I will not bet in this market myself.
Edit: I changed phrasing slightly after bets were placed, to emphasize that resolution will be YES even if one single government would be chosen via sortition. If this is opposite to the original understanding of participants, I will refund.
Resolution details
This market will resolve as YES if before 2060, any general elections for government (e.g. parliamentary or presidential) within the European Union or United States are replaced by sortition. It does not matter in which precise form sortition is introduced, as long as:
The chosen members serve a governing role
Their selection is currently (August 2023) done via elections.
The new process qualifies as sortition (see Wikipedia link below for more details).
If no example of such a change of process can be demonstrated within the European Union or United States, the market resolves NO.
Some edge cases:
If sortition is introduced temporarily (e.g. as part of an experiment), the market will still resolve YES, regardless of whether the process change is rolled back at a later stage.
If sortition is planned, but never truly implemented, this will not prompt a YES resolution.
If governments decide to set up advisory councils or other committee forms that are constructed using a sortition process, this would not count as the selected individuals being government officials. Such an example would therefore not prompt a YES resolution.
If the European Union and/or United States cease to exist, the question applies to whichever political unities have replaced them on their current territories.
Background reasoning
Amidst growing concerns about contemporary liberal democracies, sortition has repeatedly been offered as a way to resolve polarisation and factionalism among representatives, while simultaneously decreasing the gap between government and governed. As democracies attempt to adapt to the 21st century, it is likely some will experiment with new forms of choosing their officials.
Further reading
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
https://www.amazon.com/Against-Elections-David-Van-Reybrouck/dp/1847924220
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/21/opinion/elections-democracy.html
Related market
Related questions
within the European Union or United States
Firstly, this specification makes the question is misleading as the question implies that this applies to any national government. Secondly why these places specifically? If you want to exclude autocracies you could also specify any country above a certain threshold on the EIU democracy index. And if you want to exclude a bunch of micronations you could also specify for countries of a minimum population.
@parkerfriedland Point taken on the title not covering this well. Hopefully participants choose to read the description.
Neither of your reasons is the one in mind. I put the constraint in because I myself am not aware of all the currently existing processes and I'd hate to resolve this as YES because of a trivial case that existed even before the creation of this market.
My interest is in liberal democracies that are experiencing legitimacy crises and that's something I roughly cover by this demarcation. In addition, the value of prediction markets corresponds to the informational diversity of their participants and my current impression is that EU/US is overrepresented here. I may be wrong about this.
Please feel free to create a market with a larger scope!
@parkerfriedland It took me a while, but I edited the title as you made a sensible point about that and I noticed Manifold is pretty clean about communicating such edits.
How large would the group of people from which the selection is made need to be?
@lukres This market is agnostic to these particulars, although I personally consider them to be very important to the efficacy of the method. The lottery element must be explicit in the process of selecting officials, however (e.g. a political party choosing to draw straws on who takes a seat after elections does not count) and it must replace an existing election process, as the description specifies.
@Vincent I put up a minor edit, but it might still be relevant to your bet. Please let me know if you need mana back :)