Troesoyer on the Let’s Make Them Pay podcast (part 4/4)

Posted on October 13, 2026 by Yoram Gat

Previous parts: 1, 2, 3.

7. “Idiocracy” (39:20). Bennett brings up the matter of people expressing a lack of trust in the knowledge or intelligence of their fellow citizens and asks Troesoyer if he has “any anxiety over handing normal people power over their lives”. Troesoyer responds that sortition would force society to improve its system of education (presumably so that people have more knowledge and are more intelligent).

This response is problematic because it in effect accepts the classical elitist notion that people’s ability to rule depends on their education. The correct response to Bennett’s question appears to me to be: “Any change involves risk, so some anxiety is natural. But I support democracy and that means that I believe that people should have power over their lives. Others may surely believe otherwise, but then they are opponents of democracy, and they should acknowledge that”.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Elections, Sortition, video | 2 Comments »

Sortition to become part of Harvard’s senate selection bylaws

Posted on October 12, 2026 by Yoram Gat

The Harvard Crimson reports:

Planning Body Releases Final Bylaws for Harvard Faculty Senate After Input From University Leadership

Harvard’s faculty senate planning body released a final set of proposed bylaws for the group Thursday, outlining a largely advisory body that would work closely with top Harvard officials to address University-wide issues.

The new bylaws, officially endorsed by Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 and Provost John F. Manning ’82 in an accompanying letter, appear to address concerns from administrators about the body’s makeup and interactions with existing governance structures.

A new stipulation requires all senators to be elected via an approval voting process, in which voters select candidates they consider acceptable — a change the planning body said “guards against factional capture.” The final bylaws also hold that if fewer than 60 percent of eligible faculty do not vote, the election will be invalid and the seats filled by sortition.

“To avoid the common issue of low-turnout elections that make many faculty senates unrepresentative, the new bylaws take concrete steps to help ensure that Senators broadly represent their respective Faculties,” Garber and Manning wrote in the letter.

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

An allotted evaluation panel in Belgium

Posted on October 10, 2026 by Yoram Gat

Bruxelles Today reports that the municipality of Auderghem in Belgium is setting up an allotted Citizen Evaluation Council (CEC) that is going to produce a yearly evaluation of the government of the municipality. This has the potential of being a transformative application of sortition – much more impactful than the customary single-issue bodies and the “grand plan” bodies. By evaluating the actual actions of the government as a whole, rather than being assigned limited roles by the elected, or making abstract and inevitably vague plans, the evaluation council can become a meaningful channel for democratic power challenging the oligarchical electoral power. Much of course depends on the details – authority, resources, media attention – but the direction is very promising, despite not having any binding decision making power. This could be a good way for estabilishing the representativity of allotted bodies and increasing their visibility and credibility, as an initial step toward a full sortition-based system. If the population perceives the evaluations produced as valid and useful, then the next step – allowing the CEC to fire and hire the officials they are evaluating in order to promote the same values and interests the CEC uses when producing its evaluation – seems not that far fetched.

Auto-translated excepts:

The municipality of Auderghem is launching a Citizen Evaluation Council (CEC) composed of 33 residents selected by lot from among the applicants. Its mission will be to independently evaluate the municipality’s actions on an annual basis, the municipality stated.

Three criteria for evaluating the municipality

Each year, the Council will review municipal actions based on three criteria: effectiveness—specifically, what was or was not achieved and why; the relevance of decisions regarding residents’ needs; and the coherence between various projects. The method draws on an OECD framework, adapted by the ULB Policy Lab to make it accessible to residents who are not public policy evaluation specialists.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Applications, Press, Sortition | 10 Comments »

Lame review of Hélène Landemore’s book

Posted on September 27, 2026 by Nicholas Gruen

I haven’t much time for this review, both literally and metaphorically. It is a long review of Helene Landemore’s book in Foreign Affairs and is tenaciously conventional in all its assessments. I include the final lame paragraph, together with an invitation to email me on ngruen at gmail if you’d like me to email you the full paper. The public (paywalled) website is here.

Democracy is in trouble. There is no silver bullet, and the solutions must be wide-ranging and realistic. The reform agenda should include institutional innovations such as citizens’ assemblies; changes to clearly dysfunctional political, electoral, and campaign finance systems; and bottom-up efforts to rebuild the social and cultural foundations of democratic life. Landemore’s book is valuable not because it persuades readers that representative democracy should be abolished but because it dramatizes how much better the current system could be-and offers one of the many reforms that will be necessary if democracy is to live up to its potential.

Filed under: Academia, Books, Elections, Press, Sortition | 18 Comments »

Sortition at The Fulcrum

Posted on September 19, 2026 by peterstone

A website called The Fulcrum has just published a pro-sortition editorial by a high school student named Dylan Mabee. Mabee makes the case for a randomly-selected second legislative chamber. His idea is actually pretty detailed, and reminds me of the proposal by Anthony Barnett and Peter Carty for a randomly-selected House of Lords. (See their book The Athenian Option: Radical Reform for the House of Lords, Imprint Academic, 2008).

Beyond the Ballot: A Citizen Chamber for the Twenty-First Century

Under this model, a national legislature would become bicameral. The first chamber would remain an elected parliament responsible for initiating legislation, reflecting partisan competition and electoral accountability. The second chamber would be a Citizen Chamber composed of approximately 500 randomly selected citizens chosen through stratified sampling to reflect national demographics, including age, gender, region, education level, and income distribution. Members would serve one-year terms and receive full-time compensation to ensure accessibility across socioeconomic backgrounds.

Crucially, this chamber would possess binding authority. Any major legislation passed by the elected house would require the Citizen Chamber’s approval before becoming law. The Citizen Chamber could also delay legislation for reconsideration or require public revision, forcing elected officials to justify policy more transparently. However, it would not initiate legislation independently, preserving elected representatives’ agenda-setting role and preventing institutional gridlock.

Filed under: Books, Elections, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 12 Comments »

Sortition in The Nation

Posted on September 13, 2026 by Yoram Gat

Back in 2013 The Nation magazine reviewed David Greaber’s book The Democracy Project and as a result made a brief assessment of sortition, which was mentioned by Greaber in the book. “That sounds nice, but it’s far easier said than done,” wrote The Nation. According to the magazine’s search engine, sortition has been mentioned on its pages 3 times since. One of those is a 2021 interview with Hélène Landemore in the context of her 2020 book Open Democracy.

The Nation is now publishing a long review by Osita Nwanevu of Landemore’s latest book, Politics Without Politicians. Conincidentally or not, the title of the review, “Can We Save Democracy?”, is rather similar to the title of the 2021 interview, “Can ‘Lottocracy’ Save Democracy From Itself?”.

Nwanevu starts with a copule of paragraphs of dubious relevance referring to a painting by Hieronymus Bosch, to atom bombs and to a play by Norman Mailer. He then issues a dire (but not unfamiliar) warning:

The solution to the flaws of electoral representation that Landemore presents in Politics Without Politicians is simple and bold: The bums in Washington should be thrown out of office—not just those from one party, but all of them. And not just in the next election, but forever. “Electoral democracy is beyond repair,” she declares. “A system based on electoral representation is no longer—if it ever was—capable of delivering either democratic or good governance.” Instead, she argues, we the people should finally take it upon ourselves to rule directly.

That message has drawn the praise of luminaries from Lawrence Lessig to Thomas Piketty. “This thought-provoking book,” Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu has declared, “argues that the solution to dwindling support for our political institutions is more democracy, not less.” It is truly unfortunate that the book does no such thing. Read carefully and within the context of Landemore’s other work, Politics Without Politicians instead makes the case that we must rescue the democratic idea by wringing the democracy out of it. Landemore’s proposals really would disempower the politicians. But they would also, just as surely, disempower you.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Books, Deliberation, Elections, Participation, Press, Sortition | 42 Comments »

Troesoyer on the Let’s Make Them Pay podcast (part 3)

Posted on September 5, 2026 by Yoram Gat

Parts 1 and 2 are here and here.

5. Corruption (22:40). Bennet asks how sortition prevents the influence of money. Troesoyer says that sortition makes it easier to prevent corruption. In his argument he refers to two factors: term length and avoiding the electoral need to raise campaign money. Term length is important, Troesoyer says, because decision makers working together for a long period of time are able to develop trust between themselves. This allows them to collaborate among themselves and with other long-term actors, and thus to collude on corrupt enterprises. Campaign finance is a fertile ground which fosters corrupt collusion. Actors can promise help in terms of campaign funds in exchange for promotion of their interests. They can also make threats to support competitors in retaliation for non-cooperation.

But neither of these factors make for a convincing advantage of sortition over elections. Electoral systems can be, and often are, set up so that campaigns are highly regulated and publicly financed, greatly reducing the ability of campaign funds to inflence outcomes. The fundamental reason that elected officials serve narrow interests is not a direct quid-pro-quo but rather that the elected officials have a world-view in which the narrow interests are legitimate and should be served. Granted, campaign funds can be a corrupting factor but that can be fixed. The problem is that fixing that does not fix the fundamental problem with elections.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Elections, Sortition, video | 127 Comments »

Nina Roux: Sortition and democracy

Posted on September 5, 2026 by Yoram Gat

A recent book by Nina Roux has the title Tirage au sort et démocratie. Retour sur le cas athénien [Sortition and democracy. Revisiting the case of Athens].

An interview with the author doesn’t turn up that much that is new. Still, it emphasizes some points that may not be new but are worth emphasizing. One point is regarding participation. It is often said that Athens was a radical democracy because of mass participation. Roux points out that this is not the case.

Another important point is about the independence of allotted bodies from elites. In Athens, sortition was not managed by elected institutions or other elite elements. For that reason it could function meaningfully as a democratic force and impose its will on the elites. This stands in contrast with modern proposals and instantiations of allotted bodies (very much including modern juries) which are always concerned keeping those bodies in check.

One of the most stimulating reflections in your work concerns the contributions of the Athenian case to our time. Far from simply observing, you propose a path toward a radical democracy whereby sortition contributes to the people’s control over their leaders. Could you elaborate on this point?

One of the main conclusions of my work was to emphasize that sortition was not the sole source of Athenian democratic radicalism. I observed, in the sources available to me, that there were indeed constraints on citizens who wished to go to the Agora to participate in public debate, and that the city took few steps to alleviate them. To say that Athenian sortition was instituted to guarantee the representation of all social groups in institutions and to create a broad participatory movement is an exaggeration—which does not mean, however, that classical Athens was not a radical democracy. It simply functioned through means of pressure other than the massive, constant, and active participation of all citizens. The most original feature of the Athenian city-state was not sortition, which is found in other institutional contexts: it was the popular courts, composed of thousands of judges chosen by lot, who voted without possibility of appeal on all trials, including those of the city’s politicians. In The Constitution of Athens, Aristotle emphasizes the importance of sortition to protect this institution from corruption and guarantee the effectiveness of popular control over the city’s elites. The use of chance, rotation, and the constant replacement of the set of judges and magistrates prevented this democratic control mechanism from jamming. And it was a mechanism that could choose as its target any politician—even Pericles, deposed in 429 BC for his handling of the first months of the Peloponnesian War. In this respect, sortition goes hand in hand with misthophoria, the remuneration of citizens participating in political institutions. It is also inseparable from the deterrent sanctions imposed by the Athenian courts: fines, death, and exile. It is therefore not insignificant that the allotment machine, the kleroterion, explicitly associated by Aristotle with the fight against corruption, was created in the aftermath of the oligarchic episodes of 411 and 404 BC, which profoundly shook the city.

Filed under: Academia, Athens, Books, Elections, History, Juries, Participation, Press, Sortition | 12 Comments »

Troesoyer on the Let’s Make Them Pay podcast (part 2)

Posted on August 25, 2026 by Yoram Gat

This continues my review of Ian Troesoyer’s discussion of sortition with Scott Bennet, host of the Let’s Make Them Pay podcast. Part 1 is here.

3. Values and interests vs. epistemic limitations (0:13:15). Troesoyer is concerned about “class bias” in elected government. To demonstrate it, he brings up a favorite example of Terry Bouricius. A body full of landlords would make different decisions than a body in which renters are represented. This is obvious and uncontroversial. But what is the mechanism behind this effect? The straightforward mechanism refers to values and interests. Landlords promote the values and interests of landlords, renters promote the values and interests of renters. Yet, Treosoyer presents this as a matter of “bias” or “limited perspectives”. According to this telling, the landlords are “trying to do their best”. They are very much open to representing the values and interests of the renters, but due to their limited perspective they are unaware of how things look like from the renters’ perspective and thus ignore their values and interests. Bennet goes as far as saying that just there being one or two renters in a body full of landlords would “make such a difference”. (Treosoyer agrees, but not too enthusiastically, if I am not mistaken.)

Leaning heavily on the supposed epistemic difficulties of the elected decision makers in arriving at “good decisions” is a standard trope of “deliberative democrats”. (A typical example of this tendency is Alex Guerrero’s book Lottocracy.) The epistemic effect may (or may not) exist, but emphasizing it and de-emphasizing the effect of the conflict of values and interests is unjustified. Presumably the appeal of this tendency is that it sounds less crass and confrontational, and avoids presenting the electoral elite and its allies as outright exploiters. Instead it presents them as well-meaning simpletons. The well-meaning landlords, for example, despite their openness to renters’ perspectives, have never had the idea of calling a few renters to appear before their body to express those perspectives.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Books, Elections, Sortition, video | 25 Comments »

Troesoyer on the Let’s Make Them Pay podcast (part 1)

Posted on August 23, 2026 by Yoram Gat

Ian Troesoyer, a sortition activist, has recently been a guest on the Let’s Make Them Pay podcast, where he had an hour long conversation with the host, Scott Bennett. Both participants in the conversation are unapologetic supports of sortition and the presentation of the idea is very good. For those who are either completely or fairly unfamiliar with the idea of sortition, it is a good resource for hearing it discussed and examined.

As I did with one of Troesoyer’s posts on his substack, I’ll go over some points that I believe can be improved in the argumentation. Again, I am offering this as constructive criticism. I pick up the points in the chronological order in which they appear in the video, and since this turns out to be a bit long, it is posted in installments.

1. Stratified sampling (mentioned at 0:02:30 and again at 0:27:20). This is not dwelled upon in the conversation, but the mere mention of stratification is problematic. It may be that some like the the jargon because it gives the discussion a scientific ring. But the use of jargon introduces a suspicion that something untoward is at hand. In the case of the standard current sortitionist practice – what goes under the name of “citizen assemblies” – such a suspicion would be completely justified. In current practice, what is being called “stratified sampling” is a method to cover for the fact that as the process is currently arranged, a large majority of people refuse to take up offered seats. In order to try and obscure this inconvenient fact, and in order to obscure the fact that, as can be expected, refusal rates are correlated with various obvious social characteristics, the body’s makeup is adjusted in various ways so that certain statistical characteristics of the body match those of the population (e.g., the body is set up so that 50% of the members of the body are be men and 50% are women, even if more women refused to take up seats than man did). This makes the resulting body’s make up appear superficially as if it was created by sampling where no rejection of offered seats occured.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Sortition, video | 7 Comments »

Next Page »