Taking Virtual Representation Seriously

Abstract

and also the student and faculty organizers of what turned out to be a genuinely terrific conference at William & Mary, which led to this Volume, and the participants in the roundtable discussion on "Redistricting After Evenwel: The Prospects for One Person, One Vote" at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, where I presented an early draft. Thanks are due, as well, to some particularly excellent research assistants:

The rationality of qualified lotteries

“…To make use of this insulation, it may be rational to deliberately generate indeterminacy by lotteries (Duxbury, 2002). Examples are randomly selected juries in the judicial system, citizen's forums in representative democracies (Fishkin, 1988), random assignments of members of Congress to congressional committees (as suggested by Thaler, 1985), or distribution of scarce and indivisible goods or rights such as study places or hunting licenses (Heinzmann, 2020). In all these cases indeterminacy reduces the role of human agency.…”

“…Frey (1969) was one of the first to discuss aleatoric procedures in this vein. Later, Fishkin (1988) initiated the so‐called “deliberative democracy” in which randomly drawn citizen's forums discuss political issues. Buchstein (2009) proposed a second chamber of parliament in the European Union—a “House of Lots”—to achieve a broader representation of citizens 13 .…”