In my opinion elections are a mediocre, inefficient leadership selection tool.
Because elections demand participation from many people, they are very expensive in terms of opportunity cost.
Elections demand that the candidates engage in marketing and campaigning. Candidates who spend time on otherwise wasteful activity (campaigning) are more likely to win.
Because the effective value of voting is usually negative (ie it costs more to participate than you get out of it), participation is oftentimes either rare or mediocre.
To look at recent history for example, how effective was voting for leadership selection? For example, did you know that the Democratic Party actually had primary elections in 2024 where Joe Biden overwhelmingly won candidacy? Months later, Biden was declared insufficiently mentally competent to serve.
In my opinion, the more effective way to select leadership democratically is using a randomly selected leadership panel.
Select by random from membership, say, 10 to 25 panelists.
These 12 panelists will be charged to read resumes, perform candidate interviews, make a final hiring decision, set term limits, and perform annual performance reviews.
This technique is otherwise known as “sortition” or “lottocracy”. It is vastly more efficient than an election. Imagining an election with 100 members, imagine each of the 100 members uses 2 hours of their time to make a decision. That’s a net of 200 hours of opportunity cost. With sortition, 10 panelists can devote 20 hours each for the same opportunity cost (10 x 20 hours = 200 hours). Because information gathering and fact finding is a serial task, one person devoting 20 hours to a decision can be far more effective than another devoting only 2 hours.
Sortition more efficiently uses the time of membership and produces higher quality decisions by orders of magnitude.
You could argue that sortition is un-democratic. However, philosophers have associated sortition with democracy for literally thousands of years since the time of Socrates. Understanding that democracy is about co-equal governance, sortition preserves political equality by giving participants equal probability of being selected to serve.
In my opinion elections are a mediocre, inefficient leadership selection tool.
Because elections demand participation from many people, they are very expensive in terms of opportunity cost.
Elections demand that the candidates engage in marketing and campaigning. Candidates who spend time on otherwise wasteful activity (campaigning) are more likely to win.
Because the effective value of voting is usually negative (ie it costs more to participate than you get out of it), participation is oftentimes either rare or mediocre.
To look at recent history for example, how effective was voting for leadership selection? For example, did you know that the Democratic Party actually had primary elections in 2024 where Joe Biden overwhelmingly won candidacy? Months later, Biden was declared insufficiently mentally competent to serve.
In my opinion, the more effective way to select leadership democratically is using a randomly selected leadership panel.
Select by random from membership, say, 10 to 25 panelists.
These 12 panelists will be charged to read resumes, perform candidate interviews, make a final hiring decision, set term limits, and perform annual performance reviews.
This technique is otherwise known as “sortition” or “lottocracy”. It is vastly more efficient than an election. Imagining an election with 100 members, imagine each of the 100 members uses 2 hours of their time to make a decision. That’s a net of 200 hours of opportunity cost. With sortition, 10 panelists can devote 20 hours each for the same opportunity cost (10 x 20 hours = 200 hours). Because information gathering and fact finding is a serial task, one person devoting 20 hours to a decision can be far more effective than another devoting only 2 hours.
Sortition more efficiently uses the time of membership and produces higher quality decisions by orders of magnitude.
You could argue that sortition is un-democratic. However, philosophers have associated sortition with democracy for literally thousands of years since the time of Socrates. Understanding that democracy is about co-equal governance, sortition preserves political equality by giving participants equal probability of being selected to serve.