Anyone concerned about affiliating sortition closely with a US political pole should take note of last week’s New York Sun editorial [paywalled] entitled “The Newest Word From the Left — Sortition.”
Citing articles promoting sortition by the Nation’s Bhaskar Sunkara and In these Times’ editorial team, the Sun‘s editorial directly associates sortition with “the escalating aspirations of the far left.” It further implies the assemblies would be “guided” to support a progressive agenda.
Lest anyone fear that solons chosen by lottery would deviate from progressive orthodoxy, In These Times asserts that their deliberations would be guided.
The common concern about sortition costing voter power is then framed as a transfer of authority not from the elite to everyday people, as in the language of many sortition advocates, but from voters to “socialists” and “the left.”
Yet under a lottery, the voters themselves […] would lose a real say in their governance. Eliminating that check on the left’s power, though, might suit the socialists down to the ground.
Notably, the editorial does not treat sortition as a credible threat, but as a proposal that reveals the “lack of respect” for the rule of law.
It’s not our intention here to overstate the prospects of sortition being adopted. It is our intention, though, to underscore the vaulting ambition of today’s leftists vis-à-vis our constitutional system of government.
Adam Cronkright
Ali
Ahmed R. Teleb
avanderven
avergne
Alex Kovner
azakaras
Brett Hennig
campbellwallace
Simon Threlkeld
Nick Coccoma
codyhipskind
Common Lot Sortitionist
Conall Boyle
constitutionalism
davidschecter
Ethan McCutchen
graytmatter
gtridimas
Henry Tuttle
H.J. Hofkirchner
HpR
James Kierstead
John Burnheim
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Jochen Krattenmacher
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Jonathan Crock
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Jacob Richter
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Nicholas Gruen
Owen Shaffer
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Emil
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Ted Wachtel
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Wayne Liebman
Yoram Gat
Oliver Milne
Equality by lot 
well, moving from ignored to hated :)
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Perhaps the writers of the Sun editorial believe the views they espouse would not be supported by an informed cross-section of the public on a fair and level playing field.
The quotes show them to have a preference for straw men and misinformation, over honest argument.
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In his response to Mark Warren’s observation that participants in America in One Room depolarized by moving from Trump to Biden, James Fishkin remarked that Deliberative Polls may well be of interest to “Post-Trump Republicans” (the implication being that 49.8% of voters in 2024 were simply wrong/deluded/brainwashed etc). https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/imp/jos/pre-prints/content-impjos8
Conservatives naturally prefer incremental improvements to the status quo, so would be suspicious of Fishkin’s project for the “deliberative transformation of society” and Landemore’s paean to “civic love”. Sortitionists need to be scrupulously neutral and (pace Simon) we need to be aware that an informed cross-section of the public might well prefer the widespread implementation of the death penalty and the enforced repatriation of illegal immigrants. My own view is that the transition to sortitional democracy would require some serious constitutional safeguards to protect minority rights and ensure fiscal stability.
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In general, there’s unquestionably going to be a correlation between those advocating sortition and left-wing politics, for a few reasons.
I don’t think it will make much sense to hide from this, exactly, as it will come across severely dishonest.
What approach I think is vital, though, is to make clear that we consider ourselves to have the same sorts of biases that all humans have, and while we obviously earnestly believe in our own political views (otherwise we wouldn’t have them), we also believe our own political views need to be checked and *combined* with those that disagree with us.
The goal, ultimately, should be to reduce the divisions between us and create a society that is inclusive to all, regardless of political affiliation. I genuinely want people with opposing political views to feel as though they have a mechansim through which they can pursue their interests without being blocked by partisan opponents, myself included.
A jury of randomly selected citizens need to be convinced of one side or another, and while I may personally believe that my views will withstand such scruitiny, that’s simply because I’m a biased individual, like any other, and things may simply not play out how I envision it. I need to do the work to convine others, and those on the other side deserve the same opportunity to convince me of their correctness. All design choices should reflect this.
I think there is truly bipartisan demand for such a system. The feeling of being silenced by the political elite is something most people can relate to. How we speak to that will obvoiusly be very important.
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This will have little credibility coming from someone currently promoting civic assemblies in NYC, but one of the most important things we can do to avoid the dangers of tying sortition to any given party is to make sure we cultivate them in a diversity of political contexts. To date they have predominated in the US in cities and left-leaning states (with some important exceptions).
Fwiw, I suspect many of the elements of Landemore’s “civic love,” including the affection among deliberators, increased understanding of others’ perspectives, pro-social sentiment, etc, would translate smoothly into right-leaning communities, among which many are vocally concerned about polarization, loneliness, etc. But stories matter, and I’ve seen right-leaning readers put off by the book’s detailed stories that made civic love sound a bit unidirectional (even as she cited data suggesting it isn’t.)
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Jordan:> In general, there’s unquestionably going to be a correlation between those advocating sortition and left-wing politics, for a few reasons.
What are those reasons?
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keith: sortition is not, at least in this time, part of the hegemony of modern society. It’s fringe, and perhaps I’m making an assumption, but I would suspect it is more commonly advocated by people with higher levels of education. Education level is strongly correlated to left leaning ideologies.
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that’s on top of the fact that democratic reforms, in general, are correlated with left leaning views already. Proportional representation, for example, are more commonly advocated for by the left, while the trends to focus more on electoral security, like voter id laws.
This is broadly true across a number of countries.
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Yes indeed, that’s why I emphasise the need to distinguish between sortition and deliberative “democracy”. Decision making by large quasi-mandatory juries (leaving deliberation in the hands of elected advocates) doesn’t arrogate additional powers to the chattering classes. It’s essential that sortition is seen to be politically neutral, otherwise it will be a victim of the populist backlash.
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I think we can have both.
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Sure, but they aren’t the same thing. Deliberative democracy (DD) is a normative project focusing on small-group interactions. It’s comparatively recently that DD practitioners have made the claim that random selection will enable small-group exchanges to mirror the population that they “describe”, but they have not seriously taken on board the demanding constraints that this would require. And it’s alarming that this is seen to favour left-leaning ideologies, as it will lead to the demise of the sortition movement.
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I would be catious around trying to design a system around a particular kind of output. I would say you can either make the process neutral, or the outcome, but not both. While I would be highly suspicious on a claim that either side of an argument is 100% correct all the time, or that they have 100% of the relevant and important information, it would also be pretty unlikely that one side isn’t, on average, more likely to “win” in a neutral process.
If we must have a neutral outcome, it’s unlikely we can have a neutral process. Our goal should be to reassure people that our designs work to take every perspective into account and procedurally favours no side. I don’t think we should make any promises in regards to what this would output.
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I agree with the premise that there is a lot of danger in associating sortition heavily with one party or ideology.
In the US, sortition faces some headwinds on the right.
Structural advantages in the Senate and the electoral college add resistance to process reform. And the party in power has tended to be less open to process reform ideas.
But I’d argue much of the disproportionate support on the left comes from forces over which the movement has more control. The most important one is that we’re far more actively selling to the left than to the right.
We’ve produced many more articles arguing that sortition might someday support socialist reforms, for example, than arguing that sortition bodies are more likely than the public to show fiscal restraint, though evidence to date better supports the latter.
The education argument is interesting. Sortition advocacy in this era was largely birthed in academia. It speaks the language of random sampling and science. Many of its most prominent books are by academics, many of those also for them. The movement needs to shed some nerdy habits – or at least develop some new non-nerdy ones – if it’s going to broaden its appeal.
Higher education has not traditionally correlated with left-leaning politics in the US, but it does in the Trump era, in which anti-elitism is explicitly aimed at the educated. But surely there is a door for sortition advocates there. We often emphasize race in our case for representativeness but seldom education, even though, e.g., the House of Representatives is far more representative in terms of race than education. We should ask ourselves WHY we hesitate to point out the fact that sortition bodies will contain more people with lower levels of educational attainment.
The main reason the right isn’t buying is that we aren’t selling to them.
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Absolutely. Unfortunately (from a democratic perspective), this means that a) the people choose their advocates from a wide range of alternatives and b) that the decision making process isn’t corrupted by either systemic or accidental factors. This means that the decision making body has to be a) large, b) quasi-mandatory and c) silent. The fact that you think the current arrangements for citizens’ assemblies etc lean to the left means that the process needs to be redesigned. Or are you suggesting that reasons offered by left-wing deliberators are more likely to be both persuasive and morally/epistemically “correct”?
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My last response was to Jordan. I can’t speak for the US, but in the UK academic elites lean heavily to the left. In university seminars a lot of self-censorship goes on by those of us who lean to the right.
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I wasn’t making claims about whether sortition goes to the left, I was saying that those who are advocating sortition are more likely to be left leaning.
Whether left-leaning arguments are more convincing and persuasive and correct, in so much as they affirm my own biases I’d likely have to say yes. If I didn’t believe in my biases, they wouldn’t be my own biases.
Whether that’s actually the case or not, I don’t really have anything external to measure it to. If there are systemic elements that lean in one direction or another that can be isolated, we should remove them. If that ends up leading to decisions moving to the right, so be it. However, i’m only concerned with ensuring the process is as neutral as possible, rather than the outcome.
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>I wasn’t making claims about whether sortition goes to the left, I was saying that those who are advocating sortition are more likely to be left leaning.
The latter would suggest the former.
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I don’t necessarily think that’s true. I do not support sortition because I think it will enact left-wing policy, but because I think it will do a better job at bringing people together to work through problems, together. That is, in my opinion, valuable in it’s own right. I think it would lead to better societal outcomes, even if the actual chosen policies dont’ align with my own expectations of what they should enact.
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Even without group deliberation, sortition opens the possibility of departure from public opinion when it affords time and resources for deep consideration (individual deliberation). Group deliberation opens the door for further departure due to mechanisms both positive (listening, mutual understanding, social connection, etc) and negative (groupthink, information cascades…). I hear that deliberative democracy advocates (like me) need to consider the consequences of that further departure.
But I’m not sure I follow the connection to this left/right conversation. Both models involve testimony and, by whatever name, *education.* To the extent that we’re blaming education of the sortition body for introducing left-leaning political bias (and I think that frame has flaws), this factor is not unique to group deliberative designs.
What is it about group deliberation that you think introduces left-leaning bias? The facilitation method? The facilitators? Something in the nature of group deliberation?
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>Even without group deliberation, sortition opens the possibility of departure from public opinion
Yes, that’s why it needs to be demonstrated empirically that the outcome would be the same, irrespective of which citizens were chosen to participate.
>What is it about group deliberation that you think introduces left-leaning bias?
Facilitation would be ruled out ex ante for any decision-making body with statutory powers. But, I think group deliberation does tend in a liberal direction in that it’s more comfortable to be viewed as progressive than reactionary. The moral imperative to “be kind” is quite a strong one. I don’t think the issue is so much the educative effects of deliberation as the sociology of knowledge elites. The main correlation of the Brexit vote was whether or not one had a college degree.
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So is the contention is that progressives have spread social norms that will persist even in deliberative environments clearly not dominated by progressive participants and facilitated to prevent ad hominem gatekeeping?
It’s an interesting (and ultimately empirically testable) claim. It seems a bit speculative but more credible than the Sun’s intimation that facilitators willfully guide participants towards left-leaning conclusions.
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I think faciliators could work just fine. Their job is primarily to provide each person equal time to speak. With each session being recorded and transcribed, different parties can review and ensure fairness. Different parties would have abilities to repromand facilitators for violating the laid out expectations. Parties on the losing end would have no icentive to allow such facilitators to carry out their duties in a biased manner.
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I think faciliators could work just fine. The job of a faciliator is purely to provide each particiapant speaking time, to avoid domination from any single participant. By recording the sessions and providing transcripts and talking times, the facilitator’s performance can be monitered, and all parties would have access to that information and the ability to plenalize any abuses.
There’s no reason a MPs on the losing side of a trial would be incentivized to allow biased facilitators to lead the event to their own loss.
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Oh oops.. some reason my comment wasn’t showing up so I thought it failed some reason. I can’t delete them, so there they remain.
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Ethan:> So is the contention is that progressives have spread social norms that will persist even in deliberative environments clearly not dominated by progressive participants and facilitated to prevent ad hominem gatekeeping?
Yes, and it’s exacerbated by the likelihood that deliberation will increase the domination of the (liberal) chattering classes. That’s why I side with John P. McCormick and Camila Vergara’s perspective that sortitional bodies are better conceived as part of the neo-republican project to protect the demos against domination (as elites come in a variety of shapes and sizes). For my 2011 review of John’s book see https://equalitybylot.com/2011/04/14/machiavellian-democracy/
Jordan:> The job of a facilitator is purely to provide each participant speaking time, to avoid domination from any single participant.
The Athenians used a water clock. But the problem is the perlocutionary imbalances in the speech acts of the participants — which would tend to privilege educated speakers. Add this to information cascades and other random (in the pejorative sense) factors and it’s unclear as to how such a body would represent its target population, as different samples would likely come to different conclusions.
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Jurgen Habermas’s 1962 study of the historical origins of the public sphere (civil society) claims that it was the product of the deliberative conversations in the (bourgeois) coffee houses of early-modern Europe. However this was “transformed” (aka destroyed) by structural factors, including universal suffrage, welfarism, mass media and consumer culture. Following Habermas’s lead, deliberative democrats (including Fishkin, Lafont and Urbinati) have called for the (effective) siloing of deliberation from sortitional bodies to (voluntary) civil society, where it can then ‘influence’ (and constrain) elected politicians — provide them with cover to do ‘the right thing’.
Terry Bouricius’s call for binding decision making by large sortitional policy juries is orthogonal to this approach, hence my claim that it is better understood as the plebeian element in the neo-republican model of a mixed constitution. Sortition and deliberative democracy need to be kept distinct, the latter being a primarily elite project.
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“Educated” is a loaded word. The truth is, time limits favor concise speakers.
Who tend to be more intelligent. This would tend toward meritocracy.
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Who facilitates the facilitators?
All you need is rules of order, and a chairman chosen by lot.
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I do not trust facilitators.
The term itself feels slippery. Like community organizer, or social worker.
Instead of asking what his agenda should be, ask whether we want someone with an agenda having that much influence.
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Is that a problem?
People are opportunistic and disingenuous. Let’s just ignore that crowd and do our thing.
And no facilitators.
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deepdark:> This would tend toward meritocracy.
My interest is in democracy, and rules of order cannot equalise perlocutionary imbalances. We need to bear in mind that the role of sortitional deliberators would be to represent their “constituents” — who they did not select on the basis of their oratorical (or any other skills).
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>: Let’s just ignore that crowd and do our thing.
Who are the crowd, and to whom does the “our” refer?
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This is from a talk by Jonathan Sumption, a former Justice of the Supreme Court:
“The liberal consensus of the Sixties and Seventies approached the political process with a high degree of entitlement, and achieved a considerable measure of control over the courts, executive agencies, universities and other cultural institutions. Liberals used this cultural control to move into intolerant identity politics and critical theory, and to promote social and cultural policies for which there was no consensus in the population at large. They treated alternative opinions as lacking legitimacy and therefore unworthy of notice. The word “deplorables”, which may have cost Hillary Clinton the 2016 election, sums up this attitude perfectly.”
His analysis of the right-wing backlash is even more acerbic.
https://unherd.com/2026/07/the-american-disaster
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