Equality by lot

In the past three months, as preparation for a book I plan to write, I have been researching books, papers, and websites on random selection of citizens for political purposes (“sortition”). I have had an interest in this since the 1970s, but as of 1985 I knew of only one book and a few journal or magazine writings on the subject – slim pickings. Nor had I run into any additional writings during the next 40 years, despite what I regarded as the general usefulness of this idea for purposes of political reform.

The Internet has become a very efficient way to search for even obscure items. As I set out on my 2026 research, I had little reason to suppose that much of anything additional was likely to have been written on the subject, but I could not presume that there was none. To my surprise, I found numerous articles, books, and webpages on sortition. I manually developed a list of books related to sortition. After I reached 50 or so books, I realized I needed to keep track of these books in a spreadsheet. I decided to continue searching for more books. Eventually I found about 200 books (including several dissertations). The resulting spreadsheet can be found here.

Filed under: Books, Deliberation, History, Sortition | Tagged: Books, reading | Leave a comment »