[mtsr]

And there are actually more flavors of democracy that have been used to break this death spiral:

- ostracism, where the people voted to ban a person who was too mighty or dangerous from the city of Athens for a period of 10 years;

- random selection of (some kind of) representatives. This has predictable downsides, but ensures fair representation and prevents the existence of a political class.

[dr_dshiv]

Big fan of the second, which is called “Sortition.” Seems powerful

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

[thechao]

A lot of people really kick back on sortition. I think a good compromise is this: everyone votes like normal. We then take the top K candidates who got more than some fraction of the votes. (Say: greater than 1/9th of the total votes.) The winner is selected, at random, proportional to the number of votes they received. Such a system would really really on having a large number of candidates on the ballot; my preference would be (in party ballots): top 2 (or 3!) candidates from each party, and any person who can get more than T signatures. (Where T is some number like “20000” or “5% VAP”.)

[noduerme]

Does the Roman republic's tradition of appointing a dictator count? Do "illiberal democracies" with quasi-kings like Orban, Erdogan, Maduro, et al, still count as something comparable, or are these the downside of that spiral? Obviously everything that works, works until it doesn't.

[whatever1]

The longer a regime’s power is aligned with the establishment, the less democratic it becomes. There’s no clear-cut distinction between democracy or not democracy.

However, if a leader remains in power for decades, it’s highly probable that the establishment has a firm grip on the reins and is unlikely to relinquish control.

[GolfPopper]

Dr. Devereaux of A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry has a really nice overview of the position of Roman dictator over at his blog. [1]

The very short version is that 'dictator' refers to two different things. One version is the dictator appointed by the Senate in the early Republic to solve a particular crisis, who had absolute power within their sphere of responsibility and who uniformly relinquished power when their job was done.

The later dictators towards the end of the Republic were Sulla and Caesar. They seized Rome by force, then claimed the long-disused title of 'dictator' to give their actions an appearance of legitimacy.

1. https://acoup.blog/2022/03/18/collections-the-roman-dictator...

[cjfd]

Appointing a dictator for a period of a year in case of emergency is compatible with democracy. Appointing a dictator for life is not. Mainly because the dictator for the period of a year is, after that year, still accountable. Orban, Erdogan, and Maduro are on various stages of the road from democracy to non-democracy. Regarding the Romans another matter is of course that only a small part of the population has any influence on the senate, so it is in fact clearly not a democracy.

If I have to judge what is a democracy, I am going back quite a while to what I learned in high school as the definition of a democracy. "A democracy is a form of government where the three branches of government, the legislative, the executive and the judicial branch are separated and the legislative branch is in the hands of representatives elected by the people."

[Eextra953]

I think random selection would be really cool. Imagine if some fraction of our representatives were chosen at random. Not enough to be the majority, maybe something like 1/3, but enough to have a real effect.

The more I think about it, the more I like it. This would allow a sampling of all groups in a country to have access to power and decision making without the need to be exceptional in some way. It would also remove the self-selection bias of all elected officials.

[notahacker]

> This has predictable downsides, but ensures fair representation and prevents the existence of a political class.

This depends one whether you consider the existence of a political class to be purely negative.

Seems like random selection of candidates who have no influence over what happens after their term selects for all the negative aspects of a political class (ability to enrich themselves and their friends at others expense, tendency to be ignorant of and ambivalent about issues that don't really affect them) and against the [at least arguably] positive aspects (institutional knowledge of how things operate, some sort of political philosophy which has some public support, some level of skill and drive to get things done, and the motivation to try to keep the public happy enough to reelect them or their compatriots)