Sortition in 2025

Posted on December 23, 2025 by Yoram Gat

Equality-by-Lot’s traditional yearly review post. For previous editions look up each year’s December posts.

The most important sortition-related development of the year was undoubtedly the decision by YourParty in the UK to allot the delegates to it founding conference. This decision created an intense discussion around sortition, a discussion that was unprecendented certainly in the UK specifically, probably in the entire Anglosphere, and possibly even in the modern world.

Many activists were horrified to find that sortition stripped them of their standard privilege associated with their established organizing and willingness to invest time and resources. The claims that the whole setup was a way for the organizers to control the process were substantiated by the setup’s details: Thousands of allotted delegates gathered into a hall for a two-day event, inevitably forcing them into the position of passive audience, eliminating any possibility of setting the agenda for the conference. Interestingly, one of the decisions adopted was a rather vague commitment to allotting some of the delegates of future YourParty conferences.

Another notable event was the posting on YouTube and TikTok of a “Subway Take” by the Academy Award winning actor Riz Ahmed in which he proposed to “stop having all elections and elect leaders through a random lottery”. On YouTube the post has now been viewed over 2.5 million times and garnered almost 200,000 likes.

Within the standard academic sortition mud stirring, one proposal stood out: using sortition to create democratic investor assemblies for controlling corporations.

Finally, the electoralist crisis in the West continues to unfold. An opposition candidate who unexpectedly won the first round of presidential elections in Romania was disqualified and the leader of the French Right was barred from participating in upcoming elections after being found guilty of illegal management of party finances.

Filed under: Academia, Applications, Elections, Participation, Press, Sortition, Theory, video | Leave a comment »

Juries for democracy

Posted on December 19, 2025 by Yoram Gat

Sam Wang tells the story of how a grand jury refused to indict a man for assault by sandwich, segues to allotted electoral districting commissions and concludes with the following

Jury-style mechanisms may be one of our best remaining tools for fair governance.

Filed under: Elections, Juries, Press, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Bouricius in Jacobin

Posted on December 19, 2025 by Yoram Gat

Coinciding with their interview with Alexander Guerrero, Jacobin magazine has an article by sortition advocate Terry Bouricius. The article’s title is “Sortition Can Help Cure What Ails Our Democracy”. Here is a short excerpt:

The truth is, elections are a trap. Far from a democratic process, they concentrate power in the hands of elites. This was widely understood in past eras; classical and modern political philosophers observed that elections are tools of oligarchy. The liberal theory of consent of the governed, which elections claim to achieve, is about elevating a “special” caste of rulers. That’s the opposite of self-government. And when you consider the cost of campaigns in time and money, the idea that most working people can run for office — let alone win — is a joke.

Filed under: Elections, Press, Sortition | Leave a comment »

Guerrero in Jacobin

Posted on December 12, 2025 by Yoram Gat

Alexander Guerrero’s book Lottocracy was published a bit more than a year ago. Guerrero discusses the book in a recent interview in Jacobin magazine. Jacobin has, by the way, offered sortition to its readers at least once before, back in 2018.

Interestingly, Guerrero’s argumentation is much more effective and to the point in the short interview format than it was in the book. While in the book supposed epistemic difficulties of well-meaning elected officials are played up in order to explain why elected government does not promote the general interest, in the interview the principal-agent problem faced by society regarding its decision makers is treated as a self-evident case of a conflict of interests where the agent is simply promoting their own interest at the expense of those of the principal. Applying to electoral systems the same straightforward understanding of the problem that is generally taken for granted when dealing with non-electoral systems makes for a much more convincing and effective argument.

Also interesting is the fact that in the short interview Guerrero finds room to mention Bernard Manin’s important book Principles of representative government, a reference which is sorely and inexplicably missing in Lottocracy. Guerrero now refers to Manin as explaining that elections were set up as a deliberately aristocratic mechanism. This is an important historical point, which (I believe) is also missing in Lottocracy. That said, Manin’s most important idea – his “pure theory of elections” – is still missing in Guerrero’s argumentation. This theory explains why elections must produce elite rule and thus can be expected to promote elite interests at the expense of the general interests, without having to resort to the standard popular ignorance argument which is problematic both as a matter of fact and as a matter of principle.

Finally, the fact that the interview skims quickly over Guerrero’s proposal for how sortition is to be used also benefits the presentation. This brevity leaves the stage for the democratic ideas behind the mechanism of sortition and does not obscure these ideas with Geurrero’s elaborate proposed set-up which aims to prevent the allotted citizens from going democratically “wild”.

Filed under: Academia, Athens, Books, Elections, History, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 3 Comments »

More on sortition in YourParty

Posted on November 29, 2025 by Yoram Gat

The YourParty conference is taking place Nov. 29th and Nov. 30th, featuring allotted delegates. In an interview in The New Statesman, Jeremy Corbyn, one of YourParty’s leaders, explained the use of sortition as follows:

This is the most important element of Your Party for Corbyn: it has to be representative on a grassroots level. This assessment aligns him far more with the likes of Jamie Driscoll and Andrew Feinstein (who are closer to Sultana) than with his loyal allies, Murphy and Fitzpatrick, who would rather take a more top-down approach. “I think what’s needed is empowerment of our communities,” he said, explaining his hope that the founding of Your Party will be ultra-democratic.

Hence the use of sortition at the party’s founding conference, a process under which individuals are selected to create a random yet representative sample of the population (as championed by the founder of Extinction Rebellion, Roger Hallam). “For conference, I was worried that if we just said to a group, ‘look, you form yourselves into an informal group and elect delegates to conference’, what’s going to happen is those that know each other are going to elect each other, and those that don’t know anybody will be left out,” he said.

As an explanation this is coherent, but the actual procedure does not match this rhetoric at all. While the process does indeed not involve elected delegates, it appears that the allotted delegates are not involved either other than in the demeaning role of extras. The thousands of allotted delegates who are attending during the two days of the conference (in fact, it appears that each delegate attends just one of the two days), clearly have no time to generate an agenda or even discuss a pre-set agenda. They are deprived of even the symbolic role of voting on pre-set proposals (which would not have amounted to anything anyway) since the process includes online voting by any party member.

Filed under: Applications, Sortition | 4 Comments »

Craig Murray was not allotted to the YourParty conference

Posted on November 17, 2025 by Yoram Gat

Filed under: Applications, Participation, Sortition | 4 Comments »

District council in the UK will take steps to fulfil citizen assembly plan

Posted on November 15, 2025 by Yoram Gat

An announcement on the website of the Forest of Dean District council.

Forest of Dean District councillors have agreed to act on recommendations put forward in a new citizen visioning plan developed by Coleford residents. As a result, the council will now take steps to fulfil the plan’s recommendations in partnership with others, which include improving local employment opportunities, increasing social interaction across all generations and maximising community spaces.

The visioning plan was developed by a group of Coleford residents selected through a ‘sortition’ process – a random selection from all households in the town – ensuring that participants reflected the diversity of the local community.

Councillor Jackie Dale, Cabinet Member for Thriving Communities at Forest of Dean District Council said:

“I’m delighted that we can now begin addressing the recommendations made by Coleford residents. Their priorities closely align with our own commitment to tackling the Climate, Biodiversity and Ecological Emergencies, and to building thriving, resilient communities and a strong local economy.”

Filed under: Applications, Sortition | Leave a comment »

Delannoi: Are you a lottocrat?

Posted on November 15, 2025 by Yoram Gat

Gil Delannoi’s opinion piece “Are you a lottocrat?” appears in the second issue of the Journal of Sortition.

Are ‘lottocracy’, ‘lottocratic’ indispensable, necessary, useful, superfluous, or pernicious words? These words already exist, and like most words ending in ‘cracy’ or ‘ism’, they are used in a pejorative, anxious, indifferent, descriptive, positive, or enthusiastic way.

To what category are these words supposed to belong? Political regimes. Among the various approaches Aristotle used in his typology of political regimes, it is true that his reflection included the typical selection procedure of each regime. He thought, at his time, that a typical or radical democracy would include the use of sortition, but it was only a more pronounced use among the other procedures used in a democratic regime. Typical does not necessarily mean dominant. Moreover, both by observing common usage and for the sake of clarity, he retained the criterion of the number of holders of sovereignty as the name of each regime.

We could break with this tradition, though this exciting exercise is rather pointless. If a procedure were to give its name to a regime:

Hereditocracy? Votocracy/Psephocracy? Lottocracy/Klerocracy? Why not Marketocracy? (combined with Bureaucracy in the EU). Bureaucracy is characteristic of regimes as soon as it is linked with another word: autocracy, oligarchy, one-party system, partitocracy or partycracy.

The full piece is at https://www.imprint.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Delannoi_PtP.pdf.

Filed under: Academia, Books, Sortition | 4 Comments »

International Network of Sortition Advocates presents

Posted on November 14, 2025 by richwbrown

A Sortitional Constitution

for Denmark

How to give a sortition-based chamber equal constitutional status in Denmark

Join us for an engaging discussion on the effort to develop a constitution that would add a sortition-based second chamber of randomly selected citizens to complement the existing Danish Parliament (Folketinget). The model developed by Danish sortition advocates merges electoral legitimacy with deliberative equality, allowing both chambers to balance the other’s shortcomings.

Benny Nissen, INSA facilitator and founder of Sortition Foundation-Denmark, will describe the process, pitfalls, and outline the details in a proposed new constitution for Denmark.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Elections, Proposals, Sortition | Leave a comment »