Allocracy: A Word for a Time That Has Come

Posted on March 14, 2026 by Wayne Liebman

“Everybody wants to have a hand in a great discovery. All I will do is to give a hint or two as to names.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes, in a letter coining the word anesthesia, November 21, 1846

The assembly ended, a few delegates lingered. They’d spent four days deliberating on the Los Angeles City Charter. Real people, chosen by lot, wrestling with real questions about how their city should work. Now they wanted to stay involved. One of them asked, simply: what do you call this? She didn’t just mean the assembly. She meant something larger.

It stopped me cold. We’d just completed the first charter reform assembly in the United States. Los Angeles: four million people, the largest American city ever to host such a body, had given ordinary residents an official voice in rewriting the rules of their own government. A small group of voluteers I’m part of spent years building Public Democracy LA (PDLA) into an organization that could help make something like this happen, educating, organizing, strategizing, advocating, recruiting, training. Then the charter issue dropped in our lap, and RewriteLA, a new coalition, formed to generate momentum for an assembly on charter reform. PDLA ran two charter mini-assemblies (December 2025 and January 2026) and the full assembly followed in February–March. Four days across two weekends, twenty-six hours of deliberation, moderated by Healthy Democracy, with an assist from PDLA. A landmark.

And we still didn’t have a word for it.

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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 on Novara Media

Posted on October 2, 2024 by Yoram Gat

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.

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