Pros, cons and the liberation potential of random selection
Today elections are more manipulated spectacle than enforcing the real answerability of elected governments. Existing political systems make wise decision-making highly unlikely. …
Bits and pieces of Democracy 2.0
There is a LOT of new democracy thinking and experimenting going on – way more than I could put into a reasonable …
Randomly selected legislators? You’ve got to be kidding!
It’s easy to dismiss the idea of a randomly selected legislature. After all, how could a bunch of ordinary people create workable, …
Realizing Empathy as Part of Co-Intelligence
Few people – including myself until recently – have realized how important empathy is to co-intelligence. Here I focus on four important …
What is it about Random Selection??
In recent months I’ve discovered that random selection offers unexpected gifts to our efforts to create more fair, functional, and intelligent politics …
Doing democracy differently
In Is Democracy in Trouble? E.J. Dionne describes major studies suggesting that “Across most of the democratic world, there is an impatience bordering …
Public issue conversations and the legitimacy of “we the people”
I see several diverse but not necessarily mutually exclusive types of political conversation, and find that differentiating among them helps me think more clearly about this topic: 1. STAKEHOLDERS: Stakeholder conversations involve people with int…
Will Egypt Revolutionize Democracy Itself?
Thomas Friedman suggests that the special strength of Egypt’s youth-led revolutionary movement has been “the fact that it represented every political strain, every segment and class in Egyptian society.” But then he turns around and says that dive…
Randomly Selected Constitutional Convention Delegates
Dear John, Thanks for your note. I’m not sure I have an answer to your specific question about shifts (towards random selection) in the way delegates are chosen for constitutional conventions, but here are a few resources in the general area of ra…