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In governance, sortition is the selection of public officials or jurors at random, i.e. by lottery, in order to obtain a representative sample. [1] [2] [3] [4]
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. [5] [6] Sortition is often classified as a method for both direct democracy and deliberative 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, [7] [8] along with calls for making sortition more consequential than elections, as it was in Athens, Venice, and Florence. [9] [10] [11] [12]
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 [13] [ page needed ] of the magistrates for their governing committees, and for their juries (typically of 501 men).
Most Athenians believed sortition, not elections, to be democratic [13] [ page needed ] 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. Most Greek writers who mention democracy (including Aristotle, [13] [ page needed ] [Note 1] [Note 2] Plato, [Note 3] Herodotus, [Note 4] and Pericles [Note 5] ) emphasize the role of selection by lot, or state outright that being allotted is more democratic than elections (which were seen as oligarchic). Socrates [Note 6] and Isocrates [Note 7] however questioned whether randomly-selected decision-makers had enough expertise.
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. [14] [ page needed ] 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. [15]
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 ensure citizenship and consider life, character, and at times, property; capacity for a post was assumed. Rarely were selected citizens discarded. [14] [ page needed ] 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.[ citation needed ] 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 due to widely (and randomly) distributed power combined with checks-and-balances. [16] Furthermore, power did not tend to go to those who sought it. The Athenians used an intricate machine, a kleroterion, to allot officers. Headlam found the Athenians largely trusted the system of random selection, regarding it as the most natural and the simplest way of appointment. [17] While sortition was used for most positions, elections were sometimes used for positions like for military commanders (strategos). [18]
The brevia was used in the city states of Lombardy during the 12th and 13th centuries and in Venice until the late 18th century. [19] 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. [14] [ page needed ] 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. [20]
Scrutiny was used in Florence for over a century starting in 1328. [19] 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. [14] [ page needed ] 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 an increase in aristocratic power. [21]
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's book The Spirit of Laws provides one of the most cited discussions of the concept in Enlightenment political writing. In which, he argues sortition is natural to democracy, just as elections are to aristocracy. [22] He echoes the philosophy of much earlier thinkers such as Aristotle, who found elections as aristocratic. [14] [ page needed ] Montesquieu caveats his support by saying that there should also be some mechanisms to ensure the pool of selection is competent and not corrupt. [23] Rousseau also found that a mixed model of sortition and election provided a healthier path for democracy than one or the other. [24] Harrington, also found the Venetian model of sortition compelling, recommending it for his ideal republic of Oceana. [25] Edmund Burke, in contrast, worried that those randomly selected to serve would be less effective and productive than self-selected politicians. [26] [Note 8]
Bernard Manin, a French political theorist, was astonished to find so little consideration of sortition in the early years of representative government. He wonders if perhaps the choosing of rulers by lot may have been viewed as impractical on such a large scale as the modern state, or if elections were thought to give greater political consent than sortition. [14] [ page needed ]
However, David Van Reybrouck disagrees with Manin's theories on the lack of consideration of sortition. He suggests that the relatively limited knowledge about Athenian democracy played a major role, with the first thorough examination coming only in 1891 with Election by Lot at Athens. He also argues that 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, [27] citing commentators of 18th century France and the United States suggesting that they simply dislodged a hereditary aristocracy to replace it with an elected aristocracy. [28]
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. [29]
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.
David Chaum proposed selecting a random sample of eligible voters to study and vote on a public policy, [30] [31] while Deliberative opinion polling invites a random sample to deliberate together before voting on a policy. [30]
Andranik Tangian critiques electoral politics as over-representing politically active people and groups in a society. [32] [18] Cognitive diversity (or wisdom of the crowd) utilizes a variety of perspectives and cognitive skills to find better solutions. [33] According to numerous scholars such as Page and Landemore, [34] this diversity is more important to creating successful ideas than the average ability level of a group. Page argues that random selection of persons of average intelligence perform better than a collection of the best individual problem solvers. [35] This "diversity trumps ability theorem" [36] is central to the arguments for sortition. [34]
Some argue that randomly-allocating decision-making is more efficient than representative democracy through elections. [37] [38] John Burnheim critiques representative democracy as requiring citizens to vote for a large package of policies and preferences bundled together in one representative or party, much of which a voter might not want. He argues that this does not translate voter preferences as well as sortition, where a group of people have the time and the ability to focus on a single issue. [39] By allowing decision-makers to focus on positive-sum endeavors rather than zero-sum elections, it could help to lessen political polarization [38] [40] and the influence of money and interest-groups in politics. [28] Some studies show an overrepresentation of psychopathic and narcissistic traits in elected officials, which can be solved through sortition by not selecting for people who seek power. [41] [42]
Burnheim also notes the importance of legitimacy for the effectiveness of the practice. [43] 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. [44] 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. [45] [46] To bolster legitimacy, other sortition bodies have been used and proposed to set the rules to improve accountability without the need for elections. [47] 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 [48] (this work is consistent with a 2010 paper on how the adoption of random strategies can improve the efficiency of hierarchical organizations [49] ). [50]
As participants grow in competence by contributing to deliberation, they also become more engaged and interested in civic affairs. [51] Most societies have some type of citizenship education, but sortition-based committees allow ordinary people to develop their own democratic capacities through direct participation. [52]
Sortition is most commonly used to form deliberative mini-publics like citizens' assemblies (or the smaller citizen juries). [53] The OECD has counted almost 600 examples of citizens' assemblies with members selected by lottery for public decision making. [2]
Sortition is commonly used in selecting juries in Anglo-Saxon [54] 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.
Sortition is also used in military conscription, as one method of awarding US green cards, and in placing students into some schools, university classes, and university residences. [55] [56]
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 other large membership organizations whose members generally do not know many other members yet seek to run their organization democratically often find elections problematic. [57] [58] Examples include the Samaritan Ministries Health Plan using a panel of 13 randomly selected members to resolve select disputes [59] and the New Zealand Health Research council awarding funding at random to applicants considered equally qualified. [60]
A citizens' assembly is a group of people selected by lottery from the general population to deliberate on important public questions so as to exert an influence. [61] [62] [63] Other types of deliberative mini-publics include citizens' jury, citizens' panel, people's panel, people's jury, policy jury, consensus conference and citizens' convention. [64] [65] [66] [67]
A citizens' assembly uses elements of a jury to create public policy. [68] Its members form a representative cross-section of the public, and are provided with time, resources and a broad range of viewpoints to learn deeply about an issue. Through skilled facilitation, the assembly members weigh trade-offs and work to find common ground on a shared set of recommendations. Citizens' assemblies can be more representative and deliberative than public engagement, polls, legislatures or ballot initiatives. [69] [70] They seek quality of participation over quantity. They also have added advantages in issues where politicians have a conflict of interest, such as initiatives that will not show benefits before the next election or decisions that impact the types of income politicians can receive. They also are particularly well-suited to complex issues with trade-offs and values-driven dilemmas. [71]
With Athenian democracy as the most famous government to use sortition, theorists and politicians have used citizens' assemblies and other forms of deliberative democracy in a variety of modern contexts. [72] [73] As of 2023, the OECD has found their use increasing since 2010. [74] [75]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. [76] Claudia Chwalisz has also advocated for using citizens' assemblies selected by sortition to inform policymaking on an ongoing basis. [77] [78] [79] [80]
John Burnheim envisioned a political system in which many small citizens' juries would deliberate and make decisions about public policies. [83] His proposal included the dissolution of the state and of bureaucracies. The term demarchy was coined by Burnheim and is now sometimes used to refer to any political system in which sortition plays a central role. [84] [85] While Burnheim preferred using only volunteers, [86] 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. [87] 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, citizens' committees chosen by lot (or partially chosen by lot) should make major decisions. [88]
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. [89] A number of proposals for an entire legislative body to be chosen by sortition have been made for the United States, [90] Canada, [91] [92] the United Kingdom, [93] [94] Denmark, [95] and France. [96] [97]
Étienne Chouard advocates strongly that those seeking power (elected officials) should not write the rules, making sortition the best choice for creating constitutions and other rules around the allocation of power within a democracy. [98] He and others propose replacing elections with bodies that use sortition to decide on key issues. [99] [100] [26]
Simon Threlkeld proposed a wide range of public officials be chosen by randomly sampled juries, rather than by politicians or popular election. [101]
An election is a formal group decision-making process by which a population chooses an individual or multiple individuals to hold public office.
Randomization is a statistical process in which a random mechanism is employed to select a sample from a population or assign subjects to different groups. The process is crucial in ensuring the random allocation of experimental units or treatment protocols, thereby minimizing selection bias and enhancing the statistical validity. It facilitates the objective comparison of treatment effects in experimental design, as it equates groups statistically by balancing both known and unknown factors at the outset of the study. In statistical terms, it underpins the principle of probabilistic equivalence among groups, allowing for the unbiased estimation of treatment effects and the generalizability of conclusions drawn from sample data to the broader population.
Direct democracy or pure democracy is a form of democracy in which the electorate decides on policy initiatives without elected representatives as proxies. This differs from the majority of currently established democracies, which are representative democracies. The theory and practice of direct democracy and participation as its common characteristic constituted the core of the work of many theorists, philosophers, politicians, and social critics, among whom the most important are Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, and G.D.H. Cole.
Deliberative democracy or discursive democracy is a form of democracy in which deliberation is central to decision-making. Deliberative democracy seeks quality over quantity by limiting decision-makers to a smaller but more representative sample of the population that is given the time and resources to focus on one issue.
Participatory democracy, participant democracy, participative democracy, or semi-direct democracy is a form of government in which citizens participate individually and directly in political decisions and policies that affect their lives, rather than through elected representatives. Elements of direct and representative democracy are combined in this model.
John Bernard Burnheim was an Australian philosopher who was Professor of General Philosophy at the University of Sydney.
A deliberative opinion poll, sometimes called a deliberative poll, is a form of opinion poll taken before and after significant deliberation. Professor James S. Fishkin of Stanford University first described the concept in 1988. The typical deliberative opinion poll takes a random, representative sample of citizens and engages them in deliberation on current issues or proposed policy changes through small-group discussions and conversations with competing experts to create more informed and reflective public opinion. Deliberative polls have been run around the world, including recent experiments to conduct discussions virtually in the United States, Hong Kong, Chile, Canada and Japan.
Public consultation, public comment, or simply consultation, is a process by which members of the public are asked for input on public issues. This can occur in public meetings open to all in written form, as well as in deliberative groups. Surveys and deliberative groups can be conducted with self-selected citizens or with statistically representative samples of the population which enables the identification of majority opinion. Its main goals are to improve public involvement and influence, as well as the transparency and efficiency of government projects, laws, or regulations.
A kleroterion was a randomization device used by the Athenian polis during the period of democracy to select citizens to the boule, to most state offices, to the nomothetai, and to court juries.
Criticism of democracy, or debate on democracy and the different aspects of how to implement democracy best have been widely discussed. There are both internal critics and external ones who reject the values promoted by constitutional democracy.
A civic lottery, a popular term for the contemporary use of sortition or allotment, is a lottery-based method for selecting citizens for public service or office. It is based on the premise that citizens in a democracy have both a duty and the desire to serve their society by participating in its governance.
Types of democracy refers to the various governance structures that embody the principles of democracy in some way. Democracy is frequently applied to governments, but may also be applied to other constructs like workplaces, families, community associations, and so forth.
A citizens' assembly is a group of people selected by lottery from the general population to deliberate on important public questions so as to exert an influence. Other types of deliberative mini-publics include citizens' jury, citizens' panel, people's panel, people's jury, policy jury, consensus conference and citizens' convention.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to democracy.
Athenian democracy developed around the 6th century BC in the Greek city-state of Athens, comprising the city of Athens and the surrounding territory of Attica. Although Athens is the most familiar of the democratic city-states in ancient Greece, it was not the only one, nor was it the first; multiple other city-states adopted similar democratic constitutions before Athens. By the late 4th century BC, as many as half of the over one thousand existing Greek cities might have been democracies. Athens practiced a political system of legislation and executive bills. Participation was open to adult, free male citizens Adult male citizens probably constituted no more than 30 percent of the total adult population.
A deliberative referendum is a referendum that increases public deliberation through purposeful institutional design.:557 The term "deliberative referendum" stems from deliberative democracy,:509 which emphasises that "the legitimacy of decisions can be increased if...decisions are preceded by authentic deliberation.":903 Deliberative design features can promote public deliberation prior to and during the referendum vote to increase its actual and perceived legitimacy.:910 Deliberative referendums encourage open-minded and informed reasoning, rather than rigid "pre-formed opinions".:508-512 "[A]fter deliberations, citizens routinely alter their preferences".:910
Hélène Landemore is Professor of Political Science at Yale University. She has a PhD from Harvard University. Her subfield is political theory and she is known for her works on democratic theory.
Oral democracy is a talk-based form of government and political system in which citizens of a determined community have the opportunity to deliberate, through direct oral engagement and mass participation, in the civic and political matters of their community. Additionally, oral democracy represents a form of direct democracy, which has the purpose of empowering citizens by creating open spaces that promote an organized process of discussion, debate, and dialogue that aims to reach consensus and to impact policy decision-making. Political institutions based on this idea of direct democracy seek to decrease the possibilities of state capture from elites by holding them accountable, to encourage civic participation and collective action, and to improve the efficiency and adaptability of development interventions and public policy implementation.
The Global Assembly is a global citizens' assembly consisting of one hundred persons from around the world chosen by sortition to discuss issues facing the world as a whole, starting with climate change. It is a joint initiative of several bodies including the Iswe FoundationArchived 2024-06-06 at the Wayback Machine, Danish Board of Technology, and the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra and has multiple funders including the Scottish Government and the European Climate Foundation and is supported by the United Nations. On 30 October 2021, the Assembly produced the first statement that has any claim to democratically represent the voice of humanity in the form of an interim statement.
A Citizens' Initiative Review (CIR) is a small, relatively representative panel that deliberates on a ballot initiative or referendum to be decided in an upcoming election in order to produce a useful summary for voters.
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