지역정치와 다양성: 직접민주주의 제도로서 추첨제의 활용 가능성 연구

Abstract

Local decentralization or autonomous decentralization is one of top priorities of the incumbent government for innovation and maine issue of amendment of the Constitution, and at the same time is likely to become an significant driving force in changing the future of Korean society. Currently, suggested are proposals such as referendum, residents' initiative, and recall of elected officials as legal and institutional reform tasks for practical decentralization. These proposals have in common that they pursue direct democracy as a way of operating local governments' democracy. However, sortition, which is regarded as the most direct democratic system in local politics, is being excluded from discussion on institutional autonomous decentralization. This paper addressed issues on prejudice over sortition through historical analysis and explained why it is necessary to use sortition to deal with the problems of representative democracy. Misleading about sortition stems from general misunderstanding of direct democracy which is in line with the historical process that the representative system in the U.S and France in the 18th century has been widely perceived as representative democracy. As election is recognized as a universal and democratic way of selecting representatives of residents, sortition is understood as a ‘lottery’ to some extent while losing its historical rationality. Meanwhile, sortition is a system that institutionally ensures the core of democracy called ‘rule by the people.’ We have to seriously consider introducing a system such as sortition that is faithful to the nature of democracy so that we cop with the failure of election and representative democracy which is called as ‘failure of representatives.’ In the past, sortition was used to select representatives of citizens eligible for election in Athens, Rome, Venezia, Florence, and so on. Until now, it is a democratic system to be used in local politics through realistic and practical applications. Local decentralization should be realized in a way of reflecting regional diversities in local politics by taking into account of the reality of local politics. The lowest level of local government of the minimum administrative unit should be a fundamental unit of measuring local diversity. For the more, driving force behind the diversity should come from direct participation of residents. A political system without direct participation of residents concerned might become a political device repressing diversities of democratic system. That is the reason why sortition, which guarantees direct exercise of political power by residents, should be considered as an option to realize and develop diversities of local politics.