User:Superb Owl/sandbox/governance

Historical rankings of presidents of the United States

Further Reading decisions

	Repeat citations	Reliability/Notability	Scope	ideal # of works (at 13)
Sleyece
Rja13ww33
RJensen	"poor reason" to drop	"The criteria is not 'notability'"	Book ranking big city mayors within scope
Superb Owl	drop - I flagged with:	2+ citations/year (20+ citations for 10 year-old publication, 40+ for 20 yo, etc.) I flagged all under 2+ citations/yr with: and listed the citations/yr count in the description (may have to use source editing mode to see)	Only sources exactly covering this topic (presidential rankings). I flagged those that differed significantly with:	Nicholas Curt (2012) Murray + Blessing (1994) Thomas A. Bailey (1966)
WP:Further reading (excerpted - see link for full context)	Further reading...should not normally duplicate entries that are in any list of references in the article, such as is commonly used in conjunction with shortened footnotes. When a references section has very many entries, making it difficult for a reader to identify those entries suitable for further reading, such entries may be selectively duplicated in Further reading.	Reliable: Editors most frequently choose high-quality reliable sources. However, other sources may be appropriate, including: historically important publications; creative works or primary sources discussed extensively in the article; and seminal, but now outdated, scientific papers. When such sources are listed, the relevance of the work should be explained by a brief annotation.	Topical: A large part, if not all, of the work should be directly about the subject of the article. Works that are not entirely about the subject of the article should have notes that identify the relevant part of the work (e.g., "Chapter 7"). Preference is normally given to works that cover the whole subject of the article rather than a specific aspect of the subject, and to works whose contents are entirely about the subject of the article, rather than only partly.	Limited: The Further reading section may be expanded until it is substantial enough to provide broad bibliographic coverage of the subject. However, the section should be limited in size. Wikipedia is not a catalogue of all existing works, which in the case of a historical topic like World War II would run into thousands of items. When the list needs to be trimmed, preference in retention should normally be given to notable works over non-notable works.
Template:Further reading cleanup				Most editors object to 7+ works

Independent State Legislature Theory

The theory has been described as being 'fringe' and opponents fear it would enable election subversion by concentrating power in gerrymandered state legislatures or the conservative US Supreme Court which would weaken and threaten American democracy.

Moore v. Harper was proponents of a gerrymander pushing this theory in order to implement rules without approval of the State Supreme Court.

District lines for geographically-based legislatures of the U.S. already disadvantage one party because of wasted votes resulting in an efficiency gap, which can widen further with unchecked gerrymandering. These geographic efficiency gaps do not exist in statewide races like those for governor, state supreme court justice, or for ballot initiatives which are more representative of the will of the voters in that state.

Political equality

How many constitutions have political equality as an ideal?

Discuss sortition? deliberative democracy? or keep very high level?

Governance Archaeology

Governance archaeology seeks to understand the myriad combinations of ways in which people have governed themselves throughout time. A goal in this endeavor is to better understand the full range of options available to modern humans and, to the extent possible, some of the opportunities and pitfalls of different governance characteristics.

Glossary of Terms for the Collective Governance Database

Communities	Units of governance and shared culture
Institutions	Specific institutional structures within a given community
Mechanisms	Within institutions, patterns of governance practice (for example, jury, council, voting)
Culture	Within communities, patterns of shared values and norms (for example, solidarity, ritual, supernatural belief)
Time	Situates the community in history
Place	Situates the community geographically
Size	Approximate number of members in the community at the specified time and place

See also

• Glossary of archaeology
  

Political system

Political system

Room for discussion of Democracy vs. Republic?

Note rarity of democratic nations going to war with each other compared to less democratic governments.

Concentration of political power*

System of government	Most power is allocated by:	Most power is held by:	Modern governments	Examples
Democracy	Sortition	Everyone equally (universal suffrage)	None	None
Hybrid			None	Athens, Venice, Florence
Republic	Elections	Aristocrats, Upper class, Corporations, etc.	see: Democracy Index, V-Dem, etc.?
Hybrid
Autocracy	Might (e.g. coup)	Small inner circle (Dictator, Monarch, General(s), One-party state leadership)
Disputed

*WCAG 2.1 Issues...find consensus on content and another way to display Graphic(s) brainstorm: visualization of power concentration

Citizens Assembly

Power entrusted to sortition

Randomly-selected body	Time frame	Independent Power?	Scope Set by:	Permanent?	Highest Ratio of all Decision-makers Chosen By Sortition vs. Election
Juries in the U.S.	1789?-	Yes	Judges	Yes
Citizens' assemblies	1970's?-	No	Politicians?*	No*
Athens		Yes	Sortition?	Yes	9:1 sortition?
Venice		Yes	Sortition?	Yes
Florence		Yes	Sortition?	Yes

*except in regions in Belgium

Improve sourcing:

Sample size determination literature also provides an important contribution when determining how many participants are needed to give sufficient confidence that their decisions are very likely representative of the population. More participants means more confidence, but with greatly diminishing returns.

a Citizens' assembly are "like couples counseling for a nation."

Hélène Landemore describes Citizens' assemblies as places where "experts are on tap, but they are not on top."

First permanent citizens' assembly, know as the people's senate in the German-speaking region of Belgium.

Tocqueville was very positive about citizens' juries and very negative about the campaigning leading up to an election.

Hannah Arendt interest in participatory democracy

Dr. Oliver Escobar and Dr. Stephen Elstub. https://www.newdemocracy.com.au/2017/05/08/forms-of-mini-publics/ - website doesn't have a wikipedia page, but links to useful info. They edited a 2019 book on deliberative democracy that's inaccessible by normal means: https://www.elgaronline.com/display/edcoll/9781786433855/9781786433855.00007.xml?tab_body=pdf-copy1

Cost/benefit

Sortition

Talk Page

Per WP:Criticism ("In most cases separate sections devoted to criticism, controversies, or the like should be avoided in an article because these sections call undue attention to negative viewpoints.") I am integrating the the arguments and the most notable sources unless we think this article should be an exception.

Comparison to Elections

Suffrage

Discussions of suffrage (who gets to participate) tends to be similar, though sortition might enable further enfranchisement of younger people and noncitizens since they will have adequate time to study the particular issue and the fear of them being less knowledgeable than others would be largely alleviated.

Outcomes

Many (how many?) examples of policies recommended by advisory policy juries/citizens' assemblies get rejected by elected officials or by referenda.

While the reasons for each failure depend on many unique factors, the gap between what juries recommend and what elections allow may be evidence that sortition provides very different policy outcomes than one would get by voting-based systems like elected representatives and referenda.

If the difference is inherent to elections vs. sortition, then the question becomes, which system would provide better policy outcomes?

Republic

A republic is a system of government where people choose representatives through elections to make decisions in the public's interest. In contrast, a democracy might rely primarily on sortition (e.g. juries) to make decisions by a representative sample of the public while an autocracy concentrates power in very few hands.

Democracy vs. Republic debate

While the term democracy has been used interchangeably with the term republic by some, others have made sharp distinctions between the two for millennia. "Montesquieu, founder of the modern constitutional state, repeated in his The Spirit of the Laws of 1748 the insight that Aristotle had expressed two millennia earlier, ‘Voting by lot is in the nature of democracy; voting by choice is in the nature of aristocracy.’" Additional critics of elections include Rousseau, Robespierre, and Marat, who said of the new French Republic, "‘What use is it to us, that we have broken the aristocracy of the nobles, if that is replaced by the aristocracy of the rich?’"

While democracy commonly refers to elections in modern times, it is far less common to see the term 'Republic' refer to the process of sortition, even if early hybrid examples used the word Republic in their title.

"The French Revolution, like the American, did not dislodge the aristocracy to replace it with a democracy but rather dislodged a hereditary aristocracy to replace it with an elected aristocracy, ‘une aristocratie élective’, to use Rousseau’s term. Robespierre even called it ‘une aristocratie représentative’...It derived its legitimacy no longer from God, soil or birth but from another relic of the aristocratic era, elections...The fiery revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat denounced the aristocratisation of the popular revolt and took up the cause of the more than eighteen million French people who were not given a vote. ‘What use is it to us,’ he wrote, ‘that we have broken the aristocracy of the nobles, if that is replaced by the aristocracy of the rich?’"

"Democracy is not government by the best in our society, because such a thing is called an aristocracy, elected or not. That is one option, but then let’s change here and now what we call it. Democracy, by contrast, flourishes precisely by allowing a diversity of voices to be heard. It’s all about having an equal say, an equal right to determine what political action is taken."

"The American and French revolutionaries thought state business too important to be left to the people and by opting for an elected aristocracy they gave priority to efficiency over legitimacy. Nowadays we are paying the price for that. Discontent is rife and the legitimacy of the electoral-representative system is being noisily called into question."

"Montesquieu, founder of the modern constitutional state, repeated in his The Spirit of the Laws of 1748 the insight that Aristotle had expressed two millennia earlier, ‘Voting by lot is in the nature of democracy; voting by choice is in the nature of aristocracy.’ The elite character of elections was clear to him from the start. In contrast, he claimed, ‘the casting of lots is a way of electing that distresses no one; it leaves to each citizen a reasonable expectation of serving his country.'...We find similar ideas in the famous Encyclopaedia compiled by Diderot and d’Alembert in the 1750s. In the entry headed ‘aristocracy’ we read that the drawing of lots was not suitable for the aristocracy (‘Suffrage must not be given by lot; only inconveniences would result from it’). It was better to appoint a senate. ‘In that case, one might say that aristocracy is in a way, in the senate, democracy in the body of nobles, and that the people are nothing.’ The authors make it clear that the aristocracy has a responsibility for the people and in the entry for democracy they largely adopt Montesquieu’s arguments."

"The two most important books about the political philosophy of the eighteenth century agree that sortition is more democratic than election and that a combination of the two methods is beneficial to society."

Bernard Manin summarizes the situation as, "'at the same time that the founding fathers were declaring the equality of all citizens, they decided without the slightest hesitation to establish, on both sides of the Atlantic, the unqualified dominion of a method of selection long deemed to be aristocratic.'"

Unicameralism vs. bicameralism

Switches from bicameralism to unicameralism

Main article: List of abolished upper houses

Books

• Nicholas Baldwin and Donald Shell, eds., Second Chambers (New York: Routledge, 2016)
• Arend Liphart, Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 2012)
• Samuel C. Patterson and Anthony Mughan, Senates: Bicameralism in the Contemporary World (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999)