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 »

More on sortition in YourParty

Posted on November 29, 2025 by Yoram Gat

The YourParty conference is taking place Nov. 29th and Nov. 30th, featuring allotted delegates. In an interview in The New Statesman, Jeremy Corbyn, one of YourParty’s leaders, explained the use of sortition as follows:

This is the most important element of Your Party for Corbyn: it has to be representative on a grassroots level. This assessment aligns him far more with the likes of Jamie Driscoll and Andrew Feinstein (who are closer to Sultana) than with his loyal allies, Murphy and Fitzpatrick, who would rather take a more top-down approach. “I think what’s needed is empowerment of our communities,” he said, explaining his hope that the founding of Your Party will be ultra-democratic.

Hence the use of sortition at the party’s founding conference, a process under which individuals are selected to create a random yet representative sample of the population (as championed by the founder of Extinction Rebellion, Roger Hallam). “For conference, I was worried that if we just said to a group, ‘look, you form yourselves into an informal group and elect delegates to conference’, what’s going to happen is those that know each other are going to elect each other, and those that don’t know anybody will be left out,” he said.

As an explanation this is coherent, but the actual procedure does not match this rhetoric at all. While the process does indeed not involve elected delegates, it appears that the allotted delegates are not involved either other than in the demeaning role of extras. The thousands of allotted delegates who are attending during the two days of the conference (in fact, it appears that each delegate attends just one of the two days), clearly have no time to generate an agenda or even discuss a pre-set agenda. They are deprived of even the symbolic role of voting on pre-set proposals (which would not have amounted to anything anyway) since the process includes online voting by any party member.

Filed under: Applications, Sortition | 3 Comments »

Craig Murray was not allotted to the YourParty conference

Posted on November 17, 2025 by Yoram Gat

Filed under: Applications, Participation, Sortition | 4 Comments »

District council in the UK will take steps to fulfil citizen assembly plan

Posted on November 15, 2025 by Yoram Gat

An announcement on the website of the Forest of Dean District council.

Forest of Dean District councillors have agreed to act on recommendations put forward in a new citizen visioning plan developed by Coleford residents. As a result, the council will now take steps to fulfil the plan’s recommendations in partnership with others, which include improving local employment opportunities, increasing social interaction across all generations and maximising community spaces.

The visioning plan was developed by a group of Coleford residents selected through a ‘sortition’ process – a random selection from all households in the town – ensuring that participants reflected the diversity of the local community.

Councillor Jackie Dale, Cabinet Member for Thriving Communities at Forest of Dean District Council said:

“I’m delighted that we can now begin addressing the recommendations made by Coleford residents. Their priorities closely align with our own commitment to tackling the Climate, Biodiversity and Ecological Emergencies, and to building thriving, resilient communities and a strong local economy.”

Filed under: Applications, Sortition | Leave a comment »

Delannoi: Are you a lottocrat?

Posted on November 15, 2025 by Yoram Gat

Gil Delannoi’s opinion piece “Are you a lottocrat?” appears in the second issue of the Journal of Sortition.

Are ‘lottocracy’, ‘lottocratic’ indispensable, necessary, useful, superfluous, or pernicious words? These words already exist, and like most words ending in ‘cracy’ or ‘ism’, they are used in a pejorative, anxious, indifferent, descriptive, positive, or enthusiastic way.

To what category are these words supposed to belong? Political regimes. Among the various approaches Aristotle used in his typology of political regimes, it is true that his reflection included the typical selection procedure of each regime. He thought, at his time, that a typical or radical democracy would include the use of sortition, but it was only a more pronounced use among the other procedures used in a democratic regime. Typical does not necessarily mean dominant. Moreover, both by observing common usage and for the sake of clarity, he retained the criterion of the number of holders of sovereignty as the name of each regime.

We could break with this tradition, though this exciting exercise is rather pointless. If a procedure were to give its name to a regime:

Hereditocracy? Votocracy/Psephocracy? Lottocracy/Klerocracy? Why not Marketocracy? (combined with Bureaucracy in the EU). Bureaucracy is characteristic of regimes as soon as it is linked with another word: autocracy, oligarchy, one-party system, partitocracy or partycracy.

The full piece is at https://www.imprint.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Delannoi_PtP.pdf.

Filed under: Academia, Books, Sortition | 3 Comments »

International Network of Sortition Advocates presents

Posted on November 14, 2025 by richwbrown

A Sortitional Constitution

for Denmark

How to give a sortition-based chamber equal constitutional status in Denmark

Join us for an engaging discussion on the effort to develop a constitution that would add a sortition-based second chamber of randomly selected citizens to complement the existing Danish Parliament (Folketinget). The model developed by Danish sortition advocates merges electoral legitimacy with deliberative equality, allowing both chambers to balance the other’s shortcomings.

Benny Nissen, INSA facilitator and founder of Sortition Foundation-Denmark, will describe the process, pitfalls, and outline the details in a proposed new constitution for Denmark.

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

Sortition is the only worthwhile democratic option

Posted on November 1, 2025 by Yoram Gat

Octave Larmagnac-Matheron writes in the French magazine Philosophie [Original in French. Below is an English version generated by Google Translate with my touch-ups]:

In one of his characteristically thought-provoking Facebook posts, the philosopher Valentin Husson wrote a few days ago: ‘When the world tips towards illiberal democracies and authoritarianism, political courage would dictate that we propose a radical democracy. The only worthwhile one would be sortition (as with lay juries).’ I readily agree with both the observation and the proposal.

Sortition is, I believe, one of the first political ideas I defended in my short life. I remember quite well how I first arrived at this idea, during a high school lesson on Athenian institutions, which offered an overview of the workings of this unique system where members of the legislative and judicial assemblies — the Boule and the Heliaia — were chosen by lot, using a machine called the kleroterion. I was surprised that we used the same word — democracy — for both this system of chance and our own, elective system. Discovering philosophy two years later, I came to the same conclusion. Aristotle wrote that “it is considered democratic for magistracies to be assigned by lot and oligarchic for them to be elective” (Politics). Centuries later, Enlightenment philosophers wholeheartedly agree. Montesquieu wrote: “Suffrage by lot is in the nature of democracy. Lot is a way of electing that offends no one; it leaves each citizen a reasonable hope of serving their country” (The Spirit of the Laws). Rousseau agreed: “The way of lot is more in the nature of democracy” (The Social Contract).

Intrigued by these short phrases, which didn’t seem to bother many people, I then embarked on further reading. Allow me to mention two works that particularly struck me at the time. First, Bernard Manin’s Principles of Representative Government (1995). The philosopher recounts the rise of an electoral system that conquered the world following the great revolutions and clearly explains the aristocratic character of this regime that usurped the name of democracy. Next came Jacques Rancière’s Hatred of Democracy (2005), whose impassioned prose undeniably sparked enthusiasm in my young alter ego. Democracy, Rancière emphasizes, is a scandal: “Democracy means first and foremost this: an anarchic ‘government’” — without any claim to distinction — “founded on nothing other than the absence of any right to govern. […] The scandal lies there: a scandal for distinguished people who cannot accept that their birth, their seniority, or their knowledge should have to bow to the law of fate.” Isn’t impartial chance the best option for every citizen to participate in the exercise of political power — a guarantee that this power will not be monopolized?
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Filed under: Athens, Books, Elections, History, Sortition | Leave a comment »