Foley and Yoon: Sortition for the Student Assembly at the College of William and Mary

Posted on May 11, 2024 by Yoram Gat

Just two months ago, Evan Tao proposed applying sortition to selecting the student body of a Brown University. A similar proposal is now made by Michael Foley and Grant Yoon from the College of William and Mary.

Student Assembly officials shouldn’t be elected, they should be randomly selected. This somewhat radical idea has roots in ancient Athens where, for centuries, public officials were chosen via sortition. Sortition is the selection of public officials by lottery rather than election. We know, it sounds like an insane idea, but bear with us. Our goal with this article is not to convince you that sortition is a perfect system that should be implemented everywhere, we haven’t even convinced ourselves of that, but rather that it is a system with enough merit to be worth trying, and that the College of William and Mary’s Student Assembly offers the perfect laboratory within which we can test out the concept.

Our argument for sortition at the College boils down to this: randomly selected legislators would govern more effectively and promote a more inclusive culture surrounding student government on this campus.

While some might say that the self-selection inherent to campaigns ensures that our legislators are those most interested in devoting time to SA, we’d argue that this interest is actually a bad thing. If the past few weeks have taught us anything, it’s that SA has become a highly politicized institution that takes itself too seriously. The recent election(s) included alleged misinformation campaigns, an appeal of election results and a Review Board opinion that cited the Hatch Act. Given recent events, it is hard to imagine that within SA, pursuit of personal ambition has not come at the expense of transparency, relatability and effective governance. In a sortition-based system, the ambitions of legislators are limited to the impact that they can make through policy. The goalposts shift from winning campaigns to making a positive impact and proving oneself worthy of selection.

Filed under: Academia, Elections, Sortition | Tagged: Student government |

2 Responses

malkingreeklottery, on May 15, 2024 at 9:08 am said:

Hi Yoram,

Have a look! Please do not disseminate just yet, I am waiting for my colleague to approve.

Dear colleague,

I am writing to draw your attention to a new book by Irad Malkin and Josine Blok that may interest you (advanced praise and abstract below). I enclose a flyer from Oxford University Press and the introduction to the entire book (29 pages).

Our very best wishes, Irad Malkin and Josine Blok

Advance praise

âAn extraordinary piece of scholarship, this landmark book on the use of lottery in Ancient Greece reshuffles our understanding of the origins of democracyâand injects brilliant insights from the past into todayâs debate on political innovation. *Drawing Lots *is an incredible tour de forceâand an intellectual feast throughout.â

David Van Reybrouck, author of Against Elections: The Case for Democracy

âThereâs much talk in western democracies about possible uses of the lotâthe random allocation of civic resources and of political offices in the interests of equality and justice. In this prodigiously researched monograph, two historians track back to a culture and a political model in which the lot came to be seen as central and fundamental to the worldâs first democratic regimes. Politicians of today, please noteâand act.â

Paul Cartlege, University of Cambridge

âDrawing lots was one of the foundations of ancient Greek civic egalitarianism. This book is the first comprehensive survey of the practice. Yet it is more than just that: as well as explaining every detail of Greek sortition and the beliefs behind it, the authors also show just how much modern democracy might be improved by borrowing from this ancient system. This is ancient history at its most relevant.â

Ian Morris, Stanford University

âThis book provides new perspectives on the uses of the lot from the time of Homer to the Hellenistic period. Malkin and Blok show that the Greeks used the lot for a wide range of practices, from the distribution of war booty to divination. They argue that the lot epitomizes the ancient Greeksâ preference for practices that were fair and equitable. Drawing lots thus gains a new significanceâand a timely one, given todayâs interest in randomly selected citizen assemblies to bring a new policy into effect.â

Sara Forsdyke, University of Michigan

Irad Malkin, Josine Blok

Drawing Lots: From Egalitarianism to Democracy in Ancient Greece

This book offers the first comprehensive study of drawing lots as a central institution of ancient Greek society. It reveals how an egalitarian mindset guided selection, procedure, and distribution by lot and how, after three centuries of practice, drawing lots was introduced for governance, a Greek innovation that is relevant today.

The first two parts (Irad Malkin) explore the egalitarian mindset geared towards horizontal social relationships, expressed in using the lot instead of a top-down vision of authority and sovereignty. Drawing lots presupposes equality among participants deserving equal “portions” (a major concept) and was used for distributing land, inheritance, booty, sacrificial meat, selecting individuals, setting turns, mixing and integrating groups, and divining the will of the gods. It was a self-evident method broadly applied. Drawing lots would crystallize, exclusively, community boundaries and emphasize its sovereignty. The guiding values were equality and fairness. Aside from divination by lot, the gods (who also draw lots for their realms) are the guardians of the fair and just procedure of drawing lots, but they do not predetermine the outcome.

The third part, written by Josine Blok, investigates the transposition of the drawing of lots to the governance of the polis. The implied egalitarianism often conflicted with a top-down perception of society and the values of inequality, status, and merit. Drawing lots was introduced into oligarchies and democracies at an uneven pace and scale. The classical Athenian democracy, an eye-catching case both in antiquity and today, was exceptional. A conclusion (Malkin) and an envoi (Blok) about the meaning of the Greek examples for drawing lots today close the book together with an appendix (Elena Iaffe) surveying the Greek vocabulary of drawing lots (with the complimentary database kleros.org.il http://kleros.org.il).

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Sortition in 2024 | Equality by lot, on December 28, 2024 at 11:07 am said:

[…] few more mentionable sortition-related developments in 2024: Students continued to write positively about the idea. Sortition was mentioned in popular social media outlets and mass media. Of […]

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