Lottocracy on The Shape of the World podcast

Posted on October 22, 2026 by Yoram Gat

The Shape of the World is a podcast hosted by Jill Riddell, that describes itself as “exploring the intricate relationships between cities, nature, and the people who shape them”.

A recent episode features Alex Guerrero discussing “Lottocracy”.

What if your upstairs neighbor, your cousin, or the bartender down the street were chosen by lottery to represent you in government? Author and political philosopher Alex Guerrero believes this radical idea, known as lottocracy, is a better alternative than voting.

The idea is that instead of an individual announcing they want to be a leader and then launching a campaign to become one, our representatives in government would be chosen by random selection. To some degree, the concept is already utilized; the United States uses random selection to assemble its juries for legal trials, and in Europe and Canada, groups known as “citizens’ assemblies” are assembled by random selection to discuss and make recommendations on a particular issue.

In this episode, Alex examines the benefits and drawbacks of lottery-based democracy. But in general, he is a huge proponent of the concept, and he and others are working hard to make it a reality. He is convinced it will reduce the influence of money in politics and reduce corruption. It could ease gridlock and produce fairer and sounder policies. And it could make more inclusive political systems. But what would this process actually look like? And could it make the shape of the world as we know it even better?

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

I just found 200 books on sortition!

Posted on October 20, 2026 by Carl Lundgren

In the past three months, as preparation for a book I plan to write, I have been researching books, papers, and websites on random selection of citizens for political purposes (“sortition”). I have had an interest in this since the 1970s, but as of 1985 I knew of only one book and a few journal or magazine writings on the subject – slim pickings. Nor had I run into any additional writings during the next 40 years, despite what I regarded as the general usefulness of this idea for purposes of political reform.

The Internet has become a very efficient way to search for even obscure items. As I set out on my 2026 research, I had little reason to suppose that much of anything additional was likely to have been written on the subject, but I could not presume that there was none. To my surprise, I found numerous articles, books, and webpages on sortition. I manually developed a list of books related to sortition. After I reached 50 or so books, I realized I needed to keep track of these books in a spreadsheet. I decided to continue searching for more books. Eventually I found about 200 books (including several dissertations). The resulting spreadsheet can be found here.

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Filed under: Books, Deliberation, History, Sortition | Tagged: , | 1 Comment »

Lame review of Hélène Landemore’s book

Posted on September 27, 2026 by Nicholas Gruen

I haven’t much time for this review, both literally and metaphorically. It is a long review of Helene Landemore’s book in Foreign Affairs and is tenaciously conventional in all its assessments. I include the final lame paragraph, together with an invitation to email me on ngruen at gmail if you’d like me to email you the full paper. The public (paywalled) website is here.

Democracy is in trouble. There is no silver bullet, and the solutions must be wide-ranging and realistic. The reform agenda should include institutional innovations such as citizens’ assemblies; changes to clearly dysfunctional political, electoral, and campaign finance systems; and bottom-up efforts to rebuild the social and cultural foundations of democratic life. Landemore’s book is valuable not because it persuades readers that representative democracy should be abolished but because it dramatizes how much better the current system could be-and offers one of the many reforms that will be necessary if democracy is to live up to its potential.

Filed under: Academia, Books, Elections, Press, Sortition | 22 Comments »

Sortition at The Fulcrum

Posted on September 19, 2026 by peterstone

A website called The Fulcrum has just published a pro-sortition editorial by a high school student named Dylan Mabee. Mabee makes the case for a randomly-selected second legislative chamber. His idea is actually pretty detailed, and reminds me of the proposal by Anthony Barnett and Peter Carty for a randomly-selected House of Lords. (See their book The Athenian Option: Radical Reform for the House of Lords, Imprint Academic, 2008).

Beyond the Ballot: A Citizen Chamber for the Twenty-First Century

Under this model, a national legislature would become bicameral. The first chamber would remain an elected parliament responsible for initiating legislation, reflecting partisan competition and electoral accountability. The second chamber would be a Citizen Chamber composed of approximately 500 randomly selected citizens chosen through stratified sampling to reflect national demographics, including age, gender, region, education level, and income distribution. Members would serve one-year terms and receive full-time compensation to ensure accessibility across socioeconomic backgrounds.

Crucially, this chamber would possess binding authority. Any major legislation passed by the elected house would require the Citizen Chamber’s approval before becoming law. The Citizen Chamber could also delay legislation for reconsideration or require public revision, forcing elected officials to justify policy more transparently. However, it would not initiate legislation independently, preserving elected representatives’ agenda-setting role and preventing institutional gridlock.

Filed under: Books, Elections, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 12 Comments »

Sortition in The Nation

Posted on September 13, 2026 by Yoram Gat

Back in 2013 The Nation magazine reviewed David Greaber’s book The Democracy Project and as a result made a brief assessment of sortition, which was mentioned by Greaber in the book. “That sounds nice, but it’s far easier said than done,” wrote The Nation. According to the magazine’s search engine, sortition has been mentioned on its pages 3 times since. One of those is a 2021 interview with Hélène Landemore in the context of her 2020 book Open Democracy.

The Nation is now publishing a long review by Osita Nwanevu of Landemore’s latest book, Politics Without Politicians. Conincidentally or not, the title of the review, “Can We Save Democracy?”, is rather similar to the title of the 2021 interview, “Can ‘Lottocracy’ Save Democracy From Itself?”.

Nwanevu starts with a copule of paragraphs of dubious relevance referring to a painting by Hieronymus Bosch, to atom bombs and to a play by Norman Mailer. He then issues a dire (but not unfamiliar) warning:

The solution to the flaws of electoral representation that Landemore presents in Politics Without Politicians is simple and bold: The bums in Washington should be thrown out of office—not just those from one party, but all of them. And not just in the next election, but forever. “Electoral democracy is beyond repair,” she declares. “A system based on electoral representation is no longer—if it ever was—capable of delivering either democratic or good governance.” Instead, she argues, we the people should finally take it upon ourselves to rule directly.

That message has drawn the praise of luminaries from Lawrence Lessig to Thomas Piketty. “This thought-provoking book,” Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu has declared, “argues that the solution to dwindling support for our political institutions is more democracy, not less.” It is truly unfortunate that the book does no such thing. Read carefully and within the context of Landemore’s other work, Politics Without Politicians instead makes the case that we must rescue the democratic idea by wringing the democracy out of it. Landemore’s proposals really would disempower the politicians. But they would also, just as surely, disempower you.

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Filed under: Academia, Books, Deliberation, Elections, Participation, Press, Sortition | 42 Comments »

Nina Roux: Sortition and democracy

Posted on September 5, 2026 by Yoram Gat

A recent book by Nina Roux has the title Tirage au sort et démocratie. Retour sur le cas athénien [Sortition and democracy. Revisiting the case of Athens].

An interview with the author doesn’t turn up that much that is new. Still, it emphasizes some points that may not be new but are worth emphasizing. One point is regarding participation. It is often said that Athens was a radical democracy because of mass participation. Roux points out that this is not the case.

Another important point is about the independence of allotted bodies from elites. In Athens, sortition was not managed by elected institutions or other elite elements. For that reason it could function meaningfully as a democratic force and impose its will on the elites. This stands in contrast with modern proposals and instantiations of allotted bodies (very much including modern juries) which are always concerned keeping those bodies in check.

One of the most stimulating reflections in your work concerns the contributions of the Athenian case to our time. Far from simply observing, you propose a path toward a radical democracy whereby sortition contributes to the people’s control over their leaders. Could you elaborate on this point?

One of the main conclusions of my work was to emphasize that sortition was not the sole source of Athenian democratic radicalism. I observed, in the sources available to me, that there were indeed constraints on citizens who wished to go to the Agora to participate in public debate, and that the city took few steps to alleviate them. To say that Athenian sortition was instituted to guarantee the representation of all social groups in institutions and to create a broad participatory movement is an exaggeration—which does not mean, however, that classical Athens was not a radical democracy. It simply functioned through means of pressure other than the massive, constant, and active participation of all citizens. The most original feature of the Athenian city-state was not sortition, which is found in other institutional contexts: it was the popular courts, composed of thousands of judges chosen by lot, who voted without possibility of appeal on all trials, including those of the city’s politicians. In The Constitution of Athens, Aristotle emphasizes the importance of sortition to protect this institution from corruption and guarantee the effectiveness of popular control over the city’s elites. The use of chance, rotation, and the constant replacement of the set of judges and magistrates prevented this democratic control mechanism from jamming. And it was a mechanism that could choose as its target any politician—even Pericles, deposed in 429 BC for his handling of the first months of the Peloponnesian War. In this respect, sortition goes hand in hand with misthophoria, the remuneration of citizens participating in political institutions. It is also inseparable from the deterrent sanctions imposed by the Athenian courts: fines, death, and exile. It is therefore not insignificant that the allotment machine, the kleroterion, explicitly associated by Aristotle with the fight against corruption, was created in the aftermath of the oligarchic episodes of 411 and 404 BC, which profoundly shook the city.

Filed under: Academia, Athens, Books, Elections, History, Juries, Participation, Press, Sortition | 12 Comments »

Troesoyer on the Let’s Make Them Pay podcast (part 2)

Posted on August 25, 2026 by Yoram Gat

This continues my review of Ian Troesoyer’s discussion of sortition with Scott Bennet, host of the Let’s Make Them Pay podcast. Part 1 is here.

3. Values and interests vs. epistemic limitations (0:13:15). Troesoyer is concerned about “class bias” in elected government. To demonstrate it, he brings up a favorite example of Terry Bouricius. A body full of landlords would make different decisions than a body in which renters are represented. This is obvious and uncontroversial. But what is the mechanism behind this effect? The straightforward mechanism refers to values and interests. Landlords promote the values and interests of landlords, renters promote the values and interests of renters. Yet, Treosoyer presents this as a matter of “bias” or “limited perspectives”. According to this telling, the landlords are “trying to do their best”. They are very much open to representing the values and interests of the renters, but due to their limited perspective they are unaware of how things look like from the renters’ perspective and thus ignore their values and interests. Bennet goes as far as saying that just there being one or two renters in a body full of landlords would “make such a difference”. (Treosoyer agrees, but not too enthusiastically, if I am not mistaken.)

Leaning heavily on the supposed epistemic difficulties of the elected decision makers in arriving at “good decisions” is a standard trope of “deliberative democrats”. (A typical example of this tendency is Alex Guerrero’s book Lottocracy.) The epistemic effect may (or may not) exist, but emphasizing it and de-emphasizing the effect of the conflict of values and interests is unjustified. Presumably the appeal of this tendency is that it sounds less crass and confrontational, and avoids presenting the electoral elite and its allies as outright exploiters. Instead it presents them as well-meaning simpletons. The well-meaning landlords, for example, despite their openness to renters’ perspectives, have never had the idea of calling a few renters to appear before their body to express those perspectives.
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Filed under: Academia, Books, Elections, Sortition, video | 25 Comments »

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 »

Hugh Pope on the history sortition in Brussels

Posted on June 6, 2026 by Yoram Gat

While the fact that Italian city-states of the middle ages employed sortition in their governance structure is often mentioned in discussions of sortition, a new article by Hugh Pope on his substack page discusses the use of sortition in Brussels in the middle ages as well. Below is an excerpt.

In 1375, the city [Brussels] introduced a new system to choose the seven patrician members of its government. This government council would still be chosen from among the seven lineages, but with a strict new methodology to combat nepotism and corruption.

The pool of people in these lineages was not a particularly large minority, as in other early European variants of sortition-based decision-making. From about 30,000 people living in Brussels in 1375, only about 300 families belonged to the seven lineages. Of these, the only eligible candidates were men over the age of 28 who were married and could live without exercising any trade or profession.

These eligible members of the seven lineages would all meet once a year at a hall on the Grand Place in the centre of town. The aim was that each lineage should choose three candidates for alderman. Gilliat-Smith describes the drawing of the lots in each lineage as follows:

“A number of waxen balls, equal to the number of clansmen present, all without alike, but of which four contained within a white and one a black cipher, were placed in an urn, and, when they had been well shuffled, each member drew therefrom one of them, and presently, when the drawing was over, broke it. Whereupon the four men to whom the white-marked balls had fallen withdrew to a separate apartment to consider who was the most fitting man to represent their lineage, each man being free to propose what name he would, provided it was not his own.”

Filed under: Books, History, Sortition | 1 Comment »

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 »

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