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 | 23 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 | 24 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 »

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 | 7 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 »

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