Representative democracies as we know them have many familiar deficiencies. Electoral campaigns and elected representatives are subject to the corrupting influence of money and special-interest groups. Elected representatives are disproportionately drawn from society’s privileged elements. Politicians face strong strategic incentives for manipulation, deception, and viciousness in the campaign process and beyond, which damages the quality of public deliberation and feeds the public’s cynicism, alienation, and sense of disempowerment. Under market capitalism, elected representatives face systemic obstacles to pursuing policies counter to private business interests.
Several potential remedies operate within the existing confines of representative democracy. A few prominent examples include public financing of electoral campaigns and public-interest media, restrictions on private contributions, mandatory participation in elections, and quotas for legislatures. Another remedy recently advocated by a number of writers—namely, sortition, or the selection of representatives by lottery—pushes beyond these confines.1 This would represent a radical departure because, as Bernard Manin rightly observes, the selection of officers by elections has been one of the basic principles of modern representative government since its inception.2
The proposal to select legislators by lot comes in two varieties. The first is to combine elected with sorted legislative representatives, whether within a mixed chamber or—as Gastil and Wright propose—in separate chambers.3 The second approach would eliminate elections entirely and rely exclusively on sortition for selecting legislators.4 My purpose here is to defend proposals like Gastil and Wright’s, not against those who reject sortition outright but against those who would use sortition to replace elections entirely. In particular, I defend combining an elected and a sortition chamber in a bicameral legislature, as Gastil and Wright propose.
The Inherent Limitations of Democratic Elections
I proceed on the normative assumption that representative democracy is justified to the extent that it (1) promotes civil peace by disincentivizing political violence and (2) renders policy satisfactorily responsive to people’s legitimate interests, values, and norms, in part by (3) facilitating people’s political agency in a way that (4) helps resolve conflicting interests and disagreements impartially and (5) treats people as political equals. An exclusively electoral representative democracy fails with respect to three of these criteria. It does not secure an adequate level of responsiveness, nor does it resolve conflicts impartially or treat people as political equals.
Elections are supposed to promote responsiveness via two mechanisms: people can use elections to select representatives they believe are disposed to serve their interests, or they can use elections to sanction representatives they believe have not served their interests (thereby providing forward-looking representatives an incentive to do so).5
Both mechanisms face serious obstacles. The electoral selection mechanism cannot work effectively on the basis of candidates’ promises, for example, because representatives are not bound by those promises. By design, public officials have wide discretion to respond to new information and circumstances.6 Alternatively, voters might judge candidates’ dispositions on the basis of descriptive characteristics or partisan identity—on the assumption that representatives similar to themselves, or from a particular party, are disposed to serve their interests.7 Are elections an effective means for securing descriptive representation? The record suggests not. The overwhelming majority of legislators in representative democracies come from privileged socioeconomic backgrounds. Do people identify with and hence vote for parties that promote their interests? The problem is people often do not form their partisan identity on the basis of informed judgments about parties’ policies.8 This is hardly surprising given the voters’ well-documented ignorance about basic policy questions.9
Widespread voter ignorance also compromises the sanctioning or accountability mechanism. If people are disposed to vote out representatives for having failed to serve their interests, then representatives who anticipate this retrospective sanction have an incentive to serve constituents’ interests. But the mechanism depends on voters discerning the extent to which outcomes causally depend on representatives’ actions or policies. If voters punish or reward representatives because of outcomes for which the latter bear little responsibility, then representatives have little incentive to tailor policies to avoid sanction (because sanctioning will not depend on which policies they adopt). As a result, numerous social scientists have argued that retrospective voting is at best a crude mechanism for securing responsiveness.10
This problem is compounded by the well-known vulnerability of elections to domination and manipulation by the powerful. Winning competitive elections requires resources for political organization, disseminating public opinion, and mobilizing voters. Those who have greater financial resources or social standing consequently enjoy an inherent advantage over those who do not. Hence, in a conflict between haves and have-nots, elections favor the haves. Ignorant voters are especially vulnerable to manipulation because they easily fall prey to incomplete but misleading information, misinformation, and framing effects.11
If representative institutions are responsive to public opinion and societal interests, their responsiveness will be not only crude, but also partial. Elections systematically favor those with the resources to exert greater influence on electoral outcomes.12 The problem is inherent in competitive elections: By incentivizing political agency, competitive elections incentivize powerful interests to shape and influence public opinion and to mobilize voters.13
Competitive elections not only fail to resolve conflicting interests and disagreements in an impartial way, but they also fail to treat people as political equals. Elections can treat people as equals in their status as voters, but elections do not treat them as equals qua candidates. Candidates typically receive votes not on the basis of a status everyone has in common—not as political equals—but on the basis of something for which they are deemed eminent or superior to others. Furthermore, competitive elections inherently favor the wealthy thanks to the costs required to disseminate information and to overcome rivals’ prior eminence or salience. And because voters are free to vote for candidates in a discriminatory fashion (for example, on the basis of descriptive characteristics such as race, class, gender, and so on), not only do different individuals have unequal prospects, but they also do not even have equal opportunity of being elected.14
Pairing Sortition with an Elected Chamber
Sortition, by contrast, can enhance satisfactory responsiveness, help resolve conflicts impartially, and treat people as political equals. It can enhance responsiveness through the selection mechanism: random selection tends to yield an assembly that “mirrors” the population at large. We can expect a descriptively representative assembly to be inclined to make decisions reflecting what the population itself might have decided if it had, like the assembly, informed itself and deliberated about the matter.15 One of the reasons why the membership of a sortition chamber will mirror the population—rather than comprise elites, as in elected assemblies—is precisely because random selection is not susceptible to influence, domination, or manipulation by the powerful. It therefore helps resolve conflicts impartially.16 It treats people as political equals because every candidate has an equal prospect of being selected to office—regardless of social status, resources, and the like.17
A purely sorted legislature, however, would be a recipe for civil war. One of the great merits of selecting representatives via regular elections is that it disincentivizes violence in the face of social conflict. First, elections provide the losing side the prospect of winning power the next time around. Given the tremendous costs of civil war, sociopolitical groups with a reasonable prospect of future electoral success have an incentive to gain power peacefully rather than risk the consequences of resorting to violence.
Second, the losing side’s prospects for future success in a political conflict partly depend on their own agency. Whether they win or lose future elections depends, in part, on what they do between those elections. This provides them with incentives to expend resources to organize politically, build coalitions, influence public opinion, and win over the electorate.
Finally, elections help reveal the balance of power in society. They provide the losing side good evidence that they cannot count on widespread public support should they resort to violence.18
It is true that sortition provides the prospect of future change as well, but it compares less favorably on other counts. Under sortition, the selection of representatives is not tied to any particular political program. Future changes in assembly membership are not sensitive to any exercise of agency on the part of groups, and sortition does not reveal the balance of power in situations of social conflict. With no prospect of seizing power by mobilizing and contesting future elections, social forces opposed to the current legislative agenda would have stronger incentives to choose violence.
Sortition is also not a mechanism for holding representatives accountable to the public. Therefore, it has no inherent link to people’s political agency, as the argument about civil war has already emphasized. The mechanism of accountability provided by elections, unlike sortition, promotes responsiveness—however coarse—through people’s exercise of agency. Facilitating agency has intrinsic as well as instrumental significance,19 and instrumental significance is not confined to preventing civil war. Elected representatives depend on their constituents for reelection; as such, they are compelled to canvass support by responding to constituents’ demands, opinions, and criticisms.20 That the threat of electoral sanction is nonnegligible in securing representatives’ responsiveness is indicated, for example, by higher levels of responsiveness among representatives in competitive districts.21
Given that the threat of sanction is a real possibility, groups in civil society have an incentive to mobilize support via public argumentation, interest articulation, and coalition formation. As Urbinati has argued, the electoral accountability mechanism in representative democracies incentivizes a two-way circulation of public justification, argumentation, and interest articulation between representatives and the public.22 Elections foster a culture of mobilization and contestation—arguably indispensable for the ongoing health of democratic institutions—and help to articulate a range of arguments, policy proposals, and demands from multiple sites in the public sphere.23
By contrast, a pure sortition legislature fails not only as a mechanism of facilitating political agency, but it also fails to properly incentivize public discourses crucial to the epistemic quality of representatives’ deliberations.24 It is one thing for a representative assembly to be open to petitions or to being persuaded at its pleasure, as a sorted chamber—indeed, an enlightened monarch—might be. It is quite another for representatives to be forced on pain of sanction to respond to demands stemming from civil society.
Representative democracy therefore faces a contradictory set of imperatives. On the one hand, the very mechanism that is supposed to disincentivize violence, secure responsiveness, and promote political agency is also responsible for failure with respect to impartiality and political equality. On the other hand, sortition, which furnishes a potential remedy to elections’ shortcomings with respect to responsiveness, impartiality, and equality, fails adequately to promote political agency and to disincentivize civil war. My view is that a bicameral legislature, with one chamber elected and another randomly selected, strikes the right institutional compromise between the values and norms that underlie representative democracy.