Doktorarbeit,
The Use of Sortition as a Defense Against Faction
George Mason University, Ph.D., (2001)
Zusammenfassung
The threat of factions to democratic institutions has been recognized since the time of Plato, and has remained a subject of political theorizing to this day. The ancient Greeks and renaissance Venetians incorporated lotteries (sortition) into their decision making processes, and justified the use of the lot as necessary to prevent factional discord. I examine the history of thought regarding the threat of faction to democracy, and proposed solutions to that threat, including sortition. The form of sortition I analyze is the proportional lottery, where the probability of an option being selected is determined by the relative number of votes cast in its favor. I also compare sortition to plurality voting, within the context of the social choice literature, and technically, with respect to these decision technologies' responsiveness to rent-seeking initiatives. I apply the model developed by Gordon Tullock, in his seminal 1980 article, "Efficient Rent-seeking," to compare plurality voting with proportional lotteries. Tullock's argument regarding the marginal return to rent-seeking expenditures is seen to demonstrate that the intuition of the Greeks and Venetians was correct. These findings clearly have implications regarding how democratic institutions might be revised to insulate them from what has been widely recognized as their critical flaw--their vulnerability to rent-seeking factions (interest groups).
Tags
- aleatoirebd
- corruption,
- decisionbd
- non
- publié,
- {nonpubliébd,}
- {normatifbd,}
- {propositionbd,}
- {tiragebd}
