This article explores selecting legislative leadership by random selection, otherwise known as sortition. Sortition is sometimes criticized for being “too random”. To be charitable, I take this criticism to mean that sortition produces chaotic results due to random chance. However contrary to intuition, when sortition is used to selected hundreds of people at a time to form a legislature, sortition results in remarkable stability.
This is only true if those randomly drawn actually serve. For tasks that take a long time, or a lot of work, many people may decline resulting in self-selection bias. We either need quasi-mandatory service or multiple bodies with different levels of effort required. To be clear, even with some self-selection bias democratic lotteries will generate bodies that are likely to be far more representative than any elected legislature. The proposal I have made to address the problem of less-representative citizen assemblies is to use multiple bodies for different tasks. Bodies requiring longer duration or effort (agenda setting, drafting, reviewing drafts, etc.) might be smaller and somewhat less representative, with the final adopt or reject decision being made by a large, short-duration (possibly mandatory service) jury to maximize representativeness. A journal article I wrote about mult-body sortition is here:
It would be great if someone with the skills and resources would create a sortition wiki that could be used to discus and develop a "constitution of sortition" so to speak, that a govt could eventually use as a guideline or adopt. This might also generate general interest and understanding of exactly what is proposed.
This is only true if those randomly drawn actually serve. For tasks that take a long time, or a lot of work, many people may decline resulting in self-selection bias. We either need quasi-mandatory service or multiple bodies with different levels of effort required. To be clear, even with some self-selection bias democratic lotteries will generate bodies that are likely to be far more representative than any elected legislature. The proposal I have made to address the problem of less-representative citizen assemblies is to use multiple bodies for different tasks. Bodies requiring longer duration or effort (agenda setting, drafting, reviewing drafts, etc.) might be smaller and somewhat less representative, with the final adopt or reject decision being made by a large, short-duration (possibly mandatory service) jury to maximize representativeness. A journal article I wrote about mult-body sortition is here:
https://delibdemjournal.org/articles/abstract/10.16997/jdd.156/
It would be great if someone with the skills and resources would create a sortition wiki that could be used to discus and develop a "constitution of sortition" so to speak, that a govt could eventually use as a guideline or adopt. This might also generate general interest and understanding of exactly what is proposed.