Democracy by sortition…
- At 28 January, 2019
- By admin
- In Articles
DEMOCRACY BY SORTITION: AN ANALYSIS THROUGH A MICRO-EXPERIMENT WITH PUBLIC GOOD GAME
[Democracia por sorteo: análisis a través de un micro-experimento con juego de bienes públicos]
Aníbal Monasterio Astobiza
Universidad del País Vasco (UPV/EHU), España
Carlos Santamaria Zentroa, Elhuyar plaza 2, 20018, Donostia, España
anibalmastobiza@gmail.com
ABSTRACT
How to organize our society is one of the most perennial questions of the social and behavioral sciences and one of the deepest philosophical concerns. Society is complex to manage. Periodically, in most western countries a plurality of views and a diversity of preferences are aligned and coordinated via voting mechanisms to elect an individual or a political organization (party) in order to mange such complexity. This is what is called direct democracy or representative democracy. The concept of democracy was originally coined in ancient Greece 2400 years ago and in its present form it creates a perverse structure of incentives which produces unwelcome outcomes such as social inequalities in elected officials, unrepresentativeness, rule of the elite and oligarchy and also a lack of diversity. In this paper, I want to explore, both theoretically and empirically, the potential of sortition (random selection) in the form of micro-experiments in game theory to improve democracy.
Keywords: sortition, institutional design, democracy, experiments with games.
