Forum Council

In a recent discussion of an election-by-jury proposal, a broader question arose concerning the nature of political representation:

May an office legitimately represent constituent political units, communities, or federated bodies, or must legitimate representation ultimately be based only on individual persons represented directly and on an equal basis?

The immediate discussion can be found here:
https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/623/election-by-jury-www-electionbyjury-com-manifesto/40

This is a longstanding disagreement in political theory. Debates concerning the representation of individuals, states, local communities, and other constituent bodies were already central to the Federalist and Antifederalist disputes surrounding the founding of the United States. Similar questions continue to arise in discussions of federalism, bicameralism, local autonomy, sovereignty, and democratic legitimacy.

I would like to raise the issue here for broader discussion. I expect that participants may approach it from quite different normative premises and theories of political legitimacy.

My hope is that this can proceed as a Socratic discussion. For that reason, I ask that everyone remain polite and respectful and that, when disagreement reaches genuinely incompatible premises, participants be willing to identify that disagreement clearly rather than treating the other position as foolish or illegitimate.

Participants should try to state one premise at a time, explain their reasons for accepting it, and ask bounded, good-faith questions about the premises offered by others. No premise should be presumed shared merely because it appears obvious; participants should establish agreement where it is needed for an argument to proceed.

Some possible starting questions are:

1. What kinds of entities can meaningfully be represented: individual persons only, or also states, municipalities, nations, communities, institutions, or other organized bodies?
2. What makes representation legitimate: numerical equality, authorization, accountability, consent, affected interests, historical compact, or something else?
3. May different offices or legislative chambers legitimately represent different kinds of constituencies?
4. Does equal citizenship require that every political institution represent individuals on an equal basis, or only that the constitutional system as a whole secure each citizen meaningful and sufficient political standing?
5. When does representation of constituent units protect pluralism and autonomy, and when does it become an unjustified departure from political equality?
6. Under what circumstances, if any, might direct representation of individuals be an unsuitable basis for a particular office, compared with representation through constituent political units or communities?

Because this is a contentious subject, I ask participants to review the Code of Conduct before posting and to ensure that their contributions comply with it. The Code of Conduct can be found here:
https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/16/read-me-code-of-conduct?_=1783225633021

Thank you in advance to anyone who offers their thoughts.

@clay A couple of points on the actual idea (I may address some of the points from the ensuing discussion between you two later):

When I said about keeping people in a bubble, you quickly corrected me. I just had another look, and I think it was this bit that made me think of a bubble:

A controlled environment that protects jurors from external influence and manipulation

I presume then that this doesn't refer to their environment the whole time, but just when they're involved in the process - e.g. interrogating the candidates.

In any case, I think that while being able to directly interrogate candidates, rather than just getting stuff from a potentially biased media, is a good thing, I do also think it would be bad to stop them getting information from other sources, even if some or all of those sources may be biased. Some candidates will simply be better at presenting themselves, and being a slick speaker does not necessarily translate into being a good representative.

The manifesto does actually talk about expert testimony, but I can't see this being given more detail in terms of how that would work.

On sampling - random sampling obviously makes the most sense on the surface, but given the discussion that has taken place, I might address that in a separate post.

As for the idea as a whole, it's clear that informed representative sample of voters should make a better decision than the population as a whole.

However, you might consider this to be to be a slightly "philosophical" or "meta" point, but does educating and making competent the sample change its nature and stop it from being representative? The manifesto made it clear that selecting people based on competence would create a biased sample. But what are competent people other than people who were once incompetent and educated out of it?

Finally for this post, while this might give a better result within the landscape of a given election, it changes the landscape itself, which could lead to unintended consequences. The vast majority of people would never vote in an election, and they might view that negatively, with further consequences from that. Perhaps you would argue that it doesn't matter if they disengage from politics because we only need to jury to be engaged, but I think there's something a bit degenerate about a wider public that takes no interest in what their elected representatives are doing.

I have previously discussed advantages of lottery-based methods (variations on random ballot, essentially), but at least in these methods everyone gets to vote, even if most of those votes don't do anything. (This is specifically on the subject of disengagement.)

(Edit - This isn't to say I necessarily disagree with the proposal, but I'd need to play around with the arguments first.)

There are some interesting discussion points here, and I might post again later, but it probably won't be a for a few days because I'll need some time to get through the volume of stuff!

But before that, it has been brought to my attention (and I somehow ended up as a moderator on here) @clay that the tone in some of your posts may have overstepped the mark. I understand that this is just how you post, having posted on the same forums as you over the years, but it would be just as easy to make the same points without this abruptness, which can be perceived as hostility, regardless of how wrong-headed you think the other poster's arguments are.

@clay, there is no purpose in continuing this discussion with you. Your approach to discourse is unlikely to convince others, and it is not because you are right while everyone else is wrong. A good-faith response to a serious objection is to examine the premise and answer the question—not repeatedly declare the questioner confused. If you continue engaging with others on this forum in this manner, I expect you will receive responses similar to mine, and if you continue not to adhere to the Code of Conduct, you may eventually face moderation action, including a ban.

Regarding reading material, I linked you to the Code of Conduct, and I strongly advise that you read it before continuing to participate here. I would also suggest consulting a standard dictionary entry for “normative,” since the term does not mean “whatever satisfies my preferences.”

Readers can judge this exchange for themselves. You repeatedly cite your own writings as authority, refuse to engage reasonable objections in good faith, and do not answer basic questions put to you. The external citations you provide are themselves significantly more measured than your presentation of them suggests. Harsanyi, for example, explicitly presented his conclusions as conditional on particular ethical postulates and assumptions about rational choice and interpersonal comparison; he did not claim to have mathematically proved the uniquely correct theory of justice. I see no value for me, for you, for this forum, or for the broader reform movement in continuing this exchange. Best of luck to you.

@clay, I introduced “normative” to mean questions about what institutions ought to do and what arrangements are justified. That is the standard use in political philosophy. You may argue that normativity reduces to subjective preference, but that is your metaethical theory, and that conclusion has not been established here, nor is it the definition of the term.

You now appear to be defending total utilitarianism: for a given population, the best outcome is the one with the highest sum of utilities. That is a controversial normative principle, not something mathematics proves on its own. A theorem may show what follows from a chosen social-welfare function; it does not prove that summed utility is the uniquely correct standard of justice. Without an independently justified method for specifying and comparing utilities, the framework can be made to rationalize radically different outcomes simply by changing the utility assignments. Your own citation is substantially more cautious about interpersonal utility comparison than your claims here.

Regardless, your framework also seems to give rights, consent, sovereignty, self-determination, and distribution no independent force. They apparently matter only insofar as they affect the utility total. So I will ask again: if a large outside population gains many small benefits by confiscating nearly all resources from a smaller region whose residents suffer catastrophic losses, is that policy “by definition good” whenever the summed utility favors the outsiders?

Nor does “elections” solve the problem of cardinal interpersonal utility comparison. Elections record choices under a particular procedure and produce a collective decision; they do not place different people’s welfare on a common measurable scale.

Furthermore, the veil of ignorance reasoning does not by itself imply that individuals would prefer social positions that maximize their expected utility. A chooser behind the veil may evaluate not only their expected payoff, but also the distribution of benefits and burdens, the condition of the worst-off, exposure to domination, and whether some losses may legitimately be imposed for others’ gains. Treating the veil as a device for maximizing summed expected utility imports the utilitarian conclusion into the assumptions rather than deriving it.

So the normative question remains: should political institutions be governed solely by aggregate preference satisfaction, or do rights, consent, distribution, non-domination, self-determination, and political membership have independent importance? You have asserted one answer. You have not shown that the question is confused or that your answer is mathematically compulsory rather than a contestable normative commitment.

@clay you misunderstand. I am both a participant in this discussion and a moderator of the forum. The moderation note concerns your conduct; the rest of my post concerns your argument.

For reference, the Code of Conduct can be found here: https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/16/read-me-code-of-conduct?_=1783225633021

@clay, you still have not answered the questions I asked. But your response regarding Hawaii is clarifying. You appear to be saying that if a sufficiently large outside population gains enough aggregate utility from controlling policy in Hawaii, then such control is “by definition good,” regardless of Hawaiian self-government, political membership, jurisdiction, or consent.

Is that in fact your position?

If so, then your theory does not merely reject territorial weighting within an existing polity. It rejects any independent normative significance for self-determination, sovereignty, jurisdiction, bounded political membership, or consent whenever aggregate external utility points the other way. That is a radical substantive political theory, not “trivial basic social choice theory.”

The same logic would appear to permit a policy such as: “Take all extractable resources from region A and transfer them to region B,” provided that the aggregate utility gain claimed for the population of B exceeded the aggregate utility loss imposed on the population of A. Would that policy therefore be “by definition good” under your framework?

More fundamentally, how do you propose to measure utility and make cardinal interpersonal comparisons of it across the affected individuals? It seems unlikely to me that we could use, for example, atoms, or some such thing.

Moderator note: Describing another participant’s mental models as “profoundly broken” is personal disparagement. Address the argument rather than the participant’s competence. You have already been warned about this. Further personal disparagement may result in moderation action.

@clay, that is not “ethics 101”; it is a substantive and highly contested form of moral subjectivism. Aristotelian, Kantian, contractualist, natural-law, constructivist, moral-realist, and many consequentialist theories do not define “ought” as “I would subjectively prefer that.”

Likewise, legal rights are created or recognized by law, but moral rights are precisely the standards by which laws may be judged unjust. Saying that “rights are just laws” eliminates the distinction between legality and justice by definition rather than defending that conclusion.

Describing domination as a conflict between two utility functions also does not resolve the normative issue. It tells us that the parties prefer different outcomes; it does not tell us whose preference should govern, whether both preferences deserve equal standing, whether malicious or coercive preferences should count, or what constraints should apply to their aggregation.

You are advancing a preference-subjectivist theory of normativity. That is one possible philosophical position, but it is not the definition of “ought,” and it does not make competing ethical theories disappear by stipulation.

But setting that aside, I asked several questions above that your response did not address.

@clay, to clarify, “normative” does not mean “subjective preference.” It refers to claims about what institutions ought to do or what arrangements are justified. A preference-based account can be one normative theory, but it does not define or exhaust normative theory. Your appeal to unanimous hypothetical preference behind a veil of ignorance is itself a substantive normative argument. Its assumptions and conclusions remain open to examination; they do not make the normative question disappear.

You write that normative theory “cannot float free of what people would actually prefer.” That is true in the limited sense that preferences can and should inform normative judgment. But normative judgment is not wholly determined by existing preferences. People can prefer domination, discrimination, exploitation, or institutions that violate rights. Normative theory asks whether such preferences ought to govern.

Even after preferences are known, one must still decide whose preferences count, under what conditions they count, whether adaptive or malicious preferences count, how rights constrain aggregation, and whether future generations or constituent institutions should have standing.

Moreover, the veil does not mechanically yield your conclusion unless we specify the agents’ information, risk attitudes, conception of political goods, and whether they value only equal individual influence or also protections against persistent territorial domination and the political standing of constituent jurisdictions. Those are themselves normative and institutional questions.

You say that “the preferences here are not in doubt.” That appears central to your argument, but it is precisely what I doubt. Which preferences do you mean, and why should we assume that every person behind the veil would rank the available institutional arrangements in the same way?

The mathematical representation theorem may be valid conditional on its axioms. What does not follow is that those axioms adequately describe actual human preferences, capture all politically relevant values, or uniquely determine institutional design. To support your conclusion, you would need to show why the assumed preference structure, informational conditions, and conception of relevant goods are appropriate here, not merely that the conclusion follows once those assumptions are imposed. Even granting Harsanyi’s result, an additional argument is required to move from equal treatment in a social-welfare representation to the claim that every legitimate political institution must represent individuals directly and only in proportion to population.

The normative question I am raising is whether higher-level offices should remain directly accountable to the statewide population as a whole or instead be constituted partly through the local jurisdictions with which they coordinate. You say that “the remaining question isn’t open; it’s settled.”

Does your position therefore imply that any institution giving constituent political units standing independent of their populations is necessarily normatively indefensible? In particular, do you regard equal state representation in the U.S. Senate as democratically illegitimate in principle? If not, then the question cannot be settled merely by asserting equal per-person weight as the only admissible representational target. If so, that would imply that a central feature of many federated democratic systems—giving constituent units some standing independent of population—is democratically defective in principle.

This returns to my example of an 80–20 coastal–rural division. A persistent territorial minority may be outvoted indefinitely even when its interests are geographically concentrated, structurally distinct, and directly affected by decisions made at the higher level. I do not think your appeal to cardinal voting adequately resolves that problem. Cardinal voting may register the intensity of individual preferences, but it does not by itself guarantee institutional standing or protection for a territorially concentrated minority.

Federated structures address that problem by giving constituent units some independent role in higher-level decision-making. They also create other risks and tradeoffs, including unequal influence, entrenchment, and minority veto. The question is how those competing values should be balanced. It is not obvious, and certainly is not established by Harsanyi’s theorem, that there is one uniquely correct structure of political representation.

Consider two unions containing the same people and the same total population. In one, the local jurisdictions dissolve into a unitary government. In the other, they retain governments, responsibilities, and limited rights of self-rule while delegating specified powers to a common higher authority. Must the higher-level institution have exactly the same representative structure in both cases? If not, then population arithmetic alone does not determine the appropriate unit or structure of representation. The constitutional relationship among the constituent political units also matters.

Taken to its logical extreme, your principle also seems to undermine political boundaries themselves. If equal per-person influence is the uniquely legitimate representational rule, why should only residents of a state or nation participate in decisions affecting that territory? Why should the populations of China and India not collectively exercise more influence over policy in Hawaii than Hawaiians do?

Presumably the answer is that Hawaii belongs to a bounded political community whose members possess some claim to self-government. But that means the relevant constituency cannot be derived from population arithmetic alone. It depends on prior normative judgments about political membership, jurisdiction, sovereignty, self-determination, and the allocation of authority.

So the fundamental question remains: equal influence among whom, over which decisions, and within which political community? Until those questions are answered, equal per-person weighting is not a complete theory of political representation.

@clay, I understand the distinction you are drawing. Unequal weighting within an office explicitly designed to represent individuals statewide would conflict with that office’s stated representational target. Redefining the office as one partly accountable to constituent localities would be a different institutional design.

There are roughly three different kinds of questions we could discuss: normative theory about what political institutions should aim to achieve; institutional design questions about how those goals could be implemented; and legal analysis concerning what arrangements are permissible under existing constitutional and institutional constraints.

My question concerns the first two: what representational structure an election-by-jury system should implement, and how. Saying that the current office should represent the statewide population accepts that this representative function should remain unchanged. That is one idea that I am questioning, not rejecting. You place this topic within your category of “boundary” concerns. I think that category can extend beyond horizontal constituency boundaries to include vertical and hierarchical structures.

Once jurors are sampled to select public officials, the election-by-jury framework can be generalized in different ways. My examples of negotiated juror allocation and guaranteed locality representation were sketches of a more federated, hierarchical conception of the higher-level office, analogous in some respects to the relationship between states and the federal government. They were not attempts to insert arbitrary address multipliers into a structure whose purpose was otherwise accepted. They were part of questioning what purpose that structure should have in the first place. In the United States, legislative districts are generally required to contain roughly equal populations, so geographic districting is generally designed to preserve roughly (though imperfectly) equal individual weighting, even if gerrymandering often distorts the resulting representation.

The relevant disagreement, if any remains, seems not to concern terminology or the mechanics of random jury selection, but whether higher-level offices should remain directly accountable to the statewide population as a whole or instead be constituted partly through the local jurisdictions with which they coordinate.

That is a question of normative theory and institutional design, and it probably belongs in a separate discussion.