The world’s first self-run citizens’ assembly?

Posted on August 15, 2026 by Ethan McCutchen

Hélène Landemore announced on LinkedIn that the Connecticut Citizens’ Assembly had become “the first self-governed citizens’ assembly in the world.”

This morning 89 of the citizens voted for self-governance (9 against). Our brilliant lead facilitator Kenya Rutland (KJR consulting) then proceeded to select 7 representatives by lottery. The 7 accepted. They will shape the agenda for the next session until they are replaced by a new batch of 7.

The continued existence of a lead facilitator implies that not all aspects of the assembly’s governance are administered by participants. But, evidently, agenda-setting and other high-level governance decisions are in citizens’ hands in ways that Landemore, who can boast considerable scholarship on the subject, deems unprecedented.

Presumably more detail about the pioneering governance model will emerge after the assembly’s conclusion.

Filed under: Academia, Applications, Sortition | Leave a comment »

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

Hélène Landemore Making the Rounds

Posted on July 31, 2026 by peterstone

Hélène Landemore, whose work is well-known to many regulars on this blog, has been very active online promoting her new book, Politics without Politicians: The Case for Citizen Rule (2026). Here are a few of her more noteworthy recent appearances.

First, on February 9 she appeared on Future Hindsight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQXZ5Yz0bfc

The next day, she appeared on Re:Thinking with Adam Grant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4I9dTUjV10

On February 13, she appeared on Keen On America: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPt6KJ-9FZ8

And on May 20, she appeared on the Colin McEnroe Show, a Connecticut-based podcast (where the conversation, unsurprisingly, focused upon the new Connecticut Citizen’s Assembly with which Landemore is deeply involved): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k35fdnnSdkg

Filed under: Academia, Applications, Deliberation, Effects of electoralism, Elections, Juries, Sortition, Theory | 1 Comment »

Representation in Democratic Athens: Manin’s Principles Revisited

Posted on July 30, 2026 by keithsutherland

This article by Professor Josine Blok (Utrecht University) is forthcoming in a theme-issue of the journal Representation, edited by Hugo Bonin and Henk te Velde, on Bernard Manin’s Principles of Representative Government. The article is available (open access) at https://doi.org/10.1080/00344893.2026.2688260

Professor Blok argues that Manin’s distinction between direct and representative government is in need of further refinement, based on Daniela Cammack’s analysis of the Athenian system using Frank Ankersmit’s distinction between synechdochical and metaphorical representation:

A governing body or office is representative either because its members are just a part of the whole citizenry, similar to and interchangeable with the other citizens (synecdoche) or they can stand for the whole citizeny by virtue of being different from them (metaphor) (p.5)

Professor Cammack identifies both forms of representation in the Athenian governmental system:

She finds synecdochical representation in the Assembly, which is practice always held about one-quarter of all male citizens, and the Council of 500 and the jury courts, en masse drawn by lot from all male citizens. These bodies were parts of the whole and interchangeable with the whole, for any male Athenian of the right age could participate in these bodies on the rules set by law and would do so sooner or later. (ibid.)

Metaphorical representation was embodied in the (elected) executive and military offices, the rhetores and (to a lesser extent) the minor magistracies (selected by lot). The distinction between the two categories of representation was not so much the selection method as the size of the body, along with the accounatability criteria. Synecdochical representatives were not accountable (by euthynai or graphe paranomon) simply because they were ‘parts of us’, whereas Athenians saw office holders as ‘them’.

Some of the Athenian bodies (including the Council) involved a mix of the two forms of representation, and the emphasis changed over time, however two bodies in Athens were and remained fully synecdochical: the Assembly and the jury courts:

According to Cammack, the fact that the switch to metaphorical representation did not happen here was due to the large numbers of both bodies. The power of the demos was, by definition, that of a mass in the Athenian demokratia instituted in the constitution. (p. 8).

If this is the case, then the attempt by deliberative democrats and the designers of small citizens’ assemblies to claim Athenian provenance is dubious.

Filed under: Academia, Athens, Books, Elections, History, Sortition, Theory | 23 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 »

Courant: The French want democratic innovation

Posted on June 27, 2026 by Yoram Gat

Dimitri Courant writes in The Conversation about French opinions regarding allotted decision-making bodies. The original is in French, some translated excerpts are below.

A desire for democracy, not an “electocracy”

The findings are stark from the outset: Only 13% of the respondents trust politics, 17% trust the government and 21% trust the National Assembly. But 80% support a democratic political system.

The French do not reject democracy, they reject electocracy – a form of government which is based on the election of elites with a binding mandate, where the representatives are not held to the preferences of those who elected them.

This rejection does not translate into naive support for citizen assemblies, also called citizen conventions in France. Thus, 67% of those surveyed think that it is good for citizens to participate in those conventions, and 50% trust those assemblies. But among the 35% who do not trust them, 56% percent justify their skepticism with a revealing phrase: citizen assemblies are “a scam which allows politicians to buy time and engage in public relations”.
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Filed under: Academia, Deliberation, Elections, Opinion polling, Press, Sortition | 1 Comment »

The ideology behind the notion of the deliberative transformation

Posted on June 4, 2026 by Yoram Gat

In a previous post I discussed the “deliberative transformation”, a favorite trope within the theory of “deliberative democracy”. I pointed out that whereas the deliberative democrats see this hypothetical phenomenon as an ideal (maybe the central normative goal of their theory, more important than any policy outcomes), such a phenomenon, if it were really a widespread phenomenon as the deliberative democrats imagine, would be a major obstacle to an allotment-based democratic system (which, it is worth mentioning, is the only theoretically well-motivated schema of a democratic system).

This post considers the ideological structure that is associated with the idea of the deliberative transformation.

It may be claimed that the rather obvious, but of course unadmitted, starting point of the deliberative democracy theory, is that the adherents of the theory are concerned by the fact that the mass of citizens often refuse to support certain ideas that are accepted by the adherents as truth. Classically the reaction to the fact that citizens cannot be depended upon to see things as they are seen by an elite group was to assert that government should be left to those who are enlightened enough to see things as they should be seen. However, in the modern democratic age such crude elitism is unacceptable. Thus, the deliberative democrats seek a cure for the popular disorder. According to this view, deliberation is nothing more than the treatment that the deliberative democrats prescribe to the recalcitrant masses. It is the process which will lead the masses out of the Platonic cave and into the dazzling light of rational thought. If applied correctly, this treatment will inevitably, indeed, by definition of correctness, make the masses accept the objective truths, those that will lead them to support the policy choices preferred by the deliberative democrats.
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Filed under: Academia, Deliberation, Sortition | 109 Comments »

The deliberative transformation

Posted on May 16, 2026 by Yoram Gat

A favorite narrative of “deliberative democracy” is what may be called the “deliberative transformation”. According to this trope many people emerge from deliberative forums radically transformed. They become more enlightened, more tolerant, and consequently they hold “better” ideas and positions. Importantly, the change in positions is not merely that people who had been consciously uninformed and have not had a firm opinion on a certain matter have become informed and developed positions based on the newly acquired information. Such a change is unsurprising and is a natural occurrence in any process of study and consideration. Rather the phenomenon of “transformation” is that people who had held firm opinions going into the forum emerge from it newly and firmly holding contradictory opinions to those they had held.

In fact, it often appears (and may or may not be stated explicitly) that as far as deliberative democrats are concerned the deliberative transformation is the main objective of deliberative democracy. Deliberative democracy frees the unenlightened masses from their brutish shackles and allows them to adopt correct ideas whose veracity they were previously unable to perceive in their pre-deliberation situation.

There are various factual questions that may be asked with regard to the deliberative transformation phenomenon. The first is about its existence (or prevalence): do many people in fact change firmly held views as a result of participation in deliberations or is this a fairly rare phenomenon. At least as important are the questions about the nature of this transformation. Are the post-transformation ideas determined by the “deliberation” itself, as the deliberative democrats assert, rather than an artifact of certain parameters of the deliberative setup. Could different setups, different ways to arrange the discussion, different ways to present information, different ways to phrase the topic of discussion, generate different patterns of change in ideas?
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Filed under: Academia, Deliberation, Sortition | 19 Comments »

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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Filed under: Academia, Books, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 4 Comments »

Athenian democratic institutions: a very short introduction

Posted on April 2, 2026 by James Kierstead

I’m grateful to Yoram Gat for making me a contributor to this website, which has a lot of good stuff about allotment. [ Editor’s note: Welcome, James! I previously linked to James’s very interesting work several years ago here, and much more recently here. -YG ]

One of the things Yoram suggested I might do here is assemble all my introductory Twitter threads on classical Athens’ main democratic institutions. Not all of these institutions involved sortition, but most did, and readers may want to get an overview of how the sortitive institutions functioned alongside other democratic institutions that depended on voting.

Before I share the Twitter threads, though, readers who are completely new to this topic might want to check out this ten-minute video in which I provide an overview of Athens’ Assembly, Council of Five Hundred, popular courts, and city officials, as well as of the curious practice of ostracism.

Now that we’ve had the broad overview of all these institutions, let’s go into more detail, starting with the most powerful of Athens’ democratic institutions, the Assembly:

Next, the second-most powerful institution, and our first allotted one: the Council of Five Hundred.

Next up are the popular courts, staffed by allotted juries:
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Filed under: Academia, Athens, History, Sortition, video | 28 Comments »

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