Accidental Politicians: How Randomly Selected Legislators can Improve Parliament Efficiency

DATE: 07/06/2011
RETRIEVED: 21/01/2017
SOURCE: CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY, WIKIPEDIA
Authors: A. Pluchino, C. Garofalo, A. Rapisarda, S. Spagano, M. Caserta



FROM WIKIPEDIA ON SORTITION

In governance, sortition (also known as allotment or demarchy) selects officers as a random sample from a larger pool of candidates.[1]
In ancient Athenian democracy, sortition was the traditional and primary method for appointing political officials and its use was regarded as a principal characteristic of democracy.[2]

Sortition is commonly used to select prospective jurors in common law-based legal systems and is sometimes used today in forming citizen groups with political advisory power (citizens' juries or citizens' assemblies).


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Sortition to supplement or replace some of the legislators

    "Accidental Politicians: How Randomly Selected Legislators Can Improve Parliament Efficiency": shows how the introduction of a variable percentage of randomly selected independent legislators in a Parliament can increase the global efficiency of a Legislature, in terms of both number of laws passed and average social welfare obtained (this work is in line with the recent discovery that the adoption of random strategies can improve the efficiency of hierarchical organizations "Peter Principle Revisited: a Computational Study").

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition


DESCRIPTION OF THE SCIENTIFIC PAPER I'VE FOUND THE MOST INTERESTING

TITLE: Accidental Politicians: How Randomly Selected Legislators can Improve Parliament Efficiency


1. Abstract
We study a prototypical model of a Parliament with two Parties or two Political Coalitions and we show how the introduction of a variable percentage of randomly selected independent legislators can increase the global efficiency of a Legislature,in terms of both the number of laws passed and the average social welfare obtained.
We also analytically find an ”efficiency golden rule” which allows to fix the optimal number of legislators to be selected at random after that regular elections have established the relative proportion of the two Parties or Coalitions. These resultsare in line with both the ancient Greek democratic system and the recent discovery that the adoption of random strategies can improve the efficiency of hierarchical organizations.

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5. Conclusion
In this paper, by means of a prototypical Parliament model based on Cipolla classification, we showed in a quantitative way that the introduction of a well-defined number of random members into the Parliament improves the efficiency of this institution through the maximization of the social overall welfare that depends on its acts. In this respect, the exact number of random members has to be established after the elections, on the basis of the electoral results and of our analytical ”golden rule”: the greater the size difference between the Parties, the greater the number of members that should be lotted to increase the efficiency of Parliament [35].
Of course our prototypical model of Parliament does not represent all the real parliamentary institutions around the world in their detailed variety, so there could be many possible way to extend it. For example it would be interesting to study the consequences of different electoral systems by introducing more than two Parties in the Parliament, with all the consequences deriving from it. Also the government form could be important: our simple model is directly compatible with a presidential system, where there is no relationship between Parliament and Government, whereas, in the case of a parliamentary system, also such a link should to be considered in order to evaluate the overall social welfare. For simplicity, we chose to study a unicameral Parliament, whereas several countries adopt bicameralism. So, simulating another chamber could bring to subsequent interesting extensions of the model. Finally, we expect that there would be also several other social situations, beyond the Parliament,where the introduction of random members could be of help in improving the efficiency. In conclusion, our study provides rigorous arguments in favor of the idea that the introduction of random selection systems, rediscovering the wisdom and the history of ancient democracies, would be broadly beneficial for modern institutions.


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https://arxiv.org/abs/1103.1224   (Cornell University Library)


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