monetary or promotion incentives, and the fresh examination of evidence all make the jury the most attractive, least-biased decision-maker."

"The executive has incentives similar to the judiciary that casts doubts on its ability to act as well as the jury. The prosecutor may be re-elected or appointed to a more prestigious position based on her actions in office."

"Legislators, similar to judges, have career reasons to decide in certain ways. If they do not vote in certain ways, they may not receive funding for their re-election from particular interest groups in the future. They also work with other legislators and in order to garner their vote on particular legislation, they may need to promise their vote for other legislation."

"The presence and growth of juries world-wide affirms some value for lay participation."

"While the American jury arguably decides too many cases, the difference in biases and incentives for judges and juries, in addition to the presence of diversity, deliberations and consensus, makes the jury a better decision-maker than a judge. Moreover, because the executive and the legislature have similar biases and incentives as the judiciary, the jury is also the better decision-maker than those bodies."

U.S.

"...In certain ways, [other nations] utilize lay jurors as much or more than the United States despite perceptions of the American jury system leading the world in lay participation."¹⁸⁸

"The jury is required under the constitution, its role has been unconstitutionally usurped, and its fall relates to the failure of traditional actors to view it as an equal - a "branch" - and its revival can occur by restoring it to its former role."¹⁸⁷

Mid-19th century when jury started declining in England, US (though US more has had some gains but larger losses where it cannot check power) 24-25

Zenger a notable example of grand jury protecting against the executive - p 66-67

"Thomas Jefferson described, 'trial by jury…as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.'" p 67

James Wilson acknowledged the jury is not perfect, but argued its mistakes were easily corrected and it could never grow into a dangerous system. (67-68)

Separation of powers and federalism are doctrines not explicitly mentioned in the constitution, but deployed by the Supreme Court to interpret the power delegated in the constitution. (70)

“The Supreme Court’s differing treatment of the traditional actors and the jury and the deference to traditional actors has contributed to the jury’s decline…The Court has failed to acknowledge any specific authority in the jury or any necessity to guard that authority...Moreover it has ultimately held constitutional almost every modern procedure before and after the a jury deliberation that has eliminated or reduced jury authority.” (75-77)

Patton v. United States is an example where the court took power away from juries and allowed judges to rule on cases in district courts, despite the clear conflict of interest for the judicial branch to award itself this power and the lack of acknowledgment of the importance of juries in checking the power of the government. (78-79)

In Bordenkircher v. Hayes the Court also did not comment on the Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial when upholding the practice of plea bargaining, considering only the interest of the executive. (79-80)

The Supreme Court in 2010 forces states to enforce the second Amendment, but has not enforced the amendments outlining the role of juries. (83)

Scholars Akhil Amar, Nancy Marder, Roger Fairfax, Rachel Barkow, Randy Jonakait, and Renee Lettow Lerner support the idea of the jury as an important constitutional entity that checks the others. 84-85

Founding fathers including Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton thought the jury was essential as a check against judges. (62-64)

A jury is not convened unless the judiciary allows it, limiting its power. The judiciary reviews its own power and that of the jury, but the jury is not able to do the same to the judiciary or other traditional actors, removing incentives for restraint from those actors. (92-93)

“ as the jury continued to be more diverse in gender and race, the jury was less desirable to judges and corporations…this shift has occurred, particularly in the 1930s…The Supreme Court likely has been influenced by legal elites as well as by corporations to reduce jury authority over time.” (105)

(a good summary of jury's decline in the US) - 109

135-137: because the jury is a dependent actor and not independent, interpretations of the constitution should give it the benefit of the doubt when disputes about its power arise

143-144: efficiency and cost is often cited as a reason, but has no constitutional basis and can sometimes obscure the motivation for reducing jury trials, including that some actors believe they are less likely to win in front of a jury. It is also not applied to the powers or use of other governmental actors.

147: the jury in the United States exercises almost no authority today.

159: all states should require Grand Juries per the constitution

162-3: jury rights are the only rights from the Bill of Rights that the Supreme Court has not insisted that states must protect.

185: judicial acquittal, summary judgment, judges deciding money damages and grand juries in the states should be returned, while plea-bargaining should also be reconsidered.

Independent State Legislature Theory

The theory has been described as being 'fringe' and opponents fear it would enable election subversion by concentrating power in gerrymandered state legislatures or the conservative US Supreme Court which would weaken and threaten American democracy.

Moore v. Harper was proponents of a gerrymander pushing this theory in order to implement rules without approval of the State Supreme Court.

District lines for geographically-based legislatures of the U.S. already disadvantage one party because of wasted votes resulting in an efficiency gap, which can widen further with unchecked gerrymandering. These geographic efficiency gaps do not exist in statewide races like those for governor, state supreme court justice, or for ballot initiatives which are more representative of the will of the voters in that state.

Political equality

How many constitutions have political equality as an ideal?

Discuss sortition? deliberative democracy? or keep very high level?

Governance Archaeology

Governance archaeology seeks to understand the myriad combinations of ways in which people have governed themselves throughout time. A goal in this endeavor is to better understand the full range of options available to modern humans and, to the extent possible, some of the opportunities and pitfalls of different governance characteristics.

Glossary of Terms for the Collective Governance Database

Communities	Units of governance and shared culture
Institutions	Specific institutional structures within a given community
Mechanisms	Within institutions, patterns of governance practice (for example, jury, council, voting)
Culture	Within communities, patterns of shared values and norms (for example, solidarity, ritual, supernatural belief)
Time	Situates the community in history
Place	Situates the community geographically
Size	Approximate number of members in the community at the specified time and place

See also

• Glossary of archaeology
  

Political system

Political system

Room for discussion of Democracy vs. Republic?

Note rarity of democratic nations going to war with each other compared to less democratic governments.

Concentration of political power*

System of government	Most power is allocated by:	Most power is held by:	Modern governments	Examples
Democracy	Sortition	Everyone equally (universal suffrage)	None	None
Hybrid			None	Athens, Venice, Florence
Republic	Elections	Aristocrats, Upper class, Corporations, etc.	see: Democracy Index, V-Dem, etc.?
Hybrid
Autocracy	Might (e.g. coup)	Small inner circle (Dictator, Monarch, General(s), One-party state leadership)
Disputed

*WCAG 2.1 Issues...find consensus on content and another way to display Graphic(s) brainstorm: visualization of power concentration

Citizens Assembly

Power entrusted to sortition

Randomly-selected body	Time frame	Independent Power?	Scope Set by:	Permanent?	Highest Ratio of all Decision-makers Chosen By Sortition vs. Election
Juries in the U.S.	1789?-	Yes	Judges	Yes
Citizens' assemblies	1970's?-	No	Politicians?*	No*
Athens		Yes	Sortition?	Yes	9:1 sortition?
Venice		Yes	Sortition?	Yes
Florence		Yes	Sortition?	Yes

*except in regions in Belgium

Improve sourcing:

Sample size determination literature also provides an important contribution when determining how many participants are needed to give sufficient confidence that their decisions are very likely representative of the population. More participants means more confidence, but with greatly diminishing returns.

a Citizens' assembly are "like couples counseling for a nation."

Hélène Landemore describes Citizens' assemblies as places where "experts are on tap, but they are not on top."

First permanent citizens' assembly, know as the people's senate in the German-speaking region of Belgium.

Tocqueville was very positive about citizens' juries and very negative about the campaigning leading up to an election.

Hannah Arendt interest in participatory democracy

New Democracy does not have a wikipedia page, but links to useful info. They edited a 2019 book on deliberative democracy that's inaccessible by normal means.

Cost/benefit

Sortition

Talk Page

Per WP:Criticism ("In most cases separate sections devoted to criticism, controversies, or the like should be avoided in an article because these sections call undue attention to negative viewpoints.") I am integrating the the arguments and the most notable sources unless we think this article should be an exception.

Comparison to Elections

Suffrage

Discussions of suffrage (who gets to participate) tends to be similar, though sortition might enable further enfranchisement of younger people and noncitizens since they will have adequate time to study the particular issue and the fear of them being less knowledgeable than others would be largely alleviated.

Outcomes

Many (how many?) examples of policies recommended by advisory policy juries/citizens' assemblies get rejected by elected officials or by referenda.

While the reasons for each failure depend on many unique factors, the gap between what juries recommend and what elections allow may be evidence that sortition provides very different policy outcomes than one would get by voting-based systems like elected representatives and referenda.

If the difference is inherent to elections vs. sortition, then the question becomes, which system would provide better policy outcomes?

Republic

A republic is a system of government where people choose representatives through elections to make decisions in the public's interest. In contrast, a democracy might rely primarily on sortition (e.g. juries) to make decisions by a representative sample of the public while an autocracy concentrates power in very few hands.

Democracy vs. Republic debate

While the term democracy has been used interchangeably with the term republic by some, others have made sharp distinctions between the two for millennia. "Montesquieu, founder of the modern constitutional state, repeated in his The Spirit of the Laws of 1748 the insight that Aristotle had expressed two millennia earlier, ‘Voting by lot is in the nature of democracy; voting by choice is in the nature of aristocracy.’" Additional critics of elections include Rousseau, Robespierre, and Marat, who said of the new French Republic, "‘What use is it to us, that we have broken the aristocracy of the nobles, if that is replaced by the aristocracy of the rich?’"

While democracy commonly refers to elections in modern times, it is far less common to see the term 'Republic' refer to the process of sortition, even if early hybrid examples used the word Republic in their title.

"The French Revolution, like the American, did not dislodge the aristocracy to replace it with a democracy but rather dislodged a hereditary aristocracy to replace it with an elected aristocracy, ‘une aristocratie élective’, to use Rousseau’s term. Robespierre even called it ‘une aristocratie représentative’...It derived its legitimacy no longer from God, soil or birth but from another relic of the aristocratic era, elections...The fiery revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat denounced the aristocratisation of the popular revolt and took up the cause of the more than eighteen million French people who were not given a vote. ‘What use is it to us,’ he wrote, ‘that we have broken the aristocracy of the nobles, if that is replaced by the aristocracy of the rich?’"

"Democracy is not government by the best in our society, because such a thing is called an aristocracy, elected or not. That is one option, but then let’s change here and now what we call it. Democracy, by contrast, flourishes precisely by allowing a diversity of voices to be heard. It’s all about having an equal say, an equal right to determine what political action is taken."

"The American and French revolutionaries thought state business too important to be left to the people and by opting for an elected aristocracy they gave priority to efficiency over legitimacy. Nowadays we are paying the price for that. Discontent is rife and the legitimacy of the electoral-representative system is being noisily called into question."

"Montesquieu, founder of the modern constitutional state, repeated in his The Spirit of the Laws of 1748 the insight that Aristotle had expressed two millennia earlier, ‘Voting by lot is in the nature of democracy; voting by choice is in the nature of aristocracy.’ The elite character of elections was clear to him from the start. In contrast, he claimed, ‘the casting of lots is a way of electing that distresses no one; it leaves to each citizen a reasonable expectation of serving his country.'...We find similar ideas in the famous Encyclopaedia compiled by Diderot and d’Alembert in the 1750s. In the entry headed ‘aristocracy’ we read that the drawing of lots was not suitable for the aristocracy (‘Suffrage must not be given by lot; only inconveniences would result from it’). It was better to appoint a senate. ‘In that case, one might say that aristocracy is in a way, in the senate, democracy in the body of nobles, and that the people are nothing.’ The authors make it clear that the aristocracy has a responsibility for the people and in the entry for democracy they largely adopt Montesquieu’s arguments."

"The two most important books about the political philosophy of the eighteenth century agree that sortition is more democratic than election and that a combination of the two methods is beneficial to society."

Bernard Manin summarizes the situation as, "'at the same time that the founding fathers were declaring the equality of all citizens, they decided without the slightest hesitation to establish, on both sides of the Atlantic, the unqualified dominion of a method of selection long deemed to be aristocratic.'"

Unicameralism vs. bicameralism

Switches from bicameralism to unicameralism

Main article: List of abolished upper houses

Books

• Nicholas Baldwin and Donald Shell, eds., Second Chambers (New York: Routledge, 2016)
• Arend Liphart, Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 2012)
• Samuel C. Patterson and Anthony Mughan, Senates: Bicameralism in the Contemporary World (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999)

U.S. Senate

History

The drafters of the Constitution struggled and debated more in how to award representation in the Senate than in any other part of the Constitution. While bicameralism and the idea of a proportional "people's house" were widely popular, the representation discussion in the Senate proved to be a massive fight. In the end, small states using their equal power from the Articles of Confederation, including Delaware's threat that small states would find a foreign ally instead and a poorly written alternative in the Virginia Plan have been credited with helping smaller states to have the same power as larger states.

You dare not dissolve the confederation! If you do, the small states will find some foreign ally of more honor and good faith who will take them by the hand and do them justice.

— Gunning Bedford Jr., Delegate from Delaware

Criticism

Design flaws

While many of the founders' anti-democratic designs have been corrected over the years (enfranchisement oversights, direct elections of senators and the president), the existence of the Senate is to Senate Historian Daniel Wirls finds it is likely the biggest outstanding issue to be addressed.

But if not the main flaw in the American system, the Senate is certainly one of its central defects.

— Daniel Wirls, The Senate: From White Supremacy to Governmental Gridlock, 2022

While the more exclusive (smaller) Senate with 3x longer terms (6 years) holds a lot of prestige in the mind of American politicians and the public, the House of Representatives, which was the most direct form of proportional representation at its conception, was forced to contend with the legacy system of representing states (the 2 Senators elected indirectly from each state) because small states had wielded more power than their population had warranted and some threatened to secede if the transition towards a more democratic arrangement wasn't tempered by allocating Senators by state. This legacy power arrangement from the Articles of Confederation has been chosen less often by modern-day democratic countries, with unicameral, highly proportional legislatures seen as generally more popular, democratic and effective.When upper houses do exist, they have significantly less power and influence than the U.S. Senate, especially if they also forgo proportional representation. The Warren Court insisted that proportional representation in the Senate would not affect the benefits of checks and balances given the current staggered 6-year term lengths and the possibility of introducing multi-member districts that preserve the one person, one vote ideal while checking the House of Representatives. Senate historian Daniel Wirls thinks it is highly unlikely the U.S. Senate would exist if a constitutional convention was being held in the 21st century.

From the beginning, a strong majority of delegates favored a bicameral legislature with proportional representation in at least one chamber.

Its passage has also been attributed to the fact that the design of Madison's more representative Virginia Plan was poorly written or that the inertia of the status quo (the Articles of Confederation) awarding equal power to states and not citizens was too great. Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin were among the most prominent critics of this most controversial aspect of the compromise.

They who have no voice nor vote in the electing of representatives do not enjoy liberty but are absolutely enslaved to those who have votes.

— Benjamin Franklin, 1774

In the end, a few big state delegates were swayed by the argument that a smaller senate foster more productive debate among other expected qualities (a broadly shared idea at the convention) and the largely shared desire to for a bicameral legislature outweighed the concern for equal representation. The malapportionment also led to more power being given from the legislature to the Executive Branch, such as the power to nominate justices.

Structural racism debate

Unlike the Senate which was nearly evenly-divided for the first half of the 19th century, the House of Representatives consistently passed bills opposing slavery. As a result, the mythology of the Senate as a bastion for minority rights (including the use and abuse of the filibuster) grew out of the pro-slavery movement and its southern senators who, thanks to the lack of proportional representation in the senate, vetoed any attempt to free enslaved Americans for decades.

Due in part because smaller states are disproportionately white, one 2017 analysis found African Americans have roughly 75% of the representation as the average white American in the Senate, Asian Americans 72%, and Hispanic Americans 55%. This analysis calculated how many senators there were per million people (citizens or residents?) of each race and...

Legitimacy crisis

This geographic and representational bias in the Senate undermines the legitimacy of the institution, but by extension the courts whose nominees it does or doesn't confirm.

Role of federalism

Legislative bodies that began as federations (the European Union, United Nations, Canada, and United States) have varying degrees of malapportionment in their legislatures because each sovereign at the time of founding tended to have equal power, which they used to hold onto equal power at the expense of the more proportional representation where every citizen has equal power.

Deprecating pollsters RFC

Neighbors survey as more reliable?

Pollster ratings

	538 (owned by ABC)	NYT	Cook Political Report	270toWin	Decision Desk HQ/TheHill	Split Ticket	Silver Bulletin	WaPo	Economist
Tiers	0-3 star ranking (2-3~=?) based on historical accuracy, transparency	Preferred tier ~=
Rasmussen				Excludes	Includes		Includes
ActiVote				Excludes	Includes		Excludes
Trafalgar	(0.7/3)			Includes	Includes		Includes
AtlasIntel	2.7/3

Option A: Do not list individual polls, only aggregators

Delete all individual polls and only use aggregators. Wikipedia does not have bandwidth to analyze individual polls for reliability and explain how to weight/consider them to readers, therefore they represent excessive detail and WP:RECENTISM. Polling averages from WP:RS only should be included.

Option B: List polls and come up with a way to decide which polls merit listing

Option 1:

Only include individual polls that are generally seen by WP:RS to be reliable.

Option 2:

Only include individual polls where there is no consensus on WP:RS regarding their reliability (and excluding those that are, for example, excluded by a clear majority of WP:RS as unreliable). 538 ranks 259 pollsters as having a 1-star rating or better, for example.

Option 3:

Continue to include polls without much systematic consideration of reliability, relying on the perceptions of individual editors on each article.