Nina Roux: Sortition and democracy

Posted on September 5, 2026 by Yoram Gat

A recent book by Nina Roux has the title Tirage au sort et démocratie. Retour sur le cas athénien [Sortition and democracy. Revisiting the case of Athens].

An interview with the author doesn’t turn up that much that is new. Still, it emphasizes some points that may not be new but are worth emphasizing. One point is regarding participation. It is often said that Athens was a radical democracy because of mass participation. Roux points out that this is not the case.

Another important point is about the independence of allotted bodies from elites. In Athens, sortition was not managed by elected institutions or other elite elements. For that reason it could function meaningfully as a democratic force and impose its will on the elites. This stands in contrast with modern proposals and instantiations of allotted bodies (very much including modern juries) which are always concerned keeping those bodies in check.

One of the most stimulating reflections in your work concerns the contributions of the Athenian case to our time. Far from simply observing, you propose a path toward a radical democracy whereby sortition contributes to the people’s control over their leaders. Could you elaborate on this point?

One of the main conclusions of my work was to emphasize that sortition was not the sole source of Athenian democratic radicalism. I observed, in the sources available to me, that there were indeed constraints on citizens who wished to go to the Agora to participate in public debate, and that the city took few steps to alleviate them. To say that Athenian sortition was instituted to guarantee the representation of all social groups in institutions and to create a broad participatory movement is an exaggeration—which does not mean, however, that classical Athens was not a radical democracy. It simply functioned through means of pressure other than the massive, constant, and active participation of all citizens. The most original feature of the Athenian city-state was not sortition, which is found in other institutional contexts: it was the popular courts, composed of thousands of judges chosen by lot, who voted without possibility of appeal on all trials, including those of the city’s politicians. In The Constitution of Athens, Aristotle emphasizes the importance of sortition to protect this institution from corruption and guarantee the effectiveness of popular control over the city’s elites. The use of chance, rotation, and the constant replacement of the set of judges and magistrates prevented this democratic control mechanism from jamming. And it was a mechanism that could choose as its target any politician—even Pericles, deposed in 429 BC for his handling of the first months of the Peloponnesian War. In this respect, sortition goes hand in hand with misthophoria, the remuneration of citizens participating in political institutions. It is also inseparable from the deterrent sanctions imposed by the Athenian courts: fines, death, and exile. It is therefore not insignificant that the allotment machine, the kleroterion, explicitly associated by Aristotle with the fight against corruption, was created in the aftermath of the oligarchic episodes of 411 and 404 BC, which profoundly shook the city.

Filed under: Academia, Athens, Books, Elections, History, Juries, Participation, Press, Sortition |

8 Responses

keithsutherland, on September 5, 2026 at 6:28 am said:

In her forthcoming book Daniela Cammack agrees that jury courts were a key institution of Athenian democracy (see https://equalitybylot.com/2026/07/30/representation-in-democratic-athens-manins-principles-revisited/

This is one of the reasons that many modern sortition advocates were disappointed by Canevaro’s claim that Hansen’s theory of 4th century legislative courts (nomothetai) was based on a mistranslation. But we should be reassured that even if Athenian lawmaking was the prerogative of the full assembly, modern statistical theory would suggest that employing large samples would have made little difference to the outcome.

See also Ella Street’s paper on just judgment in the Athenian jury courts: https://www.ingentaconnect.com/contentone/imp/hpt/2025/00000046/00000001/art00001

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Nicholas Gruen, on September 5, 2026 at 6:29 am said:

It seems intuitively extremely unwieldy to have a trial with what is effectively hundreds or even more than a thousand judges/jurors.

Are there many accounts of how this was done where we can get a real idea of how it was organised?

Plato’s apology makes it all seem very oratorical.

I realise that attendance was by sortition, but with numbers as high as that, it seems to me that the type of deliberation involved might not be a model of thoughtfulness and might tip over into a susceptibility to demagoguery that seems to have been a feature of the assembly.

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Henry Tuttle, on September 5, 2026 at 7:18 am said:

Nicholas,

This is something I’ve handled differently in the legislative architecture I’ve been working on. I want the attention and interaction you can get in a small jury, but I don’t want the sampling problem that comes with having eleven people decide for everyone. So instead of enlarging the jury, I replicate it: multiple small independent panels hear the same competing case, deliberate separately if they want to, and vote individually by secret ballot. They are forbidden from communicating outside the group as a standard criminal jury is. The individual ballots are then pooled. This allows for larger numbers without the contagion that seems to occur when groups gets larger.

When a sample size is too small, add panels rather than seats.

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Nicholas Gruen, on September 5, 2026 at 8:18 am said:

Thanks

Yes, that sounds like a good idea, but there are two ways to go about addressing statistical significance. One is to increase the size of bodies, possibly very substantially.

But rather than ramping up sizes, one can ramp up the size of the extent of the (super)majority necessary to carry the day.

Personally, it will be a while before people will regard a small majority of a random selection of citizens as very persuasive even if it’s large and meets statisticians’ ideas of significance.

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Henry Tuttle, on September 5, 2026 at 9:06 am said:

Nicolas,

People already accept a small number of people representing them. That’s exactly what representative democracy is, right? So, it’s about ‘random’ citizens? If you increase the size of the random sample enough, it becomes virtually indistinguishable from an entire population.

But modern representative democracy has become a religion – not in the spiritual sense, obviously, but it has become faith based. The obvious and overwhelming evidence that it doesn’t work doesn’t seem to convince anyone. The solution seems to be: VOTE HARDER! People talk about Trump followers being a cult, but I see the same willful ignorance in backers of modern representative democracy.

The arguments for elections are far more about mollifying the public than actual reasoning based on facts or historical precedent.

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keithsutherland, on September 5, 2026 at 9:39 am said:

Nick,

The chapter on The People’s Court in Hansen’s Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes is a good place to start. Hansen claims that the court was the most important organ of state (alongside the assembly), as “the courts had unlimited power to control the Assembly, the Council, the magistrates and the political leaders: political trials were the largest part of the business that came before them” (p. 179). Private lawsuits were judged by panels of 201-401, public prosecutions by panels of 501-2501. Hansen provides no explanation for the numbers involved, other than “a democratic procedure to give every citizen the same chance of selection as a juror, and a bar against attempts at bribery” (p. 197). The Greeks had no mathematical understanding of statistical probability (but that doesn’t rule out an implicit notion of representation).

The system was “accusatorial”, there being no public prosecutor, but both accusation and defence could be divided between several speakers from the same group and, no doubt, the rhetorical style of both parties was oratorical. Most importantly “The jurors had no opportunity for discussion during the casting of the votes: on the contrary, it was thought undesirable for them to exchange even a word or two about the case” (p. 202). According to Ella Street (op cit) “The Athenians did not think that talking with others would serve justice or democratic equality and they prohibited verbal deliberation among jurors in the popular courts.”

I continue to be puzzled as to why deliberative democrats reference classical Athens as an inspiration for citizens’ assemblies etc. It would be much better to use the People’s Court as a model for nomothesia — as, indeed, does Hansen, even if it turned out to be wishful thinking. Henry’s proposal is an interesting compromise, but is complex, potentially expensive and vulnerable to information cascades (as explored by Kai O’Reilly’s paper which he is currently presenting at APSA).

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keithsutherland, on September 5, 2026 at 9:50 am said:

Henry:> People already accept a small number of people representing them. That’s exactly what representative democracy is, right? So, it’s about ‘random’ citizens? If you increase the size of the random sample enough, it becomes virtually indistinguishable from an entire population.

Yes indeed, the principal constraint on sample size (other than cost) being the rational ignorance threshold. But it’s a mistake to conflate statistical sampling and the active representation of interests, where people choose their own spokespersons. This has nothing to do with electoralism as a religion (unless you are suggesting that free will is a religious principle).

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Henry Tuttle, on September 5, 2026 at 9:10 pm said:

Nicholas,

I’d separate the two. A bigger sample is a closer representation of actual public sentiment. A supermajority is about certainty. If you require a supermajority from a small group, you’re mostly just amplifying the randomness of who got picked. Two-thirds of a panel of eleven will reject something with 60% real public support about seven times out of ten. You need enough votes for the threshold to mean anything.

The other problem is that a supermajority usually favors the status quo. That’s defensible for constitutional questions, but applied to everything, little changes, and nobody finds that very persuasive either.

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