There are indeed ways to design it poorly; I’ll just point again to juries to say that we know how to do it competently. I’ll rephrase the objections in terms of juries (but please note the quotes are from a hyperbolic strawman, and not literally what you said. I hope my replies to the strawman are still useful).
“People who don’t care about the particular law/case will refuse to join a jury and they’ll all get stuck in endless deliberation” - being on the jury is not always optional! While there are strategies to avoid being a juror, the large majority of folks don’t use them. People get real nervous about perjury. Also, we have several levers of control here. Congress salaries+benefits aren’t bad, getting an important position might be akin to winning a lottery. Many folks skip voting day because they feel uninformed or are required to work, but we educate jurists and require companies to give time off for their service. Finally, if a jury is stuck we call a new one; by random draw we’ll eventually get a lot of all people from one side or the other. Gridlock is only ever stochastic.
“People could bribe the juries for the outcomes they want!” - extremely risky, the state knows who is on the jury at the same time as everyone else, predicting it ahead of time is impossible, and we strongly regulate the interactions of juries + invested parties once they’re chosen. Note that we can assign political decision bodies to fairly narrow issues, so managing this at scale isn’t so difficult.
There are indeed ways to design it poorly; I’ll just point again to juries to say that we know how to do it competently. I’ll rephrase the objections in terms of juries (but please note the quotes are from a hyperbolic strawman, and not literally what you said. I hope my replies to the strawman are still useful).
“People who don’t care about the particular law/case will refuse to join a jury and they’ll all get stuck in endless deliberation” - being on the jury is not always optional! While there are strategies to avoid being a juror, the large majority of folks don’t use them. People get real nervous about perjury. Also, we have several levers of control here. Congress salaries+benefits aren’t bad, getting an important position might be akin to winning a lottery. Many folks skip voting day because they feel uninformed or are required to work, but we educate jurists and require companies to give time off for their service. Finally, if a jury is stuck we call a new one; by random draw we’ll eventually get a lot of all people from one side or the other. Gridlock is only ever stochastic.
“People could bribe the juries for the outcomes they want!” - extremely risky, the state knows who is on the jury at the same time as everyone else, predicting it ahead of time is impossible, and we strongly regulate the interactions of juries + invested parties once they’re chosen. Note that we can assign political decision bodies to fairly narrow issues, so managing this at scale isn’t so difficult.