A model I think is interesting, though I don't favor it as a good fit for an international field / movement like all of EA: When talking to EA groups in Nordic countries (EA Norway, etc), I was surprised at the extent of membership and elections as the basic means of operating any group there. If I understand right, members pay a fee to be members, and the expectation is that everyone will travel to an in-person annual meeting to vote for various leadership roles. This helps address the question of who's involved enough to get a vote.

Coming from a geographically big country, it kind of blew my mind that everyone turns up in person at one location to vote. ("Surely you did it online during covid?" "Not in Sweden!") It's one way of making membership a bit costly, but it does favor members in the city where the voting is held.

I also notice that when I talk to people in some roles there, like the elected community contact person, they often don't have much experience because they were elected less than a year ago.

People with more understanding of this system would probably have more to say about its pros and cons.
 

Some Positions In EA Leadership Should Be Elected

We should also think about why we want democracy. Intra-communal democracy is not an inherent good, and indeed, the EA community is not here for the sake of the EA community, but rather to have positive impact. However, we might think that 'democratising' or whatever we might want to call it may play important ethical or epistemic roles when we think a) diversifying viewpoints is important and b) justification and accountability are important. However, I think none of these are best served by elections. 

For diversifying viewpoints, we may want this because of the epistemic situation we are in might suggest to us that a more 'diverse' (this may only be along certain axes eg expertise, assumptions, political viewpoint/party) decision making body is necessary. I certainly think this is true in a fair few areas EA functions in. However, it isn't clear that elections, which often focus on popularity or consensus actually do that. Maybe we'd be better off doing some sort of deliberately diverse expert elicitation panel, or simply caring more about (relevant forms of) diversity in our hiring. For example, perhaps grantmakers should be making an effort to hire people with experience in conservative policy circles. Or maybe we simply do this by doing CB efforts to have a more pluralsitic 'community'; again. I notbaly think EA (or certain parts of it, for example AI) have got MUCH MUCH better at this the last few years, such that its not actually obvious how much concerted effort is needed. 

Accountability may be another reason. EAs tie lots of our identity to this community, and also much of our professional reputation. As such, we might want to be able to hold representatives accountable. However, it isn't obvious that we can't trust well constructed boards to do this, for example. Otherwise, I could imagine a scenario where a certain designated body (say, all people who have attended 2 EAGs or been employed at a certain list of organisations etc) can petition to remove someone from important leadership roles, and if a supermajority votes to remove them then they are removed. But this doesn't really seem like an election. 

More generally, it just isn't clear to me what sorts of roles we want elected. The two main levers of power in EA are a) money and b) prestige. A lot of prestige is generated by who speaks at EAGs, appears on the 80000 hours podcast etc, and its really unlikely that having an elected person making these decisions would actually change very much, or encourage the sorts of outcomes wanted. Maybe there are better ways to harness the collective wisdom of the community in these decisions, but I think they are unlikely to look like elections. And for grantmaking, there also just appears minimal reason to do elections. The main issue with regards to grantmaking in this vicinity is how few grantmakers there are (although this is maybe better than it was), which creates centralisation and thus likely a sub-optimal tayloring of the landscape to the preferences of existing grantmakers, and tying of reputations to those grantmakers. This problem is not at all solved by elections, and maybe would get worse rather than better; the problem is solved by bringing more money from different sources into EA.

I think the best argument for elections is it would reduce the 'who you know' component of EA. But a) I think this is just a lot better now than it was - as the community has grown, i think much of this has been adjusted and b) its not obvious to me that elections wouldn't optimise for something similar. 

In my opinion elections are a mediocre, inefficient leadership selection tool. 

1. Because elections demand participation from many people, they are very expensive in terms of opportunity cost.
2. Elections demand that the candidates engage in marketing and campaigning. Candidates who spend time on otherwise wasteful activity (campaigning) are more likely to win.
3. Because the effective value of voting is usually negative (ie it costs more to participate than you get out of it), participation is oftentimes either rare or mediocre.
4. To look at recent history for example, how effective was voting for leadership selection?  For example, did you know that the Democratic Party actually had primary elections in 2024 where Joe Biden overwhelmingly won candidacy? Months later, Biden was declared insufficiently mentally competent to serve. 

In my opinion, the more effective way to select leadership democratically is using a randomly selected leadership panel. 

1. Select by random from membership, say, 10 to 25 panelists.
2. These 12 panelists will be charged to read resumes, perform candidate interviews, make a final hiring decision, set term limits, and perform annual performance reviews. 

This technique is otherwise known as "sortition" or "lottocracy". It is vastly more efficient than an election. Imagining an election with 100 members, imagine each of the 100 members uses 2 hours of their time to make a decision. That's a net of 200 hours of opportunity cost. With sortition, 10 panelists can devote 20 hours each for the same opportunity cost (10 x 20 hours = 200 hours). Because information gathering and fact finding is a serial task, one person devoting 20 hours to a decision can be far more effective than another devoting only 2 hours. 

Sortition more efficiently uses the time of membership and produces higher quality decisions by orders of magnitude. 

You could argue that sortition is un-democratic. However, philosophers have associated sortition with democracy for literally thousands of years since the time of Socrates. Understanding that democracy is about co-equal governance, sortition preserves political equality by giving participants equal probability of being selected to serve. 

Some Positions In EA Leadership Should Be Elected

If we take this literally, then 'some' means 'any at all', and I think that the amount of democratic input is >0 so this should be 100% yes.

Having said that, I think the bar is kind-of acting as a 'how much do you support democratising EA', and in that sense while I do support Cremer-style reforms, I think they're best introduced at a small scale to get a track record.

Some Positions In EA Leadership Should Be Elected

Low confidence currently, but I think it should be investigated further. 

I think the membership association model is promising. In this system, at the national level, the membership meets in a general assembly to elect the board and then the board hires the executive team. This seems to work well amongst Nordic CBG orgs (I have a draft post on the subject with someone from EA Norway). In bigger countries, you might do this at the state level to stop things becoming too unwieldy.

CEA could also have a general assembly, with each national/state org electing delegates.

Of course, the usual arguments in favour/against democratic processes still apply. But it seems like a very reasonable and normal thing to look into. Perhaps this feels weird for EAs living in countries where national orgs are less of a thing, e.g. the UK and the US?

I could potentially see some sort of codetermination model working, in which some members of a board of directors (or some other board) are elected. I think this model comes from unions and labor rights. But the tricky aspect would be figuring out who gets to vote. I recall seeing some discussion about the difficulty of voting in the past: only donors? only people who are EAs? How do we draw the dividing line between who is and isn't an EA? Hopefully some people smarter and more widely read than me have good ideas, because that seems quite... tricky.

Some Positions In EA Leadership Should Be Elected

Unconfidently speculate that something valuable could come out of more experimentation here. I admit I like the ethos/optics of a more decentralized EA