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:

One worry that some have – usually expressed only delicately, in side-conversation after the talk – is that randomly chosen citizens would simply be of inadequate intellectual capacity to make epistemically responsible policy. Expressed bluntly: ordinary people aren’t smart enough. There is a concern – felt more powerfully by some than by others – that entrusting policy decisions to a randomly selected body of citizens would be a disaster, much worse than using elected representatives, and that it would be a disaster because of the intellectual (cognitive, general intelligence) limitations of ordinary citizens. (Guerrero, 2024: 275)

The concern touches on sensitive issues—whether meaningful differences in intelligence exist, whether political elites are more intelligent than ordinary citizens, and whether intelligence affects real-world outcomes—and perhaps that is why no one in the scholarly literature has seriously pressed it. My goal in this paper is to move this discussion out of whispered side conversations and into the open arena of scholarly debate over the merits of legislative sortition. Defenders of legislative sortition (and defenders of sortition more generally) deny the concern, or at the very least think it has little force (Abizadeh, 2021: 801; Bagg, 2024: 96; Benson, 2024: 212; Guerrero, 2024: 275–279; Zakaras, 2010: 465–466). I shall argue that an appropriately qualified version of the concern has merit, and that it should influence our overall assessment of legislative sortition.

Filed under: Academia, Elections, Sortition |