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.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Books, Deliberation, Elections, Participation, Press, Sortition | 20 Comments »

Troesoyer on the Let’s Make Them Pay podcast (part 3)

Posted on September 5, 2026 by Yoram Gat

Parts 1 and 2 are here and here.

5. Corruption (22:40). Bennet asks how sortition prevents the influence of money. Troesoyer says that sortition makes it easier to prevent corruption. In his argument he refers to two factors: term length and avoiding the electoral need to raise campaign money. Term length is important, Troesoyer says, because decision makers working together for a long period of time are able to develop trust between themselves. This allows them to collaborate among themselves and with other long-term actors, and thus to collude on corrupt enterprises. Campaign finance is a fertile ground which fosters corrupt collusion. Actors can promise help in terms of campaign funds in exchange for promotion of their interests. They can also make threats to support competitors in retaliation for non-cooperation.

But neither of these factors make for a convincing advantage of sortition over elections. Electoral systems can be, and often are, set up so that campaigns are highly regulated and publicly financed, greatly reducing the ability of campaign funds to inflence outcomes. The fundamental reason that elected officials serve narrow interests is not a direct quid-pro-quo but rather that the elected officials have a world-view in which the narrow interests are legitimate and should be served. Granted, campaign funds can be a corrupting factor but that can be fixed. The problem is that fixing that does not fix the fundamental problem with elections.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Elections, Sortition, video | 31 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.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Books, Elections, Sortition, video | 24 Comments »

Freeing sortition from the “deliberation” trap

Posted on August 13, 2026 by Yoram Gat

It is to its great detriment that sortition has become somehow tied to the ideology of “deliberation”. At best, “deliberation” is a distraction from the democratic thrust of sortition. It is often worse, an elitist idea that is in conflict with that democratic thrust. The talk of “deliberation” implies that groups of people are unable to spontaneously self-organize and coordinate in order to reach mutually beneficial arrangements. That unless experts set things up quite right – verify diversity of the forum, make sure the “shy” don’t get left out, facilitate the discussion, set up the correct incentives – then “deliberation” won’t happen and as a result “unwise” decisions will be made. “Deliberative democracy” is therefore an anti-democratic idea that all those who wish to see sortition used to democratize society, rather than to bolster the existing oligarchical arrangements or to modify the existing oligarchical arrangements into different oligarchical arrangements, should distance themselves from, both in their own minds and publicly.

I was again reminded of the harmful effects of the “deliberation” ideology by reading a post by Ethan McCutchen. There is a lot to agree with in the post, like the outright rejection of elections:

[W]e can’t and shouldn’t trust the old process, but not because we’re a nation of villainous idiots. The problem is not the voters but voting itself. Elections will not evolve from a source of feckless discord into one of fruitful discourse. Re-glorifying voting won’t somehow usher in a new era of healthy deliberation. Elections will not bring us back together. Elections are not the antidote; they are the poison.

To be clear democracy is not the poison, elections are.

Unfortunately, the author does his arguments the great disservice of forcing them into the “deliberative democracy” template: Continue reading →

Filed under: Deliberation, Elections, Sortition | 74 Comments »

Bagenstos on sortition in the Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission

Posted on August 11, 2026 by Yoram Gat

Election Law Blog writes:

Bagenstos, “Lottocracy as a Protector of Democracy? Sortition, Expertise, and the Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission”

Forthcoming article in the Wisconsin Law Review by Sam Bagenstos (Michigan):

A growing body of democratic theory contends that sortition—the selection of decisionmakers by lot rather than election—can strengthen democratic governance, particularly by defending the popular will against subversion by entrenched political insiders. Yet the sortition literature has struggled to answer a persistent objection—that randomly selected citizens lack the expertise to resolve the factually and legally complex questions that modern governance demands, and will therefore either flail or be captured by the very experts on whom they must rely. Advocates too often wave this concern away with slogans (“experts should be on tap, not on top”) or bury it under implausibly elaborate institutional designs.

This essay uses the first redistricting cycle of the Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission (MICRC) as a case study to examine these questions. Created by a 2018 citizen-initiated constitutional amendment, the MICRC is the most strongly sortition-based redistricting body in the United States. Michigan voters gave it final authority to adopt districting plans—rejecting arguments that an unelected, unaccountable body of “neophytes” could neither be democratic nor competent—precisely to break partisan insiders’ lock on the line-drawing process. Under the amendment, commissioners are selected by a complex process involving three rounds of random draws. The amendment also imposes strict rules disqualifying political insiders from service on the Commission, guaranteeing that the Commission will have funding and independent counsel, and requiring an extraordinary degree of public participation in the map-drawing process. It serves each of the three functions that advocates of sortition have suggested a randomly selected citizen assembly might serve: final decisionmaker, democratic check on elite capture, and generator of public information.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Applications, Elections, Sortition | 3 Comments »

Hélène Landemore Making the Rounds

Posted on July 31, 2026 by peterstone

Hélène Landemore, whose work is well-known to many regulars on this blog, has been very active online promoting her new book, Politics without Politicians: The Case for Citizen Rule (2026). Here are a few of her more noteworthy recent appearances.

First, on February 9 she appeared on Future Hindsight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQXZ5Yz0bfc

The next day, she appeared on Re:Thinking with Adam Grant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4I9dTUjV10

On February 13, she appeared on Keen On America: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPt6KJ-9FZ8

And on May 20, she appeared on the Colin McEnroe Show, a Connecticut-based podcast (where the conversation, unsurprisingly, focused upon the new Connecticut Citizen’s Assembly with which Landemore is deeply involved): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k35fdnnSdkg

Filed under: Academia, Applications, Deliberation, Effects of electoralism, Elections, Juries, Sortition, Theory | 1 Comment »

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 »

The New York Sun casts sortition as a leftist menace

Posted on July 21, 2026 by Ethan McCutchen

Anyone concerned about affiliating sortition closely with a US political pole should take note of last week’s New York Sun editorial [paywalled] entitled “The Newest Word From the Left — Sortition.”

Citing articles promoting sortition by the Nation’s Bhaskar Sunkara and In these Times’ editorial team, the Sun‘s editorial directly associates sortition with “the escalating aspirations of the far left.” It further implies the assemblies would be “guided” to support a progressive agenda.

Lest anyone fear that solons chosen by lottery would deviate from progressive orthodoxy, In These Times asserts that their deliberations would be guided.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Elections, Press, Sortition | 33 Comments »

Paul Krugman’s positive experience at jury selection

Posted on July 13, 2026 by Yoram Gat

Paul Krugman had a discussion with fellow New Jerseyans at jury selection and found them to be good people.

And it was just a far more hopeful scene — at least I found it much more hopeful — about the state of the country. It turns out that ordinary Americans — this is, again ordinary Americans from Mercer County, New Jersey, but still — ordinary Americans are a lot nicer, more thoughtful, more willing to hold interesting discussions than you might think.

And it does seem to me, given all the political news, there’s a lot of people out there, I would say primarily on the right, but not only on the right, who fundamentally hold ordinary Americans in contempt, who believe that you have to go with cheap slogans and that you can appeal to the baser instincts of everybody’s nature and that’s the way that you win.

Now, can he translate the following observation into a political agenda:

You know, this country is actually okay if we can just get past some of the people who are trying to take us down a dark path. We’re not bad people — we’re mostly good people.

Filed under: Academia, Elections, Juries, Sortition | Leave a comment »

Next Page »