Equality among whom? Why lottocrats should build on citizenship

Posted on August 27, 2025 by Jochen Krattenmacher

One of the more sensitive questions around sortition-based democracy is who should get to participate in political decision-making. Should assemblies be drawn only from citizens? Or should everyone who lives in a country be included? I have encountered this debate many times, and just now I am in a discussion whether a political party by lottocrats should aim for a lottocracy-for-citizens or a lottocracy-for-all-residents.

Here is my take: There are good arguments for extending political power, but if we want sortition to succeed and gain broad legitimacy, it should begin with citizens.

Here is the argument:

One of the greatest selling points of sortition is that it is "process-only": It exclusively is concerned with how the demos governs itself, not what its decisions should be. This outcome-neutrality has the potential to appeal to a broad spectrum of people across political tribes. However, if the adoption of sortition becomes tied to highly polarized debates over citizenship and borders, this broad appeal is diminished. Even if a political party should succeed in establishing a lottocracy for all inhabitants, chances are that it will do so at a steep price: Many people might view that lottocracy as illegitimate, which is especially dangerous for a nascent political system whose institutions will not yet be firmly established.

There’s also a psychological lens to consider: People tend to be loss-averse. When they feel that something they value—such as the privileges attached to citizenship—is being taken away, they will resist, even if the overall outcome could benefit them. And of course, there are plenty of (wanna-be) aristocrats and monarchs out there who would be more than happy to whip up such fears to gain political advantage.
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Sortition and rotation, a school of self-organization

Posted on August 27, 2025 by Yoram Gat

Edmund Griffiths is a long-time advocate for sortition. Griffiths revisits the topic in the context of the new party that is in the process of formation in the UK.

The most immediate topic is the matter of a founding conference. It seems that the plan is to somehow have a procedure of mass voting: “one member one vote, it looks like having an accessible way of engaging which is both in-person and hybrid [online, presumably -YG]”. But of course the final up-or-down vote is a small part of the decision making process.

Griffiths writes:

As in most plebiscitary systems, nearly everything would come down to how the questions were worded and presented; the faceless masses, atomized and unable to suggest amendments, would vote as they were invited to. This hybrid-OMOV system would thus devolve almost all the real decision-making power on the people who hold it now—the new party’s still-invisible leadership. Naturally we don’t know all their names. But it is hardly a secret that at least some of them are (a) independent bigwigs; I would not be astonished to learn that the others include (b) leading members of left groups who have worked with the bigwigs in front organizations; and there could even be a handful of (c) mouthy individuals among them.

[I]n fairness, you could do worse. I am proud to count (a) bigwigs (well, small-time bigwigs), and (b) left group factional operators, and (c) let’s call them people who don’t hate the sound of their own voices, among my friends. But if we want something more representative, something genuinely democratic, there is only one easy and obvious way to get it: just pick the delegates at random out of the entire membership.

Griffiths then fleshes out his proposal a bit:
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Filed under: Deliberation, Elections, Participation, Proposals, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Riz Ahmed’s subway take

Posted on August 25, 2025 by Yoram Gat

“Subway Takes” is a popular media series operated by Kareem Rahma with channels on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and X, each with hundreds of thousands of subscribers. In each short video Rahma interviews a person, often a celebrity of sorts, and the interviewee lays out their “take”: an idea that they present as unusual and important. In a recent episode, Rahma interviews Riz Ahmed, a fairly known actor, whose take is

We need to stop having all elections and elect leaders through a random lottery!!

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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”.

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Anti-sortition attitudes

Posted on August 12, 2025 by Yoram Gat

It is an unfortunate state of affairs that, despite the fact that proposals of empowering allotted bodies do enjoy significant popular support, most people are not mobilized into action by the idea of sortition. Much of that can no doubt be attributed to despair. There is no point in being politically attached to radical ideas since such attachment has insignificant impact on society and is bound to end in frustration, and quite possibly to being seen by friends and acquaintances as slightly unhinged.

Still, it is rather surprising that despite the unending contempt that many people heap on the existing electoralist system, or more accurately, on its outcomes and on those who act within the system, there is still a strong attachment to the idea of elections and aversion toward proposals at eliminating them altogether in favor of a sortition-based system. Of course, a long list of arguments against sortition is available, and they are endlessly regurgitated (often as if they were brand new) to justify the suspicion toward sortition. However, since all of these arguments are easily refuted, it is quite clear that the arguments are not the cause behind the aversion toward sortition, but rather that some underlying attitudes against sortition must be common, attitudes for which the arguments merely serve as rationalizations.
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Filed under: Academia, Elections, Opinion polling, Sortition | 19 Comments »

Allotting judges to speed up the judicial process

Posted on July 9, 2025 by johnedwardtaylor

When I was young, judges did not need to be trained as lawyers, but that was phased out because it was decided that the technical burdens of knowing the law were so great that every judge had to start off as a lawyer. I think that now that AI is coming to the fore, we should rethink that. True, there were major mistakes by untrained judges that prompted this change, but AI is so pervasive now that there is not as much need to have every judge have the same, un-diverse background. The main problem this would address is the huge backlog in the courts. The old saying that “justice delayed is justice denied” has pretty much gone out the window, the court is nothing but delay, delay, delay. I have seen it myself, mostly what they seem to be doing in court cases is finding a date when all parties can get together to hold the case. Then I read old, 20th Century novels (I’m thinking of P.G. Wodehouse stories, of course) and observe with dismay that back then it was routine in those days for minor cases like drunk and disorderly conduct to be tried the next day.

The NEXT DAY!

Why can we not do that now? Why are our standards so low that we have forgotten that? Trump has corrupted the entire American court system so effectively because it is so constipated and blocked up that any change, no matter how crooked, is accepted without a peep. The original democracy of Athens had the solution, but it is forgotten. Rotating sortition. First of all, make every job possible to be done by a “middling” worker (that is, easy enough to be done by the average person off the street. That is what makes a civil service democratic. That is what we lost when “credentialism” ruled out untrained lawyers for consideration as judges). Then limit their time of office, then select randomly, which “sanitizes” the process from exactly what Trump did to the U.S. Supreme Court. I think that AI is a gift of God to enable us to bring democracy into the 21st Century.

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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.
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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/

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Fishkin & Berkowitz in Conversation

Posted on July 5, 2025 by peterstone

James Fishkin, creator of deliberative polling, was recently interviewed by Roger Berkowitz on the podcast of the Hannah Arendt Center (which Berkowitz directs). The conversation is far-ranging, and discusses many of the most prominent deliberative experiments over the past 30 years. At the end, they discuss the difference between citizen assemblies and deliberative polls. The podcast can be found here: https://hac.podbean.com/e/can-deliberation-cure-democracy-with-james-fishkin-bonus-episode/

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Democracy and Truth

Posted on June 21, 2025 by Yoram Gat

In a recent article in The Catholic Herald Niall Gooch discusses some objections to sortition from the book Against sortition?. As he describes sortition, “[t]he idea is that involving “normal people” in such deliberation helps to spread power more widely and obtain broader perspectives”.

The contributors to the book set out various reservations about this idea, and various objections. Many of them have procedural concerns – for example, they believe that existing approaches don’t gain a wide enough spectrum of opinion, or that they are easily captured by special interests, or that they don’t really add anything new to a conventional elected legislature.

Others highlight the problems of accountability raised by citizens’ assemblies, or the way in which they dilute the legitimacy of existing bodies. But a few contributors are clearly trying to articulate something like the more fundamental problem identified by John Paul II, which we might sum up with this question: “Does involving lots more people in political decision making actually get you closer to the truth?”

Gooch refers his readers to, Evangelium Vitae, The Gospel of Life, a 1995 essay by Pope John Paul II. In it John Paul II writes:

Democracy cannot be idolized to the point of making it a substitute for morality or a panacea for immorality. Fundamentally, democracy is a “system” and as such is a means and not an end. Its “moral” value is not automatic, but depends on conformity to the moral law to which it, like every other form of human behaviour, must be subject: in other words, its morality depends on the morality of the ends which it pursues and of the means which it employs. If today we see an almost universal consensus with regard to the value of democracy, this is to be considered a positive “sign of the times”, as the Church’s Magisterium has frequently noted. But the value of democracy stands or falls with the values which it embodies and promotes. Of course, values such as the dignity of every human person, respect for inviolable and inalienable human rights, and the adoption of the “common good” as the end and criterion regulating political life are certainly fundamental and not to be ignored.
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Filed under: Academia, Books, Elections, Participation, Religion, Sortition | 4 Comments »

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