zlacker

Personally, I think random selection would produce a better result than the system we currently have. Select the legislature by lottery. Pick N (where N is some fixed integer designated by law for a each political office) candidates for each office by a random lottery, selected from a pool of everyone who has ever served jury duty. Re-roll for anyone who declines to serve or is currently incarcerated, in a coma, etc. (Obviously, the particulars of the exclusion rules have to be made very explicit so that nobody can exert undue influence by arbitrarily disqualifying people they don't like.) Give each candidate a fixed amount of government funding for their campaign. Nobody is allowed to solicit campaign contributions of any kind or permitted to spend their own money, so everyone is on an even playing field. The quantity of funding depends solely on the particular office that the person is running for. You don't get to choose what office to run for; there is a lottery for each individual office. If you are selected as a candidate for an office by the lottery, you are ineligible for other lotteries for that election year. The candidates run their campaigns. The voters pick the winner for each office by condorcet voting.

>>blahbl+(OP)
What would stop special interests from buying a new candidate every cycle? They help the candidate get elected, the candidate crafts legislation to the special interests' benefit, then the special interest hires them as a lobbyist when their term is over.

>>blahbl+(OP)
My Dad used to propose the jury duty system of democratic representation - you don't get elected, you get randomly drawn - not as a candidate, but as a member of parliament. Shorter terms, but a larger parliament. Interesting to think about, but somewhat impractical, I guess.

>>bff+H5
This already happens under the current system. It's not a new problem specific to the Jury Duty Model of Representative Democracy. The solution is to have strong ethics rules to prevent it from happening. You prohibit ex-legislators from working as lobbyists for a lengthy period of time after their term of service. You make a rule, similar to the rules in place regarding reserve military service or FMLA, that guarantees that the person's old job is still there for them after they finish their term of service in the legislature. You treat a promising a job or material wealth to a candidate or sitting legislator in exchange for their vote as a crime and prosecute lobbyists for doing it.

In one way, the system I've proposed has an inherent protection against this problem that our current system doesn't have. Specifically, because all candidates are chosen by random lottery, an incumbent cannot run for a second term except in the exceedingly rare circumstance that they are chosen twice in a row by the lottery. Therefore, the incumbent has no incentive to try to please any third party that helped them get elected in order to retain their support for a re-election campaign.

>>cromul+7a
I assume you mean it's impractical in terms of all the changes that would be required to get from the current U.S. system of government to a jury duty republic system because of the significant changes to the Constitution that would be required and the near impossibility of passing constitutional amendments, particularly given the extreme opposition that the entrenched ruling class would have towards such a system (because the primary goal of such a system is to uproot an entrenched ruling class and replace it with something more egalitarian).

However, suppose for a moment that you're the revolutionary leader of a small nation in Latin America and, after a long struggle, you have risen victorious over the oppressive old regime of your country and there is overwhelming public support for you to become dictator. But, being aware of the inherent long term problems of dictatorships, you don't want to be a dictator. So, you declare, "We will implement a constitutional republic like the Americans. But, to ensure our government always has the best interests of our people at heart and we are never again dominated by an elite ruling class, we will choose our representatives in the legislature by a lottery like the American PowerBall." What, then, would be impractical about implementing a jury duty system of democratic representation?

>>blahbl+Qm
Problems that I see revolve around the formalities of office. Learning your way around legislation, the formats, styles, trade-offs, and compromises that must be made all require time.

Beyond that, you run into the problem of lobbyists. Not the evil type that is a stand-in for the word "corruption", but instead the legitimate "education" type lobbyists. You lose much of the institutional knowledge that prevents candy coated views of the world from taking hold. Honestly, how many of the randomly selected people are going to understand the trade-offs of each and every policy, be it economic, societal, political, industrial, trade, environmental, etc. Having experienced people who have been around a few cycles provides a base level of knowledge.