Self-serving elites and the conception of the “good”

Posted on December 27, 2025 by Yoram Gat

It is only to be expected, and is generally acceptable, that a person or a group with decision-making power would use that power to shape the world in ways that seem “good” to them. In this sense being self-serving – trying to shape the world in ways that please the shaper – is benign. In the context of large scale politics this translates into the elites in society running society in ways which seem “good” to them. In this sense the elites being self-serving is benign (at least to the extent that the Iron Law of Oligarchy – i.e., the existence of a powerful political elite – is considered as a given).

The question is, of course, what do the elites see as “good”. As Western political thought presents things, elites tend to be, or at least over time tend to become, corrupt and see “good” as including, or even mainly as, the control of material goods by the elite and the control of the non-elite members of society by the elite. The “good” as the elite sees it is then in conflict with the “good” as rest of society sees it. Another, more recent, component of Western political thought is that elections are, through some mechanism (that is rarely examined very closely), an effective way – indeed, the only effective way – to prevent this corruption and to align the conceptions of the good of the elite with those of the rest of society.

It turns out that elections are not a particularly good mechanism to align the conceptions of the good of the elite and the non-elite population. Continue reading →

Filed under: Elections, Sortition, Theory | Leave a comment »

Sortition in 2025

Posted on December 23, 2025 by Yoram Gat

Equality-by-Lot’s traditional yearly review post. For previous editions look up each year’s December posts.

The most important sortition-related development of the year was undoubtedly the decision by YourParty in the UK to allot the delegates to it founding conference. This decision created an intense discussion around sortition, a discussion that was unprecendented certainly in the UK specifically, probably in the entire Anglosphere, and possibly even in the modern world.

Many activists were horrified to find that sortition stripped them of their standard privilege associated with their established organizing and willingness to invest time and resources. The claims that the whole setup was a way for the organizers to control the process were substantiated by the setup’s details: Thousands of allotted delegates gathered into a hall for a two-day event, inevitably forcing them into the position of passive audience, eliminating any possibility of setting the agenda for the conference. Interestingly, one of the decisions adopted was a rather vague commitment to allotting some of the delegates of future YourParty conferences.

Another notable event was the posting on YouTube and TikTok of a “Subway Take” by the Academy Award winning actor Riz Ahmed in which he proposed to “stop having all elections and elect leaders through a random lottery”. On YouTube the post has now been viewed over 2.5 million times and garnered almost 200,000 likes.

Within the standard academic sortition mud stirring, one proposal stood out: using sortition to create democratic investor assemblies for controlling corporations.

Finally, the electoralist crisis in the West continues to unfold. An opposition candidate who unexpectedly won the first round of presidential elections in Romania was disqualified and the leader of the French Right was barred from participating in upcoming elections after being found guilty of illegal management of party finances.

Filed under: Academia, Applications, Elections, Participation, Press, Sortition, Theory, video | Leave a comment »

Choosing by lot and the politics without titles

Posted on May 4, 2025 by towardsautonomyblog

Yavor Tarinski

The man who wears the shoe knows best that it pinches and where it pinches. ~John Dewey [1]

One of the main pillars of contemporary oligarchies worldwide is the institution of elections. Every leader and government, regardless of how liberal or authoritarian, claims its ascendance to power through some kind of electoral process. Elections are considered as “the democratic means” per se – if a system is based on elections, then it supposedly is a “democracy”.

The supporters of this view see in electoral processes a means of sustaining popular sovereignty, while avoiding what they see as a danger of popular self-rule – i.e., rule by the incompetent. But as philosopher Jacques Rancière underlines, there is an “evil at once much more serious and much more probable than a government full of incompetents: government comprised of a certain competence, that of individuals skilled at taking power through cunning.”[2]

Electoral processes tend to nurture antagonism and competitiveness, rather than cooperation and dialogue. They give way to a certain anthropological type – the power-hungry political demagogue. Rather than concerned with resolving public issues and problems, it focuses on “winning” elections. The very essence of politics is radically altered in elections-based systems – with their content being emptied of any substantial deliberatory essence and replaced with a lifestylish approach that focuses on candidates – their ways of life, the tricks they pull on each other, etc.

Ultimately, the main agenda that drives the action of the electoral anthropological type is that of opinion polls. Candidates must learn what and when to say things that will be liked by the largest amount of people, so that they can get ahead in the race. The result is a type of craft where electoral competitors outbid each other, play dirty, and resort to all sort of tricks in order to win. This becomes the main occupation of people involved in electoral competitions for office. Because of this political scientist James S. Fishkin suggests:

Candidates do not wish to win the argument on the merits as much as they wish to win the election. If they can do so by distorting or manipulating the argument successfully, many of them are likely to do so. Representatives elected through such processes are looking ahead to the next election while in office.[3]

Continue reading →

Filed under: Books, Elections, Sortition, Theory | Tagged: , , | 4 Comments »

How to answer the problem of accountability in sortition?

Posted on September 30, 2024 by johnhuang865

One of the most common criticisms against sortition is that there is no accountability, whereas election allegedly does have an accountability mechanism. What is the appropriate rebuttal to this criticism? I have tried to answer this poorly in a blog post here. I make up a matrix of hypothetical, idealized scenarios and assess elections vs sortition. I find that elections only achieve accountability contingent on high voter competence. When voter incompetence is assumed, I find that sortition will lead to better outcomes.

In other words, I find that sortition only makes sense in worlds where we do not have competent voters. Moreover, I find that sortition fails in worlds populated by solely Machiavellian personalities (maybe you could call these people homo economicus).

Voter incompetence is manifested as the inability of voters to control and create representative political parties. And their inability to wrest electoral power away from elites. Or their incompetence in participating in the right political primaries or the right elections. Or their inability to effectively compete against wealthy special interests. The public lacks the capacity to win the electoral contests.

Filed under: Sortition, Theory | Tagged: | 8 Comments »

Lafont Proposes Institutionalized, Advisory Mini-publics

Posted on May 29, 2024 by Roger Knights

Yoram published some anti-lottocracy paragraphs from Christina Lafont recently. It spurred me to read her book and compose a rebuttal, which I’m in the midst of. In the meantime, here are paragraphs from the book in which she urges the integration of advisory mini-publics in current mass democracies, from pages 148-159.

5.2. Deliberative Activism: Some Participatory Uses of Minipublics

Contestatory Uses of Minipublics

[The] considered majority opinion [of a mini-public] differs from current [mass] majority opinion [and] could give minorities a powerful tool to challenge consolidated majorities […].

[A] distinctive and very valuable feature of minipublics is their superior ability to secure effective inclusion of marginalized voices. […] This could lead to more nuanced positions on polarizing issues or it could prompt a general reconsideration of popular but unjust views […].

[I]n order to maintain their legitimacy, all such uses of minipublics would need to ensure the independence of the institutions in charge of organizing them.
Continue reading →

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Trends in Theorizing Sortition

Posted on April 17, 2024 by peterstone

Delighted to see my new review essay (co-authored with Audrey Plan, one of our department’s former Ph.D. students) appear in print. The essay deals with recent theoretical work on sortition. You can check it out here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00208345241247492.

I should add that Yanina Welp, a friend of mine, is publishing shortly a similar paper in the same journal focused more on the empirical literature on sortition. Not sure when that will appear.

Filed under: Academia, Deliberation, Elections, Proposals, Sortition, Theory | 2 Comments »

Demiocracy, Chapter 1b: The (Mass-Electoral) System Is the Problem

Posted on January 12, 2024 by Roger Knights

It’s been famously said that the general will cannot be represented—only a factionalizing “will of all.” And it’s been found, after man tore free, that Rousseau’s warning was correct.

Rousseau’s fears about representative institutions are everywhere confirmed within the politics of power: Leaders, players or actors become isolated from an audience. —Robert J. Pranger, The Eclipse of Citizenship, 1968, p. 27.

However, the general will can be incarnated in the State—“virtually” incarnated—by inserting a small, or “demitasse,” sample from the whole population. “Demiocracy” is the name I’ve adopted for this Demi-incarnated democracy.

It is rational to use a sample when using the whole would be impossible, awkward, or undesirable. We use a sample as juries for those reasons. Likewise, we use samples in focus groups, in surveys of TV viewership, and in opinion polling.

Demiocracy’s behavior will be revolutionary, though probably not (fortunately) as revolutionary as Rousseau hoped.

To make a revolution is a measure which, prima fronte, requires an apology. —Edmund Burke.

Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas. —Alfred North Whitehead.

The state begins by being absolutely a work of the imagination. Imagination is the liberating power possessed by man. —Ortega y Gasset.

All great truths begin as blasphemies. —George Bernard Shaw.

A man with a new idea is a Crank, until the idea succeeds. —Mark Twain.

A really new idea affronts current agreement. —White’s Observation.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Ballot measures, Elections, Proposals, Sortition, Theory | 8 Comments »

The American Democrat by James Fenimore Cooper

Posted on October 11, 2023 by Yoram Gat

It turns out that the American author James Fenimore Cooper (1789 – 1851), primarily known today for the novel The Last of the Mohicans, wrote in 1835 a book of political theory titled The American Democrat. The book is a rather interesting document of the political views of the “democratic” elite of his time, which are remarkably similar to the views of the “republican”, explicitly anti-democratic, elite of a generation or two before – i.e., of the American founders.

Underneath the similarity, it is clear that there are now new concerns. While the founders expended most of their efforts optimizing and justifying “checks and balances” and considered their sentiment against the rule of the mob as an easy case to make, Cooper is concerned with dispelling any misapprehensions about the equality of men – indicating that democratic ideology is gaining political power in the early 19th century. Cooper explains to his readers that if men were really thought to be equals elections would be replaced with sortition:

The absolute moral and physical equality that are inferred by the maxim, that “one man is as good as another,” would at once do away with the elections, since a lottery would be both simpler, easier and cheaper than the present mode of selecting representatives. Men, in such a case, would draw lots for office, as they are now drawn for juries. Choice supposes a preference, and preference inequality of merit, or of fitness. (p. 79)

Filed under: Books, Elections, History, Sortition, Theory | 2 Comments »

Sortition can do it all

Posted on August 27, 2023 by Nathan El

This post is a rebuttal to the conclusion of Keith Sutherland’s 2013 paper “What sortition can and cannot do”, whereby sortition is deemed inappropriate for the “advocacy role” of representative legislature owing to alleged improper representation.

Since posters here address each other with their first names and especially since I will likely be chatting with him soon, I will refer to Keith Sutherland as Keith despite having never chatted with him yet and despite that going against the convention of referring to scholars one is discussing by their last names.

I have seen that there is a long standing feud of sorts between Keith and Yoram, and I find it appropriate to mention this here given that what seems to be at the origin of the conflict is precisely largely their differing views on the extent to which sortition should pervade the selection of policymakers compounded by a more general disagreement on political ideology according to a fairly standard left-right antagonism. I have no dog in this fight nor a particular affinity to either’s position whether on sortition or on political ideology more generally as far as I can tell, appearing to hold an intermediate position in both respects. As such though I am posting on Yoram’s site against Keith, this should not be construed as an attack by “team Yoram” against “team Keith”, as further evidenced by the fact that I had never communicated with Yoram until a few days ago when a renewed focus on sortition led me to make a few comments on his site. I imagine that Keith has heard all my arguments here before, and that most others have too, but since I couldn’t find a similar post on the topic I figured it would at least be useful to have a post dedicated to it. I am presuming that readers are familiar with the paper and the concepts it discusses and so I am not reintroducing them here.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Elections, Sortition, Theory | 50 Comments »

Rancière: The scandal of sortition

Posted on July 29, 2023 by Yoram Gat

The second chapter of Jacques Rancière’s Hatred of Democracy (2005), “Politics, or the Lost Shepherd”, contains a fairly long discussion of sortition and its relation to democracy. The following paragraph is from page 41 of the English translation:

The scandal [of sortition] is simply the following: among the titles for governing there is one that breaks the chain, a title that refutes itself: the [Plato’s] seventh title is the absence of title. Such is the most profound trouble signified by the word democracy. It’s not a question here of a great howling animal, a proud ass, or an individual pursuing pleasure for his or her own sake. Rather is it clearly apparent that these images are ways of concealing the heart of the problem. Democracy is not the whim of children, slaves, or animals. It is the whim of a god, that of chance, which is of such a nature that it is ruined as a principle of legitimacy. Democratic excess does not have anything to do with a supposed consumptive madness. It is simply the dissolving of any standard by which nature could give its law to communitarian artifice via the relations of authority that structure the social body. The scandal lies in the disjoining of entitlements to govern from any analogy to those that order social relations, from any analogy between human convention and the order of nature. It is the scandal of a superiority based on no other title than the very absence of superiority.

This is somewhat reminiscent of the “blind break” argument for sortition (by eliminating all reasons for selection, bad reasons are eliminated as well). Later on, for example, Rancière emphasizes the fact that when using sortition seeking power is not a prerequisite to attaining it. But the tone here is quite different. The emphasis is on rejecting traditional or “natural” reasons, reasons that dominate social relations throughout, reasons that justify the elevated status of established elites. It is the rejection of those traditional reasons that scandalizes those elites, as well as many among the masses who have internalized the justness or naturalness of those “distinctions”.

Filed under: Academia, Athens, Books, Sortition, Theory | 9 Comments »

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