Sortition and democracy. History, instruments, and theories: a special issue of Participations journal

Posted on June 14, 2019 by Yoram Gat

Participations journal’s latest issue is devoted to sortition. This appears to be a treasure trove. The issue, titled “Sortition and democracy. History, instruments, and theories”, has 24 papers comprising over 500 pages. The French text of all papers seems to be allow unrestricted access.

The papers are organized into 5 sections:

The ancient world
The medieval world and the modern world
The Chinese world
The contemporary world
Postface

The authors include familiar names (Sintomer, Demont, Courant) as well as many that I, at least, am not familiar with.

“The contemporary world” section has some papers that seem particularly interesting, e.g., Samuel Hayat’s “The militant trajectory of the reference to Bernard Manin in French activism for sortition” and Julien Talpin’s “Does random selection make democracies more democratic? How deliberative democracy has depoliticized a radical proposal”.

Another intriguing paper is Alexei Daniel Serafín Castro’s “Political representation and the uses of sortition in Mexico: 1808-1857” which discusses a historical application of sortition that I have never heard of before.

Filed under: Academia, Elections, History, Participation, Press, Religion, Sortition |

10 Responses

Nicholas Gruen, on June 14, 2019 at 10:09 am said:

Thanks Yoram,

Are there English articles that are openly accessible?

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Yoram Gat, on June 14, 2019 at 2:12 pm said:

Apparently not. It is really a shame that the English-language discussion of sortition does not avail itself of the rich discussion in French.

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Yoram Gat, on June 14, 2019 at 2:19 pm said:

If Equality-by-Lot readers are interested, maybe we could organize a group effort of translation. People could volunteer to translate papers that appear interesting to them – starting from a machine translation if necessary – and get help from the French-speakers among us for those paragraphs that are unclear.

If we have a few takers, we could also contact the publisher, which seems to be interested in making inroads into an English-speaking audience.

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Nicolás Fernández Fioretti, on June 15, 2019 at 10:23 am said:

I’d be down for that, Yoram.

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Yoram Gat, on June 15, 2019 at 10:29 am said:

Hi Nicolas,

Cool – did you see any article that you would like to translate?

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Nicolás Fernández Fioretti, on June 15, 2019 at 6:08 pm said:

Yeah! I’d be interested in two actually: “Castoriadis and Rancière: Contributions to a philosophy of sortition” and “Political representation and the uses of sortition in Mexico: 1808-1857”.

Have you done something similar before? Would you care to organize the effort?

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Yoram Gat, on June 15, 2019 at 6:58 pm said:

Hi Nicolas,

I’ve been translating sortition-related texts from French to English for a while on this blog, but I have not tried to organize a group translation effort. I’d be happy to give it a shot.

BTW, I’d probably go for translating Julien Talpin’s “Does random selection make democracies more democratic? How deliberative democracy has depoliticized a radical proposal”.

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Nicolás Fernández Fioretti, on June 15, 2019 at 7:31 pm said:

That’s amazing. I’m very new to this site, so I don’t have a clear idea of how many additional users might join in on the effort. I’ll start right away then, but I don’t know how to reach you.

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Yoram Gat, on June 16, 2019 at 5:15 am said:

Hi Nicolas, my email address appears at the bottom of the “about” page.

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2019 review – sortition-related events | Equality by lot, on December 14, 2019 at 10:31 am said:

[…] journal devoted a special issue to sortition. 24 papers dealt with various aspects of the topic. The book Legislature by Lot, with […]

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