Sortition

In governance, sortition (also known as selection by lottery, selection by lot, allotment, demarchy, stochocracy, aleatoric democracy, democratic lottery, and lottocracy) is the selection of public officials or jurors using a random representative sample. This minimizes factionalism, since those selected to serve can prioritize deliberating on the policy decisions in front of them instead of campaigning. In ancient Athenian democracy, sortition was the traditional and primary method for appointing political officials, and its use was regarded as a principal characteristic of democracy.

Today, sortition is commonly used to select prospective jurors in common-law systems. What has changed in recent years is the increased number of citizen groups with political advisory power, along with calls for making sortition more consequential than elections, as it was in Athens, Venice and Florence.

History

Ancient Athens

See also: Athenian democracy § Selection by lot

Athenian democracy developed in the 6th century BC out of what was then called isonomia (equality of law and political rights). Sortition was then the principal way of achieving this fairness. It was utilized to pick most of the magistrates for their governing committees, and for their juries (typically of 501 men). Aristotle relates equality and democracy:

Democracy arose from the idea that those who are equal in any respect are equal absolutely. All are alike free, therefore they claim that all are free absolutely... The next is when the democrats, on the grounds that they are all equal, claim equal participation in everything.

It is accepted as democratic when public offices are allocated by lot; and as oligarchic when they are filled by election.

In Athens, "democracy" (literally meaning rule by the people) was in opposition to those supporting a system of oligarchy (rule by a few). Athenian democracy was characterised by being run by the "many" (the ordinary people) who were allotted to the committees which ran government. Thucydides has Pericles make this point in his Funeral Oration: "It is administered by the many instead of the few; that is why it is called a democracy."

A kleroterion in the Ancient Agora Museum (Athens)

The Athenians believed sortition, not elections, to be democratic and used complex procedures with purpose-built allotment machines (kleroteria) to avoid the corrupt practices used by oligarchs to buy their way into office. According to the author Mogens Herman Hansen, the citizen's court was superior to the assembly because the allotted members swore an oath which ordinary citizens in the assembly did not, therefore the court could annul the decisions of the assembly. Greek writers who mention democracy (including Aristotle, Plato, and Herodotus) emphasize the role of selection by lot, or state outright that being allotted is more democratic than elections. David Van Reybrouck cites Aristotle as saying 'Voting by lot is in the nature of democracy; voting by choice is in the nature of aristocracy.'

Past scholarship maintained that sortition had roots in the use of chance to divine the will of the gods, but this view is no longer common among scholars. In Ancient Greek mythology, Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades used sortition to determine who ruled over which domain. Zeus got the sky, Poseidon the sea, and Hades the underworld.

In Athenian democracy, to be eligible to be chosen by lot, citizens self-selected themselves into the available pool, then lotteries in the kleroteria machines. The magistracies assigned by lot generally had terms of service of one year. A citizen could not hold any particular magistracy more than once in his lifetime, but could hold other magistracies. All male citizens over 30 years of age, who were not disenfranchised by atimia, were eligible. Those selected through lot underwent examination called dokimasia to avoid incompetent officials. Rarely were selected citizens discarded. Magistrates, once in place, were subjected to constant monitoring by the Assembly. Magistrates appointed by lot had to render account of their time in office upon their leave, called euthynai. However, any citizen could request the suspension of a magistrate with due reason.

A Kleroterion was used to select eligible and willing citizens to serve jury duty. This bolstered the initial Athenian system of democracy by getting new and different jury members from each tribe to avoid corruption. James Wycliffe Headlam explains that the Athenian Council (500 administrators randomly selected), would commit occasional mistakes such as levying taxes that were too high. Headlam found minor instances of corruption but deemed systematic oppression and organized fraud as impossible given widely distributed power as well as checks-and-balances. Furthermore, power did not necessarily go to those who wanted it and had schemed for it. The Athenians used an intricate machine, a kleroterion, to allot officers. Headlam found the Athenians felt no distrust of the system of random selection, but regarded it as the most natural and the simplest way of appointment. While sortition was used for 90% of positions, elections were sometimes used for positions like for military commanders (strategos). According to Xenophon (Memorabilia Book I, 2.9), Socrates and Isocrates critiqued sortition, questioning whether randomly-selected decision-makers had enough expertise.

Lombardy and Venice – 12th to 18th century

The brevia was used in the city states of Lombardy during the 12th and 13th centuries and in Venice until the late 18th century. Men, who were chosen randomly, swore an oath that they were not acting under bribes, and then they elected members of the council. Voter and candidate eligibility probably included property owners, councilors, guild members, and perhaps, at times, artisans. The Doge of Venice was determined through a complex process of nomination, voting and sortition.

Lot was used in the Venetian system only in order to select members of the committees that served to nominate candidates for the Great Council. A combination of election and lot was used in this multi-stage process. Lot was not used alone to select magistrates, unlike in Florence and Athens. The use of lot to select nominators made it more difficult for political sects to exert power, and discouraged campaigning. By reducing intrigue and power moves within the Great Council, lot maintained cohesiveness among the Venetian nobility, contributing to the stability of this republic. Top magistracies generally still remained in the control of elite families.

Florence – 14th and 15th century

Scrutiny was used in Florence for over a century starting in 1328. Nominations and voting together created a pool of candidates from different sectors of the city. The names of these men were deposited into a sack, and a lottery draw determined who would get to be a magistrate. The scrutiny was gradually opened up to minor guilds, reaching the greatest level of Renaissance citizen participation in 1378–1382.

In Florence, lot was used to select magistrates and members of the Signoria during republican periods. Florence utilized a combination of lot and scrutiny by the people, set forth by the ordinances of 1328. In 1494, Florence founded a Great Council in the model of Venice. The nominatori were thereafter chosen by lot from among the members of the Great Council, indicating a decline in aristocratic power.

The Enlightenment

During the Age of Enlightenment, many of the political ideals originally championed by the democratic city-states of ancient Greece were revisited. The use of sortition as a means of selecting the members of government while receiving praise from notable Enlightenment thinkers, received almost no discussion during the formation of the American and French republics.

Montesquieu, for example, whose classic work The Spirit of Laws is often quoted in support of sortition, provides one of the most direct discussions of the concept in Enlightenment political writing. "The suffrage by lot," he argues, "is natural to democracy; as that by choice is to aristocracy." In making this statement about the democratic nature of sortition, Montesquieu echoes the philosophy of much earlier thinkers such as Aristotle, who also viewed election as aristocratic. Montesquieu caveats his support by saying that there should also be some mechanisms to ensure the pool of selection is competent and not corrupt. Rousseau also found that a mixed model of sortition and election provided a healthier path for democracy than one or the other. Harrington, also found the Venetian model of sortition compelling, recommending it for his ideal republic of Oceana. Edmund Burke, in contrast, worried that those randomly selected to serve would be less effective and productive than self-selected politicians.

Bernard Manin, a French political theorist, points out the surprising nature of sortition's decline during the Enlightenment in his 1997 book The Principles of Representative Government. "What is indeed astonishing," he says, "in the light of the republican tradition and the theorizing it had generated, is the total absence of debate in the early years of representative government about the use of lot in the allocation of power." There are several possible explanations as to what forces caused this demonstrated disinterest in the use of sortition in modern government. The first potential explanation that Manin offers is that the choosing of rulers by lot may have been viewed as impractical on such a large scale as the modern state. A second possible explanation given is that elections provided greater political consent than sortition.

However, David Van Reybrouck finds the following two reasons for this period's recession of sortition more compelling than Manin's:

1) The relatively limited knowledge about Athenian democracy, with the first thorough examination coming only in 1891 with Election by Lot at Athens.

2) Wealthy enlightenment figures preferred to retain more power by holding elections, with most not even offering excuses on the basis of practicality but plainly saying they preferred to retain significant elite power.

He also quotes commentators of 18th century France and the United States arguing that they simply dislodged a hereditary aristocracy to replace it with an elected aristocracy.

Switzerland

Because financial gain could be achieved through the position of mayor, some parts of Switzerland used random selection during the years between 1640 and 1837 to prevent corruption.

India

Local government in parts of Tamil Nadu such as the village of Uttiramerur traditionally used a system known as kuda-olai where the names of candidates for the village committee were written on palm leaves and put into a pot and pulled out by a child.

Methods

USCAR Court select juries by sortition

Before the random selection can be done, the pool of candidates must be defined. Systems vary as to whether they allot from eligible volunteers, from those screened by education, experience, or a passing grade on a test, or screened by election by those selected by a previous round of random selection, or from the membership or population at large. A multi-stage process in which random selection is alternated with other screening methods can be used, as in the Venetian system.

One robust, general, public method of allotment in use since 1997 is documented in RFC 3797: Publicly Verifiable Nominations Committee Random Selection. Using it, multiple specific sources of random numbers (e.g., lotteries) are selected in advance, and an algorithm is defined for selecting the winners based on those random numbers. When the random numbers become available, anyone can calculate the winners. David Chaum proposed Random-Sample Elections in 2012. Via recent advances in computer science, it is now possible to select a random sample of eligible voters in a verifiably valid manner and empower them to study and make a decision on a matter of public policy. This can be done in a highly transparent manner which allows anyone to verify the integrity of the election, while optionally preserving the anonymity of the voters. A related approach has been pioneered by James Fishkin, director of the Deliberative Democracy Lab at Stanford, to make legally binding decisions in Greece, China and other countries.

Analysis

A critique of electoral politics is the over-representation of politically active groups in society who tend to be those who join political parties. For example, in 2000 less than 2% of the UK population belonged to a political party, while in 2005 there were at best only 3 independent MPs (see List of UK minor party and independent MPs elected) so that 99.5% of all UK MPs belonged to a political party. Cognitive diversity is an amalgamation of different ways of seeing the world and interpreting events within it, where a diversity of perspectives and heuristics guide individuals to create different solutions to the same problems. Cognitive diversity is not the same as gender, ethnicity, value-set or age diversity, although they are often positively correlated. According to numerous scholars such as Page and Landemore, cognitive diversity is more important to creating successful ideas than the average ability level of a group. This "diversity trumps ability theorem" is essential to why sortition is a viable democratic option. Simply put, random selection of persons of average intelligence performs better than a collection of the best individual problem solvers.

Magnus Vinding in his book Reasoned Politics argues that sortition is more efficient by allowing decision-makers to focus on positive-sum endeavors rather than zero-sum elections. This shift towards issues and away from elections could help to lessen political polarization and the influence of money and interest-groups in politics.

A modern advocate of sortition, political scientist John Burnheim, notes the importance of legitimacy for the effectiveness of the practice. Legitimacy does depend on the success in achieving representativeness, which if not met, could limit the use cases of sortition to serving as consultative or political agenda-setting bodies. Oliver Dowlen points to the egalitarian nature of all citizens having an equal chance of entering office irrespective of any bias in society that appear in representative bodies that can make them more representative. To bolster legitimacy, other sortition bodies have been used and proposed to set the rules to improve accountability without the need for elections.

As participants grow in competence by contributing to deliberation, they also become more engaged and interested in civic affairs. Most societies have some type of citizenship education, but sortition-based committees allow ordinary people to develop their own democratic capacities through direct participation.

Modern application

Further information: Citizens' assembly

Sortition is most commonly used to form citizens' assemblies. The OECD has counted almost 600 examples of citizens' assemblies with members selected by lottery for public decision making. As an example, Vancouver council initiated a citizens' assembly that met in 2014–15 in order to assist in city planning.

Drawing straws within a small group: one of four matches is broken to be shorter than the others, and the four are presented to the group to draw from, the chooser of the short match being selected

Sortition is commonly used in selecting juries in Anglo-Saxon legal systems and in small groups (e.g., picking a school class monitor by drawing straws). In public decision-making, individuals are often determined by allotment if other forms of selection such as election fail to achieve a result. Examples include certain hung elections and certain votes in the UK Parliament. Some contemporary thinkers like David Van Reybrouck have advocated a greater use of selection by lot in today's political systems. The international non-profit and non-partisan research and action institute DemocracyNext, founded by Claudia Chwalisz, advocates for citizens' assemblies with members selected by sortition to become the defining institutions of a next democratic paradigm.

Sortition is also used in military conscription, as one method of awarding US green cards, and in placing students into some schools.

Non-governmental organizations

Sortition also has potential for helping large associations to govern themselves democratically without the use of elections. Co-ops, employee-owned businesses, housing associations, Internet platforms, student governments, and countless other large membership organizations whose members generally do not know many other members yet seek to run their organization democratically often find elections problematic. The essential leadership decisions are made by the nomination process, often generating a self-perpetuating board whose nominating committee selects their own successors. Randomly selecting a representative sample of members to constitute a nominating panel is one procedure that has been proposed to keep fundamental control in the hands of ordinary members and avoid internal board corruption. For example, The Samaritan Ministries Health Plan sometimes uses a panel of 13 randomly selected members to resolve disputes, which sometimes leads to policy changes. Also, Democracy In Practice, an international organization dedicated to democratic innovation, experimentation and capacity-building, has implemented sortition in schools in Bolivia, replacing student government elections with lotteries. Lastly, in 2013 the New Zealand Health Research council began awarding funding at random to applicants considered equally qualified.

Public policy

Main article: Citizens' assembly

Perhaps the most common example in practice today, are law court juries which are formed through sortition in some countries, such as the United States and United Kingdom. An increasingly common set of examples includes Citizens' assemblies, which have been used to provide input to policy makers all across the globe, including in countries like Ireland and Denmark. The selection of citizens may not be perfectly random, but still aims to be representative.

There are numerous examples of permanent or ongoing citizens' assemblies. In 2019, the German speaking Ostbelgien region in Belgium, implemented the Ostbelgien Model, consisting of an 24-member Citizen's Council which convenes short term Citizen's Assemblies to provide non-binding recommendations to its parliament. Later that same year both the main and French-speaking parliaments of the Brussels-Capital Region voted to authorize setting up mixed parliamentary committees composed of parliamentarians and randomly selected citizens to draft recommendations on a given issue. The permanent Paris Citizens' Assembly was established in 2021, and the permanent Brussels Citizens' Assembly on Climate was established in 2022.

At a subnational level, the Amish use sortition applied to a slate of nominees when they select their community leaders. In their process, formal members of the community each register a single private nomination, and candidates with a minimum threshold of nominations then stand for the random selection that follows. In 2015 the city of Utrecht randomly invited 10,000 residents, of whom 900 responded and 165 were eventually chosen, to participate in developing its 2016 energy and climate plan.

Following the 1978 Meghalaya Legislative Assembly election, due to disagreements amongst the parties of the governing coalition, the Chief Minister's position was chosen by drawing lots. In 2004, a randomly selected group of citizens in British Columbia convened to propose a new electoral system. This Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform was repeated three years later in Ontario's citizens' assembly.

Inspired by the work of the Citizens' Assemblies on Electoral Reform, MASS LBP has pioneered the use of Citizens' Reference Panels for addressing a range of policy issues for public sector. The Reference Panels use civic lotteries, a modern form of sortition, to randomly select citizen-representatives from the general public. A similar initiative pioneered in the United States, the Citizens' Initiative Review, also uses a sortition based panel of citizen voters to review and comment on ballot initiative measures. The selection process utilizes random and stratified sampling techniques to create a representative 24-person panel which deliberates in order to summarize the measure in question.

Political proposals for sortition

To select juries for specific issue(s) or policies

• Constitutional changes are one of the most common to solicit input via sortition. Étienne Chouard advocates strongly that those seeking power (elected officials) should not write the rules, making sortition an essential choice for creating constitutions. He also proposes replacing elections with bodies that use sortition to decide on key issues. For example, the South Australian Constitutional Convention was a deliberative opinion poll created to consider changes to the state constitution.
• Political scientist Robert A. Dahl suggests that an advanced democratic state could form groups which he calls minipopuli. Each group would consist of perhaps a thousand citizens randomly selected, and would either set an agenda of issues or deal with a particular major issue. It would hold hearings, commission research, and engage in debate and discussion. Dahl suggests having the minipopuli as supplementing, rather than replacing, legislative bodies.
• Simon Threlkeld, in the 1998 journal article "A Blueprint for Democratic Law-Making: Give Citizen Juries the Final Say" proposes that laws be decided by legislative juries rather than by elected politicians or referendums. The existing legislatures would continue to exist and could propose laws to legislative juries, but would no longer be able to pass laws. Citizens, public interest groups and others would also be able to propose laws to legislative juries.
• L. León coined the word lottocracy for a sortition procedure that is somewhat different from Burnheim's demarchy. While "Burnheim ... insists that the random selection be made only from volunteers", León states "that first of all, the job must not be liked". Christopher Frey uses the German term Lottokratie and recommends testing lottocracy in town councils. Lottocracy, according to Frey, will improve the direct involvement of each citizen and minimize the systematical errors caused by political parties in Europe.
• John Burnheim envisions a political system in which many small "citizens' juries" would deliberate and make decisions about public policies. His proposal includes the dissolution of the state and of bureaucracies. The term demarchy he uses was coined by Friedrich Hayek for a different proposal, unrelated to sortition, and is now sometimes used to refer to any political system in which sortition plays a central role.
• Influenced by Burnheim, Marxist economists Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell propose that, to avoid formation of a new social elite in a post-capitalist society, "[t]he various organs of public authority would be controlled by citizens' committees chosen by lot" or partially chosen by lot.
• Claudia Chwalisz has advocated for using citizens' assemblies selected by sortition to inform policy making on an ongoing basis.

To select public officials

• Simon Threlkeld proposed a wide range of public officials be chosen by randomly sampled juries, rather than by politicians or popular election. As with "convened-sample suffrage", public officials are chosen by a random sample of the public from a relevant geographical area, such as a state governor being chosen by a random sample of citizens from that state.
• The introduction of a variable percentage of randomly selected independent legislators in a Parliament can increase the global efficiency of a legislature, in terms of both number of laws passed and average social welfare obtained (this work is consistent with a 2010 paper on how the adoption of random strategies can improve the efficiency of hierarchical organizations).
• Michael Donovan proposes that the percentage of voters who do not turnout have their representatives chosen by sortition. For example, with 60% voter turnout a number of legislators are randomly chosen to make up 40% of the overall parliament.

Proposed changes to the legislature of the Parliament of Tasmania: A single legislative body of 50–100 people is selected randomly from the population and makes laws. One of their duties is the selection of seven members of an executive council

• C. L. R. James's 1956 essay "Every Cook Can Govern" suggested to select, through sortition, a large legislative body (such as the U.S. Congress) from among the adult population at large.
• Ernest Callenbach and Michael Phillips argued for random selection of the U.S. House of Representatives, arguing this would ensure fair representation for the people and their interests, an elimination of many realpolitik behaviors, and a reduction in the influence of money and associated corruption, all leading to better legislation.
• The House of Commons in both Canada and the United Kingdom, and/or the UK House of Lords have been proposed as providing an opportunity for sortition.
• Political science scholars Christoph Houman Ellersgaard, Anton Grau Larsen and Andreas Møller Mulvad of the Copenhagen Business School suggest supplementing the Danish parliament, the Folketing, with another chamber consisting of 300 randomly selected Danish citizens to combat elitism and career politicians, in their book Tæm Eliten (Tame the Elite).
• Terry Bouricius, a former Vermont legislator and political scientist, proposes in a 2013 journal article how a democracy could function better without elections, through the use of many randomly selected bodies, each with a defined role.
• In his 2017 presidential election platform, French politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon of La France Insoumise lays out a proposal for a sixth republic. The upper house of this republic would be formed through national sortition. Additionally, the constituent assembly to create this republic would have 50% of its members chosen in this way, with the remainder being elected.
• Adam Grant published a 2023 op-ed citing findings by Alexander Haslam showing more altruism in randomly-selected decision-makers as well as other studies showing an overrepresentation of psychopathic and narcissistic traits in elected officials.

See also

• Citizens' assembly
• Deliberative democracy
• Jury selection
• Political egalitarianism
• Solar Lottery, a 1955 science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick involving sortition
• Wisdom of the crowd

External links

• Equality by Lot blog — extensive news, discussions and general information on sortition
• Sortition as a sustainable protection against oligarchy (2011 lecture) by Étienne Chouard (video in French with English subtitles)
• Lists of writings on sortition
  • Equality by Lot's list of books (from 425 BC - 2020)
  • The Fetura or Sortition Option's list of writings (348 BC - 2002)
  • List of Simon Threlkeld's articles (1997-2020) proposing randomly sampled juries decide laws and choose public officials
  • List of sortition news from the Netherlands (2018-2022) (English-language)