Responding to a recent discussion regarding Roger Hallam and Extinction Rebelion, commenters emphasized the need to distance “ourselves” from such extremists, potentially “manipulated by malign actors”. An X post from December had this to say:
“Ordinary people selected at random” aka sortition is explicitly against the idea that explanations can discern between better and worse policies. It’s nuts!
Filed under: Mass action, Sortition | 2 Comments »
Roger Hallam, “a co-founder and strategic mastermind of the civil resistance groups Extinction Rebellion (often called XR) and Just Stop Oil”, and who is also serving “five years in prison for ‘conspiracy to cause a public nuisance'” is the protagonist of a supportive article in The New Republic. The article makes a very sympathetic presentation of Hallam’s anti-electoral and pro-sortition ideas:
Hallam calls our current moment a “pre-revolutionary period.” Such eras have arisen throughout history—if never on such a grand scale—and they unfold according to a distinct logic. One of the first casualties is moderation. “The center does not hold,” Hallam said. “You saw this before the Nazis, you saw it before the Bolsheviks, and you’re seeing it at the moment in slow motion in Western democracies.” It’s easy to miss the signs, because “the center still has institutional power,” he added. “In other words, like it’s a zombie space. It’s dead, but it hasn’t yet been pushed over by the new.”
Under such conditions, wrenching paradigm shifts are inevitable. The only question, Hallam suggested, is whether we submit to authoritarianism, as many Americans seem all too eager to do, or embrace a genuinely pro-social revolutionary alternative. While it would have been comforting to hit the snooze button with four more years of Biden-style liberalism—a sound approach in simpler times—when survival hangs in the balance, there are distinct advantages to being awake.
The centerpiece of Hallam’s plan is a radical reinvention of democracy aimed at turning elections into a historical relic. Continue reading
Filed under: Athens, Elections, History, Press, Sortition | 14 Comments »
Martin Gurri fulminates in the New York Post against the way Joe Biden’s mental decline was denied and downplayed over his term as president. Gurri points out that the White House press corps took an active part in the deception. Presumably this collaboration is a result of the fact that members of the corps are selected for their friendliness to the White House occupant. Sortition would be a remedy.
Reporters have special passes to the White House. They accompanied Biden on his trips, often on Air Force One. They saw what Appel saw: a president who “can’t say sentences.”
And they chose to think nothing of it, to say nothing, to remain at best incurious and at worst to lie and so curry favor with the mighty.
The news media’s corruption is too evident to need elaboration. But there ought to be consequences.
Here’s a modest proposal: Disband the White House press corps. Cast them out like money-changers from the temple. Select those American citizens entitled to question the president by lot, the way the Athenians chose their public officials.
Reference to Gurri’s article was sent to me by Roger Knights.
Filed under: Elections, Press, Sortition | Leave a comment »
Below are some statistics about the 15th year of Equality-by-Lot. Comparable numbers for last year can be found here.
| 2024 | Page views | Posts | Comments |
| Jan | 2,580 | 16 | 56 |
| Feb | 2,192 | 9 | 13 |
| Mar | 3,097 | 16 | 99 |
| Apr | 3,244 | 10 | 130 |
| May | 2,667 | 9 | 91 |
| June | 2,775 | 6 | 77 |
| July | 3,015 | 7 | 20 |
| Aug | 2,397 | 6 | 17 |
| Sept | 2,506 | 6 | 26 |
| Oct | 3,474 | 15 | 78 |
| Nov | 2,863 | 12 | 41 |
| Dec (to 28th) | 11,791 | 5 | 20 |
| Total | 42,601 | 117 | 668 |
Note that page views do not include visits by logged-in contributors – the WordPress system does not count those visits.
Posts were made by 11 authors during 2024. (There were, of course, many other authors quoted and linked to.) This blog currently has 567 subscribers. (The system no longer seems to differentiate between WordPress subscribers and e-mail subscribers.)
Searching for “distribution by lot” (with quotes) using Google returns Equality-by-Lot as the 3rd result (out of “about 20,400 results”). Equality-by-Lot is on the fifth page of results when searching for “sortition” (out of “about 248,000 results”). 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: Distribution by lot, meta, Sortition | 1 Comment »
Equality-by-Lot’s traditional yearly review post.
2024 continued the trend of the last few years of cooling interest in the idea of sortition among the elites. This happened despite the re-emergence of Donald Trump as a viable candidate and his subsequent election to the presidency of the United States. The same Trump who was hysterically portrayed as a menace to democracy in 2016, and triggered (together with Brexit) a wave of elite interest in sortition, was accepted this time without nearly as much alarm. Presumably, Trump’s first term indicated that he is not the threat to the electoralist establishment that he was feared to be. This time the electoralist establishment seems confident enough with the existing structures that it has no need to consider introducing allotment into the system in order to shore it up.
Indeed, the most prominent application of sortition in 2024, a third constitutional assembly in Ireland, ended in what was described as “a fiasco”, as the proposals derived from the assembly’s work (there is some controversy about how close those proposals were to the those issued by the body itself) were rejected by two thirds of the Irish in a ratification referendum. This led to the inevitable hand-wringing and acrimony among those who have been promoting sortition based on the supposed success of such bodies.
Of course, the underlying issues with electoralism are not abating. The electoralist system maintains its record of generating low approval ratings and gestures of rejection by the public.
The academic world continued to churn out the familiar arguments for and against sortition, with a side of AI. In this ongoing discussion, two notable contributions this year are Malkin and Blok’s book Drawing Lots, which sets the Greek use of sortition in a longue durée context of an egalitarian ideology, and Alex Guerrero’s tome Lottocracy which, as it argues for replacing electoralism with a sortition-based system, provides a broad overview of the literature. Also worthy of note is the impending launch of the Journal of Sortition.
A few more mentionable sortition-related developments in 2024: Students continued to write positively about the idea. Sortition was mentioned in popular social media outlets and mass media. Of particular interest is an exchange on the pages of The Conservative Woman, in which an opinion writer bashed citizen assemblies, only to be corrected by a reader who actually took part in one. A new appointee to the House of Lords in the UK advocates for selecting this chamber using sortition. A kleroterion-inspired statue is on display at the Storm King art center in New York state.
Finally, three figures who played important early roles in the modern discussion of sortition have died over the last 14 months:
Late last year John Burnheim, an Australian researcher with a seminal contribution to igniting interest in sortition, passed away. Burnheim’s 1985 book Demarchy was a radical proposal for replacing the existing electoralist system with a very different system which relied heavily on sortition.
Mogens Herman Hansen, a prominent historian of Ancient Greece, died in June this year. Hansen’s book, The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes, has become the go-to book on many questions regarding the functioning of democratic Athens, including specifically the application of sortition.
Most recently, Bernard Manin, a French researcher who wrote the seminal book The principles of representative government, died in November. Manin set out to problematize elections in the 1990’s, a time when following the collapse of the Soviet bloc electoralism was considered by a triumpalist West as the political holy grail at the end of history. Manin’s “pure theory of elections” is, in my opinion, the most incisive critique of electoralism ever written. Interestingly, Manin was not an advocate of sortition but his scholarship on this subject is unmatched.
Filed under: Academia, Applications, Books, Elections, Press, Sortition | 1 Comment »
The first issue of the new Journal of Sortition is going to be published in 2025.
Keith Sutherland, the publisher, wants to emphasize that all those who register on the webpage of Imprint Academic’s sortition hub will get a free printed copy of the first issue of JoS. Please visit https://www.imprint.co.uk/sortition-hub/.
A review of mine of Alex Guerrero’s book Lottocracy will be appearing in this first issue.
The discussion around sortition and the possibility of applying it in modern political systems has been intensifying in academia over the last two decades. A debate between sortition-optimists and sortition-pessimists (as well as intermediate positions) has been taking shape. Alex Guerrero’s Lottocracy, with its over 450 pages, recaps this debate with considerable breadth while arguing for what may be perceived as the sortition-optimist position par excellence, namely, for replacing the elections-based system with one which is sortition-based.
Among some other points, I discuss how Lottocracy, like the academic discussion of sortition as a whole, adopts a Socratic viewpoint, according to which the experts are those who should shape and authorize (or choose not to do so) the use of sortition as a tool of politics.
Filed under: Academia, Books, Press, Sortition | 38 Comments »
A new paper in the American Political Science Review covers some very well explored ground.
Empowered Minipublics for Democratic Renewal? Evidence from Three Conjoint Experiments in the United States, Ireland, and Finland
Saskia Goldberg, Marina Lindell and André Bachtiger
Abstract
This article investigates the potential of deliberative minipublics to provide a new set of institutions for democratic renewal. Using three preregistered and identical conjoint experiments in the United States, Ireland, and Finland, it first shows that minipublics are moderately attractive institutional innovations, but that in all three country contexts, citizens in general are very reluctant to grant them empowerment and autonomy as well as ask for additional provisions (such as large size or large majorities for recommendations). Subgroup analyses, however, reveal that especially participation in minipublics as well as trust in other citizens as decision-makers in combination with low political trust produces more support for empowered and autonomous minipublics. But what stands out in the empirical analysis is that most citizens want minipublics as additions to the representative system, not as a replacement of the existing democratic infrastructure, as some minipublic advocates have suggested.
As is common in this genre, the conclusions are that citizens are conservative and suspicious about giving citizen bodies decision-making power. Thus, the authors say, it is up to political experts to design institutions that would “win” the support of those citizens. Such conclusions are convenient on two counts. First, they provide cover for the conservatism of the authors themselves, and second they entrust the authors, their colleagues in academia, and their benefactors in the halls of power, with the crucial role of designing any possible reforms to the system.
Continue reading
Filed under: Academia, Deliberation, Sortition | 2 Comments »
Nicholas Coccoma writes about sortition in the Boston Review. While some of the narrative is standard, Coccoma makes some crucial points that are often avoided by the prominent members of the sortition milieu.
The Case for Abolishing Elections
They may seem the cornerstone of democracy, but in reality they do little to promote it. There’s a far better way to empower ordinary citizens: democracy by lottery.
In response to [popular] discontent, reformers have proposed a slew of solutions. Some want to expand the House of Representatives, abolish the Electoral College, or eliminate the Senate. Others demand enhanced voting rights, the end of gerrymandering, stricter campaign finance laws, more political parties, or multi-member districts and ranked-choice voting. The Athenians would take a different view. The problem, they would point out, lies in elections themselves. We can make all the tweaks we want, but as long as we employ voting to choose representatives, we will continue to wind up with a political economy controlled by wealthy elites. Modern liberal governments are not democracies; they are oligarchies in disguise, overwhelmingly following the policy preferences of the rich. (The middle class happens to agree with them on most issues.)
Continue reading
Filed under: Athens, History, Press, Sortition | 1 Comment »
A little more than a year ago, Adam Grant offered sortition to the readers of The New York Times. Now Daniel Pink offers it to the readers of the The Washington Post. Interestingly, and encouragingly in terms of the foothold that the idea of sortition may now have gained, Pink writes that he is merely echoing proposals made by readers whose ideas for “improving our country, our organizations or our lives” were solicited by the Post.
On Election Day, we affirm with our actions an unspoken principle of governance: The fairest and most democratic way to determine who wields public power is by asking citizens to cast ballots.
But what if there’s an alternative — not autocracy or monarchy but a more radical form of democratic representation and popular sovereignty?
“Why not make serving in Congress like jury duty?” asks a reader in Salt Lake City. “If you meet the criteria, you could be selected to serve for a term, which would give a broader cross-section of people representing regular Americans.”
The article is typical in the sense that instead of engaging with arguments previously made it merely repeats such previous arguments, even when these were addressed and refuted. (And even if they are transparently self-contradictory.)
It’s a bit nutty — complicated and replete with unintended consequences. But first, let’s examine its virtues.
Continue reading
Filed under: Elections, Press, Sortition | 1 Comment »
Sabine Hossenfelder is a physicist and fairly prominent YouTube figure with over 1.5 million followers. Her clips are about the physical sciences, but she occasionally strays outside this area. Her most recent video is titled “Is the USA a Democracy or a Republic?”. The analysis she offers is not too perceptive in my mind, but it does have the advantage of mentioning the idea of selecting political decision making bodies using a lottery. This idea gets a brief teaser in the introduction and a bit more detail toward the end of the video.
Naturally, most of the thousands of comments to the video focus on the democracy vs. republic matter, but at least one comment does pick up on the sortition idea:
Problem with representative democracy is that strangers, who do not know you, cannot represent you. The premise is simply false.
Voting is entering a contract, asking to be ruled by a handful of strangers. Extending them Power Of Attorney, four years into the future … If you sign that, whatever happens, you have no right to complain, because you accepted the deal.
Here is what we should do instead : Government by lottery
1000 citizens randomly selected. 200 replacements selected every year, giving five years in government for each. Then perhaps a quarterly online voting session for the rest of us; Yes/No to the bill with slimmest decisive vote, in the 1000-man parlament during that quarter.
Continue reading
Filed under: Elections, Press, Sortition | 1 Comment »
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Equality by lot 