John Gastil and Erik Olin Wright present legislature by lot as a real utopia, which would further a long democratic tradition coming from Athens and revitalized by contemporary minipublics at the end of the twentieth century. A number of convincing arguments tend to demonstrate that this is a promising way of democratizing the political system. However, some questions should be raised. What kind of democracy is at stake—deliberative democracy, as most of the proponents of minipublics advocate? Radical democracy, as induced by the frequent reference to Athens? A mix between both—or even something quite different? What is the specific value of sortition? Although defending a mixed constitution and a complex vision of democracy,1 Aristotle famously wrote, “It is considered democratic that offices should be filled by lot, and oligarchic that they should be elective.”2 Jacques Rancière goes in the same direction when he writes, “The scandal of democracy, and of the drawing of lots which is its essence, is to reveal […] that the government of societies cannot but rest in the last resort on its own contingency.”3 The political scientist Bernard Manin, in his seminal book on representative government, seems to share the same idea.4 I advocate for a much more complex narrative. The idea that sortition in politics has sustained a transhistorical democratic logic is more a myth than a historical fact, as political sortition has been used in quite different functions in history.5
I will defend four claims, two historical and two normative ones. The first historical claim, which will be central in my argument, is that when analyzing the experiments that have taken place in the last decades, two waves have to be differentiated, based on partly different concrete devices, embodying different social dynamics and pointing toward different kinds of democracy. To a large extent, the rationale of political sortition has changed from the first wave to the second one. The second historical claim is that the rationale of the first wave of democratic innovations based on randomly selected minipublics largely differs from the dynamic of political sortition in Athens, as it embodies a logic of deliberative democracy rather than a logic of self-government and radical democracy. Conversely, the second wave is more differentiated and more compatible with a neo-Athenian perspective, and empowered sortition processes that have emerged during the second wave better capture the spirit of radical Athenian democratic traditions than do consultative minipublics. My third claim is normative: these empowered sortition processes are promising for a real democratization of democracy. My last claim is that any proposal of a legislature by lot has to rely on this lesson when trying to defend a normatively convincing and politically realistic perspective.
In what follows, I will take a critical approach, which studies real democratic experiments (historical and present) to better understand the normative and political claims that come from society, rather than trying to assert pure philosophical principles. I will first describe the initial wave of experiments—composed by deliberative pools, citizen juries, and consensus conferences—that have used sortition in politics at the end of the twentieth century. These experiments have been mostly top-down consultative minipublics. They have complemented representative democracy with deliberative democracy, and the latter has been differentiated from, or opposed to, radical democracy and social movements. These devices have been akin to what Europeans call “protected designations of origin” (PDO): carefully designed, closely monitored, and often patented by their inventors. I will briefly oppose this logic of deliberative democracy based upon randomly selected minipublics to the logic of radical democracy and self-rule that characterized Athens.
In the second part, I will present the second wave of experiments. It has been much more plural than the first one. From citizen assemblies to the Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review, from the Students’ Association of Lausanne University to a left-wing political party in Mexico, and from the use of sortition between 2011 and 2016 by Occupy-like social movements such as the Syntagma Square in Greece, the anti-austerity 15-M in Spain, and the Nuit Debout in France to French president Emmanuel Macron’s political movement (En Marche), the devices have been hybridized and inventive, offering spaces for creative imagination to both practitioners and theoreticians. Most of them have been directly linked to some real decision-making and may therefore be analyzed as empowered processes. They have been coupled to representative government but also to direct democracy and to grassroots democracy. They often have articulated deliberative democracy with radical democracy.
In the third and conclusive part, drawing the conclusions of my analysis of the two waves of sortition experiments, I will develop my normative claims and explain why legislature by lot can be a crucial dimension for a radical democratization of democracy.
The First Wave of Modern Political Sortition: Deliberative Minipublics
Over the last two decades, tools that bring selection by lot back into politics, such as citizen juries, consensus conferences, and deliberative polls, have spread to other countries and resulted in many new experiences. Thousands of citizen juries have been held around the world.6 Between 150 and several hundred consensus conferences have been held, nearly half of them in Denmark.7 Dozens of deliberative polls have been conducted in the United States and around the world.8
Citizen Juries, Deliberative Polls, and Consensus Conferences
These trends can be understood only in relation to the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s and a broader push for democratic change. The ideas of participatory democracy or self-management began to inspire activists, finding an echo in the academic world. These themes built on old arguments about the elitist character of representative democracy and sounded the charge against the existing political system. However, random selection came to public attention only gradually. Its advocates were concerned with giving institutional expression to the critique of representative democracy but took a distance from radical left-wing tendencies that were modeled on the workers’ councils of 1905–20. Sortition appealed to ordinary citizens, and its attraction increased as the fascination for vanguards began to wane. The title of one of the first volumes to defend the idea of broadly using selection by lot in politics, After the Revolution?, is thus quite revealing.9
The idea of selecting a small group of citizens to deliberate within a regulated procedural framework also ran counter to some of the grassroots-democracy ideologies of the 1970s, which saw the general assembly as the highest embodiment of democracy. In this sense, deliberative polls, citizen juries, and consensus conferences are all part and parcel of a “deliberative turn” in participatory practices, as greater attention is being paid to the quality of debates and to the institutional tools that allow people to have their say on a balanced and egalitarian basis.
The idea of random selection in politics reemerged separately in Germany, where Peter Dienel argued in 1969 for “planning cells” (Planungszellen), the first ones being tested out in the winter of 1972–3, and in the United States, where Ned Crosby created a similar structure in 1971 that he called the “citizens’ jury.”10 In 1988, James Fishkin invented “deliberative polling” and in 1994 experimented with it for the first time in Britain. All three of these men were political or social scientists, and because they had no initial support from a movement, party, or institution, all three endeavored to found an institution that would disseminate, or indeed, commercialize the concept. All three moved quickly to patent it, even if Ned Crosby continued to work from a more activist perspective. Independently of these experiments, the Teknologiradet (Danish Board of Technology) decided in 1987 to open up consensus conferences to “lay” citizens, after a period during which they had been used in medical circles in the United States. Only in the late 1990s did political and academic figures begin to consider the consensus conference, the citizen jury, and deliberative polling as largely convergent procedures, and the first moves were made to produce both conceptual and empirical hybrids.
Meanwhile, whereas the earliest conceptual justifications of random selection in politics had been closely tied to an experimental urge, a more theoretical process of reflection began to gather steam. From the 1990s on, three fast-developing currents independently helped to give theoretical nobility to these procedures, at first indirectly and then in more direct ways. One of these currents has based itself on the work of John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas to theorize the practice of deliberative democracy in politics.11 The work and action of James Fishkin has been important to link deliberative democracy (whose main authors initially did not speak about random selection) and sortition.12 The other trend of literature, central for consensus conferences, has concentrated on the vast realm of “technical democracy,” drawing theoretically on the social history of the sciences.13 On a less massive scale, a few books and articles that defend or indirectly legitimize the reintroduction of random selection in politics helped to further awaken interest in the subject, especially in English-speaking and French-speaking countries.14
Eight Common Features
Beyond their differences, eight features characterize these devices of the “first wave”:
1. They constitute minipublics—that is, randomly selected representative samples, or at least a “fair cross-section of the community.”15 Most often, they are composed through some kind of stratified random selection in order to increase their representativeness.
2. Most of these experiments are top-down. Those who organize them are public authorities, or in some cases foundations, in collaboration with social scientists. They are not linked to social movements. They can even be opposed to grassroots democracy.
3. These devices have been what Europeans call “protected designations of origin” (PDO): carefully designed, closely monitored, and often patented by their inventors. They function well and are highly interesting for a scientific analysis of the ordinary deliberation between lay citizens. The dark side of the protected designations of origin is that the political imagination of actors remains limited and the diffusion hindered.
4. Most of these devices have been one-shot events. The number of institutions that have organized such minipublics several times is quite reduced compared to those that have organized them once or twice. The main exception is the Teknologiradet (Danish Board of Technology) and its citizen conferences. But even in this case, the minipublic has not become part of the “constitution.”
5. Random sortition is linked to a high-quality deliberation. The minipublic is a place where a high-quality deliberation can take place, with carefully balanced briefing materials, with intensive discussions in small groups and in general assembly, with facilitators helping an equal and inclusive discussion, and with the chance to question competing experts and politicians.
6. Most of these devices are only consultative. They give a recommendation to public authorities or provide them a counterfactual enlightened public opinion. They complement representative democracy. The aim is not to make decisions, but to improve the decision-making process with a device that enables a sophisticated deliberation among lay citizens. The minipublics allow us to know “what the public would think, had it a better opportunity to consider the questions at issue.”16
7. The minipublics are not embedded in everyday social and political relations. Citizens have no link with each other. Nor are they organized or mobilized. They discuss in an artificial institution.
8. These devices are concrete embodiments of deliberative democracy. In most books of political theory, deliberative democracy is differentiated or even opposed to participatory democracy.
The Contrast with Athens: Representative Sample Versus Self-Government of the People
The supporters of citizen juries, deliberative polls, and consensus conferences generally consider that civic participation in politics is crucial for the good health of our political system. Even if we bracket the obvious and important differences in the social, political, economic, and institutional contexts of modern democracies on the one hand, and those of ancient Athens on the other, is it enough to diagnose a partial resurgence of the ideal of Athenian radical democracy?
The close link between sortition and democracy in Athens is well known. Athens had a mixed system of aristocratic and democratic elements, and sortition was crucial for the second dimension. Each citizen could stand for selection by lot. This operated in four major types of institutions. First, it served for the yearly constitution of the boule, the main council of Athenian democracy. Second, most of the magistracies were filled by random selection.17 Third, a sort of supreme court called the nomothetai was selected by lot in the fourth century. Finally, all the judges were selected by lot. Citizenship entailed the unalienable right to participate in the assembly and to become a juror, and selection by lot became a routine activity.18 The kleroterion, the allotment “machine” most likely mentioned by Aristophanes as early as 393 BC,19 made the procedure quicker and more straightforward, while simultaneously protecting it from any attempts at manipulation.
In Athens, however, the link between random sortition and deliberation was complex. On the one hand, the Greeks theorized a form of public debate that would involve all citizens. Nevertheless, the concrete dynamic of deliberation was differentiated according to the institutions. In the people’s assembly, an essentially contradictory debate unfolded, wherein orators attempted to convince the audience: a practice conceptualized by Aristotle as rhetoric.20 Nonetheless, the public could actively express their feelings by speaking loudly. The practices of the boule were doubtless more interactive, whereas one-on-one political discussions took place in the various public spaces of the agora. In the courts, by contrast, juries were required to form their opinions by listening to the various parties but without deliberating, as all discussion among jury members was prohibited.
The coupling of rotation of the functions of power with selection by lot became a highly rational procedure that was particularly effective in warding off the professionalization of political activity and the monopolization of power by experts in a realm cut off from the citizenry. Of course, the Athenian city-state excluded women and slaves from political life and used its strength to subjugate allied cities. Within those and other important limitations, however, the Athenian way of life revolved around political activity, and citizens participated on a highly egalitarian basis in comparison with other systems known to history. Nearly 70 percent of citizens aged over thirty were bouletai at least once during their lifetimes,21 and a still higher proportion were called upon to be jurors. These institutions functioned as schools of democracy in a society with a developed civic culture where face-to-face contact made mutual checking easy to achieve. Within the relatively narrow circle of citizens, power was largely exercised by the people.
A crucial difference opposes Athens’s use of sortition and contemporary practices: the representative sample.22 In Athens, sortition and the rapid rotation of offices enabled citizens to govern and be governed in turn. This is why, in classical political thought, random selection has been associated with democracy and elections with aristocracy. Compared to present representative democracy, Athens embodied an example of radical democracy. The contemporary use of random selection is quite different. The real likelihood of being selected for a citizen jury, a deliberative pool, or a consensus conference is very low. The idea is to use sortition to select a microcosm of the citizenry, a group that has the same features and the same diversity as the citizenry, but on a smaller scale. A group of hundreds of randomly selected citizens tends to be statistically a representative sample of the citizenry as a whole. A smaller group of twelve to twenty-five persons cannot be truly representative, but this “fair cross-section of the community” incorporates some of the people’s diversity. Both types of panels embody a specific kind of descriptive representation.
The notion of representative sample is familiar to twenty-first-century readers thanks to decades of its intensive use in statistics and opinion polls. This is why it seems “quite rational to see lotteries as a means to the end of descriptive representation.”23 However, the representative sample is a late nineteenth-century invention. It was first introduced in politics with the opinion polls in the 1930s; it became an instrument for selecting trial juries only at the end of the 1960s24 and the political minipublics in the 1970s. There could be no relation between random selection and descriptive representation in Athens, as the idea that random selection statistically leads to a cross section of the population was not scientifically available at the time. Chance had not yet been scientifically “tamed.”25 Descriptive representation was important during the age of the French and North American revolutions. Mirabeau argued that the assembly should be “for the nation what a scaled-down map is for its physical area; whether in part or in full, the copy should always have the same proportions as the original.”26 But because it was impossible to rely on the notion of a representative sample, promoters of descriptive representation ignored sortition and put forward other technical solutions. Mirabeau suggested the separate representation of different social groups through what we today could call corporatist methods. The anti-Federalists proposed small constituencies.27
Bernard Manin was the first to wonder why selection by lot disappeared from the political scene along with the modern revolutions.28 He gave a two-part answer. On the one hand, the founding fathers of the modern republics wanted an elective aristocracy rather than a democracy, and so it was logical that they should reject random selection. On the other hand, the theory of consent, deeply rooted in modern conceptions of natural law, had gained so much ground that it seemed difficult to legitimize any political authority not formally approved by the state’s citizens. These two arguments are important, but they do not tell the whole story. In particular, they fail to explain why radical minorities did not demand the use of selection by lot in politics, even though they campaigned for descriptive representation.
To understand these developments, one has to point to a number of other factors. We have to abandon the realm of “pure” political ideas and look at the way in which they take material shape through governance techniques and various tools and mechanisms. The lack of a statistical concept of representative sampling at the time of the French and American Revolutions, when probability and statistics were already well established but not melted together, was a crucial reason why legislation by lot seemed doomed in modern democracies—as well as why those who upheld a descriptive conception of representation inevitably had to select other tools to advance their ideals. The sheer demographic and territorial size of modern republics seemed to forbid any serious consideration of political lotteries, since it could not allow all citizens to govern and be governed in turn.
Conversely, the present comeback of random selection is also related to representative sampling. Random selection as it is practiced in politics today is inseparably bound up with that concept. In modern democracy, the deliberation of a fair cross-section of the people is not the same as the people’s self-government. It gives anybody the same chance to be selected, but because this chance is very small, it does not allow all citizens to hold public office in turn. It leads instead to a minipublic, a counterfactual opinion that is representative of what the larger public opinion could think. John Adams wrote that the microcosmic representation he was arguing for “should think, feel, reason, and act” like the people. For contemporary deliberative democrats, the statistical similarity between “descriptive” representatives and the people is only a starting point. The minipublic has to deliberate, and during this process, it changes its mind. It begins to think somehow differently, and this is precisely the added value of deliberation.29
The Second Wave: Liberating Democratic Imagination
The inventors of the first wave of deliberative minipublics had hoped that these techniques would soon or eventually come into general use, but up to now they have had no standardized application on a large scale. This, according to Hans-Liudger Dienel, the leading expert on citizen juries in Germany, is partly due to the fact of the promoters’ concern to preserve the “purity” and seriousness of procedures: “I wonder whether the protagonists of deliberative democracy, with their societal approach, with their academic and ideological culture, might be a major obstacle for mass application of citizens juries and other direct deliberative instruments. Do they, do we, really want to leave the niche and join new coalitions to see mass application of deliberative democratic tools?”30
Another reason was the position of those who wanted to promote participatory democracy in politics and in the academy. They were more interested in other mechanisms and processes, such as Latin American participatory budgeting, which were bound up with the social mobilization of subaltern classes or challenges to the existing order. Although advocates of participatory democracy have been attentive to the deliberative quality of new participatory procedures, they have thought of them mainly as instruments in the service of social change; they initially ignored or had a rather skeptical attitude toward mechanisms based on random selection, since by their very nature they give little scope for citizen mobilization and are mainly introduced top-down.31
This situation has changed with a second wave of experiments relying on political sortition. This second wave has not replaced the first one: some of the experiments of the former began very early, and the three “classical” devices of the latter are still experimented. In addition, the second wave has taken advantage of the achievements and lessons of the first one: the techniques for organizing a good deliberation among lay citizens; the demonstration that these lay citizens can enter reasonable deliberation when organized in such conditions; the values of impartiality, epistemic diversity, and democracy attached to political sortition; the increasing public legitimacy of this particular kind of democratic innovation; and so forth. Last but not least, some of the promoters of the first wave have also been very active in the second one. However, the second wave has much broadened the panorama. The numbers have increased and the types of experiments have diversified. Four main streams can be differentiated.
Randomly Selected Minipublics and Direct Democracy
The first direction of innovation tends to couple deliberative democracy, embodied by minipublics selected by lot, and direct democracy. Citizen assemblies are the most well-known examples of this trend. The first experiment was the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly (2004), followed by the Ontario experiment the year after. British Columbia became a source of inspiration for other regions. In November 2009, Iceland was profoundly shaken by the financial crisis. Huge social movements imposed new elections and a new deal between business and unions. A citizens’ assembly of 950 randomly selected individuals and a few hundred qualified persons was created. The assembly was tasked with identifying the most important points for constitutional reform. Iceland repeated the process with a new assembly, this time entirely selected by lot, before using universal suffrage to elect a kind of jury from among the population, composed of twenty-five ordinary citizens responsible for elaborating a new fundamental law based on the material produced by the previous assembly. This process has led to a dead end due to the opposition of the new ruling parties.
Another experiment, in Ireland, has been more successful. Following an initiative launched by an NGO movement, a citizens’ assembly of 100 individuals met in June 2011. Calling itself the Citizen Parliament, the group sought to make suggestions for constitutional reform. It was met with significant response in the media. After the 2011 election, the new government accepted the idea supported by the majority of the different parties and organized a constitutional convention, sixty-seven of whose one hundred members were ordinary citizens randomly selected from the electoral register. The others were politicians, in order to avoid the negative pushback from political parties that had made the adoption of the proposals coming from the citizens’ assemblies in British Columbia and Ontario more difficult. From the work of the convention emerged the proposal to legalize same-sex marriage, which was ultimately validated by a referendum in May 2015. One of the most ambitious attempts to combine deliberative and direct democracy was thus ultimately a great success.32 The process was repeated in 2017 and 2018 with new issues and a constituent committee entirely selected by lot, leading to a constitutional amendment legalizing abortion approved by 66 percent of voters in May 2018. Other examples have been organized bottom-up, the most well known being the G1000 in Belgium.33
In Oregon, one of the most interesting experiments with citizen juries has been conducted, called the Citizens’ Initiative Review. Following a grassroots movement calling for deliberative democracy to be reconciled with the existing forms of direct democracy,34 and benefiting from the expertise of Ned Crosby, the inventor of citizen juries, members of government from both sides of the aisle decided to institutionalize the use of randomly selected citizen panels. The Citizens’ Initiative Review was officially adopted in 2011. Its principle is the following: once a collection of signatures meets with success but before voting takes place, a panel of citizen voters is organized to debate and evaluate the ballot measure in question. The panel’s decision is then shared with citizens, as well as the informational material distributed (opinions from both an initiative’s supporters and opponents).
With this kind of procedure, deliberative democracy does not short-circuit direct democracy but rather increases its rational component. Moreover, it should be noted that at the end of deliberations, the panels are forced to elaborate a majority position, rather than find consensus. The proposals submitted to the citizen panel and the popular vote have addressed mandatory minimum sentencing, legalizing medical marijuana dispensaries, corporate tax reform, and more. The evaluations that the procedure has received have been largely positive: overall, the quality of its deliberations has been touted,35 and the impact of the review panel’s opinions on voting outcomes has been non-negligible.36
Randomly Selected Minipublics and Participatory Democracy
A second trend of innovations make use of randomly selected minipublics within larger participatory dynamics. Randomly selected minipublics have been combined with participatory budgeting. The citizen juries of Berlin, organized between 2001 and 2003, were one of the most interesting examples, where Peter Dienel’s planning cells have been hybridized in an interesting way (Peter Dienel himself was not satisfied with this innovation). In each of the capital’s seventeen districts federally targeted for urban renewal, a sum of five hundred thousand euros was made freely available to a group of inhabitants for the support of local projects. They were composed half of people selected by lot from the list of residents, and half of citizens organized or active in their local area. They were given decision-making powers, and the local authority endeavored to follow their advice to the limits of its jurisdiction and the legislation then in force.37 The random method has also been used in the participatory budgets of other German and Spanish cities and in Pont-de-Claix, France, during the period of 2001–8.38 Since 2005, and with moderate success, the Chinese borough of Zeguo has even mixed the participatory budgeting taking place in the city of Wenling (an eastern Chinese city with a population of over one million inhabitants) with a version of the deliberative polls.39 Later, a quota was established to allow for the overrepresentation of entrepreneurs, so that this social class, important for local economic development, could wield more influence than its demographic weight would otherwise allow.
Randomly Selected Permanent Councils Within Institutions and Associations
Democratic imagination has been so prolific that it is in fact impossible to describe all of the different forms taken by the contemporary political use of random selection. Nonetheless, some important examples of a third trend-making use of random selection in order to establish permanent councils within institutions or associations should be mentioned.
Following a cooperation with James Fishkin’s Center for Deliberative Democracy at Stanford University, Mongolia passed a law in 2017 that makes it compulsory to organize a deliberative poll before any constitutional amendment. On April 2017, the Mongolian Parliament did just that when it brought together 669 randomly selected citizens from across the country to Ulaanbaatar for the first-ever national deliberative poll on the future of the Mongolian constitution. Although negatively affected by a number of procedural defects,40 this initiative could launch a new era of institutionalization at the national level for one of the most well-known minipublics.
A more bottom-up and original initiative took place in Switzerland. The Federation of Student Associations of the University of Lausanne, which enjoys institutional recognition and plays a significant role in the university’s operations, is organized around a statutory assembly composed half of representatives from student school associations and half of representatives supposed to speak on behalf of the federation as a whole. Until 2011, the latter were elected. Lists were drafted by the youth chapters of the various political parties on campus, and their debates were not aligned with those of the student school associations representatives, who were more likely to discuss the everyday problems of students than issues of partisan politics. In 2012, it was therefore decided that federation representatives would be randomly selected. Several variations were tried out, but the general principle remained that a lottery would be organized among students who voluntarily presented themselves. The first evaluations to emerge show that discussions within the federation have become more peaceful and more constructive, but the presence of less politically informed students simultaneously strengthens the influence of the bureau, composed of more politicized volunteers who henceforth have no true political counterweight within the federation.41
On a broader scale, in 1969 the French military welcomed the Conseil Supérieur de la Fonction Militaire, whose delegates are randomly selected following quotas that correspond to the various military corps. The council was design to create a consultative body that allowed soldiers to express their requests while avoiding any kind of politicization or union activity, both of which are legally prohibited in France within the armed forces. Since then, the designation procedure has been modified numerous times. In 2015, it was based on a combination of random selection from a group of volunteers (first step), followed by an election within this group (second step). The Conseil Supérieur de la Fonction Militaire is viewed as highly legitimate within the French armed forces and is a powerful interlocutor for the minister—much more powerful than its police equivalent, elected from trade union lists. In this case, random selection has helped to forge a representative body, to level the playing field between representatives of different ranks, and to encourage discussions oriented toward the general well-being of soldiers. As the representatives do not enjoy any sort of individual legitimacy or power by virtue of being randomly selected, they tend to encourage a form of collective “legitimacy of humility” based on their impartiality and the quality of their deliberations.42
A number of other examples exist worldwide. In France, for example, since the middle of the 2010s, randomly selected citizens’ councils are compulsory in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods, and Paris’s youth council is also selected by lot. Both citizens’ councils and Paris’s youth council are advisory, but they are included in the law or at least official rules and are not mere one-shot events depending on the goodwill of the majority. However, in the absence of grassroots social movements that would push in favor of empowered minipublics and verify whether they are well organized (and whether their recommendations produce real changes in public policies), the impact of such institutionalized randomly selected bodies may still be reduced.
Random Selection in Party Politics
A last trend makes use of sortition in order to select new kinds of representatives, instead of a minipublic. A series of experiments have used random selection in order to select party candidates in the frame of competitive party elections. A first experiment, inspired by the procedure of the deliberative poll, took place in 2006 in Marousi, a medium-sized town in the suburbs of Athens. One hundred thirty-one randomly chosen local citizens voted for who should be the mayoral candidate of PASOK, a Greek socialist party.43 At the beginning of 2010, the local Metz chapter of the French Greens randomly selected its candidates for local and legislative elections.44
It is ultimately in Mexico that the most ambitious form of random selection has been used to choose candidates for an election. The procedure was intensely discussed for several years in academic circles but also in politics. It was then proposed by the Movimiento Regeneración Nacional (MORENA), the party of the former left-wing presidential candidate Manuel López Obrador and one of the opposition’s main political organizations.45 MORENA decided to select two-thirds of its candidates for the legislative election on June 7, 2015, by using a combination of election and lottery (the other third was reserved for external candidates who were not members of the party). In each electoral district, party supporters met in assemblies to elect ten individuals (five men and five women) from which the candidates were in turn selected using a giant lottery system. This experiment has already had a significant impact throughout Latin America’s second-largest country, allowing outsiders who would never have been selected to become candidates and, in a number of cases, members of the new parliament. In July, 2018, Obrador was elected president, while MORENA, using the same system, won a majority of seats in both the parliament and the Senate.
This mix of sortition and elections recalls how a lot of electoral processes took place during the Middle Age and early modern period in Italian and other European communes and at the beginning of the nineteenth century in Mexico. Conversely, there is no historical precedent for another innovation that introduced random selection in order to select members of party assemblies or central committees. In Spain, regional sections of the left-wing parties Izquierda Unida and Podemos have also introduced sortition within their internal procedures. In Andalusia, Izquierda Unida has randomly selected 15 percent of the delegates of its 2017 assembly. In Valencia and Murcia, Podemos has randomly selected 17.5 percent of the members of its standing committee, and the procedure should be extended to Baleares and Aragon. In France, 25 percent of the central committee of République en Marche (“Republic get started”), the new French president Macron’s political organization, were randomly selected among members in 2017. The radical left-wing political movement La France Insoumise also used sortition in order to select among the members the twelve hundred delegates to its 2017 national convention, while smaller parties randomly selected their legislative candidates or the members of their standing committees.
Selection by Lot as a Tool for Radical Democracy?
What are the main differences between the first and the second wave of experiments? A very serious challenge of randomly selected minipublics concerns the tension between their deliberation and the wider public sphere.46 By definition, deliberative minipublics aim to reach a counterfactual opinion of what public opinion could be—they are better informed and enjoy a reasonably satisfactory setting in which to be formulated—that may well differ from wider popular opinion. Deliberation and participation may be presented as opposite models of democracy.47 This must not be the case, but some trade-offs are inevitable.48 A majority of deliberative minipublics of the first wave did not have much impact on the wider public sphere, and in the worst-case scenario, the democratic deliberation of a small circle of randomly selected citizens could replace a deliberative democracy including all citizens.49 In such circumstances, deliberative minipublics could be implicated in a kind of elitism, at the antipodes of radical Athenian democracy. This deliberative elitism would argue that the implication of lay citizens in politics could only ever take place within the managed arena of minipublics, other forms of participation being suspected of contributing emotional and nonreasonable elements. The first wave of experiments was also top-down and consultative (and most often, they were only for one-shot experiments). This limited strongly their potential impact on social change. They have been successful in demonstrating the possibility of a reasonable deliberation among lay citizens—but they have not been efficacious in substantially changing the real lives of citizens. Given that their existence has stemmed solely from the willingness of public authorities, it was unlikely that they could really be subversive with regard to power structures and massive injustice.50 Reasonable discussions in modest committees are not enough to impose positive change in a world where the structural resistance of dominant interests is enormous.
Had minipublics not entered the second wave, their legitimacy would have remained weak. We needed these bodies to become more than “just talk.” This happened with the second wave, which has opened the door to more dynamical experiments. Because they have been characterized by hybridizations, the political imagination of practitioners has been liberated. Often, concrete experiments have not been pure examples of deliberative democracy, and deliberation has not been perfect, but a lot of them have been empowered. This is a major difference with the first wave. In addition, random selection has also been advocated within social movements such as 15-M in Spain, Syntagma Square in Greece, and Nuit Debout in France. There are now real grassroots movements that reclaim “real democracy now” and include in this perspective the reintroduction of random selection in politics and even legislature by lot. For many of activists who advocate the coming back of random selection in politics, such as Étienne Chouard in France or David Van Reybrouck in Belgium, the legitimacy of this device has to do with some radical democratic quality it is supposed to have. In some cases, as in Mongolia, the sortition device has been institutionalized, and rulers now have to organize randomly selected minipublics. This could lead to major breakthroughs: in 2006, Ségolène Royal—who was to become the French Socialist Party candidate for the 2007 presidential elections—envisaged “popular scrutiny” of political leaders and a requirement that these should “regularly give an account of themselves to citizen juries selected by lot.”51 She lost the elections but had planned to revise the constitution and introduce sortition in case of success. Also important is the fact that sortition is no more a mere supplement to representative democracy. A number of experiments have coupled deliberative with direct or participatory democracy. It is also striking that random selection has been introduced within party politics in order to make it less elitist but has at the same time been proposed as a new path to democratization in authoritarian contexts: the well-known Chinese intellectual Wang Shaoguang, one of the most prominent figure of the “New Left,” has advocated legislature by lot instead of Western-like elections in order to make China more democratic and its political system more representative.52
According to many of the supporters of these deliberative instruments, the return of sortition in politics, after centuries of eclipse, implies that some of the ideals of ancient democracies are coming back. James Fishkin, who invented the deliberative poll, describes it as a “neo-Athenian solution” and even argues that “the key infirmities in modern democracy can find a constructive response in modern refinements and improvements in the two essential components of the ancient Athenian solution—random sampling and deliberation.”53 I have argued that random sampling was a modern invention, unknown at the time of Pericles, and that the first wave of minipublics could seem at odds with radical democracy. However, relying on the second wave, and especially those cases of empowered experiments, it now seems possible to reclaim the radical democratic imaginary that was coupled with sortition in the Athenian democracy. Table 3 summarizes the main features of political sortition in Athens and in the two waves of contemporary experiments.
Table 3. Comparing political sortition in Athens and in the two waves of contemporary experiments.
Athens |
First wave of experiments |
Second wave of experiments |
|
Main logic of the device |
Everyone takes turns to govern and be governed |
Counterfactual deliberative public opinion |
Various: counterfactual deliberative public opinion, selection of political representatives, of juries with decision-making power, etc. |
Model of democracy |
Radical democracy |
Deliberative democracy complementary to representative democracy |
Deliberative democracy combined with representative, direct, participatory democracy |
Institutions |
Council, tribunal, magistrates |
Minipublics |
Minipublics, representatives |
Where the initiative comes from |
Not applicable |
Top-down |
Top-down and bottom-up |
Relation to first inventors |
Not applicable |
Patented by the inventors |
Hybridized by the practitioners |
Institutionalization |
Full institutionalization |
Quite limited or no institutionalization, the use of sortition depends on the arbitrariness of the public authority |
Various. Complete institutionalization and compulsory use of sortition possible |
Repetition in time |
Permanent institutions |
One-shot |
Various. Repetition possible |
Link to decision-making process |
Binding |
Consultative |
Various: consultative, binding, in between |
Link to deliberation |
Variable |
Consubstantial |
Consubstantial in minipublics, no link for the selection of representatives |
Link to the notion of representative sample |
Inexistent |
Consubstantial |
Mostly consubstantial |
Link to the ordinary social/political life |
Consubstantial |
Disembedded |
Various |
From Minipublics to Legislature by Lot
In Switzerland, starting in 2015, a group of activists called Génération Nomination has been preparing a citizen initiative that would propose to replace the lower chamber with a sortition chamber. Although it will probably not succeed, it shows that legislature by lot is not only a proposal from theoreticians. This was also manifest in France with Nuit Debout, when legislature by lot was considered as a natural and self-evident dimension of democracy. The invention of the welfare state in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was the outcome of quite different actors: the revolutionary labor movement and statesmen such as the German chancellor Bismarck, churches who wanted more solidarity, and businessmen who wanted to sell their products to their workers. The return of random selection in politics could follow a similar path.
As grassroots NGOs and social movements make their voices heard, the perspective of transforming the political system and society becomes more credible, as organized citizens embedded in their social world are necessary to impose real democratic changes. They could encounter theoreticians interested in democratic theory, entrepreneurs or scientists disgusted with corruption and short-term political games, and politicians in search of a new profile. The ancients thought of mixed government as coupling the virtues of democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy. A sortition chamber could become part of a new kind of mixed government that would couple deliberative democracy with direct, participatory, and representative democracy. When linked to social, economic, and ecological changes, this new mix could be understood as part of a radical democratic turn. (For a summary, see table 3.)
However, as contemporary schemes based on random selection rely on representative samples and not upon the self-rule of citizens, legislature by lot should have specific features that differ from Athenian democracy. Gordon Gibson, the creator of British Columbia’s Citizens’ Assembly and former councilor of the prime minister, justified the experiment in the following manner:
We are … adding new elements to both representative and direct democracy. These new elements differ in detail but all share one thing in common. They add to the mix a new set of representatives, different from those we elect … The idea of deliberative democracy is essentially to import the public interest, as represented by random panels, as a muscular third force. The traditional representatives we elect are chosen by majority consensus, for an extended period, as professionals, with unlimited jurisdiction to act in our name. The new kinds we are talking about are chosen at random, for a short period, as lay citizens for specified and limited purposes.54
When widely used for a sortition chamber, in party politics and in social movements, sortition could be even more significant by coupling strong participatory elements to the deliberative ones. It should contribute to the pluralization of the forms of democratic legitimacy.55 Focusing on a sortition chamber and drawing the lessons of the two waves of experiments, I will conclude by highlighting some of its key features.
Randomly selected bodies should be institutionalized: their organization cannot be left to the arbitrariness of rulers. These bodies should be empowered and have a real decision-making power—a counterfactual and merely consultative enlightened public opinion alone will not be able to really change the lives of citizens. There will not be one perfect model that could apply everywhere: democratic innovations are always hybridized and highly influenced by the context and path dependencies.
Legislature by lot empowers a random selection of the people and not the all citizenry; its concrete institutional design should take this crucial feature into account. First of all, experience shows that randomly selected minipublics work much better when they have to focus on a specific issue rather than on general topics. This is why a sortition chamber should take the form proposed by David Owen and Graham Smith in their chapter within this volume, “Sortition, Rotation, and Mandate.” As the Athenian popular courts, the sortition chamber should be a popular body of six thousand citizens, and pools of members will be frequently randomly selected for participation in minipublics working on concrete issues. The six-thousand-citizen body would itself be rotated on a regular basis of one to a few years.
What would be the topics at stake? History shows that selection by lot has had a clear advantage over other forms of selection, including elections, when the imperative of impartiality is high (either because a conflict of interest is probable, such as in the case of an elected chamber reforming the electoral law, or because of massive trade-offs and complex modeling of dynamic systems, such as those involved in long-term environmental policies). In modern democracies, elected officials, experts, and organized interests have a strong tendency to defend particular interests. Conversely, legislature by lot will tend to recruit nonpartisan people without career interests to defend, encouraged by the deliberative procedural rules to reach a judgment tending toward the public interest. In addition, when both representative and direct democratic processes have difficulties representing the values at stake, legislature by lot is a good alternative. This is the case when it comes to dealing with the preservation of the ecosphere and living conditions for future generations. This is why a sortition chamber should have three main tasks: defining the rules of the political game; proposing solutions to highly controversial issues, such as lesbian and gay marriage or abortion in Ireland; and legislating for the long term.56 In order to increase the legitimacy of its most important decisions, it is probable that they should be validated by referendums at large: the coupling of a sortition chamber and direct democracy that has been experimented with several times seems promising.
What would be the legitimacy of the sortition chamber? In addition to its impartiality, its democratic nature will be crucial. As Lyn Carson and Brian Martin put it, “The assumption behind random selection in politics is that just about anyone who wishes to be involved in decision-making is capable of making a useful contribution, and that the fairest way to ensure that everyone has such an opportunity is to give them an equal chance to be involved.”57 The deliberative quality of randomly selected minipublics focusing on specific issues is high and usually much better than that of elected chambers. Deliberation by lay citizens conducted in good conditions leads to reasonable results.
A representative sample or a fair cross-section of the people has epistemological advantages over representative government and committees of wise men: good deliberation must include diverse points of view, so that the range of arguments considered will be broader and discussion will be more inclusive.58 Randomly selected minipublics have the advantage of being socially—and therefore epistemologically—richer than committees of experts or of political leaders but also than publics where participants come purely from volunteers or from already organized civil society. This input is important in a world of increasing complexity.
Last but not least, a specific kind of accountability will be developed in the sortition chamber. It is often claimed that the advantage of election compared to sortition is that elected politicians are accountable to their constituencies, when randomly selected citizens are not. In fact, this is far from evident, and not only because the real accountability of politicians is questionable. Sociological observation of contemporary minipublics clearly shows that citizens who have been randomly selected feel themselves to be strongly accountable. First, to the public authority that initiates the process. Second, to each other: a distinctive feature of the minipublics is that those who are perceived as speaking for particular interests rather than for the common good are quickly marginalized; either they rectify their behavior, which happens in most cases, or their voice does not count anymore. Third, citizens who take part in a minipublic feel accountable to the wider public that they represent. When dealing with the future of the ecosphere, a sortition chamber could bring a clear benefit compared to an elected one: when the latter feels accountable to its electors (and in some cases to the donors who finance the elections), the former would more easily be accountable to future generations, a group that does not exist yet.
It would be naive to think that politics will just continue as usual, with minor changes compared to the previous century. Given the size of the recent financial crisis, the increasingly dire impasse produced by the current production model, and the massive disrepute into which institutional politics has fallen, preserving the status quo is neither realistic nor adequate. Recent experiments show that legislature by lot could be part of a radical democratic renewal and a key element to make such a change sustainable in the long run.