More on sortition in YourParty

Posted on November 29, 2025 by Yoram Gat

The YourParty conference is taking place Nov. 29th and Nov. 30th, featuring allotted delegates. In an interview in The New Statesman, Jeremy Corbyn, one of YourParty’s leaders, explained the use of sortition as follows:

This is the most important element of Your Party for Corbyn: it has to be representative on a grassroots level. This assessment aligns him far more with the likes of Jamie Driscoll and Andrew Feinstein (who are closer to Sultana) than with his loyal allies, Murphy and Fitzpatrick, who would rather take a more top-down approach. “I think what’s needed is empowerment of our communities,” he said, explaining his hope that the founding of Your Party will be ultra-democratic.

Hence the use of sortition at the party’s founding conference, a process under which individuals are selected to create a random yet representative sample of the population (as championed by the founder of Extinction Rebellion, Roger Hallam). “For conference, I was worried that if we just said to a group, ‘look, you form yourselves into an informal group and elect delegates to conference’, what’s going to happen is those that know each other are going to elect each other, and those that don’t know anybody will be left out,” he said.

As an explanation this is coherent, but the actual procedure does not match this rhetoric at all. While the process does indeed not involve elected delegates, it appears that the allotted delegates are not involved either other than in the demeaning role of extras. The thousands of allotted delegates who are attending during the two days of the conference (in fact, it appears that each delegate attends just one of the two days), clearly have no time to generate an agenda or even discuss a pre-set agenda. They are deprived of even the symbolic role of voting on pre-set proposals (which would not have amounted to anything anyway) since the process includes online voting by any party member.

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Craig Murray was not allotted to the YourParty conference

Posted on November 17, 2025 by Yoram Gat

Filed under: Applications, Participation, Sortition | 4 Comments »

District council in the UK will take steps to fulfil citizen assembly plan

Posted on November 15, 2025 by Yoram Gat

An announcement on the website of the Forest of Dean District council.

Forest of Dean District councillors have agreed to act on recommendations put forward in a new citizen visioning plan developed by Coleford residents. As a result, the council will now take steps to fulfil the plan’s recommendations in partnership with others, which include improving local employment opportunities, increasing social interaction across all generations and maximising community spaces.

The visioning plan was developed by a group of Coleford residents selected through a ‘sortition’ process – a random selection from all households in the town – ensuring that participants reflected the diversity of the local community.

Councillor Jackie Dale, Cabinet Member for Thriving Communities at Forest of Dean District Council said:

“I’m delighted that we can now begin addressing the recommendations made by Coleford residents. Their priorities closely align with our own commitment to tackling the Climate, Biodiversity and Ecological Emergencies, and to building thriving, resilient communities and a strong local economy.”

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Citizens’ conventions: The sweet trap of a democratic facade

Posted on November 6, 2025 by Yoram Gat

An opinion column in Le Télégramme, a regional newspaper of Brittany, France. Original in French. The version below is a translation by Google Translate with my touch-ups.

In an opinion piece, Agnès Le Brun, regional councilor and former mayor of Morlaix, shares her perspective on participatory democracy as practiced through citizens’ conventions.

They present themselves as the miracle cure for a weary democracy, the supposedly “sweet” remedy to reconcile citizens with public decision-making. Citizens’ conventions, with their reliance on sortition and participatory deliberation, are appealing because of their promise: to bring “real life” into the world of political decision-making. But behind this veneer of democratic innovation too often lies a carefully cultivated illusion, one that harms democracy as much as it claims to revitalize it.

The first pitfall is the pretense of participation. These mechanisms are presented as a break with traditional institutions. In reality, behind a supposedly depoliticized staging of the debate, the agenda is set from above, the topics are framed, and the conclusions are rarely taken seriously by those who commissioned them.

The perennial issue of decentralization, a quintessentially Breton topic, and Loïg Chesnais-Girard’s campaign promises, diluted over time, have led the President of the Brittany Region to propose a citizens’ convention in 2026, supposedly to address the subject in the most democratic way possible. Really? Sortition is primarily a convenient pretext for circumventing elections and allows for the maintenance of the illusion of representativeness. Because a few dozen Bretons are chosen at random, the claim is that “the people” are being heard.
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Filed under: Sortition, Elections, Press, Applications, Deliberation | 6 Comments »

More Edmund Griffiths on sortition

Posted on October 8, 2025 by Yoram Gat

Edmund Griffiths, a long-time sortition advocate, has been pushing for sortition in the infighting-torn YourParty. It turns out he’s been writing a book called Sortition and Socialist Democracy to be published by Palgrave Macmillan. Griffiths also has a new article in the Morning Star discussing the sortition-related ongoings at YourParty, and in particular the fact that it turns out that the number of allotted delegates in the YourParty conference is going to be 13,000.

Your Party launch conference: the sortition of the 13,000

EDMUND GRIFFITHS makes a robust defence of sortition, the chosen method of picking attendees for the new left party’s inaugural conference from the membership at random, but sounds the alarm on the eye-watering number of suggested delegates

[A]n especially exciting plot twist [in the YourParty thriller] came in mid-September, with the announcement that delegates to the inaugural Your Party conference will be chosen by sortition.

This system — where members of decision-making bodies are picked at random — is most familiar from its use in ancient Athens and in a modern jury. The Athenians, indeed, seem to have regarded it as simple common sense that democracies choose their ruling bodies using a lottery: only oligarchies prefer to elect them.
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Filed under: Applications, Books, Sortition | 1 Comment »

A Citizens’ Assembly for Bristol

Posted on July 5, 2025 by peterstone

Recently, I posted about a citizens’ assembly to be held in Bristol to develop a “cultural delivery plan.” Now there’s an interview on the subject from the Bristol Cable, “a pioneering investigative local media co-op, owned by thousands of people in Bristol, UK.” It’s not very focused, but it does offer more insights into how the citizens’ assembly is coming to be and what the hopes are for it. It can be found here: https://thebristolcable.org/2025/05/listen-bristol-unpacked-with-david-jubb-of-citizens-in-power-can-citizens-assemblies-relight-our-democratic-fires/

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The Citizen Assembly for Norway’s Future

Posted on June 14, 2025 by Yoram Gat

“The Citizen Assembly for Norway’s Future” (Framtidspanelet) was a 56 member body of Norwegian citizens selected through what has become the standard “citizen assembly” process and that convened in the period Januray through May 2025. The report associated with the body describes it as being “initiated by seven civil society organizations”, those organizations being Save the Children, Norwegian Church Aid, The Norwegian Children and Youth Council (LNU), Caritas, WWF World Nature Fund, Langsikt – centre for long term policy, and Framtiden i våre hender. I was not able to find a more specific description of how the initiative for this body came about.

The body’s mandate was apparently associated with Norway’s oil fund – a national fund accumulating oil revenue which holds today almost $2 trillion.
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Just sortition, communitarian deliberation

Posted on May 1, 2025 by Yoram Gat

A new paper by Nicole Curato, Amiltone Luís, Melisa Ross, and Lucas Veloso in Environmental Science & Policy includes field work eliciting comments from people in Zambezia, Mozambique regarding their views on sortition in the context of the allotted Climate Assembly on the Climate and Ecological Emergency.

Just sortition, communitarian deliberation: Two proposals for grounded climate assemblies

Abstract

Sortition or recruiting randomly selected everyday citizens is a core feature of climate assemblies. Sortition, the argument goes, enforces the principle of inclusiveness, as everyone has a fair shot at getting invited to the climate assembly. This form of recruitment, however, faces criticism. It challenges traditional structures of representation and decision-making where elders, religious leaders, elected representatives, and community organisers typically give voice to the ideas and grievances of everyday people. For some, sortition valorises the atomised individual who can speak their mind in a forum, without any mechanism for the individual to reconnect their deliberative experience to the wider community. In this article, we draw on the experience of the province of Zambezia in Mozambique as one randomly selected Assembly Member took part in the world’s first Climate Assembly on the Climate and Ecological Emergency. Based on in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, and feedback sessions with local organisations in Zambezia, we offer practical insight on how sortition can deepen community connection and maximise the impact of climate assemblies in delivering practical outcomes for climate change adaptation. Using grounded normative theory, our study demonstrates how sortition can promote justice by elevating the voices of those most impacted by climate change. We also demonstrate why a communitarian approach to citizen assemblies enhances accountability and shared learning and empowers members to translate global deliberations into local actions.

One useful contribution of this article is a summary of the arguments for and against sortition that the authors drew from the literature.
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Filed under: Academia, Applications, Deliberation, Sortition | 25 Comments »

Summer Anwer: The Need for Ireland’s Citizens’ Assemblies in a Post Roe America

Posted on April 5, 2025 by Yoram Gat

A post by Summer Anwer, an undergraduate student at American University.

The intention of Dobbs v. Jackson’s Women Health Organization Supreme Court ruling was to give the authority to regulate abortion back to the people and their elected representatives. To uphold this intention and thus validate the ruling, the people’s voices of each state must be prioritized in decision making. States should adopt a form of Ireland’s citizens’ assembly to navigate abortion laws while putting citizens at the forefront of decision-making like the Supreme Court ruling intended.

Ireland’s 35-year battle for abortion rights

In 1983, the Eighth Amendment was introduced to the Constitution and established a constitutional ban against abortion. Following this strict prohibition of abortion was a 35-year battle for safe abortion access.

Several international human rights organizations called on Ireland to repeal the Eighth Amendment. The UN Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights was “particularly concerned at the criminalization of abortion, including in the cases of rape and incest and of risk to the health of a pregnant woman; the lack of legal and procedural clarity on what constitutes a real substantive risk to the life, as opposed to the health, of the pregnant woman; and the discriminatory impact on women who cannot afford to obtain an abortion abroad or access to the necessary information.”

The Citizens’ Assembly of Ireland

In 2012, Ireland created an assembly of majority citizens to discuss important topics and influence the Oireachtas, the Irish parliament. 66 citizens were randomly selected from the electorate. They require no prior knowledge, as they are given time and background information. The result is a truly representative opinion of what Ireland’s future should be. The assembly merely makes recommendations, which parliament is not required to accept. The other 33 people are politicians and the 100th person is Tom Arnold, a prominent economist.

In 2017, the citizens’ assembly voted that the Eighth Amendment also known as Article 40.3.3º should be repealed. They were given four ballots to shape the referendum, which gradually became more specific about the parameters of the potential referendum.. In 2018, the Irish government sent out a referendum for Irish citizens to vote on which asked if they wished to approve the 36th Amendment which would repeal the Eighth Amendment. 66.4% voted yes which allowed the government to introduce legislation permitting abortion in the first 12 weeks of gestation and up to 24 weeks in some circumstances. Within one year of being presented with this topic, the citizens’ assembly was able to completely change abortion policies to allow for safer abortion access. This proves that allowing the people to choose their nation’s policies and giving them a larger voice in decision-making is more efficient and leads to a happier, healthier society.
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Citizens’ Assemblies in the Ukraine

Posted on January 20, 2025 by peterstone

In November 2024, two municipalities in the Ukraine held citizens’ assemblies to deal with local issues.

Over six days of deliberations, Assembly members, representing a socio-demographic cross-section of the community, worked alongside Council of Europe experts and facilitators to develop actionable recommendations for local governments. These focused on creating urban spaces for social interaction and improving household waste management. The municipal authorities of Zvyahel and Slavutych have expressed their commitment to considering the proposed recommendations.

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