Debating Sortition

What are the appropriate uses of sortition in contemporary democracies? To what extent can these practices advance democratic transformation? Here are four big ideas.

This transcript is an edited version of the panel discussion entitled Debating Sortition last August 18, 2022. This features preliminary comments by the panelists. For the full discussion, watch the video below.

Saskia Goldberg

I’d like to start with Brett Hennig who brings in a practitioner perspective. Brett is the co-founder and director of Sortition Foundation and recently has co-authored a nice piece in Nature on Fair algorithms for selecting citizens’ assemblies. Brett is also the author of the book The End of Politicians: Time for Real Democracy.

First, can you please define sortition to us? And then also tell us why you founded the Sortition Foundation?

Brett Hennig

Define sortition. It’s simply the technical name for random selection. It’s the random selection of people to positions instead of, for example, election or any other method of selecting people to put them into an institution.

It goes back to ancient Athens, where other than the directly democratic central forum in Ancient Athens, most of the institutions around that time were randomly selected. You can go to the museum in Athens and see the Kleroterion, where they randomly selected people. Of course, Ancient Athens excluded women, had slaves, and only had the Athenian citizens. So, you know, we don’t want to replicate that, but that’s where its roots lie in.

Today, the modern use of sortition is in citizens assemblies, also called policy juries or peoples’ panels. There’s a plethora of names for these kinds of deliberative mini-publics. Citizens assemblies are the most common and widely used, at least in Europe in my experience.

Any deliberative mini-public has a sortition element. But then there’s also actually the deliberative process, the informed deliberative process and that process is as important if not more important in my mind than the actual sortition elements. So, separating out the selection and recruitment of people to deliberative mini publics and then the actual process that goes on there is key and they’re both as important as each other.

‘The informed deliberative process and that process is as important if not more important in my mind than the actual sortition elements.’

Of course, modern citizens’ assemblies are not compulsory. Unlike jury duty where if you are randomly selected to the jury, you are obliged legally to go. In citizens assemblies, it’s voluntary. They try to reduce as many barriers as they can to participation, either by paying, offering childcare or elderly care to get people to volunteer.

Due to the voluntary nature, a typical process would send out 10,000 invitations, and out of those people who reply, you will get a pool of people. That pool is typically strongly skewed, especially on socioeconomic or education levels. We typically see highly educated people register far more than lower -educated etcetera. We try to correct some of this skewing in the UK by sending more invitations to more impoverished areas.

From the pool of people, you will then often do a second random selection which corrects that skewing. So, you have a representative sample in some broad sense in terms of age, gender, geography, some socioeconomic proxy, perhaps disability, ethnicity, or attitudinal questions, depends where you are. So that’s basically my definition of modern sortition going back to the past.

The second question why did I found the Sortition Foundation? I’d become very disillusioned with modern politics. I’ve been involved in social justice movements from the outside. I’ve joined political parties. I tried to climb that greasy pole inside political parties. I’d realized that there was something fundamentally wrong, and as I was doing some reading on the history of democracy, I stumbled across the British Columbia Citizens Assembly on Electoral Reform and all the lights went off. I just went, ‘wow, that would be amazing.’ That would solve all these different problems with electoral politics. And then as you read more and more into this sort of theory, such as Hardt and Negri or reading Archon Fung and Erik Olin Wright’s book, Deeping Democracy, I came to that realization that if sortitions and citizens assemblies were empowered, then we would solve a lot of our problems. Because to me, governments are not like their people. There is something fundamentally sort of aristocratic in the electoral process. I live in Hungary but you know lots of Hungarians are not like Viktor Orbán and if you equate the government to its people there’s major problems.

Governments are not like their people. There is something fundamentally sort of aristocratic in the electoral process.

I looked around for a group who was publicly advocating for citizens assemblies, and in particular the empowerment or the institutionalization of citizens assemblies. Couldn’t find such an organization. I was at a demonstration chatting to friends and we went to a café and said we’ve got to set up an organization that could promote this kind of stuff. And so, six or seven years ago the Sortition Foundation was born. We now actually help run citizens assemblies. We’re a not for profit doing the recruitment for citizens assemblies. Using the surplus to campaign for the institutionalization of citizens assemblies.

Saskia Goldberg

We now bring in Cristina Lafont. Who might have a very different perspective on sortition.

Cristina is professor of philosophy at the Northwestern University in Chicago, and the author of a book that we probably all know, Democracy without Shortcuts: A Participatory Conception of Deliberative Democracy.

Cristina, in your book you were quite critical of lottocracy, what exactly are your reservations?

Cristina Lafont

In my book Democracy Without Shortcuts, I analyzed lottocracy as the proposal to empower citizens assemblies and other deliberative mini-publics instead of having the kind of electoral system as we have it now. I’m very critical of lottocracy so understood. Which is not the same as being opposed to citizens assemblies used in different ways.. But first the very idea of having something like a lottocracy, where we change the political system, my main concern is it is not democratic.

It is a way of empowering the few, the very few the tiny, tiny few randomly selected people to do the thinking and the deciding for the rest of the citizenry.

It is a way of empowering the few, the very few the tiny, tiny few randomly selected people to do the thinking and the deciding for the rest of the citizenry. Whereas the citizens really are just supposed to blindly defer to whatever decisions they make. They have no formal tools of holding them accountable or of collectively shaping which political agenda we are going to have. They just can only blindly refer to whatever those very few people decide, and to me, that is really not democratic. Blind deference is quintessentially a non-democratic relationship of political inequality where you have just decision makers who are not accountable, they can decide anyway they like as they see fit, and then you have people who just follow and obey and have no other way of shaping their decisions. That’s my main concern.

Especially if what we are hoping for in our democracy is that the citizenry can identify with the decisions to which they are subject. So, that leads to another problem that I also discuss in the book. Which is the promise that we will have better decisions. Maybe it’s worth empowering the few if we are going to have better decisions. We may tackle climate change. You know, who cares whether it is more or less democratic? Let’s get it done right. So that more instrumental promise, that we will get better outcomes, I think that is not true. I just think it won’t work and the reason why it won’t work is the same no matter whether the ones you are empowering are the few randomly selected or the ‘elite’ or the ‘experts’.

Rule by the few cannot provide better political decisions.

Rule by the few cannot provide better political decisions because what you need in order to have better outcomes, to have a better society, to say, tackle climate change, is not that you pass legislation that the few experts or randomly selected citizens, the ones who have been lucky enough to be informed and deliberate that they make decisions. What you really need with outcomes is that the citizenry actually does its part. It’s not enough that we pass legislation on vaccines and masks and lockdowns. What we need to get outcomes, not just legislation that looks beautiful, is that people actually get vaccinated and actually wear masks and actually accept the lockdowns. The decision takers – the citizenry – really has to do its part.

The shortcut of having a very few deciding and being informed, deliberating while the rest have no idea, no clue being manipulated, being exposed to fake news.

And so, I think lottocracy is not only non-democratic, but actually the reason why democracy was important in the first place was because if we want to really have a better society, you need the citizenry to be behind it. You are going to have to convince them anyway. The shortcut of having a very few deciding and being informed, deliberating while the rest have no idea, no clue being manipulated, being exposed to fake news. The idea that the shortcut will help us get better results, actually, it won’t work because that’s not enough.

They need to know that the decisions that this few made are actually fair.

It’s not enough to convince the people participating in the citizens assemblies and to make them realize that actually we will have to make sacrifices, we need to change our lifestyle, we need to change our consumption options or transportation decisions. We really actually have to make a lot of sacrifices to tackle climate change. And for that, people will have to be behind it and say, you know what, this is my generation, we are going to have to do these sacrifices for my kids. You have to convince them of that. They need to know that the decisions that this few made are actually fair. For example that they don’t bear the sacrifices more than others. For that you really have to go back to the citizenry.

There aren’t many ways in which we could empower the citizenry, because obviously the powers that be are not going to just give power away.

So just to make clear that I am not only not opposed to citizens assemblies, but actually very much in favour of them. Let me just say that the problem I see is sortition-based institutions could really be a way of empowering us citizens which usually doesn’t happen. There aren’t many ways in which we could empower the citizenry, because obviously the powers that be are not going to just give power away.

So, my fear is that this is a chance that we have to institutionalize those great innovations in a way that could be democratic, that could help the citizenry to empower themselves to be in a better place, to form their opinion and will, etcetera. But if we follow the, what I call the populist track, if we follow the track of saying no, we use them to empower the very few participants, we want to empower them, and we let them do their thinking undecided and we just stay the way we are, right? If we follow that track then we are again, not doing anything democratic. We are not helping ourselves to actually be able to know what we are supposed to do, to form an opinion and will and actually get it done.

For me, it’s important that we follow what I called the participatory track and use those institutions for us, for the citizenry. The ones who we want to have democratic control and be in power is us as a collective the whole citizenry. And if we go for the few and say no, they decide for us, and we just follow blindly, it’s not going to work.

Saskia Goldberg

We now bring in Samuel Bagg, whose position is somewhere in between Brett and Cristina’s. Although he does cast doubt on the standard model of sortition as representation which is according to him embraced by nearly all contemporary proponents.

Samuel is assistant professor of political science at the University of South Carolina. He is the author of a very interesting article published in the American Journal of Political Science on Sortition as Anti-Corruption: Popular Oversight against Elite Capture and also his first book, The Dispersion of Power: A Critical Realist Theory of Democracy is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

Samuel, in your article you made a case for using sortition to prevent corruption instead of achieving more authentic representation. Can you please explain this debate?

Samuel Bagg

I do position myself, I would say somewhere between the first two speakers in terms of my enthusiasm for sortition. The way I see it, basically lotteries can be a really useful tool for reform within a broader democratic system but they’re not like a truer form of democracy or a solution for all of its problems, which some advocates tend to shade over into that kind of view. I contrast what I see as a common model of sortition as representation, which invites this kind of all or nothing framing about the potential for sortition, to that with another model I call sortition as anti-corruption, which instead treats lotteries as one of many democratic tools we might use in a broader toolkit.

I think the fair thing to say is that both models are actually already present in a lot of work on sortition. On the one hand, you see a lot of talk about sortition as a way of achieving more accurate representation. And on the other hand, you also have the ability of random selection to fight corruption. And it’s often assumed that these things go hand in hand. The reason that you get better representation is precisely that you eliminate the corruption that’s inherent to electoral system. That’s one of the reasons, and there clearly is some truth to that.

For me though, it’s also important to recognise where the goals of representation and anti-corruption come apart, because depending on which one we see is primary, they actually lead us in quite different directions.

The basic idea of sortition as representation is that lotteries are a better method of realizing popular sovereignty, of ensuring that the popular will is enacted through law. And that’s why it invites this kind of all or nothing dynamic. If elections are the wrong way of achieving popular sovereignty, of choosing legislators who are going to accurately interpret and enact the popular will, then perhaps sortition is the right way, or at least a better way.

If you imagine that lotteries are going to solve this problem, I think you’re underestimating the creativity of the powerful interests that are in play here.

Now I’m on board with the critique of elections, that’s inherent in this kind of model. I agree they don’t come anywhere close to achieving accurate representation. But on the one hand, I think they do serve some important purposes and that we’d be unwise to abandon them altogether.

And on the other hand, I’m sceptical that a fully lottocratic system, a system based entirely on sortition, would actually end up doing any better. Seems to me that the powerful interests which bias the outcomes of elections under the current system wouldn’t suddenly disappear with a change in the formal procedures.

If you imagine that lotteries are going to solve this problem, I think you’re underestimating the creativity of the powerful interests that are in play here. If ultimate power is vested in this small group of randomly chosen citizens, powerful interests are going to find a way to influence them. In fact, because these people aren’t tied to broader social interest groups, they might even be more successful at influencing them. We can’t know for sure, but it seems plausible to me that that’s the case.

To protect something the public interest from capture and corruption at the hands of wealthy elites and a variety of other powerful groups, we need a range of different weapons at our disposal.

I don’t have some other better way of realizing popular sovereignty. That’s not what I’m here to say. I don’t have one weird trick that will save democracy. The way I see it instead is that there are always going to be powerful groups who are trying to ensure that the state serves their interests. And democracy is about the multitude of tools we can use to prevent that from happening. To protect something the public interest from capture and corruption at the hands of wealthy elites and a variety of other powerful groups, we need a range of different weapons at our disposal.

So, if that’s our baseline assumption, this discourse and rhetoric of popular sovereignty can seem to me a bit of a red herring. Neither elections nor sortition can be trusted to realize our true popular will, if such a thing even exists. Both tools, though, are valuable to the extent that they make it harder for these kinds of powerful interests to get their way.

Neither elections nor sortition can be trusted to realize our true popular will, if such a thing even exists.

And so, for the anti-corruption model, the task is simply defined, the best combination of different democratic tools, the combination that minimizes the ability of these particular powerful groups to dictate outcomes.

There’s certainly some overlap between these goals of representation and anticorruption. Representativeness can help to prevent certain forms of capture and corruption. But they also come apart in ways.

On the one hand, you can have a perfectly representative group that nevertheless gets corrupted at some stage in the process. And on the other hand, random selection can still help to prevent certain forms of capture, even if it doesn’t result in a perfectly representative sample.

Say you have a very small sample of people – which isn’t representative because it’s too small – by evading, by obstructing certain methods of influence that can still prevent capture. So, the two goals here, representation and anticorruption, come apart.

If we think of sortition as anti-corruption, as one tool among many for obstructing the various efforts of powerful groups to capture state power, I think that points to a more promising set of strategies for reform.

I think the two models basically suggest different horizons for reform. If we think of sortition as most basically a way of realizing popular sovereignty, we’re tempted into this kind of all or nothing logic where we see lotteries as perhaps a replacement for elections.

By contrast, if we think of sortition as anti-corruption, as one tool among many for obstructing the various efforts of powerful groups to capture state power, I think that points to a more promising set of strategies for reform.

I think ordinary citizens will be themselves most resilient to capture when they’re given relatively simple circumscribed tasks of oversight, rather than the kind of all-encompassing task of legislation, which they’re often given on the models that are often proposed. Maybe, smaller scale reform which gives randomly selected citizens real, but in an important sense limited power that I think actually has the most promise to enhance democracy on the whole.

Saskia Goldberg

Last but not the least, we welcome Sonia Bussu who is senior lecturer in politics and public administration at Manchester Metropolitan University. She’s the co-editor of a Special Issue on Embedding Participatory Governance in Critical Policy Studies and has published a lot of pieces on co-production and participatory governance.

Sonia, two questions.

What’s your take on how sortition has been characterized so far? And what role does sortition play in your conception of embedding participatory democracy?

I see participation as a means towards more social justice rather than just an end in itself.

Sonia Bussu

We, in different ways, all see some space for sortition in more or less radical ways. From my perspective, I see participation as a means towards more social justice rather than just an end in itself, or to protect liberal democracies from corruption and populism.

Participation, as it really ought to be, has to be embedded in communities. This means that the process of engagement itself has to start with and build on existing participation in everyday democracy. In this respect, I have a lot of sympathy for what Cristina was saying. Dynamics of embedding, developed through social experimentation that captures local knowledge and context-specific priorities and definitional participation. Participation then is continually realized and rewarding dynamic, and productive relationships to other institutions.

And when it comes to furthering social justice, although I definitely see a place for sortition, but I have a few problems with sortition and how mini-publics are conceived in general.

Sortition should provide every citizen with an equal chance of being invited. But this is debatable.

Sortition should provide every citizen with an equal chance of being invited. But this is debatable. Because some people just can’t be reached through the usual methods of random selection. They’re not on the electoral register, they don’t have a landline, they are not members of any organisations, people who are homeless, immigrants, many young people, people in transit. They’re often excluded from mini-publics and sortition in the same way they are excluded from representative institutions. And these are precisely the marginalized voices that I would want to include to challenge the existing power structure and actually move beyond liberal democracy.

Someone from a disempowered community might not even read a letter of invitation to a participatory process or just chuck it in the bin, because they distrust the institution.

And as they are organized right now, mini publics do little to remove many of the barriers to participation for lower social economic cohorts or certain marginalized communities. Most mini publics do have remuneration for participants, but there is a wide range of different factors that alienate some groups before they even have a chance to join the process, whether it’s self-inefficacy or distrust of institutions. Someone from a disempowered community might not even read a letter of invitation to a participatory process or just chuck it in the bin, because they distrust the institution. This is not surprising, because they continually experience systemic institutional discrimination. So, there is a massive self-selection bias with sortition as it is currently used.

There is also this unhealthy decoupling of politics and political economy when we design these spaces, which doesn’t really take into account capacities, including material capacities, to participate. The way we seem to understand and use mini-publics and sortition generally is based on a very technocratic understanding of policymaking and politics. I think this also links to what Cristina was saying. Mini-publics and sortition are often presented in a very instrumentalist way to produce better policy or to reduce corruption. I think participatory policy making is not necessarily about finding the right answer, because policymaking is much more complicated than that. And so participatory policy making is really about engaging people in finding a solution together that they have ownership of.

We need to recapture the energy and the poetry of participation.

I recently came across a blog post about bringing poetry back into policymaking. I agree that participatory policy making requires different mental models of what policymaking actually is – moving away from technocracy, which has contributed in large part to ushering populism. Populists can make very effective use of emotions. We need to recapture the energy and the poetry of participation. In this respect, we might need to recognize the limitation of mini-publics and sortition in anchoring participation in the community.

I take an approach to participation that is based on open and plural experimentation – that is margin-responsive. If we want to include mini-publics and sortition into embedded participatory ecology, we might want to reclaim and radicalize these spaces by actually co-designing them with people, with grassroots groups, with groups traditionally marginalized. They might end up looking quite different, maybe less talk-centric, using the arts and other creative and more inclusive ways of participating and deliberating—moving away from technocracy and bring in poetry into policymaking and politics.

Saskia Goldberg

Cristina, Samuel writes in his piece that he tries to convince a much wider audience, including critics, about the benefits of sortition-based formats. I was wondering whether he actually did convince you with his suggestion?

Cristina Lafont

I read Samuel’s piece and I think it’s very interesting. I agree a lot, say 80 or 90%. But there is one thing that I am more sceptical about.

I agree that we shouldn’t be thinking of citizens assemblies and these type of institutions as a better way to represent the popular will. I think that they really are not good in terms of what we understand as creating, having a collective popular will.

Once things really are at the stake it’s going to be very different.

But he seems to think that participants in mini-publics, once we are really talking about power, because Samuel’s completely right about this, we have seen the wonderful results of mini-publics who were just simply talking. The moment you empower them to actually make decisions, how they are going to work, is going to be very different than what we have experimented and seen because the stakes are so low that people are very willing to sacrifice to do anything right. Because nothing is at the stake. Once things really are at the stake it’s going to be very different.

The idea that it’s harder to capture those few representatives in the citizens assemblies than politicians was not very plausible. I think that precisely because they have zero accountability and because they won’t ever necessarily have such power again – it’s a one-off chance in your life – they are very extremely likely to be captured by the revolving door, by promises about what jobs … not bribes. It’s not bribes. It’s not violence. I don’t think the powers that be have to captured that way. No, it’s the usual way. You are simply invited by Murdoch, by the Koch brothers and you just see the possibilities of having a job in the future that will be extraordinary. I think the possibility of capturing a randomly selected person to change their lives by having opportunities is so much higher than with politicians. I’m not sure that sortition will be really excellent at anti-corruption. However, I don’t want to overstate the case, so I agree with Samuel. I see a lot of things for which it would be good.

I think that they would be very easy to capture simply because there is no formal accountability whatsoever.

Basically, for me, what it will be good about, as always, is for taking away decision making on issues by those who have an interest in it. That’s why I think the issue about gerrymandering, for example, election reform, things for which politicians are really very badly situated because they will be the judges and have a stake. For those things, I think citizens assemblies could be good. But I wouldn’t overstate it because, fine, they could do something judges can do. So, then we have checks and balance. We have a bunch of stuff we do to try to avoid corruption. But I’m not convinced with the very idea that there will be something significantly excellent about mini-publics against corruption. I think that they would be very easy to capture simply because there is no formal accountability whatsoever.

Samuel Bagg

That’s really perceptive. I think that’s right. The main danger with the model is that there would be forms of corruption that would affect randomly selected citizens as well. There would be different forums that would become dangerous with randomly selected citizens, than with elected politicians. Or at least they would look a little bit different.

The reason I think that I’m a little bit more optimistic than you is I think that the kinds of corruption that you’re talking about, which are more similar to the ones that are used on elected politicians and other experts, the revolving door, promise of a job, you know change their life forever. But I think that kind of incentive can actually be relatively well policed. If you’re talking about a career bureaucrat who’ve trained their whole life in a field, and then you say, okay, after you’re done with your job in the government, you are not allowed to hold any other job in that field that you’ve trained your whole life for. That’s first of all that’s probably unjust to tell them that. It’s also inefficient because you have all these people who are experts in this field and you’re saying you can’t do anything in the field. If you’re talking about randomly selected citizens who are there for a weekend, a week, maybe a month learning about something for the first time, they make a sort of simple yes or no decision, become sort of mini-experts in the very narrow question that they’re answering. But they’re not acquiring a lifetime of skills. You can say to that person, you can’t have a job in this field. That’s the cost of participating in this assembly… I think that’s one example of a check that you could have in the case of ordinary citizens, you wouldn’t be able to have in the case of politicians and bureaucrats.

I don’t think that people in citizens assemblies aren’t accountable. In fact, they are very accountable. They have to publicly stand up and publish this report and go behind this report.

Brett Hennig

I love these discussions around accountability. I don’t think accountability is necessarily even fundamentally connected to elections, which is potentially a radical thing to say, but I see accountability as a systemic thing. I see it far more a free press and free civil society, independent judiciary, the civil liberties, all this kind of stuff. A second term U.S. President who’s not up for election does not mean they are not accountable. I don’t think that people in citizens assemblies aren’t accountable. In fact, they are very accountable. They have to publicly stand up and publish this report and go behind this report. And say we are doing this and give reasons why and to me the reasons why is the main part of this accountability.

What we see now is governments responding to these citizens assemblies’ reports which are far more radical in terms of climate justice, in terms of social justice and anything any government I’ve ever seen. But if we look at same sex marriage in Ireland, if you look at constitutional ban on abortion Ireland, of course if you look at the French Citizens Assembly on climate, what they’ve proposed, the main stumbling block is when it hits those elected chambers and elected chambers more or less ignore or gut their proposals etcetera.

I know this is a very radical perspective, but to me, elections are not democratic.

This accountability thing is interesting. I know this is a very radical perspective, but to me, elections are not democratic. This is supported by Aristotle, it’s supported by Montesquieu, it’s supported by Rousseau. They all say democracy means lottery, elections means aristocracy. I think we’ve been trapped into that. A great book to read on that is Bernand Manin’s The Principles of Representative Government. Another great book is Anne Phillips, The Politics of Presence where she carefully distinguishes between descriptive representation and responsive representation and says, electoral systems’ attempt at responsive systems of representation, but they completely fail this descriptive representation. She comes from a sort of radical feminist perspective to argue that’s why we actually need our legislatures to be half women half men etcetera.

I really welcome this discussion about accountability. But I really don’t like comments like zero accountability or that elected people have sort of absolute accountability. I think it’s far more nuanced.

I completely agree with what Samuel was saying about popular sovereignty. I actually think that capture of the system by the few through elections is completely undermining popular sovereignty. And that’s why this simulation claim that Dryzek talks about to me is fundamental for citizens assemblies. That in an ideal democracy, every person would go through a process of informed deliberation, with diverse people confronting them and come to a decision. Not everyone can do that. How do we do that? According to Dryzek, we simulate that through a deliberate mini-public. I completely agree Sonia, that there are many practical faults in how we actually access those people. We are experimenting with door knocking on people’s house and say, ‘you’ve got this invitation, you’ve been selected, can we convince you to participate?’ To try to reach those really hard to reach people. Of course, in terms of homeless people, etcetera, that still doesn’t satisfy those things. I really welcome this discussion about accountability. But I really don’t like comments like zero accountability or that elected people have sort of absolute accountability. I think it’s far more nuanced.

Acknowledgements

This transcript was edited by Matthew Harris from the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra.

About the panellists