Hybrid between sortition and technocracy

General
1

This is a half serious half baked idea:

In many country you have the lower house (parliament) and the upper house (senate)

  • What if the upper house is a statistically significant but randomly selected group of citizens.

  • What if the lower house is not one house, but multiple houses specialising in different fields by domain experts?

Upper house (Get in via lottery)

The upper house is selected by lots, but much like normal senate, after each period of time, half the upper house is replaced by new batch of random citizens.

Lower house (Get in via Job Interview)

The lower house is not selected by lots. Instead it is though a corporate interview like process. The aim is that for each different lower houses, the participants are to be selected based on competence on the topic (e.g. economist for the economic planning lower house).

The interview panel make up is based on the role of that house, as well as ordinary citizens. An engineering interview panel will consist of senior engineer representatives as well as ordinary citizens in equal numbers.

The shortlisting process will be much like applying for government jobs as a graduate for a large corporation. You submit your resume, then do a psychometry test, then maybe a group interview, then a final individual interview.

The short-list from the interviewing process is then voted on via election. (Alternatively have the upperhouse accept or request a review of each final candidate.)

This process would actually remove the need for party affiliation entirely (though nothing stopping you from being in one), since you do not need expensive advertising campaign or media connections or influence to demonstrate your competence.

Summary

So various lower houses will do their own drafting of laws that is specific to their jurisdiction and then send it up to the upper house which would then be accepted or rejected or request to be reviewed.

LOWER HOUSE        :          UPPER HOUSE       :      LAW

[ Defence   ]  ----|
                   |
[ Economics ]  ----|
		   |----> [ CITIZEN ASSEMBLY ] --->  [ LAW DATABASE ]
[ Health    ]  ----|
		   |
[ etc ...   ]  ----|

All in all, I think the whole concept is to get close to something like a Non-partisan_democracy

Mirror of topic in reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/democracy/comments/4jeumi/brainstorming_hybrid_between_sortition_and/