Sebastián Linares: El sorteo de cargos públicos: un método para mejorar la democracia

Posted on May 26, 2013 by Yoram Gat

Sebastián Linares writes in Con Distintos Acentos (Google Translate with my touch-ups):

Lottery for public office: a method to improve democracy

The concept of democracy has been associated, in different historical periods, with two very different methods for selection of public officials and accountability: the popular election of representatives and sortition (drawing names at random). In the last two hundred years democratic theory has assumed that the only democratic method to choose public officials is the election of representatives by popular vote. However, from its origins in Athens (435 BC) until well into the nineteenth century, the concept of “democracy” used to refer to the use of sortition for the selection of public officials (Manin 1997).

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