Books | Equality by lot

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 »

Sortition: The God That Will Fail

Posted on April 9, 2026 by Yoram Gat

David Gordon, Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute and editor of the Mises Review, wrote a review of Hélène Landemore’s Politics Without Politicians. Some excerpts:

Landemore’s disdain for the power hungry is all to the good, but what she says makes me uneasy and, in any case, rests on a false premise. What makes me uneasy is that she distrusts all efforts to stand out from the crowd: How dare you think, she seems to say, that you are better than others just because you possess some specialized knowledge? Isn’t this exactly what José Ortega y Gasset wrote about in The Revolt of the Masses? (1931):

“It is false to interpret the new situations as if the mass had grown tired of politics and entrusted its exercise to special persons. Quite the contrary. That was what happened before; that was liberal democracy. The mass assumed that, in the end, with all their defects and blemishes, the political minorities understood public problems a little better than it did. Now, on the other hand, the mass believes it has the right to impose and give the force of law to its café commonplaces. I doubt that there have been other periods in history in which the crowd came to govern as directly as in our time. That is why I speak of hyper-democracy. […] What is characteristic of the moment is that the vulgar soul, knowing itself to be vulgar, has the audacity to affirm the right of vulgarity and imposes it everywhere. As they say in North America: to be different is indecent. The mass steamrolls everything that is different, eminent, individual, qualified, and select. Whoever is not like everyone else, whoever does not think like everyone else, runs the risk of being eliminated […].”

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Filed under: Athens, Books, Press, Sortition | 6 Comments »

Conservatism, mental inertia and the “memory of places”

Posted on April 7, 2026 by Yoram Gat

A few months ago, I wrote a post about the attitudes that underlie support for elections and lack of support for or outright rejection of sortition. My main point was that the arguments that are often provided for elections and against sortition should not be taken as being the causes of the positions they purport to justify but rather as rationalizations of those positions. The positions themselves are due to underlying pre-existing attitudes that are usually unacknowledged. Unlike the arguments, which are easily debunked, the attitudes are coherent and rational and provide real and reasonable causes for the observed behavior – a positive view of elections (as an ideal rather than in its actually existing manifestations) and an apathetic or negative view of sortition.

In the post I argued that the most common pro-elections and anti-sortition attitude is “conservatism or mental inertia”. I gave two justifications for this attitude. First, electoralism is the status quo and any radical change involves risk, which people wish to avoid. Second, “becoming a supporter of a fundamental political change involves the adoption of a new radical mindset which is never easy”.

Reading Emmanuel Todd’s 2017 book Où en sommes-nous ? [Where are we now?], I came across the notion of the “memory of places [mémoire des lieux]”. This is the notion that societies maintain certain ideas and habits which are quite persistent despite various changes which these societies undergo. This was reminiscent of “conservatism or mental inertia” and therefore sent me back to look at the post. I soon realized that the “attitude” of “conservatism or mental inertia” is actually rather transparently two separate attitudes, “conservatism” and “mental inertia”, which are quite distinct and quite clearly correspond to the two different justifications provided. Conservatism is clearly associated with the perceived risk which radical change involves, while mental inertia is clearly associated with the effort involved in “the adoption of a new radical mindset”.
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Filed under: Books, Elections, Sortition | 2 Comments »

Review of Landemore’s Politics Without Politicians in The Guardian

Posted on March 7, 2026 by Yoram Gat

A review of Hélène Landemore’s Politics Without Politicians by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian makes the predictable points. Substance aside, the very fact that an article in a wide circulation newspaper has the subheading

A Yale professor’s radical proposal to replace elected leaders with ordinary people, chosen by lottery

should be seen as a positive development.

The title of the review prefigures the content:

[C]ould we get rid of Farage, Truss and Trump?

Clearly we need to get rid of some politicians, but not all of them.

No Donald Trump, Nigel Farage or Liz Truss; no Zack Polanski, Jacinda Ardern or Volodymyr Zelenskyy either. No political parties and no elections, but instead a random bunch of ordinary people chosen by lottery to run the country for two-year spells, like a sort of turbo-charged jury service except with the jurors holding an entire country’s fate in their hands.

Hinsliff likes the feel good stories about “the human benefits of participation”.

The best bits of the book, worth reading for anyone interested in combating polarisation, are the unexpectedly moving chapters explaining the human benefits of participation for the French citizen jurors in particular. These range from the forging of lasting friendships and deeper civic bonds to the breakthroughs that can happen when strangers meet face to face and genuinely try to understand each other’s points of view, instead of merely yelling at each other on social media.

Giving people actual policy making power in serious matters, is, however, clearly, absurd.
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Filed under: Academia, Books, Elections, Participation, Press, Sortition | 10 Comments »

Landemore: Politics Without Politicians

Posted on February 16, 2026 by Yoram Gat

Hélène Landemore has a new book out, Politics Without Politicians: The Case for Citizen Rule. The book description is as follows:

Politicians have failed us. But democracy doesn’t have to.

Bought by special interests, detached from real life, obsessed with reelection. Politicians make big promises, deliver little to nothing, and keep the game rigged in their favor. But what can we do?

In Politics Without Politicians, acclaimed political theorist Hélène Landemore asks and answers a radical question: What if we didn’t need politicians at all? What if everyday people—under the right conditions—could govern much better?

With disarming clarity and a deep sense of urgency, Landemore argues that electoral politics is broken but democracy isn’t. We’ve just been doing it wrong. Drawing on ancient Athenian practices and contemporary citizens’ assemblies, Landemore champions an alternative approach that is alive, working, and growing around the world: civic lotteries that select everyday people to govern—not as career politicians but as temporary stewards of the common good.
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Filed under: Academia, Books, Elections, Sortition | 6 Comments »

Cockshott and Cottrell: Toward a New Socialism

Posted on December 24, 2025 by Yoram Gat

Back in 2010 and 2011, I wrote a couple of posts on this blog linking to writings by Paul Cockshott about sortition. Cockshott, who is a Marxist economist and a computer scientist, himself followed up in the comments.

I did not know until very recently, however, that Cockshott, together with a collaborator, Allin Cottrell, wrote in 1993 a book called Toward a New Socialism [full text PDF] which makes a case against elections and for the use of allotted bodies in government. While the book focuses mostly on economic planning, chapter 13, “On Democracy”, presents an insightful analysis of the oligarchical nature of electoralism as well as of the problems associated with two standard Marxist alternatives, soviets and communist party dictatorship. The analysis uses the historical cases of Athens and the Soviet revolution and also make mention of Burnheim’s Is Democracy Possible? (1985).

Some excerpts:

Chapter 13: On Democracy

Utopian social experiments are strongly associated in the public mind with brutal dictatorships and the suppression of civil liberties. Given our century’s history this is to be expected. Although there is a growing realisation in Britain of a need for constitutional change, visions of what this might involve are modest. Devolution of power to regions and alternative parliamentary electoral systems may be open for discussion, but the supercession of parliamentary democracy itself is almost unthinkable. Our object in this chapter is to think the unthinkable—speciﬁcally, to advocate a radically democratic constitution. We outline a modernised version of ancient Greek democracy, and defend such a system as the best political counterpart to socialist economic planning.

Democracy and parliamentarism

It is one of the great ironies of history that election by ballot, for millennia the mark of oligarchy, should now pass as the badge of democracy.
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Filed under: Academia, Athens, Books, Elections, History, Proposals, Sortition | 6 Comments »

Guerrero in Jacobin

Posted on December 12, 2025 by Yoram Gat

Alexander Guerrero’s book Lottocracy was published a bit more than a year ago. Guerrero discusses the book in a recent interview in Jacobin magazine. Jacobin has, by the way, offered sortition to its readers at least once before, back in 2018.

Interestingly, Guerrero’s argumentation is much more effective and to the point in the short interview format than it was in the book. While in the book supposed epistemic difficulties of well-meaning elected officials are played up in order to explain why elected government does not promote the general interest, in the interview the principal-agent problem faced by society regarding its decision makers is treated as a self-evident case of a conflict of interests where the agent is simply promoting their own interest at the expense of those of the principal. Applying to electoral systems the same straightforward understanding of the problem that is generally taken for granted when dealing with non-electoral systems makes for a much more convincing and effective argument.

Also interesting is the fact that in the short interview Guerrero finds room to mention Bernard Manin’s important book Principles of representative government, a reference which is sorely and inexplicably missing in Lottocracy. Guerrero now refers to Manin as explaining that elections were set up as a deliberately aristocratic mechanism. This is an important historical point, which (I believe) is also missing in Lottocracy. That said, Manin’s most important idea – his “pure theory of elections” – is still missing in Guerrero’s argumentation. This theory explains why elections must produce elite rule and thus can be expected to promote elite interests at the expense of the general interests, without having to resort to the standard popular ignorance argument which is problematic both as a matter of fact and as a matter of principle.

Finally, the fact that the interview skims quickly over Guerrero’s proposal for how sortition is to be used also benefits the presentation. This brevity leaves the stage for the democratic ideas behind the mechanism of sortition and does not obscure these ideas with Geurrero’s elaborate proposed set-up which aims to prevent the allotted citizens from going democratically “wild”.

Filed under: Academia, Athens, Books, Elections, History, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 3 Comments »

Delannoi: Are you a lottocrat?

Posted on November 15, 2025 by Yoram Gat

Gil Delannoi’s opinion piece “Are you a lottocrat?” appears in the second issue of the Journal of Sortition.

Are ‘lottocracy’, ‘lottocratic’ indispensable, necessary, useful, superfluous, or pernicious words? These words already exist, and like most words ending in ‘cracy’ or ‘ism’, they are used in a pejorative, anxious, indifferent, descriptive, positive, or enthusiastic way.

To what category are these words supposed to belong? Political regimes. Among the various approaches Aristotle used in his typology of political regimes, it is true that his reflection included the typical selection procedure of each regime. He thought, at his time, that a typical or radical democracy would include the use of sortition, but it was only a more pronounced use among the other procedures used in a democratic regime. Typical does not necessarily mean dominant. Moreover, both by observing common usage and for the sake of clarity, he retained the criterion of the number of holders of sovereignty as the name of each regime.

We could break with this tradition, though this exciting exercise is rather pointless. If a procedure were to give its name to a regime:

Hereditocracy? Votocracy/Psephocracy? Lottocracy/Klerocracy? Why not Marketocracy? (combined with Bureaucracy in the EU). Bureaucracy is characteristic of regimes as soon as it is linked with another word: autocracy, oligarchy, one-party system, partitocracy or partycracy.

The full piece is at https://www.imprint.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Delannoi_PtP.pdf.

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

Sortition is the only worthwhile democratic option

Posted on November 1, 2025 by Yoram Gat

Octave Larmagnac-Matheron writes in the French magazine Philosophie [Original in French. Below is an English version generated by Google Translate with my touch-ups]:

In one of his characteristically thought-provoking Facebook posts, the philosopher Valentin Husson wrote a few days ago: ‘When the world tips towards illiberal democracies and authoritarianism, political courage would dictate that we propose a radical democracy. The only worthwhile one would be sortition (as with lay juries).’ I readily agree with both the observation and the proposal.

Sortition is, I believe, one of the first political ideas I defended in my short life. I remember quite well how I first arrived at this idea, during a high school lesson on Athenian institutions, which offered an overview of the workings of this unique system where members of the legislative and judicial assemblies — the Boule and the Heliaia — were chosen by lot, using a machine called the kleroterion. I was surprised that we used the same word — democracy — for both this system of chance and our own, elective system. Discovering philosophy two years later, I came to the same conclusion. Aristotle wrote that “it is considered democratic for magistracies to be assigned by lot and oligarchic for them to be elective” (Politics). Centuries later, Enlightenment philosophers wholeheartedly agree. Montesquieu wrote: “Suffrage by lot is in the nature of democracy. Lot is a way of electing that offends no one; it leaves each citizen a reasonable hope of serving their country” (The Spirit of the Laws). Rousseau agreed: “The way of lot is more in the nature of democracy” (The Social Contract).

Intrigued by these short phrases, which didn’t seem to bother many people, I then embarked on further reading. Allow me to mention two works that particularly struck me at the time. First, Bernard Manin’s Principles of Representative Government (1995). The philosopher recounts the rise of an electoral system that conquered the world following the great revolutions and clearly explains the aristocratic character of this regime that usurped the name of democracy. Next came Jacques Rancière’s Hatred of Democracy (2005), whose impassioned prose undeniably sparked enthusiasm in my young alter ego. Democracy, Rancière emphasizes, is a scandal: “Democracy means first and foremost this: an anarchic ‘government’” — without any claim to distinction — “founded on nothing other than the absence of any right to govern. […] The scandal lies there: a scandal for distinguished people who cannot accept that their birth, their seniority, or their knowledge should have to bow to the law of fate.” Isn’t impartial chance the best option for every citizen to participate in the exercise of political power — a guarantee that this power will not be monopolized?
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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 | 2 Comments »