Re: POLI: Random democracy

Robin Hanson (hanson@hss.caltech.edu)
Tue, 18 Feb 1997 12:52:05 -0800 (PST)


I wrote:
>You could now run for office on a platform that if elected, you
>will replace yourself with a randomly selected member of your
>electorate. Since people do not now run on such platforms, I
>suspect that voters do not in fact trust such a random person to
>do as well.

Eric Watt Forste replied:
>This is bad evidence, because legislators cannot replace themselves
>with whomever they like. In the US federal House of Representatives,
>a legislator can resign at will, but the replacement is chosen by
>a special election called by the executive authority of the state
>from which the legislator was elected. Similar schemes are in effect
>in most other polities with representative legislatures.

The candidate could still agree to, if elected, vote/etc. exactly as
directed by this randomly selected citizen. Violations of this
agreement should be pretty easy to detect.

Robin D. Hanson hanson@hss.caltech.edu http://hss.caltech.edu/~hanson/