Just watched the opening speeches at the @DemNext_ launch event from last night (on YouTube via their Twitter account and well worth a watch), and @ClaudiaChwalisz‘s vision of what the sortition-governed future could like got me thinking about numbers.
The question I wanted to answer is how often would an average citizen be likely to be called to serve, and how many “veterans” or currently-serving people would they be likely to know.
I decided to plug my home country into a spreadsheet. Belgium has 11 million people and a famously multi-layered governance structure, so lots of opportunities. I also assumed that 20% of the population were not of voting age.
The top level is the Federal Government. Let’s assume a Federal executive assembly would be 300 people (twice the size of the current Federal Parliament). With annual selections you would be selected every 30 891 years.
We then have five regions (Flanders, Wallonia, Brussels, German-speaking region and the Wallon-Brussels Federation – I told you it was complicated). If there are 200 people on a regional executive assembly, you get selected every 9 267 years.
Then, there are ten provinces (Brussels is in historic Brabant but is a region not a province, so I discounted it). If each provincial executive assembly has 100 members, your chance of selection is once every 8 067 (and never in Brussels).
Finally, 581 communes from Antwerp (500k people) to Herstappe (79). Some are divided into districts so I’ve upped the number to 700. If each local executive has 75 members, your average chance of selection is once every 177 years – though it’s every year if you live in Herstappe!
There are of course also lots of topic-specific panels on things like judge appointments (to use Claudia’s example), so we have to make some assumptions there too.
I’ve assumed that each panel is half the size of the relevant Executive Assembly, and that there are 40 at federal level, 30 in each region, 20 in each province and 10 in each locality each year.
In total, that means that the chance of serving on any one of those bodies in any given year is 3,2% – so in other words you might be selected every 31 years, or twice in your adult life (at all, not to a specific Assembly).
On assumptions about sizes of family and friends group, you could expect someone in your extended family to serve every 2-3 years, and if you have 100 friends, 3 of them would be serving at any one time, so by middle age half of your friendship group would be veterans.
Because there are two levels of selection, if we assume a 10:1 ratio in first invitation responders to second invitation then you could expect an invitation letter for something every three years or so, but nine times out of ten you would not be selected.
How does that compare numerically to the Belgian system? Not every part of the Belgian system is directly elected (some of the regional bodies and the provincial councils aren’t directly elected), and there are local, regional and national elections on a regular timetable.
If you live from 18 to 80, on these assumptions about sortition you will be invited 20 times and serve twice. On the current system you will vote about 34 times (12 times each for region and federal, 10 times for the 6-year commune councils).
Now, voting is a very different sort of democratic transaction from being invited to take on actual political power in an executive assembly, but one of the challenges for the sortition-only model for me is whether people are going to be prepared to give up
a less-effective vote every five or six years for a much more powerful role in a process (that they can’t select) at two random points in their life, and maybe not at all.
It goes without saying that there are huge caveats here. If there are 400 or 4000 national panels rather than 40 that changes the numbers – it depends on what level of decision would need a panel and which would be left the to bureaucracy.
