Back in 2013 The Nation magazine reviewed David Greaber’s book The Democracy Project and as a result made a brief assessment of sortition, which was mentioned by Greaber in the book. “That sounds nice, but it’s far easier said than done,” wrote The Nation. According to the magazine’s search engine, sortition has been mentioned on its pages 3 times since. One of those is a 2021 interview with Hélène Landemore in the context of her 2020 book Open Democracy.
The Nation is now publishing a long review by Osita Nwanevu of Landemore’s latest book, Politics Without Politicians. Conincidentally or not, the title of the review, “Can We Save Democracy?”, is rather similar to the title of the 2021 interview, “Can ‘Lottocracy’ Save Democracy From Itself?”.
Nwanevu starts with a copule of paragraphs of dubious relevance referring to a painting by Hieronymus Bosch, to atom bombs and to a play by Norman Mailer. He then issues a dire (but not unfamiliar) warning:
The solution to the flaws of electoral representation that Landemore presents in Politics Without Politicians is simple and bold: The bums in Washington should be thrown out of office—not just those from one party, but all of them. And not just in the next election, but forever. “Electoral democracy is beyond repair,” she declares. “A system based on electoral representation is no longer—if it ever was—capable of delivering either democratic or good governance.” Instead, she argues, we the people should finally take it upon ourselves to rule directly.
That message has drawn the praise of luminaries from Lawrence Lessig to Thomas Piketty. “This thought-provoking book,” Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu has declared, “argues that the solution to dwindling support for our political institutions is more democracy, not less.” It is truly unfortunate that the book does no such thing. Read carefully and within the context of Landemore’s other work, Politics Without Politicians instead makes the case that we must rescue the democratic idea by wringing the democracy out of it. Landemore’s proposals really would disempower the politicians. But they would also, just as surely, disempower you.
The review summarizes the book’s bottom line as follows:
To its credit, Politics Without Politicians assembles quite a lot of evidence, empirical and anecdotal, that minipublics are useful and even inspiring bodies that prove ordinary people can play a meaningful role in the crafting of public policy. But Landemore is making a larger, more audacious argument: Electoral representation is so fatally flawed that government by minipublic should replace politicians and elections altogether. The ideal democratic government, she explains, would consist of “a central agenda-setting and legislative chamber based on lot,” while also allowing the public to vote on “relatively frequent referenda” of ambiguous authority. “My favored system thus does away with politicians entirely,” she writes, “by centering a large parliament-like assembly of randomly selected citizens as the primary site of legislative power.”
If this is indeed the book’s message, and the book’s title lends credence to the claim that it is, then this seems like a significant disambiguation of Landemore’s position relative to Open Democracy (even if a non-negligible amount of the unhelpful deliberative democracy rhetoric is still present in the new book as well, it seems).
Nwanevu’s critique covers well trodden ground:
Landemore’s certainty that we can’t [elect “politicians decent enough to govern well”] drives the book. And many of her readers, understandably, will come to share her pessimism—enough so that they might fail to notice that Landemore’s project is the obliteration of democratic rights. In the ideal system she hopes to see, the ability to vote for one’s representatives or to seek public office would be eliminated. And the “possibility of doing the governing yourself” through sortition, in her words, would clearly be very remote in a country like the United States, for instance—with an adult population of roughly 270 million people, it would be extremely unlikely that any given person would be randomly selected for a national assembly small enough to allow for deep deliberations.
In the end, Landemore’s hope is that democratic government by consent, as conventionally understood—the distribution of some formal political power to all citizens in a given society on the basis of “one person, one vote”—might be replaced someday with a system that “distributes power … on the basis of ‘one person, one lottery ticket,’” given the fact that all citizens would have at least a nominal chance of being chosen for her assemblies. But a losing lottery ticket, of course, is just a piece of paper—arguing that assemblies distribute power even to those who aren’t selected for them is akin to saying that Mega Millions makes everyone who buys a ticket richer.
So somehow having a one-in-270-million chance of ruling is just a piece of paper, but having a one-in-270-million say of which elite faction is going to rule you is a precious democratic right.
Despite offering this formalistic argument, it turns out that Nwanevu does realize that the lottery ticket and the chance to personally rule are not what sortition is about:
Conceptually, the fact that most people wouldn’t end up in one of Landemore’s assemblies is also supposed to be offset by the representativeness of the chosen few.
But with considerable help from poor arguments by sortition advocates, Nwanevu manages to replicate some standard anti-sortition talking points:
With some careful statistical work and algorithms, she argues, each assembly could reflect the demographic characteristics of the wider population as closely as possible. You might not be in the assembly or able to choose who is, the bulk of the public will be told, but someone close to your demographic profile will be there saying and doing things similar to what you probably would have said and done.
While this is the principle at work when survey researchers attempt to take snapshots of raw public opinion through samples in polls, the implication that people who share the same race, gender, or class are functionally interchangeable for the purposes of democratic representation discounts the role that individual personalities, judgments, and experiences would be sure to play in actual political debates within these assemblies. Two people of the same overall demographic profile might behave quite differently in a debate, and might have vastly different experiences, hold different worldviews, or respond to arguments and information in different ways.
This, of course, reflects a misunderstanding of the way sortition works. Demographics are irrelevant. “Experiences”, “worldviews” and ways to “respond to arguments and information”, like any other attribute of the population, will be faithfully represented in the allotted body.
What’s more, one cohort of assembly members might contain more individuals with direct knowledge of a given subject than another that could have been drawn. One side of an argument might be better represented by more charismatic, eloquent people in one potential cohort than in another. Because of all this, two different randomly chosen assemblies, told to discuss and debate the same subject or policy, might reach two different conclusions. Which one would truly represent the public at large?
The claim is then that at least one of those two hypothetical bodies which are reaching two different conclusions, being too ignorant to properly form an opinion (despite having every opportunity to seek information and expert advice), or being swayed by “charisma” and “eloquence”, is unable to represent their own values and interests. Of course, the allotted, if they wish, could ask someone (perhaps some “decent enough politician”) to help them break out of their ignorance or out of their charisma- and eloquence-induced bias. But it appears that in the author’s democratically-minded opinion the allotted would be too irrational to do so, and thus they should not be considered fit for self-rule.
[O]ther dilemmas that sortition poses [are] the privileges that deliberative spaces afford those with the time, resources, and physical ability to deliberate at length [and] the power that biased moderators or administrators might wield over the assemblies[.]
But of course all of these “dilemmas” are not inherent flaws but matters that should guide the institutional design: Time and resources should be provided to all the members of the allotted body, and moderators (if any) and administrators should be controlled by the allotted themselves. One wonders why these dilemmas are not an issue (or at least not as severe an issue) when it comes to elected bodies. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Nwanevu thinks the average citizen is too much of a simpleton to be trusted.
Nwanevu then makes a brief half-hearted defense of the 500,000 elected officials in the U.S. and finishes the review with a (rather banal but quite justified) assault on the tropes of “deliberative democracy” – politics is not about discovering facts and finding “correct” solutions. This point has of course nothing to do with sortition, but unfortunately sortition has been tied to “deliberative democracy” and so can be tarred by association to this ideology. Interestingly, when finding targets for this assault Nwanevu does not limit himself to Politics Without Politicians but mines previous books and articles by Landemore. Perhaps the latest book is less committed to “deliberative democracy” than Landemore’s previous work and is more coherent in its argumentation, and therefore it is less vulnerable to opportunistic counter-arguments that are irrelevant to the merits of sortition.
The last few sentences of the review are worth quoting as a sample of the spectacular act of projection that is typical of many arguments against sortition that pretend to be motivated by noble democratic ideals but are in fact no more than an underhanded defense of the status quo:
There are people who believe in the value of human choice and people who do not. There are people who believe in the dignity and worth of all human beings and those who—out of prejudice or for profit—are working to undermine the idea that there is anything of significance about the human being as such. And those of us who bear existential and not merely instrumental commitments to democracy and the continued development of human agency will only prevail if we present democracy as an ideal that can genuinely empower us anew—ideally, on a sounder and surer basis than “one person, one lottery ticket.” Anything less risks, among other things, driving the masses further into the arms of our worst politicians.
Filed under: Academia, Books, Deliberation, Elections, Participation, Press, Sortition |
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Strikes me as a thoughtful and fair-minded review, in particular:
Nwanevu:> One side of an argument might be better represented by more charismatic, eloquent people in one potential cohort than in another. Because of all this, two different randomly chosen assemblies, told to discuss and debate the same subject or policy, might reach two different conclusions. Which one would truly represent the public at large?
This is the central issue that lottocrats (fail to) address. While the LLN would suggest that two large randomly selected juries would be likely to align in their verdict, this is not the case with small deliberative policy making bodies. Hence the need for policy proposals to be the remit of elected representatives with a reduced proposal threshold to ensure a better match with the ideological diversity of the demos.
Yoram:> So somehow having a one-in-270-million chance of ruling is just a piece of paper, but having a one-in-270-million say of which elite faction is going to rule you is a precious democratic right.
Correct. There is a difference between having a chance and having a say. If the electoral proposal threshold is reduced (leading to a plethora of different political parties) then everyone will have a say proportionate to how many other citizens share their beliefs and preferences. But this doesn’t apply to individual speech acts, on account of the imbalances pointed out by Nwanevu in the first paragraph, hence the need to differentiate sortitional juries from deliberative democracy.
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I’ve now read the full review and agree with it:
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/helene-landemore-democracy-popular-government/
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I have read the book review, but not (yet) the Landemore (2026) book. If Landemore is advocating complete replacement of elections by sortition, I cannot agree. The sortition methods have not yet been extensively tried out in any major state or nation. We do not yet fully know their strengths and weaknesses. At best, we only have some theoretical models and some experimental hints.
Some methods of implementing sortition may work out well, some not so well. For now, the best path forward is to suggest various hybrid systems that combine sortition and election in various ways. Some of these hybrid systems may work better than others. The discussion should focus on which hybrid systems are likely to be better and why.
Even if we would suppose that sortition will (or should) completely replace elections, this will clearly not happen overnight. Of necessity, there must be a transition period (of perhaps 50 years) in which the empirical strengths or weaknesses of sortition can be evaluated. Hybrid systems would be a necessary part of the transition.
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Insightful:> For now, the best path forward is to suggest various hybrid systems that combine sortition and election in various ways.
Agree. And this has to combine a theoretical study of what sortition can and cannot do along with comparative testing. Kai O’Reilly’s groundbreaking work (presented at APSA last week) indicates progress in both areas. The Journal of Sortition is dedicated to both these domains, without any pre-commitment to normative projects like deliberative democracy.
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Nwanevu’s criticisms of Landemore’s deliberative democracy seem to me reasonable enough (although I confess I haven’t read her books, only shorter pieces and interviews). But his arguments for the superiority of the vote to the lot are strikingly hollow. The idea that an individual vote in a constituency of tens or hundreds of thousands gives one a meaningful say in the outcome seems to me just obviously false – the vote empowers groups, not individuals, so whatever say you have via the vote is necessarily mediated through an electoral coalition. But the activities by which a winning electoral coalition can be produced are very similar to the activities by which a movement could shift the outcome of a sortitional process: the greater a fraction of the public are converted to your particular cause, the more allotted representatives will be in favour of it come the draw, and hence the more receptive the allotted body will be to your arguments. The principal difference is that the allotted representatives can be expected to be more open to moral and rational persuasion than elected politicians because they don’t have donors to please or political careers to consider. This is true both in Keith’s hybrid system and in a Landemore-style deliberative system, and means the process of mass political persuasion by which change is actually (supposed to be) achieved in a democracy would continue to work (and likely work better!) in either.
As for his argument about the democratic importance of the right to seek office, this falls apart almost immediately because the ability to actually *win* office, which is where the value of running for office lies, is strictly numerically limited to exactly the same degree ‘winning lottery tickets’ are. Appointment by lot simply redistributes this limited supply of offices away from the rich and well-connected.
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Oliver,
It’s hard to argue with any of that.
>But the activities by which a winning electoral coalition can be produced are very similar to the activities by which a movement could shift the outcome of a sortitional process.
Absolutely, and that’s why an election-sortition hybrid is superior. Election (with a lowered proposal threshold) empowers a broader range of policy proposals, and informed decision by sortitional juries (in principle) enables moral and rational persuasion. A hybrid model is necessary in order to implement Pitkin’s two principal modes of representation. The other advantage is pragmatic — everyone is familiar with elections and juries — without the need to rely on Habermasian and Rawlsian norms for deliberative exchange, which according to Manin (echoing Cicero), don’t apply to large political bodies.
>Appointment by lot simply redistributes this limited supply of offices away from the rich and well-connected.
That’s true, but the final decision over elected officials is in the hands of voters. Pure sortition systems remove every semblance of choice from the vast majority of citizens, who at least are able to select between the representative claims of the various rich and/or well-connected persons offering their services.
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PS there are now several hybrid models being proposed — Jordan Rose, Kai O’Reilly as well as Kovner-Sutherland. By hybrid I mean models that allocate different functions to election and sortition, as distinct from the various parallel chamber models (Callenbach and Phillips, Barnett and Carty, Leib etc).
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The moniker “insightful1a024b83ab” above is Carl Lundgren. I did not intend to post anonymously. I will respond further shortly.
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Keith, I like your definition of “hybrid” and further references. Oliver and Yoram, I agree that the book reviewer’s “attack” on sortition is rather shallow.
I have been interested in political and economic reform since the 1970s. Along the way I came across this “hybrid” proposal by Professor James L. Payne in the January 21, 1977 National Review. In his article, “The Democratic Paradox,” he suggested the following procedure by which a jury could select its nominee:
1) Candidates for the position in question — let us say, mayor of a city — would file, submitting a dossier on themselves as complete as they liked, including testimonial letters, issue stands, etc.
2) A jury of, say, 17 members would be chosen at random from the list of registered voters of the city. The jurors would be sequestered at a local motel, and paid for the week or so they would be in session.
3) The jurors would study the dossiers of the candidates, and then the candidates would be interviewed before the jury. The candidates would be permitted to bring witnesses both to testify in their favor and, if they wished, to testify against their opponents.
4) Through a process of voting and elimination, the jury would narrow down the list of candidates, and would re-interview the semi-finalists. Eventually they would make a final decision, proposing one candidate as their first choice for mayor.
Of course, a 17-member jury would be far too small for a big-city mayor, but might work for a smaller town. Unfortunately, I do not have the article in front of me and I see no way to link to it on the Internet.
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Hi Carl,
> Along the way I came across this “hybrid” proposal by Professor James L. Payne in the January 21, 1977 National Review
That’s an interesting find of an early proposal for using sortition.
IMO, an important missing component in this proposal is for the jury to regularly meet in order to oversee the ongoing activities of the mayor, with the power to dismiss and rehire if they see fit.
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> For now, the best path forward is to suggest various hybrid systems that combine sortition and election in various ways. Some of these hybrid systems may work better than others. The discussion should focus on which hybrid systems are likely to be better and why.
I think we are not yet at the point where the question of how a transition would occur is very important. It is much more important at this point to simply argue for sortition and against elections.
As for this less-urgent question, the natural answer in my opinion is to create an allotted body that monitors the elected for corruption and conflicts of interests. In particular it would set the rules of ethics and the salaries and other perks of office of the elected.
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I support the use of sortition, but I also support elections. A jury nomination system could help to find qualified candidates who are not already well-endowed with money or the unceasing ambition needed to campaign successfully. For many elected offices, this could mean a greater diversity in types of candidates nominated and elected.
For partisan elections, each party could use sortition from its members or supporters to put up (hopefully better) nominees. For nonpartisan elections, sortition from all eligible voters could be used to nominate one or two candidates. For important offices that are currently appointed, sortition could be used as an alternative to appointments. This could include executive offices below the President or Prime Minister, as well as judges.
>”an allotted body that monitors the elected for corruption and conflicts of interests. In particular it would set the rules of ethics and the salaries and other perks of office of the elected.” – I would support this too.
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“Anonymous” above is Carl Lundgren.
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Carl, I agree there is huge potential for sortition in the appointment of executive officials. Alex Kovner and my published work to date has focused on the legislature, but the book we are co-authoring will also treat with the executive branch.
Yoram, whilst you argue against electoral/sortitional hybrids, the example you give is for an allotted jury to monitor the elected for corruption and conflicts of interests. This is the hybrid model used by blind break/prophylactic sortition theorists like Oliver Dowlen and Peter Stone, who both argue against the representational potential of random selection. The Nation review criticises the proposal of Landemore and others to replace election by sortition and Nwanevu’s conclusions cannot be addressed by simply arguing for sortition and against elections.
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Carl,
> I support the use of sortition, but I also support elections.
Why do you support elections? They are a device that inevitably puts the power in the hand of the elites. How is that useful or in any other way justified? In what situation can they be expected to produce better results than a sortition-based mechanism?
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>In what situation can [elites] be expected to produce better results than a sortition-based mechanism?
When the policy proposal threshold is reduced to the point that the competition between elites better matches the ideological diversity of the full citizen body.
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I disagree that elections “are a device that inevitably puts the power in the hand of the elites.” Elections permit a choice among multiple candidates, parties, occupations, and classes for political leaders. Power of particular office holders is only temporary, and can swiftly change in an election — leading ultimately to “rule by the people.”
Electoral democracy is the only type of democracy that currently exists in modern times. Sortitionist democracy does not yet exist, either in pure form or in hybrid form. We do not yet know the flaws in sortitionist democracy so as to be able to compare with electoral democracy. I believe it is highly likely that a combination or hybrid would work better overall than any pure form.
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Agree on the need for a hybrid approach. Pitkin is clear that there are two variants at play in democratic representation: 1) descriptive representation and 2) the active representation of interests. Although it is a foundational principle of Yoramocracy that the former automatically guarantees the latter, for most uncommitted observers it’s clear that sortition has a role in the former and election in the latter (for the reasons that Carl outlines). Why lottocrats and their critics insist on a stark choice between one or the other puzzles me. An interesting exchange on the two camps talking past each other opened today on Sortition Agora: https://sortition-agora.co.uk/post/why-cant-lottocrats-and-their-critics-communicate
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Carl,
> Power of particular office holders is only temporary, and can swiftly change in an election — leading ultimately to “rule by the people.”
Rotation in office means little if those rotated in and out represent a narrow set of policy alternatives. If there are two hereditary kings who alternate in office (say that their subjects can choose any of the two once every 4 years) you’d call that “rule by the people”?
> Electoral democracy is the only type of democracy that currently exists
By deploying the conventional term “electoral democracy” you are accepting the standard assertion that an electoralist regime is democratic. But this is something that needs to be established, not asserted. What is it that makes a regime (electoral or otherwise) democratic?
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Yoram:> If there are two hereditary kings who alternate in office (say that their subjects can choose any of the two once every 4 years) you’d call that “rule by the people”?
No, but if there were a plethora of political parties for people to choose between, a meaningful reduction to the policy proposal threshold and final decision by a large sortitional jury that’s about as good as it gets.
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Yorum,
the model I present in my paper, similar to Keith’s, has a reduced threshold for legislators to put forward legislation, which means that it isn’t one party who has power at any given time, but several. This has numerous effects you would need to account for.
Legislators wouldn’t need to have complete platforms on all issues, as they wouldn’t be required to rule on all issues. In a typical majoritarian parliament, winner takes all, and thus, winner must rule on all. But if parliament is a shared space where different parties are all able to freely push forward legislation, a party can choose have have a smaller, focused platform. Combine this with a fully proportional representative system, and you give voters the ability to freely choose parties that represent their most important issues, and have a reasonable expectation they can follow through on them.
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Yoram, I said “Elections permit a choice among multiple candidates, parties, occupations, and classes for political leaders.” Nowhere did I state or imply that a choice limited to two hereditary kings, two Ayatollahs, or two Communist Party officials would somehow constitute democracy. To the contrary, it is the person who would deny the “standard assertion that an electoralist regime is democratic” who bears the burden of evidence or proof.
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Keith and Jordan, I am guessing both of you want a multi-party system for Congress or Parliament.
In principle, any legislator can introduce legislation of any kind. At least in Congress (maybe also in a Parliament) legislation is normally diverted to a Committee. The committees, typically, are controlled by the majority party, so minority legislation gets bottled up and never reaches a vote of the Congress or Parliament.
As an alternative, could a traditional elected legislature, without the sortition chamber, be constructed to work in a similar manner? To wit, the agenda or gavel can be rotated among parties, so that each party in turn gets to place its own items up for discussion or vote, including items that the majority party or coalition would not wish to see discussed or voted on. The only difference being that it would be the elected legislature, rather than a sortition chamber, that would cast the final majority vote.
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Carl:
The issue is that parties have very little reason to support one another’s bills if you keep it as a majoritarian parliament, even if you can rotate to minority agenda setting. A party’s goal is to retain electoral dominance so that they have control over what legislation is passed, and this is achieved by being the majority party in power. Cooperation with others parties works against that goal. Ultimately, you want the other parites to be seen as incapable of getting things done, at best. You need to campaign to ensure that your party is the majority party, because that’s how you achieve your agenda.
By allowing parties to act independently of one another, and offload th decision making to a sortition body, this takes away the domination aspect of parliament. You no longer need to have the majority of the seats in order to push forward legislation, and so you no longer need to defeat the other parties to carry out your agenda. This reduces partisianship, along with a host of other benefits.
Keeping it all within the one chamber changes very little when the biggest party automatically wins.
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The other advantage of a hybrid system is that the demos gets to rule twice over — everyone gets to elect the proposers from the much wider range on offer, and then (in jury form) to choose which proposals should become law.
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Jordan,
> give voters the ability to freely choose parties that represent their most important issues
As long as the system depends on mass elections, the principle of distinction remains in effect. That is, the legislators all remain members of the electoral elite and all the policy alternatives remain constrained to those that are favored by that elite.
Various versions of elections have been implemented for many decades in many countries. The effects remain essentially the same irrespective of the fine details of each system. This is well explained by the principle of distinction. More tinkering seems pointless, unless you have a good explanation why the principle of distinction would not apply in a particular case.
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Carl,
> Nowhere did I state or imply that a choice limited to two hereditary kings, two Ayatollahs, or two Communist Party officials would somehow constitute democracy.
Well, you did write what I quoted above:
> Power of particular office holders is only temporary, and can swiftly change in an election — leading ultimately to “rule by the people.”
In this argument the mere swift change between office holders has “rule of the people” as a consequent. Now you are implying that there are additional conditions, presumably about how the electoral candidates are to be selected. If so, can you specify what those additional condition are?
As for burden of proof: At this point there is nothing to prove since we have not defined what a democracy is. I was asking how you would define democracy. Only once there is a definition can we attempt to prove that a certain system is or isn’t a democracy.
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Yoram:> all the policy alternatives remain constrained to those that are favored by that elite.
An alternative perspective — exemplified by Ledru-Rollin’s (apocryphal) claim “there go the people, I must follow them because I’m their leader” — is that, given sufficient competition, professional politicians will offer policies that are most likely to gain the support of voters. If a politician is “distinctive” it simply increases her chance of success.
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There is some truth to this, but there’s a way in which this can be significantly mitigated. In a majority rules representative scenario, there is a limit on the kinds of parties that can win. Even if we have proprotional representation, voters still want their party to have influence, and so they are generally going to vote for major parties that can at least influence policy to some degree. Party leaders are competing for broad audiences.
If you combine non-majoritarian parliament with proportional representation, there will still exist some sort of selection bias as to what leaders are elected, but it diminishes quite significantly. People do not need to vote nearly as strategically, and the broad-nature of parties reduces. Parties can specialize, voters can vote for specialized parties, as smaller, specialized parties can still find success. Even more niche needs within society can be fulfilled.
While the type of person who is going to be the leader of a party will still remain, to a degree, distinct from the rest of the population, the qualities they can have can more broad, as different groups select for different features without worry of strategic voting.
This is even *further* mitigated by the fact that the party leaders must create policy that can survive scrutiny of a trial before a jury of randomly selected citizens. Juries that do not approve legislation (and this need not be a full rejection, more on this in my next paper) can provide guidence for how the legislation can receive approval, and so direct feedback from the sortitional body goes back to the elected parliament, who can then adjust the legislation to further appeal to the more representative body.
This creates a feedback loop that fine-tunes legislation towards the actual needs of the population.
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>While the type of person who is going to be the leader of a party will still remain, to a degree, distinct from the rest of the population.
It’s true that voters prefer charismatic and persuasive politicians as their representatives need to convince the jury. But that doesn’t mean that their policy preferences will diverge.
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I agree. Especially if the policy preferences are more narrow, and carefully watched. It’s far easier to diverge when they have free reign to do as they wish, a broad platform to pick and choose from, and little oversight in any meaningful way.
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Jordan,
> There is some truth to this, but there’s a way in which this can be significantly mitigated.
So your proposal is to first create a problem – proposals are made by an elite – and then mitigate it in various ways. (Ways which it seem to me would clearly be ineffective, as are the supposed mitigations in the existing systems, but you insist would be effective.)
But why? What is the justification for a political design that deliberately gives elites a privileged role in decision-making? Why not have an allotted body creating the proposals? This seems like the obviously democratic way to go.
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Yorum:
My reasoning here is that it still provides the population some degree of control. More than it has today, and more than it would in a pure sortition system. While It’s quite plausible that a sortition body may produce all the best decisions, the broader population may not always understand why those decisions are the best, and they need some mechanism to fight back, even if they are going to lose.
In this system, if there are groups of people who feel they have been slighted by the system and improperly considered, they have, without any extra steps, a means to work to mitigate that. If they can get even a single elected official elected based on the platform of “fixing” the outcome, that offiical can create legislation to make the change and defend it in a trial. They are given a non-arbitrary way of contesting that legislation and having it fully considered in a new light.
While I’m sure there are ways in which you can re-introduce similar mechanisms into a pure lottocratic system, they will always require extra steps, additional systems, or resources of some kind. Many of these will give unfair advantages to the elite, as they will have more resources in which to use to access this system.
The system I am proposing achieves this in a far more integrated and cohesive way that requires far less systems tacked on top. The electoral, non-majoritarian parliament with a sortitional jury creates natural feedback loops which achieve the same goals, without losing sight of the broader population.
There are other advantages as well, but I’d rather get around to writing my papers and pointing towards the full arguments, than ofering them piecewise like this. But hopefully this gestures enough to it for you to get the idea.
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> While It’s quite plausible that a sortition body may produce all the best decisions, the broader population may not always understand why those decisions are the best, and they need some mechanism to fight back, even if they are going to lose.
This attributes irrationality – an inability to properly judge what is good for themselves – to the broader population. This anti-democratic position fits with the position you present in the other thread about people being poor judges of their own plans.
> In [an elections-based] system, if there are groups of people who feel they have been slighted by the system and improperly considered, they have, without any extra steps, a means to work to mitigate that. If they can get even a single elected official elected based on the platform of “fixing” the outcome, that offiical can create legislation to make the change and defend it in a trial.
This is at least as much the case in a sortition-based system as it is in an elections-based system. If there are enough of those who support the cause to elect an official to propose a fix, then statistically there would also be at least one allotted official who would care about the cause and would propose and advocate for a fix.
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It baffles me that neither the review nor this thread (unless I missed something) has engaged with Helene’s model fully, see p.245 of Politics without Politicians:
“a large agenda-setting chamber based on lot…combined with lower-level assemblies also based on lot and frequent referenda”.
This critique of “trade your vote for a lottery ticket” is a straw man argument if you read Helene’s book and take it seriously — the general public would be invited *more* often to weigh in on debates, those votes would be superior to California- or Brexit-style referenda (multiple questions and answers, not ‘yes/no’, see p.245 again), and those votes would be on substantive policy, not just selecting one elite candidate over another.
What am I missing?
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Hi Lex,
> What am I missing?
To me it seems that what you are missing is that the anti-sortition critique is not really about concern for democracy. The concern for democracy is merely a pretense, since an honest elitist critique is considered impolite (at least on the pages of The Nation – there are those who are openly elitist).
I would also point out that the details of the proposal (a proposal which is quite similar to others made before, by the way) are not only immaterial for the critique offered, they are a distraction from the main issue (democracy vs. oligarchy). Worse, they are a form of usurpation – an attempt by the elite to influence the form of a democratic government. The people do not need the political scientists to tell them how a democratic government should be designed. If and when they wish for advice, they would ask. See more here: https://equalitybylot.com/2024/12/17/a-review-of-lottocracy-in-the-journal-of-sortition/.
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Yoram:> The people do not need the political scientists to tell them how a democratic government should be designed.
Who are “the people”? In the case of 4th century Athens the demos was [potentially] all citizens meeting in the assembly. Is the modern equivalent a group of volunteers (selected by lot, but with a 95% refusal rate) and small enough for meaningful one-to-one exchange? The Athenians would have viewed that as an aleatory oligarchy.
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A 95% refusal rate is way too high. To put a “practical” proposal on the table, suppose pay for volunteers is made high enough to attract 70% to 90% volunteering from all relevant groups. Relevant groups could include various income levels and political perspectives. Stratification could be used to assure each significant group is equally represented relative to its proportion of the population. Pay for each group could be adjusted up or down within some range to try to obtain some target level for voluntary participation. Would this overcome at least one objection?
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If and when the allotted are offered present-day salaries, terms, roles and authority of present-day parliaments and refusal rates are still above 10%, we can then put some effort into improving take-up rates. Until then, all complaints about high refusal rates can be safely dismissed as hypocrisy.
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I’m agnostic as to whether participation should be ensured via bribery or mandation, although civic-duty norms could also play a key role. The trouble with stratification is who gets to choose the relevant criteria? (including deciding which political perspectives to include). The polling industry employs stratification, but the sample numbers are one or two orders of magnitude higher than current experiments with citizens’ assemblies. A quasi-mandatory sample of 500-1,000 would create a statistically-representative jury, but such a body would be restricted to listening to the debate and then voting (as was the case with Athenian dikastic juries). The verdict of such a body would be a stochastic surrogate for “the people”, but the jury couldn’t play an active role in constitutional design, as the representational fidelity would be destroyed by information cascades and other perlocutionary imbalances. Once a jury deliberates it becomes the domain of persons rather than “the people”, as demos is a singular entity.
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Yoram, Ignoring your last sentence, I had in mind different rates for different persons, depending on their income levels or other needed compensation for their time and service. I did not have in mind a single high rate of pay or perquisites for everyone selected by sortition — that would seem a little extravagant.
Kevin, Of course, I think the compensation should not be referred to as “bribery” (I am sure you were just kidding…). I think of it as just (or needed) compensation for services rendered. I looked up the current penalties for refusing mandated court jury service. According to Google AI (for the U.S.), the monetary penalties can range from $100 to $2,000, but rarely jail time. “Incarceration is rare and typically reserved for willful, repeated defiance. Federal violations carry up to three days in jail, while certain state or local jurisdictions can impose sentences up to several months for extreme non-compliance.” I do not favor jail time for a refusal to serve, and think even fines are a bit much.
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Sure, I just view all forms of jury service as a form of civic obligation (whereas sortitionists tend to view citizens’ assemblies in terms of equal opportunities). Everyone who refuses the lottery draw effectively disenfranchises their (virtual) constituents.
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