The first issue of the new Journal of Sortition is going to be published in 2025.
Keith Sutherland, the publisher, wants to emphasize that all those who register on the webpage of Imprint Academic’s sortition hub will get a free printed copy of the first issue of JoS. Please visit https://www.imprint.co.uk/sortition-hub/.
A review of mine of Alex Guerrero’s book Lottocracy will be appearing in this first issue.
The discussion around sortition and the possibility of applying it in modern political systems has been intensifying in academia over the last two decades. A debate between sortition-optimists and sortition-pessimists (as well as intermediate positions) has been taking shape. Alex Guerrero’s Lottocracy, with its over 450 pages, recaps this debate with considerable breadth while arguing for what may be perceived as the sortition-optimist position par excellence, namely, for replacing the elections-based system with one which is sortition-based.
Among some other points, I discuss how Lottocracy, like the academic discussion of sortition as a whole, adopts a Socratic viewpoint, according to which the experts are those who should shape and authorize (or choose not to do so) the use of sortition as a tool of politics.
Adam Cronkright
Ali
Ahmed R. Teleb
avanderven
avergne
Alex Kovner
azakaras
Brett Hennig
campbellwallace
Simon Threlkeld
Nick Coccoma
codyhipskind
Common Lot Sortitionist
Conall Boyle
constitutionalism
davidschecter
graytmatter
gtridimas
H.J. Hofkirchner
John Burnheim
jgarry20151
Jochen Krattenmacher
johnedwardtaylor
johnhuang865
Jonathan Crock
keithsutherland
Jacob Richter
kkoreilly
lukewhito
SimonPek
Nathan El
Nicholas Gruen
Owen Shaffer
Patrick Chalmers
Paul Gölz
peterstone
Pierre-Etienne Vandamme
pronfeld
Emil
rcaze
richwbrown
Roger Knights
roslynfuller
Pierre-Etienne Vandamme
shaharavin
tbouricius
Ted Wachtel
Joshua Laferriere
theodorestathis
towardsautonomyblog
Wayne Liebman
Yoram Gat
Oliver Milne
Equality by lot 
How can you have an initial sortition government that is not created using some “a-priori design” determined by some undemocratic group (unless the polity is small enough that every single person could participate in the initial decision-making)? The initial sortition government could subsequently create any democratic (sortition) government it wants, but how do you create that first sortition government?
Imagine a country of 12 million people ruled by a dictator. The people rise up and the dictator flees the country. The people now demand democratic (sortition) government. How would the initial allotted government be created without some undemocratic group using some “a-priori design” to determine the characteristics of the initial allotted government (how many people are randomly selected, etc.)?
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How much does this matter?
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Yoram, it is such a pleasure to see your short review of Guerrero’s new book.
I’ve ordered it but don’t have it yet. I’ll comment anyway.
I of course agree with you re the term “electoral democratic government.” We should not use, and should not accept, any term that describes our present system as “democratic,” unless it is in quotes, because it is not democratic, and our position is that it is not democratic. “Electoral government” does the job just fine, or if we are going to use terms that express an opinion on whether it is democratic, then “electoral oligarchy” seems fine to me.
Good point re “ruling elites tend to promote their narrow interests at the expense of those of the majority” being a good and sufficient reason to reject electoral government (government by elected politicians who decide the laws, and appoint the judges, and many other officials).
You say Guerrero says three year terms for jurors on legislative bodies with jurors paid $100,000 USD per year.
I’ve always been very skeptical of people serving long terms on civic juries (minipublics). (By always, I mean since the 1980s and 90s when I worked out proposals for democratic lawmaking and democratically choosing public officials, using civic juries, first publishing on that in the late 1990s, as you know.)
Long terms (and I think three years is long – considerably longer than for example anyone chosen by lottery served in Athens) risk the jurors “going native,” as Keith Sutherland has put it. Three year terms with $100,000 pay per year, plus whatever benefits and perks and pension contributions there may be, would erode the extent to which the jurors are an accurate cross-section/microcosm of the public. The jurors in Guerrero’s model will be significantly richer than most of the public in income, over their three year terms. Their work and social milieu over the three years will tend to be their fellow jurors all making $100,000 a year, the experts that advise them, presumably also well paid lobbyists trying to influence them, and maybe also journalists from the media corporations. They will also be subject to bribes and influence, in the form of money for them or their relatives, tickets to whatever it is that they like, insider trading tips for their newly available investment money, cushy job offers for their relatives and themselves, and cushy job offers for when their three year term ends. This would make Guerrero’s 20 lottocratic legislative bodies something different from an accurate microcosm, or fair epitome, of the public. And that’s a problem.
I’ll be interested to see Guerrero’s reply to these things in his book, assuming there is a reply. If the jurors vote by secret ballot that could reduce attempts to influence them with bribes and rewards (though not so much if their discussions and debates are public, with lobbyists looking to reward those who say the right things). Laws against tampering with, or improperly trying to influence, lottocratic bodies could also help.
I’m guessing the three year terms are staggered with 1/3rd of the jurors coming and going each year.
An essential part of any good proposal for a system of lottery-chosen legislatures/jury-legislatures, is having a very good and democratic arrangement for deciding procedures and arrangements. I look forward to seeing what G suggests in his book.
I prefer a separation between the jurors who decide proposed laws, and those who propose them. I infer that G does not.
There is no need to wait to set up 20 lottocratic legislatures to end the deciding of laws and choosing of independent public officials by politicians (and I do not suggest that Guerrero says there is). No law should go into effect without the majority vote of a civic jury after a fair trial on a level playing field (or at least not without the majority vote of a civic jury after some very democratic and fair process, on a level playing field, that is good for ensuring an informed result). Laws can be proposed to civic juries from a variety of sources, including politicians (including those who are in the minority in an elected body), by citizen groups, from law reform commissions chosen by civic juries using ranked choice PR voting, and by civic juries tasked with proposing laws.
If there are to continue being elected bodies (bodies chosen by voting), they should be elected by civic juries, not by popular election, with the arrangements and rules for such elections decided by civic juries. (Popular election is of course highly unsuitable for informed voting, is heavily skewed by the role of money, political parties and media, and, unless voting is mandatory, those who vote are unrepresentative of the public with younger and poorer citizens, and others, being very underrepresented among those who vote.)
If popular election cannot be fully eliminated, then at least those who are elected need to be stopped and recused from deciding laws, and from choosing independent officials. And the rules for such elections need to be decided independently from politicians and political parties (preferably by civic juries), and there should be a two stage electoral process, with civic juries winnowing down all those interested in serving in a public office to a small number that go forward to a popular election, that has ranked choice voting.
An essential part of good democratic design is that decisions are made in an informed manner. Informed views are a far better basis for decisions than poorly informed views. Also essential is a level playing field rather than one skewed in favour of what serves the self-interest of moneyed interests and elites, because to the extent there is such a skew, democracy is displaced by oligarchy. I look forward to seeing how Guerrero addresses these matters in his book.
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Regards,
Simon Threlkeld (the long “anonymous” comment is from me.
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I agree with most of Simon’s points, especially regarding the long-service problem, that’s why I prefer citizens’ juries to citizens’ assemblies. Alex Guerrero’s main objection to Yoram’s review is that it portrays him as espousing the Socratic critique of democracy, whereas he devotes a good 100 pages to a discussion of interests and incentives in both electoral and lottocratic systems.
I’m certainly no lottocrat (my preference is for a mixed constitution), but I think we should all be delighted that the lottocratic perspective is now being debated within mainstream political science (Cristina Lafont has now devoted two books to refuting Alex’s views).
Regarding the first anonymous comment regarding a-priori design, I agree that political theorists should play a leading role in determining what sortition can and cannot do as a prelude to putting it into practice (but then I would say that, as it’s in my own interests): https://equalitybylot.com/2011/03/03/what-sortition-can-and-cannot-do/
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Thanks for the responses.
Anon December 18, 2024 at 1:23 am at writes:
> How can you have an initial sortition government that is not created using some “a-priori design” determined by some undemocratic group
It is certainly true that some sort of an initial setup needs to be defined before the allotted can get to work. And it is also certainly true that without a prior allotted body to create the setup, it is inevitable that the setup would be defined by an elite-dominated process. Thus there is a bootstrapping problem at hand.
Given that, the question about the initial design is whether it is one which aims to constrain the body or one which aims to empower it (not merely nominally, but in fact) to continually redesign and rearrange the structure and procedures of the system. That is, whether the allotted body is powerful and independent enough in order to achieve, over time, increasingly effective, i.e., increasingly democratic, self-governance.
A proposal, like Guerrero’s, that aims to set out the rules of the allotted body for the indefinite future, rather than a mere starting point, is an attempt to constrain and disempower the sovereign body according to considerations imposed from the outside.
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Simon,
> Long terms
There is a trade-off in terms of length of service between representativity and competence. Short terms mean that the allotted are unable to represent their own ideas are essentially controlled by the professionals around them. They may be perfectly representative of the population but they are unable to translate their ideas into policy.
So there is the question of what the optimal term length is that hits a sweet spot in that trade-off. I don’t think people lose their identities – values and world views – very quickly. Such things take years to change and therefore a service term of a few years reasonable. Like any other aspect of the system, this should be something that the allotted themselves should be able to tune.
> bribes
This should be illegal and anything of this sort (money, favors, cushy jobs, speaking fees, etc.) can be expected to be much more tightly regulated in a democratic system than it is now.
> An essential part of any good proposal for a system of lottery-chosen legislatures/jury-legislatures, is having a very good and democratic arrangement for deciding procedures and arrangements
Yes. But the question is whether there is any reason to have these arrangement set out in advance at any detail rather than have them evolve over time by the allotted themselves as they gain experience and insights into the actual workings of the system.
> I prefer a separation between the jurors who decide proposed laws, and those who propose them.
I think there are good reasons not to have such a separation. But, again, this is something that the democratic bodies should decide themselves, based on their evolving experience, rather than having it imposed upon them. The only reason to impose a condition at the outset is if we think that without such a condition the starting point for the process of evolving institutions is so poor so that it does not allow initiating a process of self-improvement. (This is the situation with current electorcratic arrangement.)
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Keith,
> Alex Guerrero’s main objection to Yoram’s review is that it portrays him as espousing the Socratic critique of democracy, whereas he devotes a good 100 pages to a discussion of interests and incentives in both electoral and lottocratic systems.
If Alex could provide the page numbers for those sections of his book dealing with the straightforward notion that a ruling elite tends to promote its own interests and world-view at the expense of the rest of society that would be useful. (Note that “incentives” is a different matter.) The only section that I found that deals with this matter is section 6.1, “Unrepresentative Representatives, Agential Trouble”, which is 3 page section.
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Thanks Yoram, I’ve drawn Alex’s attention to this post.
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Hi Yoram. Thanks for the review. Lots to say, but I’ll restrict myself to two points.
(1) I absolutely do not espouse the “Socratic view” that “the difference between people is primarily that of knowledge” and on which “everybody has essentially the same objectives.”
This is just false. As you note above, I talk about this at the very beginning of Chapter Six, which is entitled “Unrepresentative Representatives.” The section on “Unrepresentative Representatives, Agential Trouble” explicitly presents the worry “that unrepresentative elected representatives will have agential priorities—driven by distinctive values, preferences, and background incentives—that make them unlikely to act so as to address the moral-political problems that affect the whole political community.” (p. 105). It could not be clearer that I explicitly reject what you call the “Socratic View.” I go on about this for several pages, explicitly distinguishing this concern from the epistemic/knowledge concern that I discuss in the next section, “Unrepresentative Representatives, Epistemic Trouble.” I actually spend more time on the “agential trouble” in that chapter because it is so obvious that there are non-epistemic concerns and that people do not all have the same “objectives.” I couldn’t be clearer about this, even having two distinct sections to talk about the two distinct concerns. I do not know why you would want to misrepresent my view in this way.
I then talk about this at great length in discussing the potential advantages of lottocracy, distinguishing the epistemic improvement side (addressing “ignorance” problems) from the agential improvement side (addressing what I call “distortion”), in two chapters, one explicitly focused on “Overcoming Ignorance” (Chapter 13) and the other on “Lessening Distortion” (Chapter 14).
Here is a quote from the beginning of Chapter 14: “The previous chapter focused on reasons to think that lottocratic systems will do comparatively well by the first part—the ability to appreciate the world as it is—by addressing background concerns about ignorance. But ignorance is not the only problem. Even with an accurate perception of the world, there is still a question of how an agent or system will act. One important question is whether a given political system does well, in epistemic terms, at identifying moral-political problems and potential solutions to them. A distinct question is whether a political system does well, in agential terms, at acting to respond to those problems and implement those solutions. Here, the concern is about agential distortion. Distortion, in the sense relevant here, concerns distortion in the aims, motivations, and actions of important agents within the system so that, rather than acting to identify and address extant moral-political problems, the system instead works to advance other ends. These might be the ends of furthering the financial and dominance interests of a powerful elite, bringing about enrichment and power for political agents, continuing a program of racial or patriarchal domination and oppression, or a host of other things besides addressing the moral-political problems of the political community. Economists label some behavior of this kind “rent-seeking,” but that is a narrower categorization; for one thing, some of the distortion might involve substantial wealth creation—just not in a way that addresses extant moral-political problems.” (p. 285). I then go on to talk about distortion and concerns about distortion for the next 30 pages of the chapter.
I genuinely can’t see how you could have read Chapters 6, 13, and 14 and come away with the impression that I support or endorse the Socratic View.
(2) I absolutely reject the suggestion that there should be some expert (me?) or expert group of academics who design and then impose their system on the people, “claiming to have superior knowledge which the allotted themselves lack.” You simply cannot have read the last chapter of the book, Chapter 17, in which I go on, *at length,* about the many ethical/democratic and epistemic issues involved in possible transition to a very different kind of political system, including the importance of securing informed consent of the people to any new system, engaging in small scale popularly supported experimentation, etc.
At the very beginning of the book, in framing the project, I write: “The spirit in which I offer Part II [introducing and describing lottocracy] is different. I offer it more like this: here is an idea; let us together think about whether it is a good idea, or the beginning of a good idea, or whether we might shape it into a good idea. Throughout, I try to avoid making things easy for me or for the defender of lottocracy. Particularly, I try to avoid a kind of utopian wishful thinking, in which the forces behind the problems explained at length in Part I of the book miraculously vanish, leaving lottocracy to shine in the sun. There is difficulty in doing this, however, since although I try to consider the ways in which these forces might reappear, the powers of imagination are limited, and there is no world-historical example of lottocratic government at the scale imagined here. This is the sense in which I see this project as the beginning of a collaborative endeavor. If people are convinced by the diagnosis I offer in Part I, or if they are already convinced that the fundamentals of our political system are broken, then we must—all of us—work to reimagine political institutions, to consider what might work better, to consider whether lottocracy might be an attractive direction, and, if so, how we might get
there from here.” (p. 4-5)
Later, in Chapter 17, I say things like “There are many choice points and options. I argue for certain ways of doing things, and I offer some reasons for doing things that way, but there is much to learn about how things work in practice. We should try out many ways of doing things and monitor and observe what works, what doesn’t, what might be altered and improved.” (p. 412)
This is the exact opposite of any “usurpation of the authority for designing the democratic political system.” It is the exact opposite of an “a priori design by an expert.” I encourage you (and others) to read Chapter 17 and then to read the last two paragraphs of your review and consider whether you are talking about the same book. In what way is there the suggestion that “political philosophers” are “indispensable”? It seems like you are talking about someone else and someone else’s book.
Additionally, and as a smaller point about the particular design idea I offer, I talk repeatedly throughout the book about what I call Structural Assemblies, “consisting of randomly chosen citizens, who will have responsibility for monitoring and maintaining the basic organization and support of the network of single-issue legislatures, including setting rules of procedure and deliberation, resolving jurisdictional issues, considering topical merger proposals, allocating funds based on budget proposals, and regulating the process by which people come to speak in the learning phase.” I build into the system an egalitarian, democratic way of revising and reconsidering the system, very much along the lines your above comment suggests: allowing them to “evolve over time by the allotted themselves as they gain experience and insights into the actual workings of the system.”
It is true that I do set out the specifics of a system for people to consider, but how else is a person to even begin thinking and discussing these ideas in a real, tangible way?
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Hi Alex,
Thank you for taking the time to respond. I address here the issue of the attention devoted to the conflict of interests between the rulers and the ruled and address the question of the role of experts in a subsequent comment.
I take you at your word that the matter of the conflict of interests between the rulers and the ruled is something you believe is highly important. Reading the book, however, I find that the text does not reflect this sentiment. While the subject of the conflict of interests is not completely absent from the book, it is severely de-emphasized and even when it is discussed it is invariably attenuated by being entangled with other matters.
Starting with overall space devoted to conflict of interests: In the first part, the 3 pages of section 6.1, which we mentioned as dealing with the conflict of interests, are dramatically outnumbered by the 80 pages of chapters 2, 3, 4, 5 and 7 and section 6.2 which deal with epistemic issues and incentives.
In the second part of the book you point to chapter 14. But the chapter is far from being entirely focused on the rulers/ruled conflict of interest. The only section that focuses on this matter is section 14.4, “Representative Representatives and Representative Agents”, which is 2 pages long. When you refer to the entire chapter being relevant you may be thinking about section 14.1, “capture” (12 pages), since the other sections clearly deal with other matters altogether. It is in fact doubtful whether capture is at all relevant for the matter of the ruler/ruled conflict of interest. In section 14.4 you (rightly) imply it is not when you write:
But even if capture can be seen as relevant, it is only what you call “ideological capture”, as opposed to “corruption capture”, that is relevant, while section 14.1 deals with both. So, at best, section 14.1 is only partly relevant. In all we thus have somewhere between 2 and 14 pages of the second part dealing with the rulers/ruled conflict of interests. At the same time chapters 9, 10, 11, 12 and 13, spanning 137 pages, deal with what are essentially epistemic issues – complexity, expertise, deliberation and ignorance.
Moreover, beyond the disproportion in space devoted to conflict of interests as opposed to space devoted to epistemics and incentives, when conflicts of interests are discussed, they are never allowed to stand on their own, but are always tampered with a good dose of arguments regarding epistemics and incentives. This is clearly so when talking about capture, which is at least as much about incentives as it is about interests. But it is so even when the focus is supposedly on interests in those two short sections mentioned above – 6.1 and 14.4. The three pages of section 6.1 do mention “interests and background motives” of “‘elite’ and privileged subset of the population” (scare quotes around ‘elite’ in the original), but they also devote similar attention to “capture” and “financial motivations” of those who seek political power for personal enrichment. Section 14.4, despite opening with an assertion about the impact of having representative (or non-representative) decision makers on “which moral-political problems are actually going to be addressed”, never manages to mention the word “interests”. Instead, the proposed reason for certain problems not being addressed by “those at the top of the hierarchy” is that they are either unaware of the problems of others or have not “experienced those problems intimately or personally, with a sense of desperation or hopelessness”. And, again, personal characteristics and motivations are played up. Those who seek power are ambitious and concerned about obtaining and keeping power.
To sum up, I stand by my original point. In the context of Western regimes, the academic literature in general and the sortition-optimist literature more specifically are very hesitant in approaching the issue of the conflict of interests between the rulers and the ruled (as opposed, of course, to their attitude to this subject in the context of enemy regimes). Their critiques of electoralism always play up supposed epistemic difficulties that plague this regime and de-emphasize the straightforward point that electoralism generates elite rule, and the inevitable consequence that elite interests are promoted at the expense of the interests of the rest of the population. Deliberately or not, this attitude is echoed in Lottocracy.
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Yoram, you continue to misrepresent my view and my book in order to have it fit your preconceived ideas about “the academic literature in general and the sortition-optimist literature more specifically.”
I am not at all hesitant in “approaching the issue of the conflict of interest between the rulers and the ruled.” The very beginning of the book begins with the Aristotle quotation connecting elections to oligarchy. Reference to the elite or elite capture appears *94 times* in the book. It’s not the most interesting of philosophically complicated idea, nor is it at all a new idea, so a book that focused on that would be pretty boring or short, but how many pages are spent on a discussion is a poor substitute for the actual content of that discussion in discerning importance or centrality or substantive views. You can, and should, just read the words I wrote.
If an author says, “I absolutely, categorically, reject the idea that X,” but they say that in one page, or even just a sentence, it is critical malpractice to flatly attribute to them the view that X. If they say it over whole paragraphs, pages, sections, over many chapters, you cannot say that they “echo” the idea that X.
You might say “I wish they had focused more on why X is misguided” or “they should spend more time discussing and rejecting X” but then you have to provide reasons to support those claims.
You could, motivated by some Freudian ideas about the subconscious, attempt to argue that they really embrace X, despite their explicit rejection of it, but you’d need to provide some very good evidence, and this is almost always lazy, bad scholarship, allowing the critic to import their own biases and find hidden commitments everywhere to support their own take on what is wrong with everyone else.
You continue to misrepresent the content of the book, but fortunately to do so in ways that will be obvious to anyone who actually looks at the book. For example, you say “chapters 9, 10, 11, 12 and 13, spanning 137 pages, deal with what are essentially epistemic issues – complexity, expertise, deliberation and ignorance.”
Chapter 9 sets out the basic model of the system; it is not about “epistemic issues.”
Chapter 12 is about single-issue legislatures in general, considering many questions about how they would function; it is not just or even largely about “epistemic issues.”
Even Chapters 10 and 11, which are about Experts and Deliberation, respectively, and do talk about epistemic issues, also have quite a lot that has nothing to do with epistemic issues, and quite a lot to do with differing interests, incentives, and objectives across the political community.
I do care about “epistemic issues” and I think they are important. But I also care about and discuss at significant length many other issues as well, including concerns about elite capture, elite power, divergent interests, elite manipulated division and conflict, and many similar things. It is just incautious or willful misreading to suggest otherwise, as you do in attributing the “Socratic view” to me, suggesting that I maintain that “the difference between people is primarily that of knowledge” and that “everybody has essentially the same objectives.”
Having said this, I am not going to reply further about this, and will let people judge this issue for themselves if they are inclined to read the book.
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Hi Alex,
I am happy to agree to disagree on the matter of the emphasis that the book lays on the conflict of interests between the rulers and the ruled. Just like you, I think your book speaks for itself.
I will note though that as I have pointed out, and indeed as you have yourself noted in the book in a paragraph I quoted above, “capture” and “conflict of interests between the rulers and the ruled” are not at all the same thing. In fact, an institution needs to be captured only if there is no a-priori conflict of interest between the insititution and the public. No one would say, for example, that a manufacturer who sold poor quality merchandise to its customers did so because it was captured by the shareholders. The conflict of interests between the shareholders who want maximize profit and the customers who want quality merchandise is built into the institution.
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Hi Alex,
Regarding the indispensability of political philosophers and their role as those who design and authorize the use of sortition.
Yes, the book certainly makes it clear that your proposals are tentative and a basis for further discussion. My claim, however, is not that you intend to impose your own personal proposals on society. My claim is that you and your interlocutors in academia see it as the legitimate role of experts to design and authorize the way sortition can be used. The processes of monitoring, observation, alteration and improvement which you refer to are processes which take place among the academic experts (in consultation with politicians and other elite groups, perhaps). I don’t see any indication in the book that you are proposing to change that. Such elite-dominated processes can hardly be considered democratic or a reasonable way to arrive at a democratic system. The warnings issued in chapter 17 about the dangers of radical change do not, as I see things, add a democratic flavor to the process but rather keep it even more detached from the urgent needs of the victims of the current system.
In fact, this point can also provide an answer to the question with which you end your comment. A way to “begin thinking and discussing [the use of sortition] in a real, tangible way” could be to set up an allotted body which is tasked with assessing the functioning of the current regime and planning a transition to a more democratic system. Such a body, if set up properly – e.g., given sufficient time, resources, and attention – could be a much more effective, and a much more democratic, way to express the needs and aspirations of the population and to generate real, tangible proposals than a never-ending conversation among experts.
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Yoram,
> Long terms
I think citizens chosen by lottery are competent to serve on a legislative jury that decides a proposed law (by majority vote using secret ballot), after a fair trial of the law on a level playing field. With no need to require such jurors to spend three years serving on such legislative juries, nor to require them to ever serve on any other jury or lottocratic body whatsoever.
Such legislative juries deciding laws could number 1,000 citizens, chosen in democratic lotteries using stratified random sampling
Apparently one of the first orders of business for Trump and the Republicans is to enact a law providing big tax cuts for the rich. In an actual democracy they would have no such power. Instead, in my view, no law would go into effect until it is approved/passed/enacted by majority vote by a legislative jury, after a fair trial of the law on a level playing.
Their proposed tax-cuts-for-the-rich-law ought, in my view, to go a legislative jury trial. Trump and the the House and Senate Republicans supporting it could be in charge of presenting the case to the jury for their proposed law.
Extrapolating from Athenian practices in the 4th century BCE, five citizens chosen by civic jury could be in charge of presenting the case against the law, with the civic jury choosing them being tasked with choosing five people who would do an excellent job of presenting that case. Maybe among those they choose might be Bernie Sanders or other Democrats. The five could then invite others to join them in running and presenting the case.
Trump et al, and those presenting the case against their proposed law, would be given equal and ample time to present their cases to the jury, and would have an equal amount of funding for their cases, so that the trial would be on an a fair and level playing field. (The exact details of how such trials work could be worked out in the ways I have proposed in articles going back to 1998.)
I think that after such a fair trial on a level playing field, the 1,000 jurors would be perfectly competent to make the decision about the tax cuts law by majority vote using secret ballot. Do you think they would not be?
Long terms are very much contrary to the jury/lottocratic tradition from Athens to now. Trial jurors in the Anglo-Scottish-American tradition have never had to serve for three years deciding trials or serving on other juries. It has always been, for centuries, enough that they serve on only one trial jury. In Athens, those who served in the jury courts, and those who apparently decided laws after hearing the trial for a law, were under no obligation to serve for three years, nor to serve even once in any other trial.
I think long terms of service are not needed for laws to be decided by civic jury or by lottery-chosen bodies. And that therefore there is no need to compromise representivity and “ruling in turns,” in order to have long terms of service.
Nor is there any need to compromise the basic democratic idea that citizens are competent to make decisions, in the context of well-designed decision-making arrangements, without having to serve for years or undergo extensive training for months or years.
In an actual democracy, the Supreme Court, regulatory commissions and other “independent” public officials would not be chosen by the president and confirmed by the Senate. They would instead be chosen by civic jury. Such civic juries are in my view perfectly competent to choose such officials, without the jurors needing to serve for three years, and with no need for them to serve on any other jury or lottocratic body whatsoever.
(For my thoughts on choosing public officials by civic juries and how that would work, see my articles on that topic going back to 1997.)
> Lottocratic proposals from academics and experts
I say bring it on. Propose away. But with all such proposals only going into effect if approved/enacted by civic juries after a fair trial on a level playing field.
And with legislative juries being able to consider and pass into law other ways for proposed laws to be worked out and put forward.
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Simon:> Trump and the the House and Senate Republicans supporting it could be in charge of presenting the case to the jury for their proposed law. . . . Extrapolating from Athenian practices in the 4th century BCE, five citizens chosen by civic jury could be in charge of presenting the case against the law
That seems imbalanced, as one set of advocates are chosen by election and the others by the jury. Given the Lafont/Urbinati claim that modern political parties are the modern (representative) equivalent of the Greek ho boulomenos principle, why not have the opposing advocates selected by election as well? Alex Kovner and I are very much in agreement with the thrust of your proposal, the only change required being a reduction in the proposal threshold of the elected house to ensure a closer match to the ideological diversity of the electorate. Although this principle is anathema to deliberative democrats, legislators would, in practice, be incentivised to choose advocates who could command the support of the majority of jurors, so the end result would be e pluribus unum.
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[…] which, as it argues for replacing electoralism with a sortition-based system, provides a broad overview of the literature. Also worthy of note is the impending launch of the Journal of […]
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Keith: >a reduction in the proposal threshold of the elected house
I strongly agree with this, as I think you know, including for the reason you say. The threshold should I think be quite low (or if there are tiered thresholds, then at least one/some of them should be quite low).
For all kinds of reasons that are not hard to see or imagine, it might well be that many proposed laws that the public or a civic jury would support, are likely to have the support of only a minority of an elected house, in some cases only the support of a rather small minority.
Even with no improvement to how elected houses are chosen, this would be a massive advance for democracy and good governance imo.
>That seems imbalanced, as one set of advocates are chosen by election and the others by the jury. Given the Lafont/Urbinati claim that modern political parties are the modern (representative) equivalent of the Greek ho boulomenos principle, why not have the opposing advocates selected by election as well?
Well, selection by a civic jury is a type of election (election by civic jury rather than popular election). Also, in Athens the five that were in charge of the case against were chosen by the Assembly, whereas those who proposed were self-selected citizens. (The proposers and opposers were chosen by quite different methods.)
I’m not sure what you mean by “selected by election” here. Do you mean chosen in a fresh election just to be the opposers in a particular civic jury trial, or do you mean other members of the elected house that happen to oppose the proposed law?
Re the latter case, I would be concerned as to whether the best opposers would be chosen. Suppose the law is one in which all or the vast majority of members of the elected house have a strong conflict of interest in favour of the proposed law (such as an election law that favours incumbants, or that protects members of the house from being investigated and prosecuted for corruption or lying, or that serves the interests of rich interests that fund election campaigns). It might be that the opposers in such a case might be rather half-hearted in their opposition if they are members of the house. It might be hard to design a way of choosing opposers from the elected house that fully avoids this problem.
>legislators would, in practice, be incentivised to choose advocates who could command the support of the majority of jurors
Yes, and this is one of the very good things about this arrangement. The members of the house have an incentive to bring forward laws that have a real chance of winning over the majority of a civic jury, rather than laws that serve narrow interests at the expense of the public.
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Thanks Simon, I think we are in broad agreement.
>in Athens the five that were in charge of the case against were chosen by the Assembly, whereas those who proposed were self-selected citizens.
Yes that’s true, but Athens was a direct democracy. In a large representative democracy, it’s important that both camps should be well matched in terms of resources and that all citizens should have a say (as they did in Athens when electing the five representatives).
>Do you mean chosen in a fresh election just to be the opposers in a particular civic jury trial, or do you mean other members of the elected house that happen to oppose the proposed law?
The latter. But Alex’s proposal is slightly different in that the reduced proposal threshold would lead to three (or more) alternatives (not just proposers and opposers). He also has a new model of rolling elections that he outlines in a paper for the first issue of the Journal of Sortition.
>Suppose the law is one in which all or the vast majority of members of the elected house have a strong conflict of interest in favour of the proposed law . . . It might be that the opposers in such a case might be rather half-hearted in their opposition if they are members of the house.
Yes, that’s a risk. Our expectation is that the reduced proposal threshold will ensure a better match between elected reps and the ideological diversity of the electorate. In their paper for JoS, Oliver Milne and Terry Bouricius argue for a low threshold in order to better accommodate radical voices. Given that the citizen’s jury has the final word, politicians will have to shape their policies to win popular support (“there go the people, I must follow them, for I am their leader”).
For a free printed copy of the first issue of the Journal of Sortition register at https://www.imprint.co.uk/sortition-hub/
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I am late to this discussion… but have three unrelated responses:
On the bootstrap launch issue, we need many draft proposal ideas, including Alex’s (and my own) simply as fodder to allow a randomly selected constitutional convention to mix/match/invent a good starting point for a democratic lottery system. Likely this body would want to include a built-in lottery process for regularly refining and improving the design. No expert academics would be making these decisions.
Now a bit about Yoram’s insistence that the conflict of interests between the rulers and the ruled should be the dominant (or perhaps sole?) argument offered for moving to sortition. It is THAT failing of the electoral system that caught his eye, and when anyone brings up epistemic angles, he seems to think they are watering down the key issue, or misdirecting the reader. I think it is useful for readers to recognize that even if there were NO conflict of interests between elected rulers and the ruled, elections would STILL be a terrible and undemocratic design that makes bad decisions. That point doesn’t argue AGAINST the conflict of interest point… it adds to it.
Lafont was mentioned a couple of times above, and I want to bring in the arguments of Eric Shoemaker, whose recent doctoral thesis (mentioned in a recent EbL post https://equalitybylot.com/2024/12/15/a-phd-dissertation-written-in-favor-of-democracy-without-elections/) is all about why elections are undemocratic and a full sortition system would be superior and democratic. In his thesis, and a separate journal article he rather thoroughly dismantles Lafonts arguments against empowered sortition bodies (Shoemaker, Eric. 2024. “The Democratic legitimacy of the micro‐deliberative shortcut: A defense of randomly selecting legislators.” Journal of Social Philosophy [Preprint]. doi:10.1111/josp.12598.)
I asked Eric to write a summary of his analysis of Lafont’s arguments, and I am pasting the three-paragraph summary here:
“In her book Democracy Without Shortcuts, Christina Lafont argues that empowering deliberative mini-publics would be undemocratic. While there are many threads within her argument, at the centre is a conception of democratic legitimacy according to which the public’s approval of the laws they live under is of paramount importance. According to Lafont, ideally the whole public would deliberate, and then agree on a public policy, and that public policy would become the law. But when the public has not deliberated, ‘correspondence’ between public opinion and the law must come first. On her view, an empowered deliberative mini-public would either be redundant, in case it agrees with the broader public about what to do after its deliberations, or illegitimate, if it changes its mind through deliberation and enacts a policy which does not match (pre-deliberation) public opinion.
“This concept of legitimacy should be rejected for several reasons. Foremost because ‘correspondence’ without deliberation is not very meaningful. What an average citizen’s knee-jerk reaction to a pollster’s question is not a good indicator of their deeply held values and convictions. Furthermore, aligning public opinion to the law can be achieved by manipulating public opinion through propaganda rather than democratic deliberation. Also, Lafont’s correspondence conception of legitimacy does not require that decisions be made through a democratic procedure – just that the public like their laws, even if they are made by an unaccountable king.
“Lafont rejects what she calls the ‘micro-deliberative shortcut’, where a mini-public deliberates and decides rather than the whole public as she would prefer, in favour of what we may call the ‘correspondence shortcut’, where we skip deliberation and try our best to match the laws to unreflective and often contradictory poll results. Ultimately, any democratic decision-making in non-ideal circumstances involves shortcuts. The question is which shortcut we ought to take. Lafont is willing to grant that the mini-public’s decisions represent what the whole public would have chosen if it had deliberated, and should accept that this fact makes them the most democratic decision-making mechanism we can use in the world we live in today.”
I can’t help but notice the irony that Lafont and Yoram seem to agree that the agreement of the general public with the laws adopted is the best (or even only) measure of whether a system is “democratic,” even though Lafont and Yoram have opposite ideas about the most likely system to get there. But their measuring device easily allows authoritarian dictatorships with strict control over the media, to meet this standard and allows them to declare those authoritarian systems “democratic.”
While PROCEDURE is not everything, I think that democratic procedure is essential for defining a democracy, which is (as Eric Shoemaker defines it):”the collective and coequal rule of the people.”
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>While PROCEDURE is not everything, I think that democratic procedure is essential for defining a democracy, which is (as Eric Shoemaker defines it):”the collective and coequal rule of the people.”
Absolutely.
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Terry,
> we need many draft proposal ideas […] No expert academics would be making these decisions.
But, of course, those many draft proposals will not come from a representative section of the public but would rather reflect elite notions. Setting the agenda, or having disproportionate influence on the agenda, represents significant political power even if the final decisions are made by others.
> a randomly selected constitutional convention
I am not sure to what extent this body was featured in your own proposals, but it was completely absent (or at least highly de-emphasized to the extent that I don’t remember its appearance) in Alex’s book.
> even if there were NO conflict of interests between elected rulers and the ruled, elections would STILL be a terrible and undemocratic design that makes bad decisions
Very emphatically no. This is a crucial point that should be emphasized. If the rulers had the same interests as the ruled then there would be every reason to expect good governance (i.e., governance that would meet with popular approval).
> I can’t help but notice the irony that Lafont and Yoram seem to agree that the agreement of the general public with the laws adopted is the best (or even only) measure of whether a system is “democratic,”
This may be what Lafont calls “democratic”, but that is not at all what I am calling “democratic”. A public of millions cannot make any policy decisions and cannot meaningfully agree or disagree with most of the policy decisions made. In a democratic system the public approves the process of governance and its outcomes as a whole.
> But their measuring device easily allows authoritarian dictatorships with strict control over the media, to meet this standard and allows them to declare those authoritarian systems “democratic.”
For this to be the case, we must believe that citizens can be fooled by the media into thinking that things are working according to their own values and interests while in fact they are not. This possibility is a classic aristocratic trope. Indeed it is the main theme of Plato’s famous allegory of the cave. I reject this idea, as does anyone who has a democratic outlook. In fact, if we accept it, then no one making any political argument can withstand opposition since their interlocutor can always claim that the argument is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the situation which the one making the argument has because they are completely misled by the media which is under strict control of someone (and which uses this strict control to hide the fact that they have this strict control).
> I think that democratic procedure is essential for defining a democracy, which is (as Eric Shoemaker defines it):”the collective and coequal rule of the people.”
Unfortunately, “the collective and coequal rule of the people” is just a slogan. It’s a good slogan which I agree with, but as I have pointed out many times before such slogans give very little guidance on how a particular system can be judged as being democratic or not. What are the procedural attributes that make a procedure democratic?
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>What are the procedural attributes that make a procedure democratic?
Going back to Dahl, it is that the agenda, options and final decision be determined by the demos. How to do that in large modern states is a non-trivial problem but addressable both in theory and practice (presupposing majoritarianism).
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> the agenda, options and final decision be determined by the demos
The question is not “how to do that” but “how do we know that it is so”? Without being able to assess whether this criterion is met (or to what extent it is met), it is no more than a slogan and is useless (or arguably worse than useless) as a scientific tool.
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The agenda/proposals of the electoral coalitions that passed the superminority threshold (set at only 16% in the Milne/Bouricius paper in the Journal of Sortition), would map reasonably well to the ideological diversity of the electorate. And the successful coalition would be the one who most accurately anticipated the informed preferences of the allotted jury. If several juries (deliberating in parallel) delivered the same “verdict” then that’s as reliable a metric as we can hope for.
If anyone wants to read the paper I’m referring to, please apply for a complimentary printed copy of JoS at imprint.co.uk/sortition-hub or request an e-print from Oliver or Terry.
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So the criterion that you are offering for a democratic system is “one that works according to the Milne/Bouricius paper in the JoS volume 1 issue 1”?
As a general criterion this seems no more convincing (and probably less convincing) than the standard “a democratic system is one that selects the government in fair and free elections”.
Both of those definitions focus on “how” rather than “what” – neither really reflects the essential normative connotations of the term. Relatedly, both are wide open for interpretation and do not lend themselves to judgment-independent assessment.
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Yes, and my criterion is quantifiable: which of the six competing proposals is accepted by the citizen jury, and is the result repeatable (if not, then we don’t know which “verdict” reflected the informed preferences of the target population).
I think Dahl would have approved.
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So nothing matters but the fact that 6 proposals are presented to the allotted and the fact that of those 6 the same one is consistently selected by multiple allotted bodies?
For example, how the authors of the proposals are selected does not matter? How well the selected proposals are actually implemented does not matter either?
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I want to be clear that the paper Keith refers to simply describes various criteria for assessing uses of sortition, and is not endorsing or advocating Keith’s super-minority system, or any of the other specific examples discussed. I personally don’t think it is a democratic system, as it entrusts agenda setting to elites who win elections. While Keith sees this as a sort of “representative ho boulomenos (from any who wishes to propose),” I think it fails to achieve that. I don’t think agenda setting by political parties that win elections is the same as allowing the demos to set the agenda. I favor lottery selected representative agenda setting bodies, likely accompanied by an option for petitioning to add to the agenda.
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>how the authors of the proposals are selected does not matter?
They are selected by election — proportional representation under universal suffrage. Any other selection mechanism would be undemocratic.
>How well the selected proposals are actually implemented does not matter either?
Both the Athenian template and our modern analogue have mechanisms to ensure that magistrates are held to account. The Milne/Bouricius and Dowlen papers in JoS imagine ways in which sortition could contribute to this task.
>I favor lottery selected representative agenda setting bodies
Unfortunately the devil is in the detail and Terry has never provided a convincing explanation for his representative claim for small voluntary agenda-setting bodies.
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I have written a bit about how an Agenda Council chosen by lot might function. While I probably should write a lot more about the details, here is a link to a section of chapter 16 of my draft book available for free online here https://democracycreative.substack.com/p/solving-dilemmas-with-multi-body that discusses the Agenda Council. The members would serve short terms, and be selected by a two step lottery and stratified sampling. Because those selected in the first round could decline, the body would not be perfectly representative. However, they would be far more representative than any legislature in the world. What’s more, because they are only selecting agenda topics, and not drafting, reviewing, or adopting any proposals slight deviation from ideal representativeness is not a problem. I will paste one parageraph here from that section about why this is a far better method for setting an agenda than allowing elected politicians handle the task:
“The Agenda Council and their staff would seek out problems needing attention, rather than merely react to media or special interest group pressures. For example, the United States now faces a little discussed, but indisputable, infrastructure deficit (transportation, water systems, etc.) that arguably is ignored by elected representatives because raising the issue doesn’t benefit re-election. The goal is to set an agenda rationally, in the public interest, rather than according to the dictates of electoral imperatives, where being able to blame political opponents is the priority.”
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> I want to be clear that the paper Keith refers to simply describes various criteria for assessing uses of sortition, and is not endorsing or advocating Keith’s super-minority system, or any of the other specific examples discussed. I personally don’t think it is a democratic system, as it entrusts agenda setting to elites who win elections.
So you are saying that Keith Sutherland is misrepresenting other people’s positions? What a surprise.
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keithsutherland> elections, mechanisms, …
So you really do not realize that if the “democratic” nature of a system depends on those then in order to operationalize “democracy” these concepts need to be operationalized as well?
In other words, operationalizing your proposed concept of democracy is at least as intractable, and is at least as judgment-dependent, as operationalizing the standard “free and fair elections” concept.
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Elections are operationalized in the polling booth. I never suggested that the Milne/Bouricius paper advocated (rather than described) our system, although Oliver did insist on reducing the Kovner superminority threshold to 16%, in order to provide space for more radical proposals.
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> Elections are operationalized in the polling booth.
How is the “free and fair” part operationalized?
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I can’t claim any expertise in the study of voting procedures (no doubt there’s an extensive polsci literature). The focus of Alex and my work is on the proposal threshold in the legislative assembly.
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[…] Guerrero’s Lottocracy. Unsurprisingly, Kolodny is not sympathetic to the idea of sortition. Predictably, Kolodny finds ample opportunities to criticize Guerroro’s “relentlessly […]
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[…] 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 […]
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