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Would this be apropriate?
"An extreme form of demarchy is the focus of one episode of the science fiction television series Babylon 5. In the episode an alien race is thrown into chaos when a constitutionally required period of demarchy is reached. During this period, every community is expected to randomly sort themselves into equal numbers of "greens" and "purples" who then fight a revolutionary civil war against each other. The victors become members of a new and dominant political party until the following revolutionary period begins." anonymous
Occupy Wall street Movement's "Consensus Process" as a variation on Demarchy. Demarchy is random, the "Consensus Process" as used by the Occupy Movement may, or may not be random. Tim Kasey on Oct. 17th, 2011. If you can find an earlier citation, I would be willing to concede my credit for this discovery. The "Occupy Wall street" movement may be too new to find anything newer on the subject. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.237.214.100 ( talk) 15:30, 17 October 2011 (UTC)
The examples here are good, but broader than just "Demarchy", which AFAIK is a fairly specific proposal for a political structure. Idealy this page should be split into "Demarchy" and "Sortition" pages which reference each other, the more general stuff ending up under "Sortition".
-- pm67nz
OK, sortition now exists, but I didn't find a convenient home for the old Consensus Conference text from this page:
To organize a Consensus Conference around a particular topic, advertisements are made, seeking local "lay volunteer participants" who are chosen to reflect the demographic makeup of the community and who lack significant prior knowledge or involvement in the topic at hand. The final panel might consist of about 15 people, including homemakers, office and factory workers, and university-educated professionals. The participants engage in a process of study, discussion, and consultation with technical experts that culminates in a public forum and the production of a report summarizing the panel's conclusions about the topic at hand.
"Not only are laypeople elevated to positions of preeminence, but a carefully planned program of reading and discussion culminating in a forum open to the public ensures that they become well-informed prior to rendering judgment,” says Loka Institute director Richard Sclove. "Both the forum and the subsequent judgment, written up in a formal report, become a focus of intense national attention - usually at a time when the issue at hand is due to come before Parliament. Though consensus conferences are hardly meant to dictate public policy, they do give legislators some sense of where the people who elected them might stand on important questions. They can also help industry steer clear of new products or processes that are likely to spark public opposition."
-- pm67nz
To my knowledge no other person has come up with the term "Klerostocracy" except myself. If I am the first, then I release the copyright of the term to the public domain.
One Salient Oversight 05:49, 29 Jun 2004 (UTC)
It would be interesting to see accountability addressed. In a representative democracy, the representatives (supposedly) are accountable. In a direct democracy, the people are accountable to themselves. In a demarchy, how would a random selection be accountable? Just curious. :) -- Stevietheman 23:09, 5 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Klerostocracy isn't exactly the same as Demarchy -- Klerostocracy would mean that decisions are made randomly (who decides the list is another matter), whereas demarchy means that the decisions are made by randomly chosen people.
User:Cagliost 30-08-2004
I'm not happy with the current state of the section titled "problems on the implementation of demarchy," but rather than simply delete the problematic sections, I think I should first annotate it here to explain what I find objectionable. The section in question is as follows:
In short, the passage above seems to make a number of speculative assertions, based on fairly arbitrary assumptions about the type of existing political system in which someone might attempt to implement demarchy. I think it would be good for this article to include some discussion of potential problems with demarchy, but the "problems of implementation" section in its current form doesn't seem to do the job. -- Sheldon Rampton 06:59, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I reworded the BC Citizen's Assembly example to remove the claim that it "used Demarchy". The article has just finished defining demarchy as a "political system without the states or bureaucracies" and "democracy without elections". A group chosen by the government specifically (and solely) to recommend changes to (not the elimination of) elections does not seem to be demarchy, regardless as to whether the group itself may have been chosen by sortition!
Also, some of the later sections of the article seem to be written more as an essay on demarchy, not an encyclopedic article. "Demarchy could also replace...", "An alternative...might be...", "Many politicians make decisions...for their own political gain". A tonal rewrite is probably in order. - David Oberst 20:27, 29 June 2006 (UTC)
As I have noted above, the word "Klerostocracy" was probably invented by myself. As such, there is actually no other reference to this word that I know of outside this article. Since that is the case, I have decided to remove the word from the first sentence of the opening paragraph. I still think the word is valid and the second section of the article about the word should be included. -- One Salient Oversight 03:02, 13 September 2006 (UTC)
It would seem that many of the criticisms of direct demo. are shared by demarchy. A synopsis of or link to criticisms of direct democracy would help address the lack of content in criticism of demarchy.
What exactly is the difference? Should the two articles be combined in some way?
Note that I have sent a merger to Demarchy from Sortition. -- One Salient Oversight ( talk) 04:18, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
Sortition and demarchy should be kept separate. Sortition is a general mechanism for selecting decision makers of some kind, or rather, a mechanism for selecting them from a larger, pre-selected pool. Demarchy is an application, a form of government based on a particular kind of sortition: top-level decision makers selected from a relatively comprehensive pool of citizens. This indicates that the sortition and demarchy articles should be distinct, and suggests that any extended discussions of historical and theoretical applications of sortition to demarchy per se (for example, in Greece) might best be placed in the demarchy article, with only a brief summary here. 66.127.54.23 ( talk) 03:56, 8 August 2010 (UTC)
Sortition is larger than demarchy. This article does a disservice by conflating the two. "Demarchy" is a specific use of sortition. John Burnheim was the one to popularize 'demarchy' and he meant it in a special, limited sense -- citizen juries or commissions. / The whole article 'demarchy' should be much diminished to speak only of that proposal. — Preceding unsigned comment added by MedianMale ( talk • contribs) 16:06, 24 February 2012 (UTC)
I agree totally. The article on demarchy can stay but there should be minimal content on random selection (sortition) within it. Just reference the sortition page. Mikedonovan2011 ( talk) 21:01, 14 August 2014 (UTC)
There seems to be a battle going on. Some users keep pulling the text down, leaving this big wide open white space on the page, and some users (or user) keeps pulling it back up. I think it looks fine the way it is (right now) with the text pulled up. If you want to pull it down again, note your reasons/make your suggestion on this discussion page. Otherwise leave it the way it is. Jiminezwaldorf 02:31, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
As it currently stands this article reads like a promotional piece for Demarchy, and runs afoul of WP:NPOV . The electionering section has line that assert opinions as facts and list the many unproven benefits of Demarchy. I was tempted to remove most of the first three sections because of POV statements, but I thought it would be best to bring it to the talk page for discussion. TonyBallioni ( talk) 23:15, 19 January 2008 (UTC)
I don't think it is, except in a trivial sense. Burnheim wrote:
Democracy is possible only if the decision-makers are a representative sample of the people concerned. I shall call a polity based on this principle a demarchy. “Demarchy” is an archaic word which Hayek used to describe the view he advocated in Law, Legislation and Liberty (3 vols., London, Routledge and Kegan Paul: 1973, 1976, 1979). How ever, since he did not employ it persistently, it has not passed into current use and I feel justified in attempting to appropriate it.
In addition to anarchy there is monarchy, oligarchy, matriarchy etc. Demarchy literally means "people-rule", more or less the same as democracy, and would have that meaning even if the word anarchy didn't exist. Anocracy on the other hand, would mean something quite different ("no-power"?). In short demarchy is derived from dem- and -archy, rather than democracy and anarchy.
Unless of course anyone can come up with a relevant citation from either Burnheim or Hayek. Pm67nz ( talk) 05:54, 28 May 2008 (UTC)
I have noticed that the Sortition article has taken a life of its own and is now pretty much an article on Demarchy. Just to reiterate:
1. Sortition is a process of random selection.
2. Demarchy is a system of government whereby representatives are selected by sortition.
In other words, sortition can be applied beyond the world of politics (eg lotto) while Demarchy is a form of politics based upon sortition. Much of the Sortition article needs to be moved over to the Demarchy article.
-- One Salient Oversight ( talk) 04:25, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
I have cleaned up the intro a little to first, aim for some neutrality and secondly to distance demarchy from a system of voting for representation with a system designed to overcome problems inherent in democracy. As a system it is either that practices in the past, or an unimplemented theory.
I don't think sortition should be merged with demarchy. Sortition is used in functions outside of national or regional government.
The article needs some serious cleaning. It is littered with personal opinion, wild theory and almost no references. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Shabidoo ( talk • contribs) 17:37, 2 June 2010 (UTC)
I agree with Mindstalk, Pm67nz, Shabidoo, and 207.6.224.49. I find that I made the same points independently above, and I am (boldly) removing the proposed-merger templates. 66.127.54.23 ( talk) 03:57, 8 August 2010 (UTC)
I would like to again propose to merge the two articles. Demarchy seems to have been coined by Hayek for something totally unrelated to what this article is about. Later, Burnheim used it for his proposal which includes the dissolution of the state, sortition and many other components. Again not what this article mainly about. At the time I found this article the only places where the term was used to describe "any political system which uses sortition as its main selection mechanism", was the website of Newid (now unfortunately owned by cybersquatters). All other sources using the term this way, as far as I can tell, were either inspired by this wikipedia article or by Newid (let me know if you know otherwise). What is more important, there is quite a bit of reasearch about what in this article is called demarchy (see for example [1]), but nobody ever uses this term, other than very rarely to refer to Burnheims proposal.
Even if we wanted to accept the definition, which I'm convinced is a mistake, it is enough to look at the two articles to see they are really covering the same ground. I suggest to try to create e new article out of the two and naming the result sortition. If it is then discovered that it would really become too long, we can always decide to put some section of it in their own article. I think the reason sortition got initially taken out was that it is a much more well understood concept, so certainly deserves its own article, only probably it just have been renamed. fela ( talk) 18:02, 8 December 2012 (UTC)
I agree with the comments of TonyBallioni and Shabidoo. I've added the "primary sources" template, since most or all of the references come from proponents, rather than what Wikipedia is based on - secondary sources ( WP:PRIMARY).
I also moved the "original research" template to the top, since much of the article is unreferenced, not just the section that had it, and it is an article-scope template. ★NealMcB★ ( talk) 16:19, 27 November 2010 (UTC)
The third paragraph ends "Candidates were almost always male, Greek, educated citizens holding a minimum of wealth and status." but it's not clear whether these citizens were generally those holding *the* minimum of wealth and status (i.e. least wealthy and of lowest status) or those holding at least a minimum of wealth and status (i.e. some group consisting of the most wealthy and those of highest status). The latter seems more likely, but that's all the more reason to mention it if it really is the former. Lordandmaker ( talk) 20:59, 10 December 2011 (UTC)
...not so sure about this. As I recall, the government was described as having a technologically advanced form of direct democracy - a situation in which the figurehead President becomes ultimately somewhat irrelevant, so they opted for a random choice. Thoughts? -- wwwwolf ( barks/ growls) 11:56, 10 May 2012 (UTC)
I knew this system under the name stochocracy. (As a side note, this is in fact in my view real democracy, as opposed to our theoretical system actually beeing aristocracy, government by elites, best & elected people --but this is another story.)
The point is that both terms are mostly synonym,as mentionned in the other article, thus why do both articles exist? Also note that en. article "demarchy" in fact correlates with "stochocracy" in other languages such as fr ( fr:stochocratie). What about merging the 2 article into "demarchy" (as the article is more developped and the term seems better known --or less unknown-- in en.), and redirect from " stochocracy"?
denis 'spir' ( talk) 20:31, 29 July 2013 (UTC)
![]() | This article was nominated for merging with Sortition on 2012-12-08. The result of the discussion was merge. |
There wasn't anything remotely close to a consensus on this (two are for and two are against). Why was a pop decision like this made? Very bad call here. I would have voted against if I knew there was a heads up. -- Shabidoo | Talk 20:30, 27 December 2014 (UTC)
![]() | The contents of the Demarchy page were merged into Sortition on 2014-12-27 and it now redirects there. For the contribution history and old versions of the merged article please see its history. |
![]() | Find sources: Google ( books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
![]() | This redirect does not require a rating on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||
|
Userbox
|
Would this be apropriate?
"An extreme form of demarchy is the focus of one episode of the science fiction television series Babylon 5. In the episode an alien race is thrown into chaos when a constitutionally required period of demarchy is reached. During this period, every community is expected to randomly sort themselves into equal numbers of "greens" and "purples" who then fight a revolutionary civil war against each other. The victors become members of a new and dominant political party until the following revolutionary period begins." anonymous
Occupy Wall street Movement's "Consensus Process" as a variation on Demarchy. Demarchy is random, the "Consensus Process" as used by the Occupy Movement may, or may not be random. Tim Kasey on Oct. 17th, 2011. If you can find an earlier citation, I would be willing to concede my credit for this discovery. The "Occupy Wall street" movement may be too new to find anything newer on the subject. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.237.214.100 ( talk) 15:30, 17 October 2011 (UTC)
The examples here are good, but broader than just "Demarchy", which AFAIK is a fairly specific proposal for a political structure. Idealy this page should be split into "Demarchy" and "Sortition" pages which reference each other, the more general stuff ending up under "Sortition".
-- pm67nz
OK, sortition now exists, but I didn't find a convenient home for the old Consensus Conference text from this page:
To organize a Consensus Conference around a particular topic, advertisements are made, seeking local "lay volunteer participants" who are chosen to reflect the demographic makeup of the community and who lack significant prior knowledge or involvement in the topic at hand. The final panel might consist of about 15 people, including homemakers, office and factory workers, and university-educated professionals. The participants engage in a process of study, discussion, and consultation with technical experts that culminates in a public forum and the production of a report summarizing the panel's conclusions about the topic at hand.
"Not only are laypeople elevated to positions of preeminence, but a carefully planned program of reading and discussion culminating in a forum open to the public ensures that they become well-informed prior to rendering judgment,” says Loka Institute director Richard Sclove. "Both the forum and the subsequent judgment, written up in a formal report, become a focus of intense national attention - usually at a time when the issue at hand is due to come before Parliament. Though consensus conferences are hardly meant to dictate public policy, they do give legislators some sense of where the people who elected them might stand on important questions. They can also help industry steer clear of new products or processes that are likely to spark public opposition."
-- pm67nz
To my knowledge no other person has come up with the term "Klerostocracy" except myself. If I am the first, then I release the copyright of the term to the public domain.
One Salient Oversight 05:49, 29 Jun 2004 (UTC)
It would be interesting to see accountability addressed. In a representative democracy, the representatives (supposedly) are accountable. In a direct democracy, the people are accountable to themselves. In a demarchy, how would a random selection be accountable? Just curious. :) -- Stevietheman 23:09, 5 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Klerostocracy isn't exactly the same as Demarchy -- Klerostocracy would mean that decisions are made randomly (who decides the list is another matter), whereas demarchy means that the decisions are made by randomly chosen people.
User:Cagliost 30-08-2004
I'm not happy with the current state of the section titled "problems on the implementation of demarchy," but rather than simply delete the problematic sections, I think I should first annotate it here to explain what I find objectionable. The section in question is as follows:
In short, the passage above seems to make a number of speculative assertions, based on fairly arbitrary assumptions about the type of existing political system in which someone might attempt to implement demarchy. I think it would be good for this article to include some discussion of potential problems with demarchy, but the "problems of implementation" section in its current form doesn't seem to do the job. -- Sheldon Rampton 06:59, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I reworded the BC Citizen's Assembly example to remove the claim that it "used Demarchy". The article has just finished defining demarchy as a "political system without the states or bureaucracies" and "democracy without elections". A group chosen by the government specifically (and solely) to recommend changes to (not the elimination of) elections does not seem to be demarchy, regardless as to whether the group itself may have been chosen by sortition!
Also, some of the later sections of the article seem to be written more as an essay on demarchy, not an encyclopedic article. "Demarchy could also replace...", "An alternative...might be...", "Many politicians make decisions...for their own political gain". A tonal rewrite is probably in order. - David Oberst 20:27, 29 June 2006 (UTC)
As I have noted above, the word "Klerostocracy" was probably invented by myself. As such, there is actually no other reference to this word that I know of outside this article. Since that is the case, I have decided to remove the word from the first sentence of the opening paragraph. I still think the word is valid and the second section of the article about the word should be included. -- One Salient Oversight 03:02, 13 September 2006 (UTC)
It would seem that many of the criticisms of direct demo. are shared by demarchy. A synopsis of or link to criticisms of direct democracy would help address the lack of content in criticism of demarchy.
What exactly is the difference? Should the two articles be combined in some way?
Note that I have sent a merger to Demarchy from Sortition. -- One Salient Oversight ( talk) 04:18, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
Sortition and demarchy should be kept separate. Sortition is a general mechanism for selecting decision makers of some kind, or rather, a mechanism for selecting them from a larger, pre-selected pool. Demarchy is an application, a form of government based on a particular kind of sortition: top-level decision makers selected from a relatively comprehensive pool of citizens. This indicates that the sortition and demarchy articles should be distinct, and suggests that any extended discussions of historical and theoretical applications of sortition to demarchy per se (for example, in Greece) might best be placed in the demarchy article, with only a brief summary here. 66.127.54.23 ( talk) 03:56, 8 August 2010 (UTC)
Sortition is larger than demarchy. This article does a disservice by conflating the two. "Demarchy" is a specific use of sortition. John Burnheim was the one to popularize 'demarchy' and he meant it in a special, limited sense -- citizen juries or commissions. / The whole article 'demarchy' should be much diminished to speak only of that proposal. — Preceding unsigned comment added by MedianMale ( talk • contribs) 16:06, 24 February 2012 (UTC)
I agree totally. The article on demarchy can stay but there should be minimal content on random selection (sortition) within it. Just reference the sortition page. Mikedonovan2011 ( talk) 21:01, 14 August 2014 (UTC)
There seems to be a battle going on. Some users keep pulling the text down, leaving this big wide open white space on the page, and some users (or user) keeps pulling it back up. I think it looks fine the way it is (right now) with the text pulled up. If you want to pull it down again, note your reasons/make your suggestion on this discussion page. Otherwise leave it the way it is. Jiminezwaldorf 02:31, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
As it currently stands this article reads like a promotional piece for Demarchy, and runs afoul of WP:NPOV . The electionering section has line that assert opinions as facts and list the many unproven benefits of Demarchy. I was tempted to remove most of the first three sections because of POV statements, but I thought it would be best to bring it to the talk page for discussion. TonyBallioni ( talk) 23:15, 19 January 2008 (UTC)
I don't think it is, except in a trivial sense. Burnheim wrote:
Democracy is possible only if the decision-makers are a representative sample of the people concerned. I shall call a polity based on this principle a demarchy. “Demarchy” is an archaic word which Hayek used to describe the view he advocated in Law, Legislation and Liberty (3 vols., London, Routledge and Kegan Paul: 1973, 1976, 1979). How ever, since he did not employ it persistently, it has not passed into current use and I feel justified in attempting to appropriate it.
In addition to anarchy there is monarchy, oligarchy, matriarchy etc. Demarchy literally means "people-rule", more or less the same as democracy, and would have that meaning even if the word anarchy didn't exist. Anocracy on the other hand, would mean something quite different ("no-power"?). In short demarchy is derived from dem- and -archy, rather than democracy and anarchy.
Unless of course anyone can come up with a relevant citation from either Burnheim or Hayek. Pm67nz ( talk) 05:54, 28 May 2008 (UTC)
I have noticed that the Sortition article has taken a life of its own and is now pretty much an article on Demarchy. Just to reiterate:
1. Sortition is a process of random selection.
2. Demarchy is a system of government whereby representatives are selected by sortition.
In other words, sortition can be applied beyond the world of politics (eg lotto) while Demarchy is a form of politics based upon sortition. Much of the Sortition article needs to be moved over to the Demarchy article.
-- One Salient Oversight ( talk) 04:25, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
I have cleaned up the intro a little to first, aim for some neutrality and secondly to distance demarchy from a system of voting for representation with a system designed to overcome problems inherent in democracy. As a system it is either that practices in the past, or an unimplemented theory.
I don't think sortition should be merged with demarchy. Sortition is used in functions outside of national or regional government.
The article needs some serious cleaning. It is littered with personal opinion, wild theory and almost no references. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Shabidoo ( talk • contribs) 17:37, 2 June 2010 (UTC)
I agree with Mindstalk, Pm67nz, Shabidoo, and 207.6.224.49. I find that I made the same points independently above, and I am (boldly) removing the proposed-merger templates. 66.127.54.23 ( talk) 03:57, 8 August 2010 (UTC)
I would like to again propose to merge the two articles. Demarchy seems to have been coined by Hayek for something totally unrelated to what this article is about. Later, Burnheim used it for his proposal which includes the dissolution of the state, sortition and many other components. Again not what this article mainly about. At the time I found this article the only places where the term was used to describe "any political system which uses sortition as its main selection mechanism", was the website of Newid (now unfortunately owned by cybersquatters). All other sources using the term this way, as far as I can tell, were either inspired by this wikipedia article or by Newid (let me know if you know otherwise). What is more important, there is quite a bit of reasearch about what in this article is called demarchy (see for example [1]), but nobody ever uses this term, other than very rarely to refer to Burnheims proposal.
Even if we wanted to accept the definition, which I'm convinced is a mistake, it is enough to look at the two articles to see they are really covering the same ground. I suggest to try to create e new article out of the two and naming the result sortition. If it is then discovered that it would really become too long, we can always decide to put some section of it in their own article. I think the reason sortition got initially taken out was that it is a much more well understood concept, so certainly deserves its own article, only probably it just have been renamed. fela ( talk) 18:02, 8 December 2012 (UTC)
I agree with the comments of TonyBallioni and Shabidoo. I've added the "primary sources" template, since most or all of the references come from proponents, rather than what Wikipedia is based on - secondary sources ( WP:PRIMARY).
I also moved the "original research" template to the top, since much of the article is unreferenced, not just the section that had it, and it is an article-scope template. ★NealMcB★ ( talk) 16:19, 27 November 2010 (UTC)
The third paragraph ends "Candidates were almost always male, Greek, educated citizens holding a minimum of wealth and status." but it's not clear whether these citizens were generally those holding *the* minimum of wealth and status (i.e. least wealthy and of lowest status) or those holding at least a minimum of wealth and status (i.e. some group consisting of the most wealthy and those of highest status). The latter seems more likely, but that's all the more reason to mention it if it really is the former. Lordandmaker ( talk) 20:59, 10 December 2011 (UTC)
...not so sure about this. As I recall, the government was described as having a technologically advanced form of direct democracy - a situation in which the figurehead President becomes ultimately somewhat irrelevant, so they opted for a random choice. Thoughts? -- wwwwolf ( barks/ growls) 11:56, 10 May 2012 (UTC)
I knew this system under the name stochocracy. (As a side note, this is in fact in my view real democracy, as opposed to our theoretical system actually beeing aristocracy, government by elites, best & elected people --but this is another story.)
The point is that both terms are mostly synonym,as mentionned in the other article, thus why do both articles exist? Also note that en. article "demarchy" in fact correlates with "stochocracy" in other languages such as fr ( fr:stochocratie). What about merging the 2 article into "demarchy" (as the article is more developped and the term seems better known --or less unknown-- in en.), and redirect from " stochocracy"?
denis 'spir' ( talk) 20:31, 29 July 2013 (UTC)
![]() | This article was nominated for merging with Sortition on 2012-12-08. The result of the discussion was merge. |
There wasn't anything remotely close to a consensus on this (two are for and two are against). Why was a pop decision like this made? Very bad call here. I would have voted against if I knew there was a heads up. -- Shabidoo | Talk 20:30, 27 December 2014 (UTC)