Yoram Gat

Troesoyer on the Let’s Make Them Pay podcast (part 3)

Posted on September 5, 2026 by Yoram Gat

Parts 1 and 2 are here and here.

5. Corruption (22:40). Bennet asks how sortition prevents the influence of money. Troesoyer says that sortition makes it easier to prevent corruption. In his argument he refers to two factors: term length and avoiding the electoral need to raise campaign money. Term length is important, Troesoyer says, because decision makers working together for a long period of time are able to develop trust between themselves. This allows them to collaborate among themselves and with other long-term actors, and thus to collude on corrupt enterprises. Campaign finance is a fertile ground which fosters corrupt collusion. Actors can promise help in terms of campaign funds in exchange for promotion of their interests. They can also make threats to support competitors in retaliation for non-cooperation.

But neither of these factors make for a convincing advantage of sortition over elections. Electoral systems can be, and often are, set up so that campaigns are highly regulated and publicly financed, greatly reducing the ability of campaign funds to inflence outcomes. The fundamental reason that elected officials serve narrow interests is not a direct quid-pro-quo but rather that the elected officials have a world-view in which the narrow interests are legitimate and should be served. Granted, campaign funds can be a corrupting factor but that can be fixed. The problem is that fixing that does not fix the fundamental problem with elections.
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Filed under: Elections, Sortition, video | 14 Comments »

Nina Roux: Sortition and democracy

Posted on September 5, 2026 by Yoram Gat

A recent book by Nina Roux has the title Tirage au sort et démocratie. Retour sur le cas athénien [Sortition and democracy. Revisiting the case of Athens].

An interview with the author doesn’t turn up that much that is new. Still, it emphasizes some points that may not be new but are worth emphasizing. One point is regarding participation. It is often said that Athens was a radical democracy because of mass participation. Roux points out that this is not the case.

Another important point is about the independence of allotted bodies from elites. In Athens, sortition was not managed by elected institutions or other elite elements. For that reason it could function meaningfully as a democratic force and impose its will on the elites. This stands in contrast with modern proposals and instantiations of allotted bodies (very much including modern juries) which are always concerned keeping those bodies in check.

One of the most stimulating reflections in your work concerns the contributions of the Athenian case to our time. Far from simply observing, you propose a path toward a radical democracy whereby sortition contributes to the people’s control over their leaders. Could you elaborate on this point?

One of the main conclusions of my work was to emphasize that sortition was not the sole source of Athenian democratic radicalism. I observed, in the sources available to me, that there were indeed constraints on citizens who wished to go to the Agora to participate in public debate, and that the city took few steps to alleviate them. To say that Athenian sortition was instituted to guarantee the representation of all social groups in institutions and to create a broad participatory movement is an exaggeration—which does not mean, however, that classical Athens was not a radical democracy. It simply functioned through means of pressure other than the massive, constant, and active participation of all citizens. The most original feature of the Athenian city-state was not sortition, which is found in other institutional contexts: it was the popular courts, composed of thousands of judges chosen by lot, who voted without possibility of appeal on all trials, including those of the city’s politicians. In The Constitution of Athens, Aristotle emphasizes the importance of sortition to protect this institution from corruption and guarantee the effectiveness of popular control over the city’s elites. The use of chance, rotation, and the constant replacement of the set of judges and magistrates prevented this democratic control mechanism from jamming. And it was a mechanism that could choose as its target any politician—even Pericles, deposed in 429 BC for his handling of the first months of the Peloponnesian War. In this respect, sortition goes hand in hand with misthophoria, the remuneration of citizens participating in political institutions. It is also inseparable from the deterrent sanctions imposed by the Athenian courts: fines, death, and exile. It is therefore not insignificant that the allotment machine, the kleroterion, explicitly associated by Aristotle with the fight against corruption, was created in the aftermath of the oligarchic episodes of 411 and 404 BC, which profoundly shook the city.

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

Troesoyer on the Let’s Make Them Pay podcast (part 2)

Posted on August 25, 2026 by Yoram Gat

This continues my review of Ian Troesoyer’s discussion of sortition with Scott Bennet, host of the Let’s Make Them Pay podcast. Part 1 is here.

3. Values and interests vs. epistemic limitations (0:13:15). Troesoyer is concerned about “class bias” in elected government. To demonstrate it, he brings up a favorite example of Terry Bouricius. A body full of landlords would make different decisions than a body in which renters are represented. This is obvious and uncontroversial. But what is the mechanism behind this effect? The straightforward mechanism refers to values and interests. Landlords promote the values and interests of landlords, renters promote the values and interests of renters. Yet, Treosoyer presents this as a matter of “bias” or “limited perspectives”. According to this telling, the landlords are “trying to do their best”. They are very much open to representing the values and interests of the renters, but due to their limited perspective they are unaware of how things look like from the renters’ perspective and thus ignore their values and interests. Bennet goes as far as saying that just there being one or two renters in a body full of landlords would “make such a difference”. (Treosoyer agrees, but not too enthusiastically, if I am not mistaken.)

Leaning heavily on the supposed epistemic difficulties of the elected decision makers in arriving at “good decisions” is a standard trope of “deliberative democrats”. (A typical example of this tendency is Alex Guerrero’s book Lottocracy.) The epistemic effect may (or may not) exist, but emphasizing it and de-emphasizing the effect of the conflict of values and interests is unjustified. Presumably the appeal of this tendency is that it sounds less crass and confrontational, and avoids presenting the electoral elite and its allies as outright exploiters. Instead it presents them as well-meaning simpletons. The well-meaning landlords, for example, despite their openness to renters’ perspectives, have never had the idea of calling a few renters to appear before their body to express those perspectives.
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Filed under: Academia, Books, Elections, Sortition, video | 24 Comments »

Troesoyer on the Let’s Make Them Pay podcast (part 1)

Posted on August 23, 2026 by Yoram Gat

Ian Troesoyer, a sortition activist, has recently been a guest on the Let’s Make Them Pay podcast, where he had an hour long conversation with the host, Scott Bennett. Both participants in the conversation are unapologetic supports of sortition and the presentation of the idea is very good. For those who are either completely or fairly unfamiliar with the idea of sortition, it is a good resource for hearing it discussed and examined.

As I did with one of Troesoyer’s posts on his substack, I’ll go over some points that I believe can be improved in the argumentation. Again, I am offering this as constructive criticism. I pick up the points in the chronological order in which they appear in the video, and since this turns out to be a bit long, it is posted in installments.

1. Stratified sampling (mentioned at 0:02:30 and again at 0:27:20). This is not dwelled upon in the conversation, but the mere mention of stratification is problematic. It may be that some like the the jargon because it gives the discussion a scientific ring. But the use of jargon introduces a suspicion that something untoward is at hand. In the case of the standard current sortitionist practice – what goes under the name of “citizen assemblies” – such a suspicion would be completely justified. In current practice, what is being called “stratified sampling” is a method to cover for the fact that as the process is currently arranged, a large majority of people refuse to take up offered seats. In order to try and obscure this inconvenient fact, and in order to obscure the fact that, as can be expected, refusal rates are correlated with various obvious social characteristics, the body’s makeup is adjusted in various ways so that certain statistical characteristics of the body match those of the population (e.g., the body is set up so that 50% of the members of the body are be men and 50% are women, even if more women refused to take up seats than man did). This makes the resulting body’s make up appear superficially as if it was created by sampling where no rejection of offered seats occured.
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Filed under: Sortition, video | 5 Comments »

Freeing sortition from the “deliberation” trap

Posted on August 13, 2026 by Yoram Gat

It is to its great detriment that sortition has become somehow tied to the ideology of “deliberation”. At best, “deliberation” is a distraction from the democratic thrust of sortition. It is often worse, an elitist idea that is in conflict with that democratic thrust. The talk of “deliberation” implies that groups of people are unable to spontaneously self-organize and coordinate in order to reach mutually beneficial arrangements. That unless experts set things up quite right – verify diversity of the forum, make sure the “shy” don’t get left out, facilitate the discussion, set up the correct incentives – then “deliberation” won’t happen and as a result “unwise” decisions will be made. “Deliberative democracy” is therefore an anti-democratic idea that all those who wish to see sortition used to democratize society, rather than to bolster the existing oligarchical arrangements or to modify the existing oligarchical arrangements into different oligarchical arrangements, should distance themselves from, both in their own minds and publicly.

I was again reminded of the harmful effects of the “deliberation” ideology by reading a post by Ethan McCutchen. There is a lot to agree with in the post, like the outright rejection of elections:

[W]e can’t and shouldn’t trust the old process, but not because we’re a nation of villainous idiots. The problem is not the voters but voting itself. Elections will not evolve from a source of feckless discord into one of fruitful discourse. Re-glorifying voting won’t somehow usher in a new era of healthy deliberation. Elections will not bring us back together. Elections are not the antidote; they are the poison.

To be clear democracy is not the poison, elections are.

Unfortunately, the author does his arguments the great disservice of forcing them into the “deliberative democracy” template: Continue reading →

Filed under: Deliberation, Elections, Sortition | 74 Comments »

Bagenstos on sortition in the Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission

Posted on August 11, 2026 by Yoram Gat

Election Law Blog writes:

Bagenstos, “Lottocracy as a Protector of Democracy? Sortition, Expertise, and the Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission”

Forthcoming article in the Wisconsin Law Review by Sam Bagenstos (Michigan):

A growing body of democratic theory contends that sortition—the selection of decisionmakers by lot rather than election—can strengthen democratic governance, particularly by defending the popular will against subversion by entrenched political insiders. Yet the sortition literature has struggled to answer a persistent objection—that randomly selected citizens lack the expertise to resolve the factually and legally complex questions that modern governance demands, and will therefore either flail or be captured by the very experts on whom they must rely. Advocates too often wave this concern away with slogans (“experts should be on tap, not on top”) or bury it under implausibly elaborate institutional designs.

This essay uses the first redistricting cycle of the Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission (MICRC) as a case study to examine these questions. Created by a 2018 citizen-initiated constitutional amendment, the MICRC is the most strongly sortition-based redistricting body in the United States. Michigan voters gave it final authority to adopt districting plans—rejecting arguments that an unelected, unaccountable body of “neophytes” could neither be democratic nor competent—precisely to break partisan insiders’ lock on the line-drawing process. Under the amendment, commissioners are selected by a complex process involving three rounds of random draws. The amendment also imposes strict rules disqualifying political insiders from service on the Commission, guaranteeing that the Commission will have funding and independent counsel, and requiring an extraordinary degree of public participation in the map-drawing process. It serves each of the three functions that advocates of sortition have suggested a randomly selected citizen assembly might serve: final decisionmaker, democratic check on elite capture, and generator of public information.

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Filed under: Sortition, Elections, Academia, Applications | 3 Comments »

Paul Krugman’s positive experience at jury selection

Posted on July 13, 2026 by Yoram Gat

Paul Krugman had a discussion with fellow New Jerseyans at jury selection and found them to be good people.

And it was just a far more hopeful scene — at least I found it much more hopeful — about the state of the country. It turns out that ordinary Americans — this is, again ordinary Americans from Mercer County, New Jersey, but still — ordinary Americans are a lot nicer, more thoughtful, more willing to hold interesting discussions than you might think.

And it does seem to me, given all the political news, there’s a lot of people out there, I would say primarily on the right, but not only on the right, who fundamentally hold ordinary Americans in contempt, who believe that you have to go with cheap slogans and that you can appeal to the baser instincts of everybody’s nature and that’s the way that you win.

Now, can he translate the following observation into a political agenda:

You know, this country is actually okay if we can just get past some of the people who are trying to take us down a dark path. We’re not bad people — we’re mostly good people.

Filed under: Academia, Elections, Juries, Sortition | Leave a comment »

Troesoyer: The Fundamental Problem Isn’t Capitalism, It’s Aristocracy

Posted on July 6, 2026 by Yoram Gat

Ian Troesoyer is a nurse practitioner, epidemiologist and sortition activist living in Idaho, USA. Treosoyer has recently published a very good article on Substack with the title above. The article begins as follows:

To my comrades engaged in the struggle for a more just world, let me attempt to convince you that underneath the existential problems of capitalism is a deeper problem. A problem that has ironically been shared by all the electoral “democracies” of the West as well as all the major communist and socialist governments that have existed.

The fundamental problem isn’t capitalism, it’s aristocracy: the idea that distinguished individuals – those with supposedly greater knowledge, moral standing, legitimacy, etc. – should make the decisions on behalf of the rest of us.

Aristocracy is the underlying philosophy for both elections and vanguard parties.

Now, you might be saying, “elections aren’t intended to just let distinguished people make the decisions, we pick politicians based on their ability to represent the will of the people!”

Or you might be saying, “Lenin, Mao, Castro, etc. weren’t just doing whatever they wanted, they were acting on behalf of the people!”

Here’s the thing: pretty much all aristocracies say they’re “doing the will of the people.” Kings and dictators say they’re doing the will of the people.

Don’t watch the mouth, watch the hands.

Troesoyer’s construction of his argument is very well done (including such nice details as the well-placed scare quotes in the expression ‘the electoral “democracies”’), easily outdoing the large majority of the authors writing on this subject. (As a sample of what passes for discussion of sortition see this recent Jacobin magazine piece.)

Troesoyer starts with the essential attribute of elections – the “principle of distinction”:

The only decision elections permit common people to make is which distinguished people – in other words, aristocrats – will make decisions for them. Elections appear to be based on political equality because we all get a formally equal say about which elite campaign finalist will make decisions on our behalf, but – critically – we don’t get an equal opportunity to actually make political decisions ourselves. All other things being equal, people with greater privilege have a greater chance of winning elections, so the range of policies available for us to pick from is limited to the preferences of the most privileged members of society.
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Filed under: Elections, History, Sortition | 11 Comments »

Jacobin rehashes the tired old clichés of the sortition debate

Posted on July 4, 2026 by Yoram Gat

The left-leaning Jacobin magazine has offered its readers the idea of sortition back in 2018 and then last December had a couple of pieces advocating for sortition – one being an interview with Alexander Guerrero and one being an article by Terry Bouricius. Jacobin now has a debate of sorts [paywalled, but full text here] in which Anand Gopal takes the ostensibly pro-sortition position and Ben Burgis plays the skeptic.

The text methodically checks off the squares on the sortition debate bingo card: “democracy is in retreat”, “big money”, “popular sovereignty”, “democracy is not just [a system that] happens to work out best but [where] the public actually has a right to manage its own affairs”, not wanting to pick your lawyer or book agent[!] at random, “technocratic objections to democracy”, “a multicameral approach, with both lotteries and elections”, “demographic similarities”, “atomized individuals”, “we want a chamber that has a place for parties”, “accountability”, “for a country of 350 million, it doesn’t really make sense to have 350 people sitting in council”, “smaller scales”, “people systematically shirk jury duty”, “[w]ith the Zohran election, there was a tremendous sense that “we did this””, “instant recall”, etc., etc.

As usual, this format of discussion provides no rational way out of the on-the-one-hand-but-on-the-other-hand conundrum. Jacobin‘s readers are left to their own prejudices to decide which hand they prefer – the one with some sortition (but not without elected officials to balance things out), or the one where sortition is deemed altogether undesirable due to this or that principle (even if it may result in better outcomes).

Filed under: Elections, Press, Sortition | 13 Comments »

Upstairs and downstairs in the European Commission’s headquarters

Posted on July 1, 2026 by Yoram Gat

Politico reports:

Staff working at the Berlaymont building [The European Commission’s headquarters] received a text at midday, reading: “BERL — URGENT — Due to extreme weather conditions, forced shut down of air cooling system from floor 1 to 7 for the rest of the day.”

The 13-story building is home to Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, her 26 commissioners and about 3,000 staff. Von der Leyen works on the 13th floor, and most of her commissioners’ offices are housed on floors eight or above.

Belgium and much of Europe have been sweltering for the past week, with record-breaking temperatures.

The Commission issued guidance for its staff earlier this week, which included avoiding going outside at the hottest times of day, drinking water regularly and starting work earlier.

But the advice angered some Commission staff who work in buildings without air-conditioning, including DG AGRI, according to internal communications seen by POLITICO’s Brussels Playbook.

“It’s like feudalism,” a Commission official working on a lower level of the Berlaymont, granted anonymity to speak freely, told POLITICO on Friday, referring to the fact that upper floors housing commissioners got to keep their AC on. A second official agreed it was a “disgrace.”

Filed under: Elections, Press | Leave a comment »