The Mirror recently ran an article about Baroness Smith of Llanfaes, currently the youngest member of the House of Lords. She is a Plaid Cymru nominee for a peerage who advocates for both Welsh independence and a randomly-selected House of Lords.
Meet the youngest House of Lords member plotting to bring it down from the inside
Next week, the Baroness will speak in favour of radical change at an event in Westminster calling for a House of Citizens – where every person in the country would have the chance to be randomly selected for a stint in the second chamber, as for jury service.
Just out: an article proposing that Australia select its Head of State through a multi-stage process involving sortition at the beginning and the end. The author doesn’t really seem to endorse the idea; rather, he just offers it as an alternative that’s “a little bit whacky.” Here’s the link:
Nicholas Coccoma writes about sortition in the Boston Review. While some of the narrative is standard, Coccoma makes some crucial points that are often avoided by the prominent members of the sortition milieu.
The Case for Abolishing Elections
They may seem the cornerstone of democracy, but in reality they do little to promote it. There’s a far better way to empower ordinary citizens: democracy by lottery.
In response to [popular] discontent, reformers have proposed a slew of solutions. Some want to expand the House of Representatives, abolish the Electoral College, or eliminate the Senate. Others demand enhanced voting rights, the end of gerrymandering, stricter campaign finance laws, more political parties, or multi-member districts and ranked-choice voting. The Athenians would take a different view. The problem, they would point out, lies in elections themselves. We can make all the tweaks we want, but as long as we employ voting to choose representatives, we will continue to wind up with a political economy controlled by wealthy elites. Modern liberal governments are not democracies; they are oligarchies in disguise, overwhelmingly following the policy preferences of the rich. (The middle class happens to agree with them on most issues.) Continue reading →
A little more than a year ago, Adam Grant offered sortition to the readers of The New York Times. Now Daniel Pink offers it to the readers of the The Washington Post. Interestingly, and encouragingly in terms of the foothold that the idea of sortition may now have gained, Pink writes that he is merely echoing proposals made by readers whose ideas for “improving our country, our organizations or our lives” were solicited by the Post.
On Election Day, we affirm with our actions an unspoken principle of governance: The fairest and most democratic way to determine who wields public power is by asking citizens to cast ballots.
But what if there’s an alternative — not autocracy or monarchy but a more radical form of democratic representation and popular sovereignty?
“Why not make serving in Congress like jury duty?” asks a reader in Salt Lake City. “If you meet the criteria, you could be selected to serve for a term, which would give a broader cross-section of people representing regular Americans.”
The article is typical in the sense that instead of engaging with arguments previously made it merely repeats such previous arguments, even when these were addressed and refuted. (And even if they are transparently self-contradictory.)
It’s a bit nutty — complicated and replete with unintended consequences. But first, let’s examine its virtues. Continue reading →
Sabine Hossenfelder is a physicist and fairly prominent YouTube figure with over 1.5 million followers. Her clips are about the physical sciences, but she occasionally strays outside this area. Her most recent video is titled “Is the USA a Democracy or a Republic?”. The analysis she offers is not too perceptive in my mind, but it does have the advantage of mentioning the idea of selecting political decision making bodies using a lottery. This idea gets a brief teaser in the introduction and a bit more detail toward the end of the video.
Naturally, most of the thousands of comments to the video focus on the democracy vs. republic matter, but at least one comment does pick up on the sortition idea:
Problem with representative democracy is that strangers, who do not know you, cannot represent you. The premise is simply false.
Voting is entering a contract, asking to be ruled by a handful of strangers. Extending them Power Of Attorney, four years into the future … If you sign that, whatever happens, you have no right to complain, because you accepted the deal.
Here is what we should do instead : Government by lottery
1000 citizens randomly selected. 200 replacements selected every year, giving five years in government for each. Then perhaps a quarterly online voting session for the rest of us; Yes/No to the bill with slimmest decisive vote, in the 1000-man parlament during that quarter. Continue reading →
In an ideal world, I wouldn’t have chosen an election year for my American book tour. It’s not that I dislike elections generally. And — praise be — a population of 300 million Americans has managed to raise one presidential candidate who is not a convicted felon awaiting sentence.
No, my problem with American elections — and it viscerally distresses me every four years — is the affront to democracy called the Electoral College. I’ve done the math. The Electoral College can hand you the presidency even if your opponent receives three-quarters of the popular vote. Of course that’s a hypothetical extreme. The familiar reality is that campaigns ignore all but a handful of “swing” states.
A genuine electoral college, however, could work rather well. Voters in every state would elect respected citizens to meet in conclave to find a president — like a university search committee or the College of Cardinals. They’d headhunt the best in the land, interview them, study their publications and speeches, exhaustively vet them — and finally after a secret ballot announce the verdict in a puff of white smoke. Continue reading →
Following a piece previously published in The Conservative Woman which was “less than enthusiastic” regarding citizens’ assemblies, a reader of the magazine wrote with her first hand experience as an allotted juror in a citizen jury convened to discuss assisted dying policy in the UK.
The testimony is very interesting and shows the typical inquisitive, perceptive, sensible and open-minded attitude one may expect from a random member of the public (as opposed to the tendentious single-minded attitude exhibited by the opinion writer who authored the previously published piece). While describing the jury process rather favorably and rejecting the label “choreographed charade” that was used by the opinion writer, the testimony quite reasonably expresses displeasure with the fact that the process was presented as being a decision-making process while in fact all decisions were being taken elsewhere and independently of the ongoings in the jury.
My involvement began on February 29, when a letter about the jury arrived. It was addressed ‘To the Resident’ and mine was one of 7,000 addresses selected at random. The jury was to consist of 30 people. Those willing to participate were asked to register on the website of the Sortition Foundation, which had been engaged to recruit jury members ensuring they were broadly representative of the population.
Patrick Deneen is a professor of political science at Notre Dame university. He is a fairly prominent public intellectual in US politics, popular especially among the Republican elite. His 2018 book, Why Liberalism Failed, drew quite a bit of attention.
A piece by Deneen has recently been published by the Notre Dame magazine. It is a surprisingly, even impressively, good. The heavy punches just keep coming. Here are some excerpts.
Democracy and Its Discontents
The claim that our democracy is imperiled should rightly strike fear in the souls of citizens, but it ought also to give pause to any student of politics. During most of the four decades I have studied and written about democracy, political scientists, and especially political theorists such as myself, would begin not with a claim about the relative health of democracy, but rather with a seemingly simple question: What is democracy?
Yet according to a dominant narrative among today’s academics, public intellectuals, media personalities and even many citizens, it is largely assumed that we know what democracy is. Continue reading →
Novara Media is British media organization which publishes videos on YouTube. On August 31st it published a video in which the presenters mocked a certain UK MP. In the context of lamenting the supposed stupidity of that MP, one of the presenters, Aaron Bastani, suggested appointing the entire House of Commons by lot. Bastani seemed fairly well informed about the topic, mentioning the term sortition and the use of the mechanism in Athens.
The argument about sortition generating a more competent body is somewhat unusual since it is conventionally claimed that sortition generates a more representative but less competent body.
The video had over 17,000 views and over 200 comments, but none of the comments as far as I could see picked up on the topic.
I mean you’d be better off, you’d honestly be better off, just the first person you see on the street or in the pub and saying “Look, you’re going to be an MP for a constituency”, they will be better than Esther McVey.
By the way, that’s something I really believe. If you randomly chose individuals and you made them MPs and then they had to form parties and alliances over a period of time, I genuinely believe they would do a better job than than the House of Commons. I know people are going to get upset with me. That’s not anti-politics left populism. It’s called sortition. It used to be the basis of Athenian democracy. I’m saying that it would be superior, with women involved and no slave class. I do genuinely believe it would give us better MPs than the caliber we have right now.
David Cottam is a British historian and former principal of Sha Tin College, an international secondary school in Hong Kong, and a columnist in the China Daily Hong Kong Edition. In a recent column he writes about sortition.
Hong Kong, currently a hybrid of democratic and meritocratic government, is ideally placed for developing [a system with an element of sortition]. Like ancient Athens, its compact size and well-educated population would readily facilitate such a move. Introducing an element of sortition into the Legislative Council would answer the call for greater representation of the people without risking a return to the sort of partisan conflict and obstructionism that previously characterized the legislature. This would establish Hong Kong as a model of modern government, truly representing the people but without the vested interests and divisiveness of warring political parties. Such a system would also reflect Hong Kong’s unique amalgam of Western and Chinese influences, combining democratic values with the nonpartisan Confucian values of harmony and social cohesion. Indeed, this could provide an excellent model of government, not just for the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, but for any place wanting to enhance political participation, reduce partisan division, and ensure that the common good rather than party interests always prevails.
Just out: an article proposing that Australia select its Head of State through a multi-stage process involving sortition at the beginning and the end. The author doesn’t really seem to endorse the idea; rather, he just offers it as an alternative that’s “a little bit whacky.” Here’s the link:
Nicholas Coccoma 
A little more than a year ago, Adam Grant 
Patrick Deneen is a professor of political science at Notre Dame university. He is a fairly prominent public intellectual in US politics, popular especially among the Republican elite. His 2018 book, Why Liberalism Failed, drew quite a bit of attention.
David Cottam is a British historian and former principal of Sha Tin College, an international secondary school in Hong Kong, and a columnist in the China Daily Hong Kong Edition. In 
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