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Randomly-selected second chamber #188
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I had exactly the same idea whilst reading Rebooting Democracy :) so I'm a 👍 One question though: the 5 year term would be full time? I was thinking that either very short, or legislation-specific terms would be better. Given the deliberation involved, it wouldn't be good to have the House of Citizens ;) deliberate on a piece of legislation only for their term to be up before it could finish. Unless of course, we're synchronising with the Commons...? |
Oh and the 5 year impact on someone's life could be huge...especially if we're making this compulsory, because it could ruin their career prospects. So for that reason alone in fact I'd be more inclined to say legislation-specific citizen panels, rather than a consistent house with a 5 year term. |
The core arguments for a random selection (from Rebooting Democracy) are:
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As it's open to debate
I've removed the term length now. |
@PaulJRobinson http://www.democraticaudit.com/?p=5788 may be of interest to you on this. I'm trying to find a better reference to include along with the actual text as well. |
There are some interesting arguments put across here, but they still feel But let me take each of the 4 arguments detailed above:
In sum, I can see how a random group can be equally good at making sound I'm afraid this is a strong 👎 from me. ps: Practical Issues 1) Can you say "I don't want to spend next 5 years in On 17 June 2014 07:16, James Smith notifications@github.com wrote:
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My suggestion: replace (or augment) the HoL with a 'jury' system on a per-Bill basis. This would be selected randomly (like criminal juries) — with the benefits as per above — but without asking them to give a major chunk of their life for an extended term (beyond that which happens with court trials). The vast majority would be disposed of in a day or two. The mechanisms here already exist, and are well known, and could largely be reused. Other parts of it need fleshed out a little more (e.g. how to best prevent a government bringing back the same law again and again until it gets a sympathetic jury), but what do people think of the idea in the large? |
The jury-per-bill system does seem interesting. Do you think you'd need a permanent second house if you did this, or would it be replaced by these bill-specific citizen panels? Do you know of anywhere that's doing this on a regular basis? |
@Floppy Trying to remember some of the examples in Rebooting Democracy. They were based on referendums I think, so transferring that principle to bills might be new. That'd require us to commit to trials rather than a full implementation. |
Yeah, I don't remember examples of it being used during creation of legislation. Perhaps, yes, we should propose some options in this PR. I'll have a think. |
I've come around to this one having now read Reboot Democracy. 👍 |
@philipjohn I assume you're still a 👍 on this one? If so, we should be able to merge it. |
"I've come around to this one having now read Reboot Democracy. 👍" -- ha, that's an example of deliberation changing people's minds! I'm not completely sure about implementing this one straight away, without first doing "Research deliberate democracy" #216 How do "long game" future ideas like that fit in? i.e. things we think are good ideas, but there isn't enough evidence yet to risk implementing. A similar example is Citizens Income in Green policy - they don't have a plan to implement it straight away, as you have to know quite a lot to make sure it balances financially. But they'd work towards it, research it more and so on. (I think, I'm paraphrasing here!) |
The whole thing is a long game really. We have plenty of stuff that's vision of where we want to get to - there are many steps along the way. We could add a note after merging both PRs to clarify if needed though. |
Yep, I'm still a 👍 and on #216 |
Randomly-selected second chamber
This proposal is open for discussion and voting. If you are a contributor to this repository (and not the proposer), you may vote on whether or not it is accepted. How to voteVote by entering one of the following symbols in a comment on this pull request. Only your last vote will be counted, and you may change your vote at any time until the change is accepted or closed.
Proposals will be accepted and merged once they have a total of 2 points when all votes are counted. Votes will be open for a minimum of 7 days, but will be closed if the proposal is not accepted after 90. Votes are counted automatically here, and results are set in the merge status checks below. ChangesIf the proposer makes a change to the proposal, no votes cast before that change will be counted. |
Based on the citizen panels idea from Rebooting Democracy.