The typical sortition advocate looks at the theory of electoral accountable and state, well, electoral accountability is so bad it might as well not even be there. But that doesn’t let sortition off the hook. Even if electoral accountability is terrible, that doesn’t mean that lottocratic accountability is good.
Imagine a particularly corrupt society. Random selection rotates the citizens in. These citizens understand what lottery gives them, and they use their power to pay themselves exhorbitant salaries. Or they take bribes from patrons wishing to change legislation.
Even with multi-body sortition, given sufficient coordination between the multiple bodies, all participants could conspire to be corrupt and reward themselves across every panel and assembly.
Of course this is true with elections. Elected officials occasionally conspire to reward themselves across various checked and balanced institutions. If these elected officials are sufficiently discrete, then the voters are none the wiser and cannot apply appropriate electoral feedback.
I imagine a very coarse button that voters could press to hold lottocrats accountable, a sort of nuclear option similar to the practice of banishment.
Every year, voters could have an opportunity to punish a runaway lottocracy.
A referendum shall be held every year and ask, “Should the lottocrats be punished?”
- Should the lottocrats serving right now be punished?
- Should the lottocrats that served 1 year ago be punished?
- Should the lottocrats that served 2 years ago be punished?
- Should the lottocrats that served 3 years ago be punished?
- Should the lottocrats that served 4 years ago be punished?
To pass the referendum, at least 30% of the entire voting population must participate and vote in favor. Like banishment, this referendum demands a critical threshold of participation. Moreover for the referendum to pass, at least 60% must vote in favor rather than against.
If voters vote to punish the lottocrats:
- The currently serving lottocrats could be decimated. 70% of the lottocrats will be culled and kicked out of office. Of the lottocrats culled, their salaries shall be forfeited. The rest will be spared at random in order to ensure some continuity of the past.
- Of the lottocrats to be punished, the entire sum of their salaries, and 70% of their wealth and assets, will be seized on the assumption the wealth may be ill gotten.
- A special prosecutor will be appointed by Citizens’ Assembly to investigate the behavior of all the lottocrats and individually prove their innocence. If proven innocent, the wealth and salaries will be returned. Yet innocence must be conditional on for example, if they were aware of any corruption, they made the best of efforts to inform the public and key decision makers. If proven guilty, further criminal punishments would be handed down.
I hope such a system would inspire a healthy fear in lottocrats to resist the temptation of corruption and bribery.
This potential tool is a collective punishment sledgehammer with no nuance. It’s not in the power of voters to perform a sophisticated investigation. What they can know is that they’re unhappy with the status quo, and that if they’re sufficiently unhappy, they can lay waste against the lottocracy. That’s why I think such a tool would be sufficiently easy for the voters to wield.
An ideal society, happy with the way things are, would never think to activate the sledgehammer. Lottocrats could also track the year-on-year votes and thereby correct course before ever reaching the threshold.
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I agree with John that if we are going to adopt Athenian approaches to democratic representation, then we should also look at their approaches to punishing those who betrayed the trust placed in them. It’s worth exploring the 4th century reforms, after which large (c500) randomly-selected juries decided on the adoption or rejection of new laws. As these bodies “deliberated” in silence before up/down voting it’s hard to imagine how they could be corrupted. The proposals would be introduced by elected politicians and, according to a new article ‘Ambition for office, and the nature of election in ancient Greek democracies’ in the Journal of Sortition, this would not be dissimilar to Athenian practice. The article is paywalled, but anyone who would like a free printed inspection copy of the launch issue should email emma@imprint.co.uk
https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/imp/jos/2025/00000001/00000001
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It’s important that allotted office-holders be held accountable, but referendum is not the way to do it – as we have seen in the UK, referenda frequently express the inchoate moods of the voting public rather than their considered judgement, and would turn the process into a PR battle (with the spoils going to those with the most clout) rather than a genuine accountability mechanism. A better approach would be review by jury, so those making the decision are well-informed and to some degree insulated from the tides of public opinion.
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Agree with Oliver. My argument with Daniela Cammack in our JoS articles is on the comparative merits of citizens’ juries and referenda. If you want to read it, just email emma@imprint.co.uk for a free inspection copy.
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A set of healthy and reliable accountability tools is essential, and perhaps some sledgehammer tool can be in the tool box (though this particular one seems more problematic than useful). The multi-body sortition design was created specifically as a bulwark against corruption and bad actors. The randomly selected Rules Council would not know any of the identity of members of Policy Juries, since these would be kept confidential at least until their work was completed (like court juries in the U.S.). Due to regular rotation, every member of each body would have an interest in designing systems for preventing corruption, since they would soon be out of office and suffer any future corruption.
Here is a link to a section of chapter 12 of my book manuscript (free on substack), specifically about how sortition can be used to prevent corruption.
https://democracycreative.substack.com/p/some-benefits-of-sortition
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Even if the Rules council were kept anonymous, sufficiently motivated bad actors can still bribe them.
Imagine for example, the lottocracy decides to reward themselves with exhorbitant salaries. And despite anonymity, they also offer this bribe to the Rules Council. With legislative state power, they have the power to do so.
The Rules Council now has a choice… take the payoff and reward yourself, or stand up for some greater good. Depending on social cohesion and cultural values, we might expect some chaos here.
Obviously similar things happen in our current system. For decades the Supreme Court was a seen as an almost neutral arbiter of justice and facts. Now we find that several justices have been receiving gifts for decades.
Yes, lottocratic juries have a future term interest in preventing corruption, only if their temporary power doesn’t permanently transform them into members of the upper class. If temporary power is permanently transformative, their future interests no longer align with the public.
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Multi-body sortition makes the ploy impossible. It is reasonable to assume an initial rule should and would be that any change in pay, or other benefits proposed by a Rules Council would not go into effect until all members had rotated off. More specifically, ALL rule changes, would not go into effect until they had been presented to a separate randomly selected jury that must hear pro and con arguments before adopting or rejecting the rule change. The key is that nobody would ever have power to increase their own pay, or do anything else significant, alone. Once this rule is in place (and the principle is so obvious that it is incorporated into many existing constitutions and statutes preventing even elected representatives from raising their own pay), it becomes self-perpetuating, because no Rules Council would propose a rule that the council that comes AFTER them should have the power to enrich themselves, or NOT submit future rules changes to an independent jury. And no jury would be likely to insert such an obvious route to corruption. This is a core principle of multi-body sortition.
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To me this proposal seems self-contradictory. It presupposes a very corrupt society and yet at the same time it assumes that some institutions of government can be trusted to fulfill their roles faithfully.
Regarding the second proposed sanction, who will implement the seizure of assets? If everybody is so corrupt, then what institution can be trusted to faithfully implement the law?
Regarding the third proposed sanction, if we are willing to trust a special prosecutor to pursue and prosecute corrupt officials, and if we are willing to trust the courts to arbitrate such cases, why is the referendum needed to begin with?
Beyond these questions, there is also the risk that the entire mechanism could encourage corruption rather than discourage it. If the innocent are punished together with the guilty (proposed sanctions 1 and 2), it could generate an atmosphere of cynicism and bitterness among the allotted and serve to undermine the entire sortition-based system.
Accountability for crimes and corruption should come through the regular mechanism: the courts. The courts and the mechanisms for uncovering and investigating crimes should of course be democratized by empowering allotted juries to hold power in these systems as well.
A society that is so corrupt that no individual and no body with any power can be trusted to promote the public interest is by hypothesis assumed to be doomed to have very poor governance and no institutional arrangement can avoid this outcome.
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>Even if the Rules council were kept anonymous, sufficiently motivated bad actors can still bribe them.
The (UK) Climate and Nature Bill (recently withdrawn) legally obliged the Secretary of State to include in his (sic) climate strategy any proposals that received 66% support of the Climate Assembly (constituted by sortition). Given the pivotal role of climate policy, such a body would have been subject to very intense lobbying — including from “green” industries, alongside the usual suspects.
>A society that is so corrupt that no individual and no body with any power can be trusted to promote the public interest is by hypothesis assumed to be doomed to have very poor governance and no institutional arrangement can avoid this outcome.
“If men were angels, no government would be necessary”.
Given that there is no good reason to assume that the popolo are any more virtuous than the grandi, the task of institutional design is to work with the crooked timbers of mankind. The republican solution has generally been to constrain one set of interests with another.
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To repeat the obvious point that Sutherland always manages to misunderstand: The issue is not that the allotted are more or less virtuous than the elite, but that each group – the allotted or the elite – act to promote their own values and interests. The values and interests of the allotted can be expected to be aligned with those of the public while those of the elite can be expected to be misaligned.
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Yes, that is the standard dualism of the republican model of governance (especially the Harringtonian variant) and freedom resides in the conflict between the two. The only difference is that modern republicans (like myself) recognise the plurality of elite interests. The superminority principle ensures a better match between elites and the ideological diversity of the political community. And the allotted get to make the final choice.
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