Description du projet
Méthodes statistiques avancées pour l’étude des loteries politiques
Récemment, des loteries politiques ont été utilisées pour sélectionner au hasard des citoyens chargés de prendre des décisions sur des questions polarisantes, telles que la désaffection, la réforme de l’avortement et le changement climatique. Ces loteries ont permis un meilleur accès aux minorités et ont contribué à stabiliser les conflits politiques grâce à des systèmes délibératifs solides. Cependant, malgré leur importance potentielle, ces expériences naturelles de loteries n’ont pas fait l’objet d’études approfondies. Pour combler cette lacune, le projet POLLOT, financé par le CER, compilera un ensemble de données comparatives sur ces loteries politiques, les législateurs, les activités parlementaires et les bureaux à travers l’Europe. L’équipe analysera également les décisions prises par des groupes désignés de manière aléatoire dans le cadre de chaque expérience naturelle, en s’inspirant des expériences passées lors de la démocratisation en Europe et en organisant de nouvelles loteries dans les assemblées de citoyens en ligne d’aujourd’hui.
Objectif
Political lotteries randomly select individuals to take a political decision. Recently, lotteries have put citizens together to find solutions to today’s contentious, polarizing issues, such as disaffection, abortion reform, and climate change. What explains their varied success? Lotteries equalise opportunity of access to all. Random chance can strengthen those otherwise in the minority. A wider variety of opinions can also improve debate and reduce polarization. The ideal, but unfeasible experiment would randomly vary group characteristics, assign real political power, and observe effects over time. Instead, this project draws lessons from past experiments during democratisation in Europe - whereby legislators were randomly assigned to groups within legislatures - and experiments with lotteries in online citizens’ assemblies today. Lotteries ensured that minorities participated in deliberation in small groups, and were assigned influential legislative tasks. These natural experiments with lotteries have never before been investigated using modern statistical methods, and their role in opening access to politics is almost entirely absent from empirical studies of democratisation. This project compiles a novel, comparative dataset of these political lotteries, legislators, parliamentary activity and offices from different European countries. Next, the decisions of randomly assigned groups will be analysed within each natural experiment. A theory of debate in randomly drawn groups reducing polarization will be verified by cross-national comparison across experimental contexts, and in a present-day experiment that allows controlled conditions. By opening access to minorities and contributing to strong, deliberative party and committee systems, lotteries stabilised political conflict. They have the potential to do so again today. The research will help inform evidence-based innovation of our representative democracies, as experiments with lotteries have already begun.
Champ scientifique
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Thème(s)
Régime de financement
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsInstitution d’accueil
75341 Paris
France