Sortition

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In politics, sortition (also known as allotment or the drawing of lots) is the selection of decision makers by lottery. The decision-makers are chosen as a random sample from a larger pool of candidates.

In ancient Athenian democracy, sortition was the primary method for appointing officials, and its use was widely regarded as a principal characteristic of democracy. It is commonly used today to select prospective jurors in common law-based legal systems.

Ancient Athens

Athenian democracy developed in the 6th century BC out of what was then called isonomia (equality of law and political rights), and sortition was the principal way of achieving this fairness. It was used to select most^[1] of the magistrates for their governing committees, and for their juries (typically of 501 people). 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.^[2]

It is accepted as democratic when public offices are allocated by lot; and as oligarchic when they are filled by election.^[3]

In Athens, "democracy" (literally meaning rule by the people) was in opposition to those supporting 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."^[4]

The Athenians believed sortition to be more democratic than elections^[1] 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 and therefore the court could annul the decisions of the assembly. Both Aristotle^[1] and Herodotus (one of the earliest writers on democracy) emphasize selection by lot as a test of democracy:

The rule of the people has the fairest name of all, equality (isonomia), and does none of the things that a monarch does. The lot determines offices, power is held accountable, and deliberation is conducted in public.^[5]

Past scholarship maintained that sortition had its roots in the use of chance to divine the will of the gods, but this view is no longer common among scholars.^[6]

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Today

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 have advocated a greater use of selection by lot in today’s political systems for example reform of the British House of Lords and proposals at the time of the adoption of the current Constitution of Iraq.

Sortition proposals put forward for discussion in the modern world generally relate to the means for selecting a large legislative body (such as the U.S. Congress) from among the adult population at large. One such proposal is C. L. R. James's 1956 essay "Every Cook Can Govern."^[7]

A more recent proposal was made by the Marxist economists Allin Cottrell and Paul Cockshott. They propose that, to avoid formation of a new social elite in a post-capitalist society...

The various organs of public authority would be controlled by citizens’ committees chosen by lot. The media, the health service, the planning and marketing agencies, the various industries would have their juries. Each of these would have a defined area of competence. A committee for the energy industry, for instance, would decide certain details of energy policy but it could not disregard a popular vote, say, to phase out nuclear power. The membership of the committees need not be uniformly drawn from the public. The health service committees could be made up partly of a random sample of health service workers, and partly of members of the public. As Burnheim argues, the principle should be that all those who have a legitimate interest in the matter should have a chance to participate in its management."

^[8]

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Advantages

Effective representation of the interests of the people

A modern advocate of sortition, political scientist John Burnheim, argues for sortition as follows (Is Democracy Possible?, pp. 124–5):

But do we, in order to have democracy, have to find a way in which the demos first makes up its mind what is to be done and then controls its representatives in the process of carrying it out? What I want to suggest is a different conception. Let the convention for deciding what is our common will be that we will accept the decision of a group of people who are well informed about the question, well-motivated to find as good a solution as possible and representative of our range of interests simply because they are statistically representative of us as a group. If this group is then responsible for carrying out what it decides, the problem of control of the execution process largely vanishes. Those directing the execution process are carrying out their own decisions. They may need a little prodding to keep them up to the mark, but there is no institutional basis for a conflict of interest between bodies responsible for making decisions and those responsible for execution. They have an overriding interest in showing that their decisions are practical and well-grounded.

Fairness and equality: Sortition is inherently egalitarian in that it ensures all citizens have an equal chance of entering office irrespective of any bias in society:

Compared to a voting system – even one that is open to all citizens – a citizen-wide lottery scheme for public office lowers the threshold to office. This is because ordinary citizens do not have to compete against more powerful or influential adversaries in order to take office, and because the selection procedure does not favour those who have pre-existing advantages or connections – as invariably happens with election by preference. From an organisational point of view a citizen-wide lottery system gives all citizens an equal stake in the office in question and so defines the size of the active (or potentially active) citizen body.^[9]

Democratic: Almost all Greek writers who mention democracy (including Aristotle,^[1]Plato and Herodotus) both emphasise the role of selection by lot or state outright that being allotted is more democratic than elections. For example Plato says:

"Democracy arises after the poor are victorious over their adversaries, some of whom they kill and others of whom they exile, then they share out equally with the rest of the population political offices and burdens; and in this regime public offices are usually allocated by lot."^[10]

We see the same idea in the 18th century after the re-emergence of democracy in the writings of Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu:

"The suffrage by lot is natural to democracy, as that by choice is to aristocracy"^[11]

Less corruptible than elections: Sortition may be less corruptible than voting because processes can be developed to ensure that selection is completely fair. For example, Athenians used complex allotment procedures with an intricate machine to allot officers. Like Athenian democrats, critics of electoral politics in the 21st-century argue that the process of election by vote is subject to manipulation by money and other powerful forces and because legislative elections give power to a few powerful groups they are believed to be less democratic system than selection by lot from amongst the population.

Fair representation: Modern supporters see selection by lot as overcoming the various demographic biases in race, religion, sex, etc. apparent in many legislative assemblies.^[12] This actually differs somewhat from Athenian democracy, in which women (and others) were not eligible to participate, and therefore a bias was inherent.

Power to ordinary people: An inherent problem with electoral politics is the over-representative of the politically active groups in society who tend to be those who join political parties. For example in 2000 less than 2% ^[13] of the UK population belonged to a political party whilst 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. As a result political members of the UK population were represented by one MP per 1800 of those belonging to a party whilst those who did not belong to a party had one MP per 19 million individuals who did not belong to a party.^{[verification needed]}

Voter fatigue: Supporters also argue that sortition alleviates the problems of voter fatigue and rational ignorance, which is seen as a problem in both representative democracy and direct democracy.

Loyalty is to conscience not to political party: Elected representatives typically rely on political parties in order to gain and retain office. This means they often feel a primary loyalty to the party and will vote contrary to conscience to support a party position. Representatives appointed by sortition do not owe anything to anyone for their position.

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Disadvantages

Pure sortition does not discriminate: The most common argument against pure sortition (that is, with no prior selection of an eligible group) is that it does not discriminate those selected and takes no account of particular skills or experience that might be needed to effectively discharge the particular offices filled. Just as the Athenians did not choose generals (Strategos) by lot, so today most would agree that random selection from the general population would not be a good way of filling the role of medical surgeon or aircraft pilot due to the specialist skills that those roles require. The same is argued for many political offices as, under a system based on election, it is thought unlikely that those manifestly lacking the requisite skills will be elected to office. According to Xenophon (Memorabilia Book I, 2.9), this classical argument was offered by Socrates:

[Socrates] taught his companions to despise the established laws by insisting on the folly of appointing public officials by lot, when none would choose a pilot or builder or flautist by lot, nor any other craftsman for work in which mistakes are far less disastrous than mistakes in statecraft.

The same argument is also made by Edmund Burke in his essay Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790):

There is no qualification for government but virtue and wisdom, actual or presumptive. [...] Everything ought to be open, but not indifferently, to every man. No rotation; no appointment by lot; no mode of election operating in the spirit of sortition or rotation can be generally good in a government conversant in extensive objects. Because they have no tendency, direct or indirect, to select the man with a view to the duty or to accommodate the one to the other.

Misrepresentation: Because it introduces randomness in determining outcomes, there is always the statistical possibility that sortition may put into power an individual or group that does not represent the views of the majority of the people whom they represent. In the most extreme case, there could be a complete disjuncture between the views of those put into power and the views of everyone else, although the chances of this diminish dramatically as the size of the group increases.

Sortition can put in power people with minority views: Some of the officials selected by sortition may hold views that greatly differ from those common in the population. For example, an unusually poor or unusually wealthy official may be selected, and once in power may try to use it to change a tax system in a way that will benefit himself and others like her, in a manner that is opposed by, and possibly detrimental to, the majority of the population. A similar situation could occur with a person who holds unusual religious or moral ideas. This could be particularly disastrous^[why?] if such a person were chosen for an executive office like prime minister or president.

Voting confers legitimacy^{[original research?]}: Those who see voting as expressing the "consent of the governed", maintain that voting is able to confer legitimacy in the selection. According to this view, elected officials can act with greater authority than when randomly selected. With no popular mandate to draw on, politicians lose a moral basis on which to base their authority. As such, politicians would be open to charges of illegitimacy, as they were selected purely by chance.

Some forms of sortition entail compulsion^{[original research?]}: If a system of pure, universal sortition is also involuntary, then measures for compelling people to serve need to be instituted. Though a system could allow people to opt out.

Enthusiasm of the representatives^{[original research?]}: In an elected system, the representatives are to a degree self-selecting for their enthusiasm for the job. Under a system of pure, universal sortition the individuals are not chosen for their enthusiasm. Many electoral systems assign to those chosen a role as representing their constituents; a complex job with a significant workload. Elected representative choose to accept any additional workload; voters can also choose those representatives most willing to accept the burden involved in being a representative. Individuals chosen at random from a comprehensive pool of citizens have no particular enthusiasm for their role and therefore may not make good advocates for a constituency.

Accountability^{[original research?]}: In an voting system, representatives must seek to appease their constituents in order to be elected. Additionally, the representatives generally seek re-election at some future date. This makes them more accountable for their actions, and more likely to represent the wishes of their constituents.

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Methods

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 screening for merit can overcome the risk of selecting those who lack ability or enthusiasm.

The selection method may need to be carefully designed in order to preserve public confidence that it has not been rigged. The process may be conducted or supervised by a panel themselves selected at random, such as a grand jury being used to administer the random selection of the next grand jury.

One robust, general, public method of allotment is 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.

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Examples

Historical

The Athenian democracy made much use of sortition, with nearly all government offices filled by lottery rather than by election.
The Doge of Venice was appointed by a lengthy procedure using alternating rounds of sortition and election.
The Signoria of Florence and other Italian city-states was elected by lot during the medieval period.

Modern

Juries are found in courts of law, and in the context of community involvement as citizens' juries.
In 2004 Canadian province of British Columbia asked a randomly selected group of citizens forming the Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform to propose a new electoral system for the provincial government. 3 years later the province of Ontario did the same.
MASS LBP, a Canadian company inspired by the work of the Citizens' Assemblies on Electoral Reform has pioneered the use of Citizens' Reference Panels for addressing a range of policy issues for public sector clients. The Reference Panels use civic lotteries, a modern form of sortition, to randomly select citizen-representatives from the general public.
Danish Consensus conferences give ordinary citizens a chance to make their voices heard in debates on public policy. The selection of citizens is not perfectly random, but still aims to be representative.
The South Australian Constitutional Convention was a deliberative opinion poll created to consider changes to the state constitution.
Some election laws regarding certain offices in the United States provide that, in the case of a tie between the leading candidates, a coin toss (rather than a runoff election) shall be conducted.
In the election of electorate MPs in New Zealand, if there is a tie between the leading candidates and this situation persists after an obligatory recount, the Chief Electoral Officer chooses the MP from among the leading candidates by lot. (The UK [1], New Mexico [2] and other governments have similar rules for breaking ties.)

Non-government

The Internet Engineering Task Force uses sortition to select the nominating committee which selects its leadership. It has also defined a robust, general, public method for making random selections: RFC 3797 - Publicly Verifiable Nominations Committee Random Selection
Consensus conferences have been run in the USA by the Loka Institute, a nonprofit organization concerned with the social, political, and environmental repercussions of research, science and technology.
Deliberative polls
Several Spanish savings banks (caja de ahorros) randomly elect compromisaries among some account holders (for example, those who had an account for more than four years and with mean holdings over the minimum wage in Caja de Ahorros de Asturias (2002)). Those chosen then gather in assembly to elect the bank members representing account holders.
In Spain, Argentina and Switzerland, citizens are randomly selected to manage ballot boxes and count ballots on election days.
The Slashcode forum software as used in Slashdot randomly elects forum moderators that assign points to postings. The randomness is weighted with karma and posting frequency. The registered readers can later meta-moderate the work of the random moderators.

Proposals

Political scientist Robert A. Dahl suggests in his book Democracy and its critics (p. 340) that an advanced democratic state could form groups which he calls minipopuli. Each group would consist "of perhaps a thousand citizens randomly selected out of the entire demos," 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.
John Burnheim, in his book Is Democracy Possible?, describes a political system in which many small "citizen's 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 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.
Ernest Callenbach and Michael Phillips argue for random selection of the U.S. House of Representatives in their book A Citizen Legislature.
"Convened-sample suffrage" uses sortition to choose an electoral college for each electoral district.^[14]
"Accidental Politicians: How Randomly Selected Legislators Can Improve Parliament Efficiency": a new Italian study which shows how 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 in line with the recent discovery that the adoption of random strategies can improve the efficiency of hierarchical organizations "Peter Principle Revisited: a Computational Study").
The upper house of a parliament might be selected through sortition. Anthony Barnett and Peter Carty proposed this to the Royal Commission on the Reform of the House of Lords in the UK in 1999. Their proposal was published: The Athenian Option: Radical Reform for the House of Lords. Similarly, the People's Senate Party in British Columbia, Canada promotes this notion.
Étienne Chouard, a French political activist, proposes replacing elections with sortition.^[15]^[16]