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.

As many on this website already know, research and writing in this area have accelerated in recent decades. From ancient Greece, only 4 books survive. In the modern era, 1600-1959, 5 more books. In the three decades, 1960-1989, 11 books. In the two decades, 1990-2009, 48 more books. In the one decade, 2010-2019, 66 books. In the current decade, 2020-2027, 67 books so far, or about 9 books per year. Another way of looking at this, the median date for published books on sortition was in 2016 – a mere 10 years ago. The median would be the date on which half the book titles were published before, and the other half of titles were published after.

The spreadsheet provides approximate dollar prices for a physical copy of each book, as reported by Amazon.com for a USA customer. I report Kindle prices only if no physical copy is available. For 178 books with prices, the median price was $25 and the average was $38. The total cost to purchase all of them would be $6,700. The total page length of all 200 books is nearly 52,000 pages.

I also report Amazon ratings – both the average rating and the number of ratings by Amazon purchasers. The spreadsheet also computes an adjusted rating, that statistically adjusts the average ratings to account for number of ratings and the randomness in ratings. On a scale of 1 to 5, all adjusted ratings are between 4 and 5; the adjusted rating for 83 books with no ratings is set to 4.000. I make no independent judgement of book quality.

I have classified 44 books as AGD (Ancient Greek Democracy) and 48 books as DD (Deliberative Democracy). The remaining 110 books all deal with sortition in some other fashion. I only included books that deal with sortition in some manner – whether extensively or not, whether pro, con, or otherwise. I excluded books that may be interesting from a political science perspective, but do not appear to mention or discuss sortition. I neither searched for nor included books whose primary focus is the random selection of jurors in a courtroom setting. Since I have not read all these books, there may be some mistakes of inclusion or exclusion. Also, my Internet search has probably failed to turn up a few or several additional books that should be included.

The Equality-by-Lot website has a booklist (currently with 49 books) accessible from its menu and at https://equalitybylot.com/literature/. On a going forward basis, it would be worth considering whether to add some or all of these new-found books to the EBL book list. Assuming enough people wish to read or review these books, we can perhaps annotate the list with such information as “point of view” of the authors, and which pages or sections (or entire book) discuss sortition.

Filed under: Books, Deliberation, History, Sortition | Tagged: Books, reading |