Decades of legal challenges, campaign finance reforms, and transparency laws have attempted to reduce the influence of money in politics. Yet, election campaigns in major democracies continue to break spending records year after year.
The problem is that as long as winning power requires running multi-million-dollar campaigns, politicians will remain dependent on major donors, political action committees, and powerful lobbying groups.
We keep trying to restrict how campaign money is spent. But what if the problem isn’t how campaigns are funded, but the fact that we have campaigns in the first place?
If government representatives were selected by lot—drawing random names from the public registry—the need for campaign fundraising would vanish overnight. You cannot bribe, donate to, or lobby a representative who hasn’t been chosen yet and won’t be standing for re-election.
Sortition ends the ‘corruption of dependency’ by default, shifting power back to ordinary people who have no career political ambitions to protect.
This approach to eliminating institutional corruption is explored in detail in the book, The Answer by Kizzi Nkwocha.
Is it possible to take money out of politics without changing how we choose our representatives?
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