Elections and Sortition: two systems, two destinies, two ways to do politics

Posted on January 26, 2025 by Nicholas Gruen

In the pretty likely event of a hung parliament after the next Australian election, the cross-bench becomes kingmaker. I’m hoping — and expecting — the crossbench to seek greater use of citizen assemblies in governing Australia. But what comes next is crucial.

Some think it would be great if a citizen assembly was held on an important issue — or two or three. Allegra Spender proposes one on tax. Others want one on housing. It would be nice to see them go ahead. But I’m sceptical they can achieve a lot.

First, on their own, citizen assemblies can be useful in lots of circumstances, but I’d say they’re most successful where they solve problems for politicians.

Ireland has become the pin-up boy for citizen assemblies

They’ve probably acquired a higher visibility in Ireland than anywhere else. And two of them have gone very well — allowing same-sex marriage and the repeal of anti-abortion provisions of the constitution. That’s because both solved problems for the politicians.

Irish citizen assemblies haven’t done noticeably better than elsewhere on the other occasions where they typically created problems for the politicians. In these circumstances, if politicians can’t ignore the citizen assembly on account of the profile it’s acquired, they cherry-pick its recommendations.

More importantly, whether or not the politicians accept their recommendations, the citizen assemblies usually contemplated are temporary and, as such, don’t aspire to leave any institutional trace. They also rehearse existing relationships in which we the people propose and the Government disposes.

I’ve gone to some lengths to propose an alternative, A standing citizen assembly effectively operating as a third house. (There’s something similar in the German-speaking part of Belgium). It is not more ‘radical’ than existing suggestions. It establishes an institution with exactly as much formal power as the other citizen assemblies just discussed. None.

The idea that it is more radical comes from what I call its greater ‘imaginative vigour’. Without proposing any change in formal power structures, it follows through on the idea that a different logic needs to enter the system.

I don’t see a citizen assembly as a tricky new ‘hack’. Nor is it that important to me that it seems more democratic. That’s a good thing, but, as we’ve seen in Iraq and Afghanistan and as the ancient Athenians discovered during the Peloponnesian War, more democratic structures don’t always arrive at better decisions.

The more I’ve thought about representation by sampling as opposed to representation by election, the more deeply I’ve appreciated their differences.

By their nature, elections separate the governed from those who govern. That’s why Aristotle called selection by lot ‘democratic’ and elections aristocratic or oligarchic. Montesquieu and America’s founding fathers agreed.

Electoral systems are also intrinsically competitive. And the competition for votes rewards performativity, manipulation and dissimulation.

That plunges electoral democracy into deep pathologies.

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Sortition Advocated in the Windsor Star

Posted on January 20, 2025 by peterstone

The Windsor Star just published an editorial by James Winter, a professor emeritus at the University of Windsor, advocating the replacement of federal elections with sortition. The reasons given are diverse, from the cost of elections to the disproportionity resulting from “first-past-the-post” elections to the self-serving nature of politicians. I am unaware of anything previously written by James Winter on this subject, but perhaps others know more.

Filed under: Academia, Athens, Press, Proposals, Sortition | Leave a comment »

Citizens’ Assemblies in the Ukraine

Posted on January 20, 2025 by peterstone

In November 2024, two municipalities in the Ukraine held citizens’ assemblies to deal with local issues.

Over six days of deliberations, Assembly members, representing a socio-demographic cross-section of the community, worked alongside Council of Europe experts and facilitators to develop actionable recommendations for local governments. These focused on creating urban spaces for social interaction and improving household waste management. The municipal authorities of Zvyahel and Slavutych have expressed their commitment to considering the proposed recommendations.

Filed under: Applications, Sortition | Leave a comment »

Online Service Platform to Use Randomly-Selected Juries

Posted on January 20, 2025 by peterstone

The online service platform AnyService will now be using juries to arbitrate disputes involving service providers and consumers on its platform. The juries will be randomly selected from users with experience in the relevant area (e.g., experience with plumbing services for a dispute involving plumbing).

A painter was hired through the platform to paint a house. The client alleges that the painter failed to meet the agreed terms, while the painter argues otherwise. On all existing platforms, this issue would be resolved by customer service, but not on the AnyService platform.

Here, everything is resolved by a jury. The jury is made up of other platform users. The disputing parties do not know who the jurors are, and vice versa, making this system completely impartial and, as many claim, the safest in the world.

Filed under: Applications, Juries, Press, Sortition | Leave a comment »

Sortition in Yorkshire Bylines

Posted on January 9, 2025 by peterstone

Sortition gets a plug in an article recently published in the Yorkshire Bylines, entitled “Sortition Revolution: A Bold Plan to Avert Civilisation’s Collapse.” The article can be found here:

https://yorkshirebylines.co.uk/politics/sortition-revolution-a-bold-plan-to-avert-civilisations-collapse/

The author is Peter Garbutt, a Green Party councillor in Sheffield: https://sheffieldgreenparty.org.uk/about-us/councillors/councillor-peter-garbutt/

Unfortunately, the article doesn’t detail much of a case for government by Citizens’ Assemblies; Garbutt seems to take both them and UBI (universal basic income) as self-evidently good. Moreover, it relies upon a number of extremely dubious claims. (I hardly think that a concern with economic growth is some sort of con foisted upon the masses by the ruling class.) Nonetheless, this seems to be the latest attempt to connect green politics with sortition.

Filed under: Press, Sortition | 4 Comments »

Proposal: Allot White House press passes among all citizens

Posted on January 8, 2025 by Yoram Gat

Martin Gurri fulminates in the New York Post against the way Joe Biden’s mental decline was denied and downplayed over his term as president. Gurri points out that the White House press corps took an active part in the deception. Presumably this collaboration is a result of the fact that members of the corps are selected for their friendliness to the White House occupant. Sortition would be a remedy.

Reporters have special passes to the White House. They accompanied Biden on his trips, often on Air Force One. They saw what Appel saw: a president who “can’t say sentences.”

And they chose to think nothing of it, to say nothing, to remain at best incurious and at worst to lie and so curry favor with the mighty.

The news media’s corruption is too evident to need elaboration. But there ought to be consequences.

Here’s a modest proposal: Disband the White House press corps. Cast them out like money-changers from the temple. Select those American citizens entitled to question the president by lot, the way the Athenians chose their public officials.

Reference to Gurri’s article was sent to me by Roger Knights.

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

Equality by Lot 2024 statistics

Posted on December 28, 2024 by Yoram Gat

Below are some statistics about the 15th year of Equality-by-Lot. Comparable numbers for last year can be found here.

2024 Page views Posts Comments
Jan 2,580 16 56
Feb 2,192 9 13
Mar 3,097 16 99
Apr 3,244 10 130
May 2,667 9 91
June 2,775 6 77
July 3,015 7 20
Aug 2,397 6 17
Sept 2,506 6 26
Oct 3,474 15 78
Nov 2,863 12 41
Dec (to 28th) 11,791 5 20
Total 42,601 117 668

Note that page views do not include visits by logged-in contributors – the WordPress system does not count those visits.

Posts were made by 11 authors during 2024. (There were, of course, many other authors quoted and linked to.) This blog currently has 567 subscribers. (The system no longer seems to differentiate between WordPress subscribers and e-mail subscribers.)

Searching for “distribution by lot” (with quotes) using Google returns Equality-by-Lot as the 3rd result (out of “about 20,400 results”). Equality-by-Lot is on the fifth page of results when searching for “sortition” (out of “about 248,000 results”). Asking ChatGPT “what are good websites about sortition?” does not return (for me, at least) Equality-by-Lot as one of the recommendations.

Happy holidays and a happy new year to Equality-by-Lot readers, commenters and posters. Keep up the good fight for democracy!

Filed under: Distribution by lot, meta, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Sortition in 2024

Posted on December 28, 2024 by Yoram Gat

Equality-by-Lot’s traditional yearly review post.

2024 continued the trend of the last few years of cooling interest in the idea of sortition among the elites. This happened despite the re-emergence of Donald Trump as a viable candidate and his subsequent election to the presidency of the United States. The same Trump who was hysterically portrayed as a menace to democracy in 2016, and triggered (together with Brexit) a wave of elite interest in sortition, was accepted this time without nearly as much alarm. Presumably, Trump’s first term indicated that he is not the threat to the electoralist establishment that he was feared to be. This time the electoralist establishment seems confident enough with the existing structures that it has no need to consider introducing allotment into the system in order to shore it up.

Indeed, the most prominent application of sortition in 2024, a third constitutional assembly in Ireland, ended in what was described as “a fiasco”, as the proposals derived from the assembly’s work (there is some controversy about how close those proposals were to the those issued by the body itself) were rejected by two thirds of the Irish in a ratification referendum. This led to the inevitable hand-wringing and acrimony among those who have been promoting sortition based on the supposed success of such bodies.

Of course, the underlying issues with electoralism are not abating. The electoralist system maintains its record of generating low approval ratings and gestures of rejection by the public.

The academic world continued to churn out the familiar arguments for and against sortition, with a side of AI. In this ongoing discussion, two notable contributions this year are Malkin and Blok’s book Drawing Lots, which sets the Greek use of sortition in a longue durée context of an egalitarian ideology, and Alex Guerrero’s tome Lottocracy which, as it argues for replacing electoralism with a sortition-based system, provides a broad overview of the literature. Also worthy of note is the impending launch of the Journal of Sortition.

A few more mentionable sortition-related developments in 2024: Students continued to write positively about the idea. Sortition was mentioned in popular social media outlets and mass media. Of particular interest is an exchange on the pages of The Conservative Woman, in which an opinion writer bashed citizen assemblies, only to be corrected by a reader who actually took part in one. A new appointee to the House of Lords in the UK advocates for selecting this chamber using sortition. A kleroterion-inspired statue is on display at the Storm King art center in New York state.

Finally, three figures who played important early roles in the modern discussion of sortition have died over the last 14 months:

Late last year John Burnheim, an Australian researcher with a seminal contribution to igniting interest in sortition, passed away. Burnheim’s 1985 book Demarchy was a radical proposal for replacing the existing electoralist system with a very different system which relied heavily on sortition.

Mogens Herman Hansen, a prominent historian of Ancient Greece, died in June this year. Hansen’s book, The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes, has become the go-to book on many questions regarding the functioning of democratic Athens, including specifically the application of sortition.

Most recently, Bernard Manin, a French researcher who wrote the seminal book The principles of representative government, died in November. Manin set out to problematize elections in the 1990’s, a time when following the collapse of the Soviet bloc electoralism was considered by a triumpalist West as the political holy grail at the end of history. Manin’s “pure theory of elections” is, in my opinion, the most incisive critique of electoralism ever written. Interestingly, Manin was not an advocate of sortition but his scholarship on this subject is unmatched.

Filed under: Academia, Applications, Books, Elections, Press, Sortition | 1 Comment »

A review of Lottocracy in the Journal of Sortition

Posted on December 17, 2024 by Yoram Gat

The first issue of the new Journal of Sortition is going to be published in 2025.

Keith Sutherland, the publisher, wants to emphasize that all those who register on the webpage of Imprint Academic’s sortition hub will get a free printed copy of the first issue of JoS. Please visit https://www.imprint.co.uk/sortition-hub/.

A review of mine of Alex Guerrero’s book Lottocracy will be appearing in this first issue.

The discussion around sortition and the possibility of applying it in modern political systems has been intensifying in academia over the last two decades. A debate between sortition-optimists and sortition-pessimists (as well as intermediate positions) has been taking shape. Alex Guerrero’s Lottocracy, with its over 450 pages, recaps this debate with considerable breadth while arguing for what may be perceived as the sortition-optimist position par excellence, namely, for replacing the elections-based system with one which is sortition-based.

Among some other points, I discuss how Lottocracy, like the academic discussion of sortition as a whole, adopts a Socratic viewpoint, according to which the experts are those who should shape and authorize (or choose not to do so) the use of sortition as a tool of politics.

Filed under: Academia, Books, Press, Sortition | 38 Comments »

A PhD Dissertation Written in favor of Democracy without Elections

Posted on December 15, 2024 by johnhuang865

I just stumbled across a PhD thesis recently published in November, 2024. It is entitled “The Rule of Ordinary People: The Case for a Sortition-Based Democracy without Elections,” by Eric Shoemaker, from the University of Toronto’s Philosophy Department. I have not read it yet but you can find the thesis here.

The abstract is:

In this dissertation, I challenge the orthodox position that elections are the democratic method for selecting political representatives. I reconstruct the concept of democracy shared broadly by democratic theorists to demonstrate that assemblies of randomly selected citizens are more democratic, as representatives of the public, than elected politicians. The primary arguments against sortition focus on the idea that the random selection of legislators is not democratic. Having argued that random selection is more democratic, I divide these criticisms into three different interpretations of why it is normatively significant that the members of the mini-public are not chosen by those whom the mini-public represents, and rebut each of them. In addition to defending the use of legislative mini-publics, I propose and defend institutional blueprints for a political executive and judiciary which put ultimate authority in the hands of randomly selected officials. In doing so I demonstrate that a representative democracy without elections is possible, and that because it would be more democratic, it is the model of democracy which we ought to strive for.

Filed under: Academia, Press, Sortition | Leave a comment »

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