Press | Equality by lot

Greenwald on the aggression of electoralist states

Posted on October 23, 2026 by Yoram Gat

Glenn Greenwald was recently a guest on Piers Morgan’s show (appearing in a panel together with other guests). In a recap video Greenwald collects excerpts of his from the show. The collection forms a condemnation of the West’s rich record of aggression in the 21st century. Interestingly, Greenwald ties this record to the electoralist system.

Greenwald repeatedly makes the point that the consistent U.S. and Western aggression toward their enemies is the result of an aggressive consensus among Western elites, so that the public cannot vote to stop it, since all credible choices on the ballot support it. In fact, Greenwald points out, the public does wish to stop the diversion of resources into the war efforts, and since none of the mainstream parties offers this option, formerly fringe parties are gaining power at the expense of mainstream parties.
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Filed under: Elections, Press, Academia, video, Effects of electoralism | 32 Comments »

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 »

Sortition to become part of Harvard’s senate selection bylaws

Posted on October 12, 2026 by Yoram Gat

The Harvard Crimson reports:

Planning Body Releases Final Bylaws for Harvard Faculty Senate After Input From University Leadership

Harvard’s faculty senate planning body released a final set of proposed bylaws for the group Thursday, outlining a largely advisory body that would work closely with top Harvard officials to address University-wide issues.

The new bylaws, officially endorsed by Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 and Provost John F. Manning ’82 in an accompanying letter, appear to address concerns from administrators about the body’s makeup and interactions with existing governance structures.

A new stipulation requires all senators to be elected via an approval voting process, in which voters select candidates they consider acceptable — a change the planning body said “guards against factional capture.” The final bylaws also hold that if fewer than 60 percent of eligible faculty do not vote, the election will be invalid and the seats filled by sortition.

“To avoid the common issue of low-turnout elections that make many faculty senates unrepresentative, the new bylaws take concrete steps to help ensure that Senators broadly represent their respective Faculties,” Garber and Manning wrote in the letter.

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

An allotted evaluation panel in Belgium

Posted on October 10, 2026 by Yoram Gat

Bruxelles Today reports that the municipality of Auderghem in Belgium is setting up an allotted Citizen Evaluation Council (CEC) that is going to produce a yearly evaluation of the government of the municipality. This has the potential of being a transformative application of sortition – much more impactful than the customary single-issue bodies and the “grand plan” bodies. By evaluating the actual actions of the government as a whole, rather than being assigned limited roles by the elected, or making abstract and inevitably vague plans, the evaluation council can become a meaningful channel for democratic power challenging the oligarchical electoral power. Much of course depends on the details – authority, resources, media attention – but the direction is very promising, despite not having any binding decision making power. This could be a good way for estabilishing the representativity of allotted bodies and increasing their visibility and credibility, as an initial step toward a full sortition-based system. If the population perceives the evaluations produced as valid and useful, then the next step – allowing the CEC to fire and hire the officials they are evaluating in order to promote the same values and interests the CEC uses when producing its evaluation – seems not that far fetched.

Auto-translated excepts:

The municipality of Auderghem is launching a Citizen Evaluation Council (CEC) composed of 33 residents selected by lot from among the applicants. Its mission will be to independently evaluate the municipality’s actions on an annual basis, the municipality stated.

Three criteria for evaluating the municipality

Each year, the Council will review municipal actions based on three criteria: effectiveness—specifically, what was or was not achieved and why; the relevance of decisions regarding residents’ needs; and the coherence between various projects. The method draws on an OECD framework, adapted by the ULB Policy Lab to make it accessible to residents who are not public policy evaluation specialists.
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Filed under: Applications, Press, Sortition | 10 Comments »

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 »

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.

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

Jacobin rehashes the tired old clichés of the sortition debate

Posted on July 4, 2026 by Yoram Gat

The left-leaning Jacobin magazine has offered its readers the idea of sortition back in 2018 and then last December had a couple of pieces advocating for sortition – one being an interview with Alexander Guerrero and one being an article by Terry Bouricius. Jacobin now has a debate of sorts [paywalled, but full text here] in which Anand Gopal takes the ostensibly pro-sortition position and Ben Burgis plays the skeptic.

The text methodically checks off the squares on the sortition debate bingo card: “democracy is in retreat”, “big money”, “popular sovereignty”, “democracy is not just [a system that] happens to work out best but [where] the public actually has a right to manage its own affairs”, not wanting to pick your lawyer or book agent[!] at random, “technocratic objections to democracy”, “a multicameral approach, with both lotteries and elections”, “demographic similarities”, “atomized individuals”, “we want a chamber that has a place for parties”, “accountability”, “for a country of 350 million, it doesn’t really make sense to have 350 people sitting in council”, “smaller scales”, “people systematically shirk jury duty”, “[w]ith the Zohran election, there was a tremendous sense that “we did this””, “instant recall”, etc., etc.

As usual, this format of discussion provides no rational way out of the on-the-one-hand-but-on-the-other-hand conundrum. Jacobin‘s readers are left to their own prejudices to decide which hand they prefer – the one with some sortition (but not without elected officials to balance things out), or the one where sortition is deemed altogether undesirable due to this or that principle (even if it may result in better outcomes).

Filed under: Elections, Press, Sortition | 13 Comments »