Yoram Gat

In Defence of Trial by Jury

Posted on March 10, 2026 by Yoram Gat

Editor note: This post has been substantially revised following a note from James Kierstead.

The UK government is aiming to reduce the use of trial juries in the UK, claiming this is useful in order to “modernise the criminal courts” and “save victims from pain and anguish of delays”. Under the proposal “cases with a likely sentence of three years or less heard by a Judge alone – estimated to take 20% less time than a jury trial”.

James Kierstead, who has written before about sortition and its history, writing in spiked, makes several good points regarding juries and the attempt to reduce their purview, highlighting the hypocrisy and manipulation behind the government’s claims.

Labour’s attack on jury trials is an attack on democracy

Justice secretary David Lammy’s plans will take yet more power out of ordinary people’s hands.

A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to attend In Defence of Trial by Jury, a panel event co-organised by spiked and the Free Speech Union. The event was a response to UK justice secretary David Lammy’s absurd plans to reduce the number of Crown Court cases that go before juries.

The panel members questioned Lammy’s assumption that jury trials were to blame for the Crown Court’s current backlog of almost 78,000 cases (rather than, say, a lack of funding or the number of spurious claims that now make it to court). And they emphasised the centrality of jury trials to our liberal institutions and to the common law, which has long been a bulwark of liberty in Britain, as in other English-speaking countries.

Yet one thing that struck me about the panellists’ excellent contributions is that they all centred on what philosopher Isaiah Berlin called ‘negative’ liberties – our freedom from coercion by the state – rather than on ‘positive’ liberties – our freedom to participate in decision-making with our fellow citizens. In other words, the contributions had more to say about liberalism than about democracy.

The threat to civil liberties posed by Lammy’s jury-trial plans is not to be underestimated. Especially at a time when Brits can be charged with ‘inciting racial hatred’ for expressing concern about illegal immigration on social media, as was the position of former Royal Marine Jamie Michael last year. Michael, as it happened, was cleared by a jury of his peers after only 17 minutes. It is understandable to wonder what might have happened had a judge from our current legal elite decided the verdict.
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Filed under: Juries, Participation, Press, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Review of Landemore’s Politics Without Politicians in The Guardian

Posted on March 7, 2026 by Yoram Gat

A review of Hélène Landemore’s Politics Without Politicians by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian makes the predictable points. Substance aside, the very fact that an article in a wide circulation newspaper has the subheading

A Yale professor’s radical proposal to replace elected leaders with ordinary people, chosen by lottery

should be seen as a positive development.

The title of the review prefigures the content:

[C]ould we get rid of Farage, Truss and Trump?

Clearly we need to get rid of some politicians, but not all of them.

No Donald Trump, Nigel Farage or Liz Truss; no Zack Polanski, Jacinda Ardern or Volodymyr Zelenskyy either. No political parties and no elections, but instead a random bunch of ordinary people chosen by lottery to run the country for two-year spells, like a sort of turbo-charged jury service except with the jurors holding an entire country’s fate in their hands.

Hinsliff likes the feel good stories about “the human benefits of participation”.

The best bits of the book, worth reading for anyone interested in combating polarisation, are the unexpectedly moving chapters explaining the human benefits of participation for the French citizen jurors in particular. These range from the forging of lasting friendships and deeper civic bonds to the breakthroughs that can happen when strangers meet face to face and genuinely try to understand each other’s points of view, instead of merely yelling at each other on social media.

Giving people actual policy making power in serious matters, is, however, clearly, absurd.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Books, Elections, Participation, Press, Sortition | 8 Comments »

Kogelmann: Sortition and cognitive ability

Posted on March 1, 2026 by Yoram Gat

In a new paper, Brian Kogelmann stakes an explicitly elitist position against sortition, by arguing quite plainly that the average person is too stupid to hold power.

Sortition and cognitive ability

Abstract: There is a growing sense that representative democracy is in crisis, leading to renewed interest in alternative institutional designs. One popular proposal—what I call legislative sortition—says we should replace elected legislators with randomly selected citizens. While legislative sortition has drawn both numerous supporters and critics, one objection has received little attention: that ordinary citizens’ lower cognitive abilities, relative to elected officials, will diminish the quality of governance. This paper articulates and evaluates this concern, distinguishing between several versions of it. I argue that some forms of the objection are implausibly strong, but that a suitably qualified version can be defended. Although this does not provide a decisive reason to reject legislative sortition, it meaningfully shapes how we should assess its promise.

Legislative sortition faces many objections (Lafont, 2020; Lafont and Urbinati, 2024; Landa and Pevnick, 2021; Umbers, 2021). And yet, I have found no sustained scholarly investigation of what I believe is the most common reaction to it among those who encounter it for the first time. Guerrero describes it:
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Filed under: Academia, Elections, Sortition | 10 Comments »

Landemore: Politics Without Politicians

Posted on February 16, 2026 by Yoram Gat

Hélène Landemore has a new book out, Politics Without Politicians: The Case for Citizen Rule. The book description is as follows:

Politicians have failed us. But democracy doesn’t have to.

Bought by special interests, detached from real life, obsessed with reelection. Politicians make big promises, deliver little to nothing, and keep the game rigged in their favor. But what can we do?

In Politics Without Politicians, acclaimed political theorist Hélène Landemore asks and answers a radical question: What if we didn’t need politicians at all? What if everyday people—under the right conditions—could govern much better?

With disarming clarity and a deep sense of urgency, Landemore argues that electoral politics is broken but democracy isn’t. We’ve just been doing it wrong. Drawing on ancient Athenian practices and contemporary citizens’ assemblies, Landemore champions an alternative approach that is alive, working, and growing around the world: civic lotteries that select everyday people to govern—not as career politicians but as temporary stewards of the common good.
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Filed under: Academia, Books, Elections, Sortition | 5 Comments »

The solution is in plain sight

Posted on February 10, 2026 by Yoram Gat

Phil Wilson writes in Z about the horrors of electoralism and “the most enormous obstacle to sortition” – the fact that those who claim to be against the horrors cannot bring themselves to consider the democratic alternative.

A Plea for Sortition and Direct Democracy in the Wake of the Epstein Files

The Epstein Files do not warrant shock and horror. A quiet nod of the head along with maybe a lopsided, very restrained smile might suffice. I will consider my most cynical smirk – the one conveying a sort of fatalistic disgust normally employed for train delays, and added charges to my cell phone bill. These redacted millions of pages contain just enough information to let us know two things: 1) the rich pukes who run our lives with godly, bored indifference, have been raping, torturing and maybe sometimes murdering trafficked children, and 2) absolutely nothing will be done about it.

The Epstein Files are not a revelation, but a reminder. Why feign horror when the feral dog shits on the rug? Do some of us accept that capitalism performs epic acts of mass murder and torture, yet blanche in utter disbelief at the sadistic hobbies that elites enjoy in private? Did anyone imagine that Larry Summers and Peter Thiel spent their down time delivering blankets to the nearest tent city?

The Epstein Files shows the public the private face of societal suicide. When psychopaths seize control of governmental and corporate institutions, they gain the cover needed to act out the most predatory sexual fantasies, but that is nothing compared to what corporate and political policy inflicts upon countless millions of victims. If we are horrified at the private evils committed by Epstein’s clients, we ought to be far more distraught over the public crimes of these morally castrated pillars of capitalism – war, colonialism, privatized prisons, privatized hospitals, privatized armies and the unmitigated project of environmental ruin and mass extinction.

We have voted and revoted. The ballot box leads inevitably to Trump. We can’t vote our way out of this. It will take massive resistance – Minneapolis writ across the face of the country. I believe that the goal of resistance ought to be the end of electoral politics, the end of parties, the end of super-PACs, the end of politics as mass spectacle. The biggest challenge involves massive, organized, committed civil disobedience – but that will yield nothing without a vision of renewal.

The solution is in plain sight.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Elections, Press, Sortition | 3 Comments »

Is voting working? What if we rolled the dice instead?

Posted on February 2, 2026 by Yoram Gat

Michael J. Smith from Portland, Maine, in the United States writes in the Sun Journal:

Everybody likes democracy — in principle. But apparently fewer and fewer people are happy with the actual thing, if the Pew Research Center is to be believed.

My dear old mom, of blessed memory, used to sigh and say, “If only we could get the money out of politics!” But in a social context where there are relatively few people who have lots of money, and don’t mind spending it on politicians, to promote their interests, this is difficult.

What Mom meant by “politics” — and what we usually mean by “democracy,” too — is in fact electoral politics: the machinery of parties, nominations, polls, advertising and “messaging.” And of course campaign contributions, which is a genteel euphemism for “bribes.”

The spectacle itself is squalid enough: the mendacity of “talking points,” the non-responsive answer to the tendentious question, the rhetorical trickery, the vulgar personal attacks and the hollow, deceptive slogans.

But more to the point, it simply doesn’t deliver what it promises: namely, some approximation to what Rousseau called the “general will.” Our executives and legislatures consistently fail to come up with things that the public wants. Examples abound, but we have an especially glaring one before us just now. Public opinion has turned very strongly against Israel, across the partisan spectrum, but all our politicians, from president to dogcatcher, are basketballs-to-the-wall for the South Africa of the Levant.
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Filed under: Athens, Elections, History, Press, Proposals, Sortition | Leave a comment »

Jakobi: Lottocracy as Democracy

Posted on January 31, 2026 by Yoram Gat

Lottocracy as Democracy: Political Equality, Representation and Public Control without Elections? is the Ph.D. thesis of Julia Jakobi written in 2024 at the university of Hamburg under the supervision of Christine Straehle and Annabelle Lever. In the introduction Jakobi writes that “[i]n the following I will ask: is lottocracy the better form of democracy?” and “[t]he aim of this thesis is […] to assess the democratic legitimacy of randomly selected citizens’ assemblies, independent of additional approval by elected politicians. To do so, I focus on Alexander Guerrero’s (2014; 2020; 2021a; 2021b) utopian proposal of lottocracy.” (Interestingly, this was being done exactly at the time that Guerrero was finally publishing his long promised book on this subject.)

I have not read the thesis carefully from end to end but it seems like it is to a large extent a typical product of the genre of academic work on sortition. It cites the usual sources and covers the usual topics (equality, representation, participation, accountability, deliberation) in the usual manner, ultimately leaving the reader without a clear structure for understanding the issues involved. It is however an accessible work (and much shorter than Guerrero’s book, for example) and can serve as a starting point for those who are interested in and are unfamiliar with the academic work on the subject.

Filed under: Academia, Deliberation, Elections, Participation, Proposals, Sortition | Leave a comment »

Equality by Lot 2025 statistics

Posted on December 27, 2025 by Yoram Gat

Below are some statistics about the 16th year of Equality-by-Lot. Comparable numbers for last year can be found here.

2025	Visitors	Posts	Comments
Jan	778	7	28
Feb	708	6	22
Mar	1,249	7	41
Apr	1,639	8	48
May	1,985	7	32
June	1,739	3	13
July	2,232	4	3
Aug	5,550	6	28
Sept	10,673	4	25
Oct	11,760	4	48
Nov	16,893	9	49
Dec (to 27th)	17,363	6	14
Total	72,569	71	351

This year’s number of page views statistics as reported by the WordPress system show very large spikes that probably indicate some sort of automated activity that is not being filtered by the WordPress data gathering. The bar chart produced by the system is completely distorted by these spikes and I therefore do not post it this year. I switched to tabulating “visitors” rather than “page views”, since the former seem somewhat more stable. I am not sure how “visitors” are counted and how reliable the counting is. In any case, comparison with viewership statistics of previous years may not make sense.

Posts were made by 12 authors during 2025. (There were, of course, many other authors quoted and linked to.) This blog currently has 398 are e-mail subscribers and 152 WordPress subscribers.

Searching for “distribution by lot” (with quotes) using Google returns Equality-by-Lot as the 5th result. Equality-by-Lot is on the bottom of the first page of results (9th link) when searching for “sortition“. (Google no longer provides an estimate of the total number of results for the search terms.) Asking ChatGPT “what are good websites about sortition?” does not return (for me, at least) Equality-by-Lot as one of the recommendations.

Happy holidays and a happy new year to Equality-by-Lot readers, commenters and posters. Keep up the good fight for democracy!

Filed under: History, meta, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Self-serving elites and the conception of the “good”

Posted on December 27, 2025 by Yoram Gat

It is only to be expected, and is generally acceptable, that a person or a group with decision-making power would use that power to shape the world in ways that seem “good” to them. In this sense being self-serving – trying to shape the world in ways that please the shaper – is benign. In the context of large scale politics this translates into the elites in society running society in ways which seem “good” to them. In this sense the elites being self-serving is benign (at least to the extent that the Iron Law of Oligarchy – i.e., the existence of a powerful political elite – is considered as a given).

The question is, of course, what do the elites see as “good”. As Western political thought presents things, elites tend to be, or at least over time tend to become, corrupt and see “good” as including, or even mainly as, the control of material goods by the elite and the control of the non-elite members of society by the elite. The “good” as the elite sees it is then in conflict with the “good” as rest of society sees it. Another, more recent, component of Western political thought is that elections are, through some mechanism (that is rarely examined very closely), an effective way – indeed, the only effective way – to prevent this corruption and to align the conceptions of the good of the elite with those of the rest of society.

It turns out that elections are not a particularly good mechanism to align the conceptions of the good of the elite and the non-elite population. Continue reading →

Filed under: Elections, Sortition, Theory | 2 Comments »

Cockshott and Cottrell: Toward a New Socialism

Posted on December 24, 2025 by Yoram Gat

Back in 2010 and 2011, I wrote a couple of posts on this blog linking to writings by Paul Cockshott about sortition. Cockshott, who is a Marxist economist and a computer scientist, himself followed up in the comments.

I did not know until very recently, however, that Cockshott, together with a collaborator, Allin Cottrell, wrote in 1993 a book called Toward a New Socialism [full text PDF] which makes a case against elections and for the use of allotted bodies in government. While the book focuses mostly on economic planning, chapter 13, “On Democracy”, presents an insightful analysis of the oligarchical nature of electoralism as well as of the problems associated with two standard Marxist alternatives, soviets and communist party dictatorship. The analysis uses the historical cases of Athens and the Soviet revolution and also make mention of Burnheim’s Is Democracy Possible? (1985).

Some excerpts:

Chapter 13: On Democracy

Utopian social experiments are strongly associated in the public mind with brutal dictatorships and the suppression of civil liberties. Given our century’s history this is to be expected. Although there is a growing realisation in Britain of a need for constitutional change, visions of what this might involve are modest. Devolution of power to regions and alternative parliamentary electoral systems may be open for discussion, but the supercession of parliamentary democracy itself is almost unthinkable. Our object in this chapter is to think the unthinkable—speciﬁcally, to advocate a radically democratic constitution. We outline a modernised version of ancient Greek democracy, and defend such a system as the best political counterpart to socialist economic planning.

Democracy and parliamentarism

It is one of the great ironies of history that election by ballot, for millennia the mark of oligarchy, should now pass as the badge of democracy.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Athens, Books, Elections, History, Proposals, Sortition | 6 Comments »