For assistance with the preparation of this book and the September 2017 conference, we thank University of Wisconsin–Madison graduate student researcher Jake Carlson and Penn State undergraduate Ethan Paul. The conference attendees helped refine all of these essays: in addition to the authors in this volume, appreciation goes to Archon Fung from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, Ned Crosby from the Jefferson Center for New Democratic Processes, sortition advocate Campbell Wallace, and David Schecter, who serves as associate director of research and development for the newDemocracy Foundation. We also appreciated the insights offered by two doctoral students from the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s sociology program, Kristinn Arsaelsson and Sara Gia Trongone. We are also grateful to the Politics & Society journal, which helped make the conference possible and published selections from this book in a special issue.
An earlier version of our sortition proposal benefited from comments by Sam Bowles, Lyn Carson, Hélène Landemore, Tom Malleson, and Pierre-Étienne Vandamme. Helpful comments also came from conferences Erik Olin Wright attended in 2016—the regular meeting of the Analytical Marxism Group and a special “Utopia for Our Times” event in Louvain, Belgium, celebrating the five hundredth anniversary of the publication of Thomas More’s Utopia.
As ever, we thank family and friends who have offered support and feedback along the way. Our book has benefited from their kind—and frank—feedback every step of the journey.
John Gastil, State College, Pennsylvania
Erik Olin Wright, Madison, Wisconsin