Equality by lot

In a new paper, Brian Kogelmann stakes an explicitly elitist position against sortition, by arguing quite plainly that the average person is too stupid to hold power.

Sortition and cognitive ability

Abstract: There is a growing sense that representative democracy is in crisis, leading to renewed interest in alternative institutional designs. One popular proposal—what I call legislative sortition—says we should replace elected legislators with randomly selected citizens. While legislative sortition has drawn both numerous supporters and critics, one objection has received little attention: that ordinary citizens’ lower cognitive abilities, relative to elected officials, will diminish the quality of governance. This paper articulates and evaluates this concern, distinguishing between several versions of it. I argue that some forms of the objection are implausibly strong, but that a suitably qualified version can be defended. Although this does not provide a decisive reason to reject legislative sortition, it meaningfully shapes how we should assess its promise.

Legislative sortition faces many objections (Lafont, 2020; Lafont and Urbinati, 2024; Landa and Pevnick, 2021; Umbers, 2021). And yet, I have found no sustained scholarly investigation of what I believe is the most common reaction to it among those who encounter it for the first time. Guerrero describes it:
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