Voting, lotteries, and justice

Polity

Volumn 40, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 246-253

  Stone, Peter ^a  

^a STANFORD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Constituency; Democracy; Justice; Random selection; Rehfeld; Representation

Indexed keywords

EID: 41849127051     PISSN: 00323497     EISSN: 17441684     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1057/palgrave.polity.2300101     Document Type: Article

References (11)

1. Andrew Rehfeld, The Concept of Constituency: Political Representation, Democratic Legitimacy, and Institutional Design (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). All subsequent references to Rehfeld's book appear in parentheses in the text.
2. Technically Rehfeld believes that constituencies should ideally be heterogeneous, stable, and voluntary but that the last of these is, practically speaking, incompatible with the first two. Given this tradeoff, he defends the idea that the heterogeneous/stable/involuntary combination is the best that can be achieved under realistic conditions (178).
3. Rehfeld at one point suggests that "one person, one vote" is the "default position" that ought to be used "when assigning political shares" (12). This description accurately captures that status that Rehfeld assigns to the principle.
4. Peter Stone, "Why Lotteries Are Just," Journal of Political Philosophy 15 (September 2007): 276-95.
5. Such was the case for the use of sortition in Renaissance Florence, as well as for the Byzantine process by which the Doges of Venice were chosen (a process that incorporated a random component). On the former, see John M. Najemy, Corporatism and Consensus in Florentine Electoral Politics, 1280-1400 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982).
6. On the latter, see Robert Finlay, Politics in Renaissance Venice (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1980). Several months after our symposium took place, I became aware of the work of Oliver Dowlen, who draws a similar distinction between different uses of random selection.
7. This would still leave the question of which white men, Latino women, etc. get assigned to each constituency. One could accomplish this task randomly There have been political proposals along these lines. One proposal from the United Kingdom, for example, would replace the House of Lords with a body whose members are randomly selected but balanced to ensure proportional representation by gender and place of residence. See Anthony Barnett and Peter Carty The Athenian Option: Radical Reform for the House of Lords (London: Demos, 2000), 12. But if the goal is simply to ensure that each constituency mirrors the nation with respect to race and gender, then random selection is by no means mandatory One could, for example, assign all white men between eighteen and twenty-one years old to a single constituency, all white men between twenty-two and twenty-five to another constituency, etc. By assumption, only race and gender influence individual interests, and so every single white man has exactly the same interests regardless of age. This is of course ridiculous, but so long as the list of factors determining individual interests is presumed to be finite, a similar example can be constructed.
8. Here I rely heavily on the ideas of John Rawls, especially as developed and elaborated by Joshua Cohen. See John Rawls, Political Liberalism, expanded ed. (New York, Columbia University Press, 2005);
9. Joshua Cohen, "Democratic Equality;' Ethics 99 (July 1989): 725-51;
10. and Joshua Cohen, "Pluralism and Proceduralism," Chicago-Kent Law Review 69 (1994): 589-618.
11. Gerald N. Rosenberg, The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring about Social Change? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).