Yoram Gat

Giving a voice to “the shy”

Posted on April 12, 2026 by Yoram Gat

An op-ed piece in The New York Times by Hélène Landemore opens as follows. (Full text here.)

No Shy Person Left Behind

At its core, our political system is a popularity contest. Elections reward those who are comfortable performing in public and on social media, projecting confidence and dominating attention. This dynamic tends to select for so-called alpha types, the charismatic and the daring, but also the entitled, the arrogant and even the narcissistic.

This raises a basic but rarely asked question: Why are we filtering out the quiet voices? And at what cost?

Over the past two decades, my research on collective intelligence in politics, democratic theory and the design of our institutions shows that the system structurally excludes those I call, in my new book, “the shy.” By the shy I mean not just the natural introverts, but all the people who have internalized the idea that they lack power, that politics is not built for them, and who could never imagine running for office.

In what follows, Landemore promotes allotted citizen assemblies as a way to get the voice of “the shy” heard.

This way of presenting things raises two questions. First, why use the term “the shy” to refer to a group for which this label is clearly inappropriate? The category described by Landemore would be much more appropriately described as “the disenfranchised”, “the politically suppressed”, or “the politically oppressed”. The term “the shy” implies an inherent psychological property of the people being so described, while the category Landemore describe is clearly socially manipulated into a sense of political impotence – a manipulation that in all probability is primarily done by constructing society in a way where the sense of impotence is a completely realistic understanding of the political situation.
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Sortition: The God That Will Fail

Posted on April 9, 2026 by Yoram Gat

David Gordon, Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute and editor of the Mises Review, wrote a review of Hélène Landemore’s Politics Without Politicians. Some excerpts:

Landemore’s disdain for the power hungry is all to the good, but what she says makes me uneasy and, in any case, rests on a false premise. What makes me uneasy is that she distrusts all efforts to stand out from the crowd: How dare you think, she seems to say, that you are better than others just because you possess some specialized knowledge? Isn’t this exactly what José Ortega y Gasset wrote about in The Revolt of the Masses? (1931):

“It is false to interpret the new situations as if the mass had grown tired of politics and entrusted its exercise to special persons. Quite the contrary. That was what happened before; that was liberal democracy. The mass assumed that, in the end, with all their defects and blemishes, the political minorities understood public problems a little better than it did. Now, on the other hand, the mass believes it has the right to impose and give the force of law to its café commonplaces. I doubt that there have been other periods in history in which the crowd came to govern as directly as in our time. That is why I speak of hyper-democracy. […] What is characteristic of the moment is that the vulgar soul, knowing itself to be vulgar, has the audacity to affirm the right of vulgarity and imposes it everywhere. As they say in North America: to be different is indecent. The mass steamrolls everything that is different, eminent, individual, qualified, and select. Whoever is not like everyone else, whoever does not think like everyone else, runs the risk of being eliminated […].”

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Filed under: Athens, Books, Press, Sortition | 6 Comments »

Conservatism, mental inertia and the “memory of places”

Posted on April 7, 2026 by Yoram Gat

A few months ago, I wrote a post about the attitudes that underlie support for elections and lack of support for or outright rejection of sortition. My main point was that the arguments that are often provided for elections and against sortition should not be taken as being the causes of the positions they purport to justify but rather as rationalizations of those positions. The positions themselves are due to underlying pre-existing attitudes that are usually unacknowledged. Unlike the arguments, which are easily debunked, the attitudes are coherent and rational and provide real and reasonable causes for the observed behavior – a positive view of elections (as an ideal rather than in its actually existing manifestations) and an apathetic or negative view of sortition.

In the post I argued that the most common pro-elections and anti-sortition attitude is “conservatism or mental inertia”. I gave two justifications for this attitude. First, electoralism is the status quo and any radical change involves risk, which people wish to avoid. Second, “becoming a supporter of a fundamental political change involves the adoption of a new radical mindset which is never easy”.

Reading Emmanuel Todd’s 2017 book Où en sommes-nous ? [Where are we now?], I came across the notion of the “memory of places [mémoire des lieux]”. This is the notion that societies maintain certain ideas and habits which are quite persistent despite various changes which these societies undergo. This was reminiscent of “conservatism or mental inertia” and therefore sent me back to look at the post. I soon realized that the “attitude” of “conservatism or mental inertia” is actually rather transparently two separate attitudes, “conservatism” and “mental inertia”, which are quite distinct and quite clearly correspond to the two different justifications provided. Conservatism is clearly associated with the perceived risk which radical change involves, while mental inertia is clearly associated with the effort involved in “the adoption of a new radical mindset”.
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Filed under: Books, Elections, Sortition | 2 Comments »

The ancients would laugh

Posted on March 30, 2026 by Yoram Gat

Excerpts from an article on the CBC website.

Athens: Birth of Democracy, a documentary from The Nature of Things, follows host Anthony Morgan as he investigates the origins of democracy in ancient Athens, how it functioned and what this political experiment may have to teach us today.

Standing at the Leokoreion — a recently excavated open-air temple built in the centre of ancient Athens — archaeologist John Camp shows Morgan the exact spot where the spark of the Western world’s first democratic government is believed to have ignited.

Camp, former director of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, points to an inscription that reveals it was here, in 514 BC, where one of Athens’s two ruling tyrants, Hipparchus, was assassinated.
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Filed under: Academia, Athens, Elections, History, Press, Sortition, video | 3 Comments »

Sortition on TED-Ed

Posted on March 23, 2026 by Yoram Gat

An animated video named “Could lotteries replace elections?” on the popular channel TED-Ed has amassed almost 100,000 views since it was published a few days ago. The video makes many familiar and incoherent arguments for and against “lottocracy”, with Alex Guerrero, Cristina Lafont and Nadia Urbinati mentioned by name.

Toward the end, the video does come surprisingly close to making the fundamental point that democracy should be about building “institutions that serve everyone and address real problems”. (Unsurprisingly, this is immediately followed by a cliché about it being “up to us to keep experimenting until we find a system that achieves those ideals”.)

Filed under: Academia, Elections, Participation, Sortition, video | 4 Comments »

Quinn: The case for sortition

Posted on March 14, 2026 by Yoram Gat

Kevin Quinn, a member of the United States Marine Corps from Concord, New Hampshire, United States, writes in the Concord Monitor.

Most of us have been selected for jury duty, and for those of you who have not yet had the honor, look forward to it! Jury duty is determined through a process called sortition, which involves the random selection of a group of people to obtain a representative population in a given area. In more diverse populations, sortition allows for fairer trials as there is a lower likelihood of gross overrepresentations of certain populations.

For instance, in a case of elder abuse, if we used a system other than sortition, we might only have either elderly people running, to take up pyres and pitchforks for the alleged abused, or we might only have nursing home workers running, in order to protect those from their creed. Either of these, or a combination of the two, would not actually provide a representative population of the area in which the abuse occurred, and therefore would not give the accused a fair trial.

Some of you may know that our state legislature made national news during the past month. Kristin Noble, who is the Chair of the House Education Policy and Administration committee, had messages leaked where she made suggestions that segregation should find its way back into New Hampshire Schools. This is not the first time that our state legislature has made the news, either. In 2015, Warren Groen, in front of a class of 4th graders, decided to compare the talons of a red-tailed hawk to Planned Parenthood.

The House has also become a cesspool for the “Free State Project” to advance its agenda at a local level. The Free State Project is a group of out-of-state political operatives who have the agenda to turn New Hampshire into a libertarian safe haven. The number of representative seats available in New Hampshire has facilitated the takeover of our government by these out-of-state radicals. As recently as 2021, a closely aligned group rated 150 of our representatives with at least an A-minus grade in terms of alignment with their political agenda.

I am tired of our system being made a mockery of by clowns like Kristin Noble and Warren Groen, and tired of our system being abused by radical groups like the Free State Project. But our current political climate is one of bitter complaints and not one of solutions. For the House, I propose sortition.

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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 | 2 Comments »

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.
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Filed under: Academia, Books, Elections, Participation, Press, Sortition | 10 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 | 11 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 | 6 Comments »