Equality by lot

Equality-by-Lot’s traditional yearly review post.

2024 continued the trend of the last few years of cooling interest in the idea of sortition among the elites. This happened despite the re-emergence of Donald Trump as a viable candidate and his subsequent election to the presidency of the United States. The same Trump who was hysterically portrayed as a menace to democracy in 2016, and triggered (together with Brexit) a wave of elite interest in sortition, was accepted this time without nearly as much alarm. Presumably, Trump’s first term indicated that he is not the threat to the electoralist establishment that he was feared to be. This time the electoralist establishment seems confident enough with the existing structures that it has no need to consider introducing allotment into the system in order to shore it up.

Indeed, the most prominent application of sortition in 2024, a third constitutional assembly in Ireland, ended in what was described as “a fiasco”, as the proposals derived from the assembly’s work (there is some controversy about how close those proposals were to the those issued by the body itself) were rejected by two thirds of the Irish in a ratification referendum. This led to the inevitable hand-wringing and acrimony among those who have been promoting sortition based on the supposed success of such bodies.

Of course, the underlying issues with electoralism are not abating. The electoralist system maintains its record of generating low approval ratings and gestures of rejection by the public.

The academic world continued to churn out the familiar arguments for and against sortition, with a side of AI. In this ongoing discussion, two notable contributions this year are Malkin and Blok’s book Drawing Lots, which sets the Greek use of sortition in a longue durée context of an egalitarian ideology, and Alex Guerrero’s tome Lottocracy which, as it argues for replacing electoralism with a sortition-based system, provides a broad overview of the literature. Also worthy of note is the impending launch of the Journal of Sortition.

A few more mentionable sortition-related developments in 2024: Students continued to write positively about the idea. Sortition was mentioned in popular social media outlets and mass media. Of particular interest is an exchange on the pages of The Conservative Woman, in which an opinion writer bashed citizen assemblies, only to be corrected by a reader who actually took part in one. A new appointee to the House of Lords in the UK advocates for selecting this chamber using sortition. A kleroterion-inspired statue is on display at the Storm King art center in New York state.

Finally, three figures who played important early roles in the modern discussion of sortition have died over the last 14 months:

Late last year John Burnheim, an Australian researcher with a seminal contribution to igniting interest in sortition, passed away. Burnheim’s 1985 book Demarchy was a radical proposal for replacing the existing electoralist system with a very different system which relied heavily on sortition.

Mogens Herman Hansen, a prominent historian of Ancient Greece, died in June this year. Hansen’s book, The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes, has become the go-to book on many questions regarding the functioning of democratic Athens, including specifically the application of sortition.

Most recently, Bernard Manin, a French researcher who wrote the seminal book The principles of representative government, died in November. Manin set out to problematize elections in the 1990’s, a time when following the collapse of the Soviet bloc electoralism was considered by a triumpalist West as the political holy grail at the end of history. Manin’s “pure theory of elections” is, in my opinion, the most incisive critique of electoralism ever written. Interestingly, Manin was not an advocate of sortition but his scholarship on this subject is unmatched.

Filed under: Academia, Applications, Books, Elections, Press, Sortition | 1 Comment »