The age-old complaints about politics barely seem to change: Politicians are only in it for the power and advantage, they’re prone to exploit their office for personal gain, they’re partisan hacks or lifelong establishment figures who play the game with little regard for the well-being of their constituents. The list could go on and on. So how do you address such seemingly structural problems as recurrent corruption?

You randomly select at least some of your legislators from a nation’s population. That’s what the Athenians did in one of the first iterations of institutional democracy — and its what some modern day scientists say could help improve the democratic process.

From MIT’s Technology Review:

In practice, there are numerous examples of democratic systems that are rife with corruption or paralysed by disagreement. Even in benign parliaments, it is often an open question as to whether the work they do really benefits the majority of people.

Today, Alessandro Pluchino and amici at the Universitá di Catania in Italy say there is a better way. They have modelled the behaviour of a two-party parliament and examined how it changes as randomly selected independent legislators are introduced into the system. Their counterintuitive conclusion is that randomly selected legislators always improves the performance of parliament and that it is possible to determine the optimal number of independents at which a parliament works best.

The researchers built upon a behavior model built by Carlo Cipolla, which rates people as acting for some combination of personal gain, societal good, or the opposites. People’s behavior typically fell in one of these quadrants:

And you can guess where modern day politicians tend to land. So, to even out the distribution, and to see if adding randomly-selected politicians to the mix would improve the situation, the scientists ran some tests. They created “an agent -based model of a parliament of 500 individuals made up of two parties. The members of a party all lie within a circle of certain size, centred at a point which represents their average behaviour. Independents can sit anywhere in the diagram and are introduced at random,” MIT explains. Every member selected can do the two things modern politicians do (at the core): vote, and introduce acts.

The researchers wanted to know from a mathematical perspective, if adding a random distribution of ‘politicians’ would increase the number of acts that got passed — and if those acts were socially beneficial. So, the “measure of performance is the number of acts passed multiplied by their average social benefit.” They expected to see the number of socially-beneficial acts passed increase as more ‘random politicians’ were added to the mix. And sure enough:

“They ran their model for various distributions of power in the two party system and found that in every case, adding random legislators improves the performance of parliament.”

There you have it. This sounds kind of far-fetched, but it’s actually a really good idea. And as mentioned earlier, it’s far from a new one. Imagine if it was a civic duty to act as legislator, if you were randomly selected to do so (like a draft for governance) — and left office after a term without having to cater to corporate interests to drum up campaign finances for reelection. It would give us a way to sidestep the tightening grip that corporations and the wealthy have on our politics. Sure, there would be some lazy, incompetent people selected who would act in their own self-interest or against the societal good. But as Pluchino’s work shows, they’re offset by smarter ones, willing to work for the good of society.

And it would be a truer representation of democracy, and a respite from a system that continues to favor wealthy white males with corporate or political ties, despite a fast-changing demographic. Perhaps it could indeed reduce corruption, and stymie the influence of lobbyists — maybe embracing a process that appears its opposite could salvage a truer democracy.

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Photo: Izik via Flickr/CC BY