The French School of Athens builds a kleroterion

Posted on February 8, 2025 by Yoram Gat

Kathimerini reports about a project of the French School of Athens involving building a full size marble reconstruction of an Athenian kleroterion:

It is made of marble and weighs about 300 kilos. It is 1.20 meters tall, but on its wooden base it’s the height of a tall adult. And while it looks like an inscribed column, if you get close up, you’ll find that it has many rows of slots in a vertical and horizontal arrangement. What are they for? To receive wooden tiles with the names of citizens who, through a special process, will be selected for public office, or not, at least until their luck is tested again.

It is a faithful copy of an ancient kleroterion, a randomization device similar to the one that the Athenians of the 5th and especially the 4th century BC used to select citizens to be lawmakers, state officials and jury members.

“The best method of democratic selection was to draw lots,” archaeologist and historian Veronique Chankowski, director of the French School of Athens, who coordinated the construction and study of the ancient lottery device, tells Kathimerini. “A person was selected not because they belonged to a specific family or social network, nor because they were rich. This machine chose them.”

Filed under: Academia, Athens, Press, Sortition | 2 Comments »

The New Republic: There’s little doubt that sortition beats election hands down

Posted on January 29, 2025 by Yoram Gat

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 »

Sortition Advocated in the Windsor Star

Posted on January 20, 2025 by peterstone

The Windsor Star just published an editorial by James Winter, a professor emeritus at the University of Windsor, advocating the replacement of federal elections with sortition. The reasons given are diverse, from the cost of elections to the disproportionity resulting from “first-past-the-post” elections to the self-serving nature of politicians. I am unaware of anything previously written by James Winter on this subject, but perhaps others know more.

Filed under: Academia, Athens, Press, Proposals, Sortition | Leave a comment »

Coccoma: The Case for Abolishing Elections

Posted on November 11, 2024 by Yoram Gat

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 kleroterion-inspired statue at the Storm King art center

Posted on October 26, 2024 by Yoram Gat

Artist Taryn Simon created a statue inspired by the kleroterion. It is on display at the Storm King art center in New York state.

Artist Taryn Simon (American, b. 1975) has imagined an election machine based on surviving archaeological fragments of the kleroterion, an ancient device from the beginnings of democracy in Athens.

More at artnet.com.

Filed under: Athens, Sortition | Tagged: | 2 Comments »

Patrick Deneen on democracy, populism and sortition

Posted on October 2, 2024 by Yoram Gat

Patrick Deneen is a professor of political science at Notre Dame university. He is a fairly prominent public intellectual in US politics, popular especially among the Republican elite. His 2018 book, Why Liberalism Failed, drew quite a bit of attention.

A piece by Deneen has recently been published by the Notre Dame magazine. It is a surprisingly, even impressively, good. The heavy punches just keep coming. Here are some excerpts.

Democracy and Its Discontents

The claim that our democracy is imperiled should rightly strike fear in the souls of citizens, but it ought also to give pause to any student of politics. During most of the four decades I have studied and written about democracy, political scientists, and especially political theorists such as myself, would begin not with a claim about the relative health of democracy, but rather with a seemingly simple question: What is democracy?

Yet according to a dominant narrative among today’s academics, public intellectuals, media personalities and even many citizens, it is largely assumed that we know what democracy is. Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Athens, Books, education, Elections, History, Press, schools, Sortition | 17 Comments »

Restarting Democracy

Posted on September 27, 2024 by theodorestathis

A timeless phenomenon, observed everywhere, is that fewer and fewer citizens believe, and rightly so, that their participation in public affairs can change the existing unjust and miserable type of regime. This is confirmed by the turnout, which falls continuously from election to election. Exactly what it takes for the various saviors to germinate, and this is exactly what is happening nowadays, that will protect us from our many ills. Unfortunately, the Hitler regime, a product of Weimar “democracy”, reminds fewer and fewer people of the evils that lie ahead.

The full paper is here.

Filed under: Athens, Sortition | Leave a comment »

Britain is no longer a democracy and democracy isn’t working

Posted on August 13, 2024 by Yoram Gat

Tim Flinn from Garvald in Scotland writes to the East Lothian Courier about sortition, and demonstrates the terminological confusion in which our society finds itself by asserting within the space a few sentences both that “[i]f a democracy is defined a ‘government of the people, by the people and for the people’ then Britain is no longer one”, and that “[d]emocracy isn’t working”.

Your interview with our MP was welcome and he emerged as a sincere and decent man.

I wish him the best, but guarantee that after five years of government, the main issues we have today will have barely been touched.

There will be several reasons for this but an important one is that our democracy is not fit for purpose – for starters, far more of us didn’t vote for Mr Alexander’s winning party than did.

That means his party has the underwhelming support of a minority of the citizens.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Athens, History, Juries, Press, Sortition | Leave a comment »

Mogens Herman Hansen – prominent classicist with an interest in sortition – dies

Posted on July 12, 2024 by Yoram Gat

The Guardian has an obituary of Mogens Herman Hansen.

Danish historian who transformed our understanding of the way Athenian democracy functioned

The term democracy emerged in the classical city-state of Athens to denote power exercised by common people, at that point men who were not slaves. From around the sixth century BC, officials were chosen by lot and were subordinate to a citizens’ assembly that made decisions. Writers on this process tended to describe it in theoretical terms. But the Danish historian Mogens Herman Hansen, who has died aged 83 after a short illness, transformed understanding of how Athenian democracy functioned by approaching it empirically, through a series of simple questions.

Hansen established the actual practices of the direct democratic assembly, the nature of the leadership exercised by the distinct classes of orators and generals in the absence of any form of partisan political structures, and the importance of mood and rhetoric on the opinions of the mass assembly.

His second insight was based on the fact that previous interpretations of Athenian democracy had ignored how it had changed as a result of Athens’ defeat in the Peloponnesian war with Sparta and the constitutional reforms that began in 403 BC.

The system had moved from the assembly being sovereign to one that was ruled by the distinction between laws (nomoi) that were permanent, and decisions (psephismata) that had to be made in conformity with the laws, and could be challenged in the courts if they were not.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Athens, Books, History, Sortition | 2 Comments »

Malkin and Blok: Drawing Lots

Posted on May 24, 2024 by Yoram Gat

Drawing Lots: From Egalitarianism to Democracy in Ancient Greece, a new book by Irad Malkin and Josine Blok, has just been published by Oxford University Press. The book is a major landmark in the study of sortition and its association with democracy. The book aims to show, via a review of the history of the application of allotment in the ancient Greek world, that Greek democracy grew out of an egalitarian mindset, a mindset that was expressed, as well as presumably reinforced, by the widespread application of allotment in different contexts over a centuries-long period.1

Before the lot became political, drawing lots and establishing a mindset of equal chances and portions were already ubiquitous during the centuries before Cleisthenes laid the foundations for democracy in 508. They touched upon a whole spectrum of life and death, both private and public. They expressed values of individuality, fairness, and equality.

Malkin considers his new book as the first comprehensive treatment of classical allotment. He points out a rather astounding fact – allotment, “a significant institution that permeated the lives of Greeks during the archaic period and impacted how they saw human society and structured their expectations and behaviors”, has received very little attention by classicists.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Athens, Books, Elections, History, Sortition | Tagged: , , , | 2 Comments »

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