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 | 2 Comments »

Second issue of the Journal of Sortition

Posted on November 11, 2025 by Yoram Gat

The second issue of the Journal of Sortition is available. Half-price subscriptions are also available.

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

The lottery politics of Britain’s Your Party

Posted on November 7, 2025 by Yoram Gat

A fairly long article by Michael Chessum in Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières has the title “The lottery politics of Britain’s Your Party: Why sortition undermines socialist organising”. Here are some excerpts.

[Your Party’s] leadership’s embrace of sortition appears less about democratic innovation than maintaining control. Regional assemblies lack voting powers, online suggestions disappear into a black box, and the conference floor will inevitably privilege prominent figures exempt from the lottery system.

This reflects a broader crisis on the British left: rather than building genuine mass politics rooted in branches and workplaces, we’re lurching between quick fixes – whether “hyperleaders” like Mélenchon or procedural shortcuts like sortition. Both bypass the difficult work of developing democratic structures that connect members to strategy and politicise participation from the base upwards.

[Your Party’s] founding conference, set for late November in Liverpool, will be populated by sortition. 13,000 party members will be enfranchised at random, with 6,500 attending on each day. The party membership as a whole will only get a symbolic, “confirmatory” vote on the final draft of the constitution. This constitution could, according to documents released in October, enshrine sortition as the permanent system for conferences.

If we take this plan at face value, the founding leadership of Your Party, with all of its embedded control freakery, is intending to entrust its future to an idealistic, unprecedented process, putting its faith in a literally random assortment of members. More substantive arguments aside (and we’ll come to those), would-be proponents of sortition in Your Party must begin by asking themselves: is that really plausible?

[O]ne would have to be wilfully naive to think that [sortition’s] appearance in Your Party is down to the sudden conversion of senior Corbyn aides to the Athenian democratic ideal.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Athens, Elections, Participation, Press, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Citizens’ conventions: The sweet trap of a democratic facade

Posted on November 6, 2025 by Yoram Gat

An opinion column in Le Télégramme, a regional newspaper of Brittany, France. Original in French. The version below is a translation by Google Translate with my touch-ups.

In an opinion piece, Agnès Le Brun, regional councilor and former mayor of Morlaix, shares her perspective on participatory democracy as practiced through citizens’ conventions.

They present themselves as the miracle cure for a weary democracy, the supposedly “sweet” remedy to reconcile citizens with public decision-making. Citizens’ conventions, with their reliance on sortition and participatory deliberation, are appealing because of their promise: to bring “real life” into the world of political decision-making. But behind this veneer of democratic innovation too often lies a carefully cultivated illusion, one that harms democracy as much as it claims to revitalize it.

The first pitfall is the pretense of participation. These mechanisms are presented as a break with traditional institutions. In reality, behind a supposedly depoliticized staging of the debate, the agenda is set from above, the topics are framed, and the conclusions are rarely taken seriously by those who commissioned them.

The perennial issue of decentralization, a quintessentially Breton topic, and Loïg Chesnais-Girard’s campaign promises, diluted over time, have led the President of the Brittany Region to propose a citizens’ convention in 2026, supposedly to address the subject in the most democratic way possible. Really? Sortition is primarily a convenient pretext for circumventing elections and allows for the maintenance of the illusion of representativeness. Because a few dozen Bretons are chosen at random, the claim is that “the people” are being heard.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Applications, Deliberation, Elections, Press, Sortition | 6 Comments »

Bellon: Citizens’ conventions against democracy

Posted on October 8, 2025 by Yoram Gat

André Bellon is a former French politician, a member of the French national assembly in the 1980’s and the early 1990’s, and the founder of the reformist organization, the Association for a constitutional assembly. He writes the following in Revue Politique et Parlementaire. [Original in French, Google translation with some touchups.]

Members of parliament in favor of “citizens’ conventions” want, under the pretext of democracy, to place universal suffrage, an expression of popular sovereignty, under supervision.

Like the infamous sea serpent, we periodically see the resurgence of calls for the famous “citizens’ conventions,” formed by randomly selected individuals, supervised by experts, presenting themselves as spokespersons for the people. For their promoters, this represents a democratic revolution; in fact, it is a trick for mobilizing citizens without any real political power, or even for eliminating all popular sovereignty.

Originally, this proposal was particularly supported by experts who – perhaps by chance – saw themselves as leaders of these conventions. Didn’t one of them naively declare that he was struck by the fact that at the end of the debates, those drawn by lot found themselves, for the most part, in agreement with the experts?
Continue reading →

Filed under: Elections, Press, Sortition | 2 Comments »

Activists blast the “the anti-democratic ‘sortition’ method”

Posted on September 27, 2025 by Yoram Gat

The “World Socialist Web Site” has a report about a recent rally in which Zarah Sultana, a co-founder of YourParty, spoke. The piece goes into some detail about the infighting in YourParty and mentions the sortition issue.

Tina Becker, from the “Why Marx?” group and a member of the Your Party “proto-branch” in Sheffield, asked Sultana about the anti-democratic “sortition” method being imposed by Corbyn’s “Organising Committee” to select delegates to the founding conference. Becker explained it meant “We can’t put forward motions, we can’t put forward amendments. There will be a lottery system to choose delegates.” She asked Sultana, “Should the regional meetings be able to vote and have amendments? Should we not be the ones who decide how Your Party should be run and not the six MPs, and what are you trying to do to change that?”

Sultana replied, “I too am quite critical of sortition, but that is what has been announced for the conference, and so we need to make sure it’s democratic. And I think there’s a way to still do that.”

Her remarks made clear there would be no organised challenge to Corbyn’s anti-democratic stitch-up. She did not and could not explain how delegates randomly selected based on “gender, region and background” could be “made democratic”. Sortition is being employed to block members from exercising democratic control, preventing them from nominating delegates who are accountable and who best reflect their views, suppressing any political challenge to Corbyn’s (and Sultana’s) unelected cliques.

Filed under: Press, Proposals, Sortition | 5 Comments »

Hallam: Sortition is democracy

Posted on September 20, 2025 by Yoram Gat

Roger Hallam, a co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, recently released from a year-long stay in jail where he was serving a sentence for criminal political activities, has been a sortition advoacate for some time. Hallam has a new forceful article in The New Stateman (and a new book). Unlike other authors, for Hallam, sortition is not an add-on. It is democracy. If memory serves, Hallam is the most high-profile consistent advocate for sortition to date.

Hallam starts by a full frontal assault on elections.

Voting isn’t democratic. We need sortition

Randomly selecting people to rule would be a hell of a lot better than holding elections

[V]oting and elections do not, and never have, produced rule by the people. What they produce is oligarchy – rule by the few. Don’t take my word for it. This was standard political knowledge from ancient times up to the French Revolution. What you got with voting and elections was a few people in charge – obviously! Because, as everyone who observes what actually happens knows, so-called electoral “democracies” are always controlled by the few. Sure, if you like voting and elections and oligarchies that’s fine. They have their pros and cons, but don’t delude yourself and others that you are a democrat. You are not.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Books, Elections, History, Press, Sortition | 5 Comments »

A predictable critique of Guerrero’s Lottocracy

Posted on August 23, 2025 by Yoram Gat

Niko Kolodny, Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley has a lengthy piece in the Boston Review which reviews Alexander Guerrero’s Lottocracy. Unsurprisingly, Kolodny is not sympathetic to the idea of sortition. Predictably, Kolodny finds ample opportunities to criticize Guerroro’s “relentlessly thorough”, eclectic argumentation.

In particular, Kolodny effectively exploits Guerrero’s reliance on the supposed inability of the public to represent its own interests without proper guidance. For example:

Guerrero imagines that each SILL [single-issue, lottery-selected legislatures] would be guided in its deliberation by a poll of those few citizens who somehow are able to take a week off of work and other responsibilities to pay attention to the five day-long discussions of the final five proposals. Again, if the powerful can, in effect, buy off the general public to support a particular electoral party, then why can’t the powerful mobilize a (again, presumably quite small) group to pay attention to the review of proposals for the Water Access and Water Quality SILL and support what they favor? No one but the powerful, one worries, would be minding the store.

Kolodny’s argument above, as well as his other arguments (e.g., his assertion that people cannot be expected to accept offers in an allotted body), are standard. He goes so far as to inflict on his readers the electoralist dogma about how “[b]y choosing some political programs and parties over others, [voters] shape the political/ideological space within which the elected representatives must operate until the next election”. A formula he quotes from Cristina Lafont and Nadia Urbinati’s The Lottocratic Mentality: Defending Democracy Against Lottocracy.

Such arguments are easily refuted and have been refuted many times. However, Guerrero’s book is not up to the task. Instead, the book makes it easy for the opponents of sortition – or more to the point, for the opponents of democracy – to rehash the old superficial talking points and present them as “a splendid and convincing recent counterpoint to arguments for lottocracy”.

Filed under: Academia, Books, Elections, Press, Proposals, Sortition | Leave a comment »

A call for an institutional upheaval

Posted on July 6, 2025 by Yoram Gat

An open letter by Eric Jourdain and the CaP Démocratie collective to the president of the parliament of Wallonia published in the Belgian newspaper Le Soir (machine translation):

Mr. President,

The crisis of democracy we have been experiencing for several decades is serious and profound. Serious because it results in the rise of populism, which reminds us of the 1930s leading up to the Second World War.

This crisis is profound because the very foundations of our political system are at stake. Today, a large portion of the population feels poorly represented, or even completely unrepresented, by political parties. An IWEPS survey indicates that 80% of Walloons no longer trust politics.

It is the quality of citizen representation, over which political parties have a monopoly, that is at stake. This monopoly has existed since 1830, but the world has changed a lot in the meantime.

Yet, with a few exceptions, the political world seems hardly concerned about this situation. Improving our system of governance and the way citizens are represented within our institutions do not seem to be a priority.

A Necessary Shock Therapy

The problem is profound, and to remedy it, we need shock therapy, an institutional upheaval. Faced with the partycracy that is plaguing our country, as Mr. Prévot put it, how can we break with this system?

We demand the establishment of a true bicameral system with a second assembly completely independent of the first, and we propose that it be composed by drawing lots. This method of representation has proven itself in ancient history but also in the 21st century. Isn’t it said that in a democracy, the people are sovereign? This sovereign should always have the power to make their voice heard and thus command respect. Voting once every five years is no longer sufficient.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Elections, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 1 Comment »

A Citizens’ Assembly for Bristol

Posted on July 5, 2025 by peterstone

Recently, I posted about a citizens’ assembly to be held in Bristol to develop a “cultural delivery plan.” Now there’s an interview on the subject from the Bristol Cable, “a pioneering investigative local media co-op, owned by thousands of people in Bristol, UK.” It’s not very focused, but it does offer more insights into how the citizens’ assembly is coming to be and what the hopes are for it. It can be found here: https://thebristolcable.org/2025/05/listen-bristol-unpacked-with-david-jubb-of-citizens-in-power-can-citizens-assemblies-relight-our-democratic-fires/

Filed under: Applications, Press, Sortition | Leave a comment »

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