Browsing by Subject "Sortition"

Sortition – selecting representatives by drawing lots – has played a significant part in the history and development of democracy. When it comes to modern more representative variants of democracy, the custom of sortition has, however, fallen from grace and largely vanished from the main stage of democracy. But how well would it work in modern parliaments, compared to current practice of electing representatives? The thesis undertakes a task to simulate the main functions of a plural parliament in the case where there are no randomised representatives present, and in the case where randomised representatives are present – to different extents – and ultimately contrast them to solve this research question. The thesis takes on the research question with the method of constructing a rather simplistic model of a plural parliament and its functions, generating a metric of the hypothetical quality and volume of the legislation produced by the parliament. The model is run and re-run thousands of times as a so-called Mont Carlo simulation with few randomised and many fixed variables to produce overall results dataset of the simulations with different fractions of randomised legislators present in the parliament. The results dataset is ultimately subjected to an analysis of variance (ANOVA) to determine the likelihood of the different fractions of independent legislators producing legislation of different quantity and quality on average. The result of the conducted ANOVA is that the produced quantity and quality of legislation produced by different fractions of independent legislators very probably is not equal on average. Therefore, the quality and quantity of legislation seems to depend on the fraction of randomised legislators in a plural parliament. The quality and quantity of legislation is, further, higher on average in plural parliaments with a moderate number of randomised legislators than it is in a plural parliament where randomised legislators are not present. The thesis continues to conclude that – as the quality and quantity is on average higher with a moderate number of randomised legislators and as the true quality and quantity of the legislation is very probably not equal across the simulations – the quality and quantity of the legislation is higher with a moderate amount of sortition, i.e., randomised legislators present in a plural parliament. The thesis goes on to briefly discuss the ways the conditions of the model could be enabled in real-life and the best ways to achieve the results that the model points towards.