More Edmund Griffiths on sortition

Posted on October 8, 2025 by Yoram Gat

Edmund Griffiths, a long-time sortition advocate, has been pushing for sortition in the infighting-torn YourParty. It turns out he’s been writing a book called Sortition and Socialist Democracy to be published by Palgrave Macmillan. Griffiths also has a new article in the Morning Star discussing the sortition-related ongoings at YourParty, and in particular the fact that it turns out that the number of allotted delegates in the YourParty conference is going to be 13,000.

Your Party launch conference: the sortition of the 13,000

EDMUND GRIFFITHS makes a robust defence of sortition, the chosen method of picking attendees for the new left party’s inaugural conference from the membership at random, but sounds the alarm on the eye-watering number of suggested delegates

[A]n especially exciting plot twist [in the YourParty thriller] came in mid-September, with the announcement that delegates to the inaugural Your Party conference will be chosen by sortition.

This system — where members of decision-making bodies are picked at random — is most familiar from its use in ancient Athens and in a modern jury. The Athenians, indeed, seem to have regarded it as simple common sense that democracies choose their ruling bodies using a lottery: only oligarchies prefer to elect them.
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Filed under: Applications, Books, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Bellon: Citizens’ conventions against democracy

Posted on October 8, 2025 by Yoram Gat

André Bellon is a former French politician, a member of the French national assembly in the 1980’s and the early 1990’s, and the founder of the reformist organization, the Association for a constitutional assembly. He writes the following in Revue Politique et Parlementaire. [Original in French, Google translation with some touchups.]

Members of parliament in favor of “citizens’ conventions” want, under the pretext of democracy, to place universal suffrage, an expression of popular sovereignty, under supervision.

Like the infamous sea serpent, we periodically see the resurgence of calls for the famous “citizens’ conventions,” formed by randomly selected individuals, supervised by experts, presenting themselves as spokespersons for the people. For their promoters, this represents a democratic revolution; in fact, it is a trick for mobilizing citizens without any real political power, or even for eliminating all popular sovereignty.

Originally, this proposal was particularly supported by experts who – perhaps by chance – saw themselves as leaders of these conventions. Didn’t one of them naively declare that he was struck by the fact that at the end of the debates, those drawn by lot found themselves, for the most part, in agreement with the experts?
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Filed under: Elections, Press, Sortition | 2 Comments »