House of Lords

[sobrique]

So, one of the things that I was pondering, after the last time the 'appointing people to the House of Lords' came up.
The House of Lords, to my mind, serves a very valuable purpose - in much the same way as the 'tenure' system does. It allows people to stand for something, without having to worry about losing the next popularity contest.
Which is why it's _always_ going to be flawed if it's done by election, or by appointment from Parliament.

So why not make that a 'national lottery' instead? Same selection criteria as jury duty, although maybe with ability to opt out?
'Winners' are appointed, and receive a 'tenured' seat in the house of Lords.

It'll mean you'll get all manner of people, from all walks of life in the mix.... but isn't that really what's needed, when acting as a feedback mechanism on legislation? That you've a representative sample of the population, who are able to say 'hang on a minute'?

Comments

[sobrique.livejournal.com]

In a sense, monarchy is government by random selection.
The heir is such by their birth, not by ... any other redeeming features, such as being competent.

It's worked at least moderately well in a lot of places. It's not perfect perhaps, but I think gives a degree of weight to the notion that anyone can be trained into the role.

I think it's a necessary thing to have leadership in your country who _aren't_ catering to popularity contests. Democracy _is_ fundamentally flawed, thanks to the tyranny of the majority.
You need a balancing mechanism, and - to my mind - that's to get someone who's randomly picked to apply oversight.

[chess]

One of the big problems with monarchy is you generally only get one data point, so when they happen to be any good it's fine, but if they're bad it's awful.

I would expect random-government-selection to work better when you have a larger number of data points so that you are more likely to get some decent people from a wide variety of definitions of 'decent', and they can compensate for the bad eggs.

Also, royalty have certain properties (like being trained from birth for the role, and always being of a high social class background) which random selection over the population at adulthood wouldn't have.

If you didn't also have a conventional body of elected geographical representatives you would probably also need some kind of constraints on the randomness to ensure a more representative sample (like 'make sure you pick at least one person from each constituency' at least, as geography is still quite important to many people, and maybe some kind of social-class / income-level banding also).