Kogelmann: Sortition and cognitive ability

Posted on March 1, 2026 by Yoram Gat

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 |

10 Responses

Anonymous, on March 1, 2026 at 9:10 pm said:

no one is smart enough to handle complexity. A pluralistic approach is mandatory. I once saw a group of farmers destroy a group of cambridge educated engineers at a practical contest. The issue isn’t smarts.

it’s communication. Connectivity and process.

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briancady413, on March 2, 2026 at 10:36 am said:

Yoram Gat, thank you for your service in publishing, If anyone can share from behind the paywall the full article, I’d be much obliged. Does Kogelmann prove that the primary challenge to legislatures is cognitive, not ethical? Brian-

When rich pool their money via a corporation, rich-owned media say ‘entrepreneurial’ and ‘fair’. When poor pool their labor via a union, rich-owned media say ‘restraint of trade’ and ‘unfair’. Let’s form a global, interfaith, multi-union, democratic, community media powerhouse owned by the rest of us, since ‘Who hires the piper, calls the tune’.

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Yoram Gat, on March 2, 2026 at 7:45 pm said:

Hi Brian – Thank you.

I have not yet read the entire paper. If you share an email address, I can send you a copy of the paper. You can also have a look at https://www.briankogelmann.com/uploads/5/5/8/6/55864067/in_defense_of_oligarchy.pdf for another example of this genre of writing.

> Let’s form a global, interfaith, multi-union, democratic, community media powerhouse owned by the rest of us, since ‘Who hires the piper, calls the tune’.

Any concrete ideas of how this would work? There are after all many attempts at “democratic media” or “popular media” which are funded by contributions of the public. What is the missing ingredient that you are proposing? I’d be up for a medium that is specifically focused on sortition. In fact, this is what Equality by Lot is. Unfortunately, it seems that there is not that much interest. There aren’t that many readers, there are fewer commenters, and even fewer writers. Any ideas how to increase the reach of the idea of sortition (through Equality by Lot or otherwise) would be welcome.

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keithsutherland, on March 3, 2026 at 8:47 am said:

>There aren’t that many readers, there are fewer commenters, and even fewer writers. Any ideas how to increase the reach of the idea of sortition (through Equality by Lot or otherwise) would be welcome.

Avoid alienating potential readers and contributors by disparaging them as self-interested sycophants.

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Yoram Gat, on March 3, 2026 at 7:59 pm said:

Heh. Self-interested sycophantic activity is not what I am aiming to promote. We obviously have more than enough of that being constantly produced by the electoralist system. To the extent that calling out self-interested sycophants discourages them from engaging in self-interested sycophancy on this blog or elsewhere, this should be considered a positive development.

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keithsutherland, on March 4, 2026 at 7:32 am said:

Yoram, I’m not going to engage in mud-slinging but, given the number of sortition scholars you have insulted on this forum (and your general contempt for academia), you might take a look in the mirror if you want an answer to your question.

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Yoram Gat, on March 4, 2026 at 7:58 pm said:

It is somewhat ridiculous that some “sortition scholars” are so thin-skinned that they feel insulted when their work is critiqued.

In any case, it is not “sortition scholars” but rather the public at large that I would like to see become part of the discussion about sortition, here or elsewhere.

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keithsutherland, on March 5, 2026 at 7:51 am said:

In every other knowledge domain (including piloting and flute playing) professional expertise is valued. When the topic is the wisdom of crowds the same principle is applicable, yet sortition scholars (note the lack of scare quotes) are dismissed by the convenor of this forum as self-interested sycophants. If, like Alex Guerrero, I had spent ten years preparing a monograph on the topic, I would be equally pissed off when the discussant attacked it for raising epistemic issues. [Note, btw, that I disagree with Alex, Helene and other lottocrats on just about everything to do with sortition.]

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Yoram Gat, on March 5, 2026 at 8:02 pm said:

No, Sutherland, you are the one whom I dismiss for the sycophant you are. You have been working very hard many years to earn the disdain with which I treat you. The falsehoods and non-sequiters that make up your comment above give just a hint of your manipulative and dishonest style.

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keithsutherland, on March 7, 2026 at 11:06 am said:

I’ll leave it to others to make their own assessment as to whether this kind of rhetoric discourages people from participating in this forum.

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