Randomly choosing people to serve in government - or sortition - could be the best way to achieve democracy
Every election cycle we vote, and then we hate our government and our politicians - corrupt, self serving, concerned more with appearances rather than policy. Is this what democracy and self-governance is all about? Well, no. What is democracy anyways?
One of the most ancient practices of democracy is the tradition of sortition, where people are randomly selected and paid to serve in a legislature. Critics react with bewilderment and skepticism. How could we possibly trust normal people - stupid, ignorant people - to become our leaders? Well, I think that normal people will perform the job of representative far better than any elected official.
The Benefits of Sortition
Proportionate Statistical Representation
The fundamental technology lying behind sortition is the mature understanding of statistics. With a random sample, for example of 500 individuals, a sortition assembly would be guaranteed representation of the smartest, average, and dumbest of society. It would guarantee proportionate representation of race, class, sex, and gender. It would guarantee superior representation for profession, ideology, religion, and any category you can think of. Sortition is the ultimate method for constructing a proportionately representative Congress. No other technique, no electoral technique, can come close.
With proportionality finally comes the ability to accurately estimate the wants and desires of the median member of society. Sortition, combined with majority rule, is a collective intelligence system that iteratively optimizes in favor of the most satisfactory policy.
Eliminating Political Campaigning
Political campaigning demands substantial amounts of time investment. Many politicians may use a majority of their time not crafting legislation or making policy decisions but instead campaigning.
In order to win an election, all politicians need money, resources, and influence in order to obtain votes. Politicians must make deals with the rich and powerful to fund their campaign. This connection between elections and money is as old as democracy itself. Since the time of Ancient Athens and Aristotle, elections were never considered to be “democratic” but instead “oligarchic”, a system of government ruled by the rich. To Aristotle if elections are not democratic, then what is? Well, “It is accepted as democratic when public offices are allocated by lot”, or lottery. Sortition is the original form of democracy.
Suppressing Factionalism
Sortition has been historically and contemporarily observed to be a strong deterrent to political factionalism [1, 2] in Ancient Athens. Sortition-based democracies are not multi-party states but zero-party states. In Renaissance Era Italian city-states, sortition was used to in combination with elections to deter factional domination in favor of broad-based consensus candidates [1]. Finally, factional suppression has been observed in contemporary Indian tribes where sortition is practiced. In these tribes, sortition results in an egalitarian government where power is shared among all villagers. When elections were introduced into these societies however, the author observed a rise in power hierarchies and even the introduction of toxic masculinity into these societies.
But why would random selection suppress factionalism? Because of the time and resources needed to win elections, political candidates have need of making strategic allies and consolidating power on the road to victory. Oftentimes this means making alliances with the rich and wealthy in order to fund campaigns. Oftentimes this means rewarding allies with political office, rather than selecting bureaucrats by merit.
In contrast, sortition assembly members have no need to campaign nor do they have any need to stand out. Therefore sortition members have less opportunity to construct corrupting relationships with the powerful and influential. Sortition assembly members are paid for their work irrespective of whether their favored proposal wins or loses.
Mitigating Rational Ignorance
All voters, including you and me, are rationally ignorant. We don't have the time nor resources to adequately monitor and manage our politicians. On average we vote ignorantly, oftentimes solely due to party affiliation, or the name or gender of the candidate, rather than actual qualification. We assume somebody else is doing the monitoring, and hopefully we'd read about it in the news. And yes, it is somebody else. Marketers, advertisers, lobbyists, and specialists pay huge sums of money to influence your opinion and construct your news reality. Every elections is a hope that we can refine our ignorance into competence.
In contrast, in sortition, normal citizens are given the time, resources, and education to become informed using the process of deliberative democracy. Normal citizens are given the opportunity to deliberate with one another and come to compromise. Normal citizens are finally fairly compensated for the difficult work of realizing democracy.
In contrast, politicians constantly refuse to compromise for fear of upsetting ignorant voters - voters who did not have the time nor opportunity to research the issues in depth. Our modern, shallow, ignorant management of politicians has led to an era of unprecedented polarization, deadlock, and government ineptitude.
A Proven Track Record of Competence
After interest in sortition resurged in the 2000’s, hundreds of sortition-based assemblies such as Citizens' Assemblies have already been conducted. The decisions they have come to have been of high quality in my opinion. For example:
In Ireland, Citizen Assemblies were instrumental in the legalization of both gay marriage and abortion in a traditionally Catholic country. These assemblies were used to resolve politically volatile subjects so that fearful politicians would not have to.
Recent 2019-2020 Citizen Assemblies in Ireland and France reached consensus on sweeping, broad reforms to fight climate change. In Ireland taxes on carbon and meat were broadly approved. In France the People decided to criminalize "ecocide", raise carbon taxes, and introduce regulations in transportation and agriculture. Liberal or conservative, left or right, near unanimous decisions were made on many of these proposals.
The BC Columbia Citizens Assembly was tasked with designing a new electoral system to replace the old first-past-the-post (FPTP) system. The organizers brought in university experts. The organizers also allowed citizens, lobbyists, and interest groups to speak and lobby. Assembly members listened to all the sides, and they decided that the lobbyists were mostly bullshit, and they decided that even though the university experts had biases, they were more trustworthy. This assembly ultimately, nearly unanimously decided that Canada ought to switch to a Single-Transferable-Vote style election system. They were also nearly unanimous in that they believed FPTP voting needed to be changed. This assembly demonstrates the ability of normal people to learn and make decisions on complex topics.
America in One Room deliberative polling experiments have demonstrated the ability of regular Americans to deliberate amongst one another and come to compromises.
The Citizens’ Assembly of Scotland decided after deliberation that a sortition-based Citizen’s Assembly ought to be permanently created to check and balance the power of their elected counterparts. In other words, this Citizens’ Assembly decided that sortition was a competent and legitimate method of governance.
Implementation
Sortition may or may not be combined with other forms of popular rule.
The least extreme is the use of Citizen Assemblies or Deliberative Polling in an advisory capacity for legislatures or referendums. Examples of these have been implemented in Ireland, the UK, France. They have also been implemented in Oregon in the form of "Citizens Initiative Review" (CIR). Here, a random body of Oregonians are tasked with reviewing ballot propositions and giving referendum voters information about the propositions.
A hybrid, two-house Congress has been proposed where one house is chosen by lottery while the other remains elected. This system attempts to balance the pro's and con's of both sortition and election, and use both as checks and balances against each other.
Instead of two houses, a single legislature could mix in both randomly selected people and elected politicians.
Rather than have citizens directly govern, random citizens can be used exclusively as intermediaries to elect and fire politicians as a sort of electoral college. The benefit here is that citizens are given the time and resources to deploy a traditional hiring & managing procedure to make political appointments. This system removes the typical criticism that you can't trust normal people to govern and write laws.
Most radically, multi-body sortition constructs checks and balances by creating several sortition bodies - one decides on what issues to tackle, one makes proposals, one decides on proposals, one selects the bureaucracy, etc, and completely eliminates elected office.
Common Critiques
People are Stupid!
The most common critique is an irrational contempt towards the abilities of normal people despite abundant empirical evidence demonstrating compentence of sortition-based assemblies. There is also abundent empirical evidence demonstrating the incompetence of elected assemblies. It should be made clear that the entire design of modern sortition is to avoid the ignorance-driven politics of elections in favor of a more deliberative form of democracy.
Lotteries are Chaotic and “Too Random!”
When lotteries are used to select large groups of people (for example 500 to form a Congress), the resulting characteristics of the assembly are remarkably stable rather than chaotic. Similarly, if you flip a coin 500 times, it’s quite likely that the amount of heads to tails will be about equal. It is highly unlikely that a small minority faction could come to dominate the assembly.
People are lazy and would want to get out of service!
To be clear, I support volunteer-only lotteries where the participants are very well-compensated for their time and effort. Many benefits can be proposed to mitigate life circumstances preventing service, such as the ability to delay your service term, providing child-care, providing elderly care, and paying for transportation and relocation costs.
Campaign finance reform is a better option!
Show me any society that has managed to prevent the corrupting influence of elections through campaign finance reform, and maybe I’d believe this line of reasoning more. The corrupting influence of elections is even observed in societies that do not operate with traditional campaign donations, for example in Communist party politics [9].
We need experts in Congress!
Unfortunately, our elected Congressmen have never been experts either. They are not experts in public policy, nor public health, nor economics, nor military matters. Expertise instead is delegated out to bureaucrats and advisors who are hired and fired by legislatures, and the same would happen in sortition.
Elected officials however do have a small advantage to sortition assemblies in that having pursued a career in politics, politicians have more political experience. In contrast, normal people, having pursued careers in all other fields, will have far greater diversity of all other experience.
The experts would rule over Congress!
Though it is likely that bureaucratic power would be strengthened in sortition, the power to select bureaucrats, hire them, and fire them, would ultimately be reserved for legislatures. So it would be the other way around. The sortition assembly rules over the bureaucrats as their bosses.
Corruption
Corruption in my opinion is the most legitimate criticism of sortition. The argument goes that because sortition assembly members are more likely to be less wealthy, they will also be more receptive to explicit bribery and corruption. In sortition therefore we are making a tradeoff, for all of the benefits listed above, including the elimination of legalized campaign-related corruption, in exchange for potentially greater explicit criminal corruption.
Corruption could be controlled for using checks and balances using various Implementations described in “Implementations”, or for example using secret ballot at certain stages of decision making.
Corruption could also be mitigated by implementing clever policy. For example, a "bounty” could be introduced where sortition members are rewarded for reporting bribery solicitations. This introduces substantial risk to potential bribers who may fear that a sortition member will take the instant payoff rather than a riskier bribe.
There are also some advantages that sortition enjoys compared to elections. Because of power rotation and term limits, a briber cannot establish long term relationships with the sortition assembly. Therefore a briber must bribe a new assembly member after every lottery. Each additional bribe makes it more and more likely that a briber will get caught, therefore making bribery even more risky.
Concluding Remarks
Do you believe that people ought to govern over themselves? Do you believe in democracy? And do you think there is something rotten the way our current “democracies” function? Well, sortition is a powerful technique that we can use to finally take democracy to the 21st century.
The movement towards this new kind of democracy is small but growing. If you’re interested in helping out, please take a look at organizations such as “Democracy without Elections” or the “Sortition Foundation”.
References
Reybrouck, David Van. Against Elections. Seven Stories Press, April 2018.
Hansen, Mogens Herman. The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes (J.A. Crook trans.). University of Oklahoma Press, 1991.
Dahl, Robert A. On Democracy, 2nd Ed. Yale University Press, 1998.
The End of Politicians - Brett Hennig
Open Democracy - Helene Landemore
TG Bouricious - Democracy through multi-body sortition: Athenian lessons for the modern day
Gastil, Wright - Legislature by lot: envisioning Sortition within a bicameral system
Y Sintomer - From deliberative to radical democracy? Sortition and politics in the twenty-first century
A Shal - What if we selected our leaders by lottery? Democracy by sortition, liberal elections and communist revolutionaries, 2021.
A Lang. But is it for real? The British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly as a model of state-sponsored citizen empowerment. 2007.
Resources
https://www.sortitionfoundation.org/ -- A European based organization
https://www.democracywithoutelections.org/ -- An American pro-sortition community.
https://equalitybylot.com -- A blog for pro-sortition academics.
https://randomaccessdemocracy.org/resources/ - A collection of information about sortition.
https://joinofbyfor.org/ -- A US sortition advocacy nonprofit.