Howdy folks,
Our guest for the January 9, 2024 episode of Redneck Gone Green will be Terry Bouricius, a long-time democracy advocate. Terry will be making the case for sortition, a method of randomly selecting individuals for public office or participation in decision-making processes, ensuring a representative and unbiased distribution of responsibilities. It involves randomly choosing individuals from a pool, rather than relying on elections or appointments based on merit or popularity.
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As regular readers know, I normally write a short piece and post it here for those who want a deeper diver on the topic. This week, I have decided to allow Terry to speak directly for himself. With his permission, I am reposting an essay he authored titled “Enter Sortition,”which serves as a solid introduction to the topic.
Onward to the world we deserve,
David Cobb (he/him)
Why I put my pronouns in my email signature
“Sortition” refers to the process of selecting public officials, usually for a deliberative body, by random lottery. This practice was central to the flourishing of democracy in ancient Greece for centuries, and is currently experiencing a resurgence in the form of citizens’ assemblies. Modern implementations typically use a scientific stratified sampling procedure similar to that of public opinion surveys.
Lottery selection plays only a small role in modern electoral democracies. We rely on the principle of random selection (rather than election) in the jury selection process when potentially taking away a person’s liberty. The lottery principle is used to create a deliberative body that fairly and impartially represents the community. Juries have been viewed as such a vital bulwark against the danger of an oppressive state that the right to a jury trial was incorporated into the American Constitution. Outside of this court context, lottery selection has been rather rare in modern democracies. However, in the past couple of decades, many hundreds of jury-like citizens’ assemblies have been empaneled through sortition (also known as “democratic lotteries”) to tackle public policy issues all around the world.
The classical Athenians’ best-known democratic tool was the ecclesia, their mass Assembly. Around six thousand, out of a population of thirty to sixty thousand eligible male citizens attended. However, the Assembly was not the sole, nor even the defining feature of ancient Greek democracy. Many non-democratic Greek city states, such as Sparta, also had such assemblies, but, unlike Athens, their agenda was controlled by the elite.
Sortition was sacrosanct to the Athenian democrats, who considered it far more democratic than elections. Most Athenian magistrates, the courts, legislative panels and the administrative Council of Five Hundred, which set the agenda and prepared proposals for the Assembly, were selected using this random lot procedure.1
The drawing of lots can be used to accomplish certain tasks while adhering to key principles. Depending on the task, these principles might include fairness, impartiality, political equality, and defense against bias, corruption or tyranny. Sortition can also be used to create a statistically representative sample from a population. Deliberation by such representative “mini-publics” has been a key feature of modern citizens’ assemblies.
Mass assembly democracy among all citizens is unworkable on the scale of a modern nation state. However, both election and sortition are able to overcome this problem of scale. Ancient Athenians believed elections inevitably favored wealthy, well-connected individuals over average citizens, and thus elections sacrificed the principle of equality. Only a handful of public offices requiring unique characteristics, such as military generals, were filled by election.2
Sortition predominated in Athens for roughly two centuries. The view that elections are inherently oligarchic, whereas selection by lot is especially suited to democracy, persisted for over two millennia. From the time of Aristotle up through the Age of Enlightenment with political theorists like Montesquieu and Rousseau in the eighteenth century, it was understood that sortition was a fundamental tool of democracy, while elections were a tool for aristocracy.
However, sortition is merely a tool. If all citizens participate as equals in the lottery, it is democratic. But if only a subset of wealthy families are allowed to participate in the lottery, it is aristocratic. Numerous medieval and Renaissance aristocratic Italian city-republics, such as Venice and Florence, combined sortition and election into a complex multi-level process. Sortition played a crucial role in overcoming factionalism and protecting against tyranny. There were many variations from city to city, and within any given city over time.3
Sortition was also a means of avoiding corruption due to a concentration of power, assuring true equality of opportunity, and affirming the right of the citizenry to self-govern. The ancient Athenians, and many Renaissance Italian city states, believed the equal chance to serve was a cornerstone of political equality. In addition to sortition, the Athenian approach to self-governance also mandated relatively short terms and rotation of office. This can be generalized as the principle of rule and be ruled in turn. Designers of “modern” republics, beginning with the founders of the United States and the French Republic, distrusted democracy, equating it with mob rule. They rejected sortition and democracy in favor of election to facilitate rule by a “natural aristocracy,” as opposed to a hereditary one.
Although the ancient Greeks used sortition to appoint most of their magistrates (typically administrative and executive officers in panels of ten), sortition is most appropriate for legislative and judicial bodies, where judgment, rather than execution, is the focus. Sortition bodies may be used to craft proposals, or for approving or disapproving proposals prepared by others, or evaluating performance of executives. But even in cases where expertise is needed, randomly selected bodies have certain benefits over elected bodies. Ordinary citizens have an interest in seeking out bona fide policy experts, as opposed to consulting mostly with special interest lobbyists or partisan loyalist campaign and public relations experts.
In discussing representation, it is important to make a distinction between the legislative and executive functions of government. While these two functions are often intermixed (a president proposes and may veto laws, ministers in parliamentary systems have both legislative and executive roles), I will focus on the legislative function as the primary domain of representative democracy. The framers of the American system of government focused on the legislative side, giving relatively few powers explicitly to the executive. Over the centuries, more and more power has accrued to the office of the president, to the point that it is now frequently referred to by scholars as the “imperial presidency.”
I would not propose to select an executive, such as a mayor, governor, or president, by random selection from among all citizens. No one person can be representative of the whole, plus an executive must possess specific skills. However, random selection could play a beneficial role, as it did in many Renaissance city-states. For example, it might make sense to have a statistically representative subset of the society function as a sort of hiring committee to recruit an executive, similar to the way that a city council appoints a city manager. A process with a smaller group (i.e not the whole electorate) can avoid money-tainted campaigns, and directly interview and evaluate potential executives up close, rather than from quick ads designed to prick emotions.
Sortition is now being used in innovative implementations around the world. The size, design, powers and procedures of these panels selected using democratic lotteries varies, as does the name – variously known by names such as citizens’ assemblies, planning cells, policy juries, or mini-publics. I will discuss some of these exciting innovations in subsequent chapters. I hope to show that with appropriate design and implementation, sortition can be superior to elections as a central tool for democratic popular self-rule.
Terry Bouricius
Terry served in the Vermont House of Representatives from from 1991 to 2001 as a member of the Vermont Progressive Party. Prior to that, he served on the city council in Burlington, Vermont, from 1981 to 1991.
He entered politics with the Liberty Union Party, where he ran for a seat in the Vermont Senate twice with their nomination. He left the Liberty Union Party to aid in the creation of the Citizens Party, and ran for state senate and lieutenant governor.
Terry was the first member of the Citizens Party elected anywhere in the United States. He was an ally to Mayor Bernie Sanders, and served one term as president of the city council. He and Tom Smith were the first members of the Vermont Progressive Party elected to the state house.
Today Terry refers to himself as a "recovering politician" and has become an outspoken critic of electoral democracy. His experiences in office and as an electoral reform analyst at FairVote convinced him that electoral democracy is fundamentally undemocratic, as it excludes all but a small political class the opportunity to participate formally in government policy. He believes that citizens' assemblies, selected via a stratified random sample to create a microcosm of a population, are much better suited to the task of deliberating over policy than professional politicians, who are mainly focused on re-election. He is currently working on a book titled "The Trouble With Elections: Everything We Thought We Knew About Democracy is Wrong" which describes his thinking on this subject in detail.