Democracy in Dysfunction

Distress over the poor performance of our modern democracy seems to be constantly reaching new heights (or perhaps “sinking to new depths” is more fitting). Public focus on democracy’s failures may wax and wane, but the problems become readily apparent whenever the system is stressed. The election and re-election of Donald Trump as US President shocked and dismayed liberals and many traditional free-market conservatives, but also substantiated the depth of the disdain many Americans feel for politics as usual. Our elective government and politics are indisputably failing. During the periodic crises over raising the national debt ceiling, many commentators acknowledge that the American political system is completely dysfunctional. Some even suggest it might be beyond repair. In discussing President Obama’s concessions to Republican demands back during the July 2011 standoff, Nobel Memorial Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times:

In the long run, however, Democrats won’t be the only losers. What Republicans have just gotten away with calls our whole system of government into question. After all, how can American democracy work if whichever party is most prepared to be ruthless, to threaten the nation’s economic security, gets to dictate policy? And the answer is, maybe it can’t. (Krugman 2011)

Republican Senate leader Mitch McConell said at the time, “What we did learn is this—it’s a hostage that’s worth ransoming” (quoted by Benen 2012). Since that standoff, Congressional leaders have repeatedly resorted to the strategy of threatening national default, and quite plausibly a collapse of the global economic system based on the US dollar, for political advantage.

Nobody really expects democracy to completely live up to the ideal. But when the distance between ideal and reality grows too great, we should re-examine our assumptions and reflect on ways our democracy might function better. In the final days of the notorious Trump–Clinton election, a New York Times–CBS poll found that more than 80 percent of Americans said they were repulsed rather than excited by the campaign (Martin, Sussman, and Thee-Brenannov 2016). While 2016 seemed like an extreme example at the time, the trend toward popular disgust with politics has only accelerated.

We must, however, take into account both the political process and the policy outputs of our democracy. Even if the process is distressing, if the results serve the public reasonably well, people will generally tolerate it. Congressional pundits often quip that nobody likes to see how sausage, or legislation, is made. But they assume that the unseemly processes are equally necessary for achieving the final (at least palatable) products. It’s long past time to reconsider our assumptions about both process and output in American democracy today.

Even before Trump, Americans complained about hyper-partisanship, uncivil smears, poor representation, domination by special interests, public alienation, and politicians who seem unable to tackle critical and urgent issues. On countless matters, including war, taxes, corporate bail-outs, health care, etc., there is a stark divergence between Congressional actions and public attitudes, as revealed in opinion polls. Our elected leaders seem eager to talk about, but unwilling or unable to effectively deal with severe economic problems, budget deficits, decaying infrastructure, the growing chasm between the “99 percent” majority of Americans and the super-rich, and the steadily growing effects of climate change. These are just a few examples of the repeated failures of our politicians to face up to issues that knowledgeable people agree only get worse by delay.

For years, surveys have typically shown that around two-thirds of Americans believe that the rich benefit most from the policies of the federal government, while only a tiny percentage think that the middle class benefits most. More than three-quarters of respondents typically agree that members of Congress are more interested in serving special interest groups, especially large corporations, than the people they allegedly represent. A 2016 Associated Press–GfK poll found that nearly 80 percent of Americans felt dissatisfaction or anger at the federal government. A CBS news story about the poll stated:

This anger isn’t so much driven by political ideology as it is by an overall disdain for a political system that doesn’t seem to be working, voters said in follow-up interviews. They’re upset with both parties, as well as career politicians and Washington insiders who, those surveyed said, don’t put their constituents’ interests first. (CBS News 2016)

A Pew Research Center poll in 2023 found that 63 percent of Americans agreed that all or most elected officials at the local, state and federal level ran for office “to make a lot of money”, and only 15 percent believed that all or most of them ran to serve the public (Pew Research Center 2023). Another survey, conducted by the Pew Research Center, found that 67 percent of Americans agreed that the phrase “most politicians are corrupt” described their country well (Pew Research Center 2021).

Though it is possible that the people are simply mistaken about the performance of their elected politicians, overwhelming evidence indicates that they are correct. It is not a coincidence that most people believe government policy favors an elite. I will argue that this is a direct result of our electoral system. While various election reforms may ameliorate some of the failings, by their fundamental nature, elections are unfixable. However, this book is not primarily about documenting the poor performance of politicians in our electoral system. If you’re reading this, you probably don’t think politics are satisfactory as they are. My jumping off point accepts this dismal situation as a proven fact. Instead, in this book I examine why this is so, and suggest what can be done about it.

Some among us accept these disheartening characteristics of American politics as the unavoidable price of admission for nations wishing to join the democratic club. Others actually revel in the spectacle and gamesmanship of contemporary politics. But many people, myself included, decry these as threats to our society’s long-term health and even survival. Is democracy doomed to endlessly suffer from such failings? Or might there be a better form of democracy itself? That is the question that underlies this project.

Fears of the Framers

The distressing traits of electoral democracy discussed here are frequently treated by commentators as if they were new, or at least far worse than in the past. But the inherent flaws of elections were already recognized by the Founders and Framers of the United States government. In a 1787 essay setting forth the failings of the Articles of Confederation, entitled “Vices of the Political System of the United States”, James Madison presented this troubling dynamic of elective representation. He wrote that those seeking elective office had one of three motives: “1. Ambition” and status, “2. Personal interest” and financial gain, or “3. Public good.” He determined that “Unhappily the two first are proved by experience to be most prevalent” (Madison 1787a).

Madison also worried about factions. He hoped to dilute this problem to some extent by sheer force of size; he figured that a vast nation would have so many competing interests that they couldn’t easily consolidate and control the government. But this turned out not to be the case. The underlying imperatives of competitive elections quickly caused these dreaded factions to coalesce in the form of national political parties—with their attendant partisan rancor. Ironically, Madison himself helped found one of the first national political parties in the new republic.

The partisan political system we have in the United States, in which two dominant parties maintain a duopoly over all levels of government, is exactly what many of our Founders feared most for their republic. John Adams, in a 1780 letter to his friend Jonathan Jackson discussing the soon-to-be-released Massachusetts Constitution, stated that:

There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution. (Adams 1780)

George Washington also warned about partisanship in his 1796 Farewell Address to the nation:

The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty. (Washington 1796)

The feared partisanship blossomed almost immediately with the rise of the Federalists, aligned with Hamilton, and the Democratic-Republicans, aligned with Madison and Jefferson. Hyper-partisanship has been the reality in American politics from the beginning. The relatively brief interludes of civility and bipartisanship, such as in the 1950s and 1960s, have been the exception rather than the rule. Around 1800, the Federalist Connecticut Courant warned that if Thomas Jefferson became president, “Murder, robbery, rape, adultery, and incest will be openly taught and practiced, the air will be rent with the cries of the distressed, the soil will be soaked with blood, and the nation black with crimes” (quoted in Hartford Courant 2021).

It’s clear that American democracy, and Western democracy in general, hasn’t lived up to the ideal, yet support for that ideal has nevertheless spread across the globe over the past two centuries. However, a joint Harvard–University of Melbourne study in 2017 suggests that trend has reversed. By drawing on data from the European and World Values Surveys, researchers found there has been a precipitous decline in public commitment to governments based on competitive elections. In well-established electoral systems, such as the United States, Britain, and Australia, the percentage of people who say they feel it is “essential” to live in a democracy has steadily dropped since World War II, from roughly 75 percent down to just over 25 percent by the time of the study. While not as precipitous, this diminution is even occurring in famously liberal countries such as Sweden and the Netherlands. Widespread disdain for democracies’ “establishment politicians” is a global phenomenon (Foa and Mounk 2017).

Most observers agree that the election of the non-politician Donald Trump in the United States was largely a result of that growing public sentiment. In 2020, researchers compiled a new dataset combining more than 25 data sources, 3,500 country surveys, and 4 million respondents between 1973 and 2020, asking citizens whether they are satisfied or dissatisfied with democracy in their countries. The authors wrote, “We find that dissatisfaction with democracy has risen over time, and is reaching an all-time global high, in particular in developed democracies”.

By 2020, the percentage of residents in electoral democracies who reported that they were dissatisfied with democracy in their own country reached 57.5 percent. Between the 1990s and today, dissatisfaction with democracy in the United States has fluctuated, but overall has had the sharpest rise of any country surveyed (Foa et al. 2020).

This brings me to a central thesis of this book. I argue that it is not the principles of democracy—self-rule and government of, by, and for the people—that are causing dissatisfaction, but rather partisan electoral politics and politicians.

So, is there a remedy? There may well be. But the optimal route to a better democracy is not along the path toward improving elections, which most reformers assume is the only way forward. In normal parlance, democracy and elections have become synonymous (though, as we will see, this wasn’t originally the case). After all, elections are seen as the quintessential means for holding leaders accountable. “Free and fair elections” are almost universally considered the cornerstone of representative democracy. But could elections themselves be the root of the problem?

This book is about the numerous inherent democratic defects of elections, and how we might build a better democracy without exclusively relying on them. It is difficult to recognize what things we “take for granted” simply because we know nothing else but what exists. As the saying goes, “fish would be the last to discover water”. The notion that fixing democracy is just a question of fixing the electoral process is an assumption we must overcome. But in order to move forward, it is essential to first determine in which direction we should go. Where is democracy’s North Star?

This book systematically sets out the case that democracy’s North Star is sortition. Though a little-known term, this concept was fundamental to the Ancient Greek democracies, and can be the basis for rebuilding a vibrant democracy today as well.

Sortition

“Sortition” refers to the process of selecting public officials, such as for deliberative bodies, by random lottery. Sortition was central to the flourishing of democracy in Classical Athens. Aristotle wrote that selecting panels by lottery “is thought to be democratic, and the election of them oligarchical” (Aristotle 2016, 108). For over two millennia, from when the word “democracy” was originally coined in Ancient Greece, through the Age of Enlightenment, it was understood that elections were a tool for aristocracy (violating political equality and favoring the wealthy elite and well-connected), while “democracy” (meaning “people’s power”) required sortition.

Ruling elites pushed sortition to the periphery. In modern times, lottery selection is mostly relegated to the creation of court jury pools. However, in the past couple of decades, nearly a thousand jury-like citizens’ assemblies have been impaneled around the world. They used democratic lotteries to create panels that could tackle thorny public policy issues. The size, design, powers, and procedures of these panels selected using democratic lotteries vary, 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. A good summary of the benefits of randomly selected mini-publics is offered by Phil Parvin of Loughborough University:

Strategies which seek to incorporate the perspectives of small groups of citizens into the traditionally configured institutions of representative democracy may serve to open up the decision-making process to the views of all citizens and, hence, serve to break up the structural asymmetries in influence which emerge as a consequence of too heavy a reliance on widespread, society-wide participation. They also offer a possible solution to the lack of political knowledge among marginalised citizens by providing opportunities for reflective deliberation and knowledge gathering in controlled environments: inviting small groups of citizens to reflect collectively on issues, providing these citizens with the relevant facts on which to reflect, and then incorporating the resulting insights either formally or informally into the decision-making process may go some way to plugging the epistemic gaps which characterise contemporary mass societies, improve decision-making, and provide a real voice for citizens who have been genuinely empowered to know and defend their own interests (Parvin 2017, 48).

Parvin is describing the use of sortition as a supplement to existing political institutions. While sortition will necessarily take an ancillary role initially, 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.

My Path

About Terry →

My own path to the concept of sortition did not begin in academia. Although I majored in political science, I never read a thing about sortition in college. My interest in sortition grew from decades of in-the-trenches involvement in electoral politics, two decades as an elected lawmaker, and decades as an election reform policy analyst. During my time as a legislator, it became obvious to me that the “People’s House” was not very representative of the people who actually lived in Vermont. My epiphany came while dealing with a bill about the rights and responsibilities of tenants and landlords in an eviction situation. My fellow committee members were an outgoing and garrulous bunch. Shy wallflowers almost never become legislators.

During a break between witnesses, one committee member regaled a few of us with a story about how a landlord friend of his had had an apartment trashed by a renter. The story had vivid details about damage to the carpeting and walls. While not directly relevant to the bill under consideration, the story did create a frame with a clear perpetrator and victim. Nobody offered a counter-story in which a tenant had been abused by a bad landlord. While discussing the eviction bill during committee “mark-up” (when committee members propose amendments, etc.) I realized that committee members were relying more on anecdotal information from their own circle of contacts and those of their fellow committee members than on any statistical reports or formal testimony from scheduled witnesses. They also naturally interpreted any testimony through the filters of their own life experience, giving extra credence to information that corresponded with their preconceived ideas, and re-interpreting or discounting testimony that didn’t fit their worldview. Testimony on behalf of tenants seemed to be especially discounted. With hindsight, I recognize that I did the same thing, but on the opposite side from most of my colleagues. I saw that the experiences and beliefs of legislators shape legislation far more than facts.

Roughly one-third of Vermonters were renters, but not one of the committee members was a renter. I did an informal survey of the House, and as far as I was able to determine, only one out of 150 members was a tenant (no, it wasn’t me— my wife and I had recently purchased a house). It was readily apparent that the interests of tenants were under-represented in the legislature, and the resulting statutes reflected that fact. I thought that if the House were genuinely representative of the population, meaning one-third of the legislators had been renters, that the nature of the debate, and possibly the outcome, could have been very different. While research indicates that mere diversity of opinion within a group does not necessarily mean a melding of views (the method of deliberation is key, as will be discussed later), one might hope that the debate would have been more robust, with questionable assumptions actually being questioned.

After that experience, I frequently commented that any 150 Vermonters pulled from the phone book would be more representative than the elected House membership. While the transition away from landlines to cell phones makes the “phonebook” an outdated reference (not to mention that phone books of the twentieth century often only listed the male “head of household”), a genuinely random sample would be more representative, not only in terms of the renter/ landlord diversity, but also in every other respect, including gender, class, race, age, cognitive style, and political philosophy.

The intellectual conservative William F. Buckley, Jr. made a similar point decades earlier, when he quipped that he would “sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University” (Buckley 1963, 134). Buckley was probably attempting to belittle the elite faculty of Harvard, rather than seriously proposing sortition. However, this sentiment, that random citizens might be better than elites, is actually rather widespread.

A public opinion survey by Rasmussen Reports conducted in January of 2010 found that just 36 percent of Americans thought Congress did a better job than a random group of Americans selected from a telephone book could do, while 45 percent thought the random sample would do a better job (Rasmussen Poll 2010). By 2024, just 27 percent thought Congress would do better, while the share who thought a random group of people selected from the phone book would do better than Congress had grown to 54 percent (Rasmussen Poll 2024b).

This response might just be an expression of disdain, as in “a monkey could do a better job than Congress”. But when made more concrete, support for the concept of sortition actually increases. The Center on Policy Attitudes, associated with the School of Public Affairs of the University of Maryland, did a survey in 1999, which included the following more detailed question:

Imagine that a group of 500 American citizens was selected from all over the country to be representative of the entire US population. This group then met and was informed on all sides of the policy debate on a number of public policy issues and had a chance to discuss these issues. They were then asked to make decisions on what they thought was the best approach to these issues. Do you think the decisions of such a group would probably be better or worse than the decisions that Congress makes? (quoted in Morin 1999, 34)

From the survey, 66 percent thought the representative group would be better than Congress, and just 15 percent thought they would be worse (the survey results were reported in Morin 1999, 34).

A more recent poll released by a democratic lottery advocacy organization, Of By For, showed almost identical results in 2020 (Of By For 2020). A 2021 survey of over 4,000 Americans conducted by the Pew Research Center (though with less specific question wording) found essentially the same attitudes (Pew Research Center 2021). My decade of experience serving in the state legislature convinces me that this popular assessment is correct. While there are some exceptional individual legislators (both good and bad), and elected legislators are probably more extroverted and egotistical than the average citizen, I saw no evidence that they are more competent, intelligent, compassionate, or capable than any random group. However, as I will demonstrate in subsequent chapters, elected policymakers have unique electoral imperatives and psychological biases that make them generally less competent and capable than ordinary people.

I stepped down as a legislator after ten years and went to work with a national voting reform organization called FairVote: the Center for Voting and Democracy as a policy analyst. For the next decade, I primarily worked on proportional representation and a ranked ballot voting system known as instant runoff voting or ranked choice voting.

The ground-breaking use of a democratic lottery in the Canadian province of British Columbia sparked my interest in this fundamentally different model of democracy. In 2004, 160 randomly selected residents (one man and one woman from each of the province’s 79 legislative districts, plus an aboriginal man and woman) were convened as a “citizens’ assembly” with a mandate from the provincial government to evaluate the electoral system. If they deemed it superior, they were to propose a new one for the province. Over many months, they went through a learning phase, a public hearings phase, and a deliberative phase to produce a final referendum proposal. As an election reform expert, I gave testimony to this citizens’ assembly. The representativeness, competence, and freedom from corruption of this citizens’ assembly of everyday people, selected by lot, was inspiring. This was my “aha moment”. I came to the stunning realization that “this is what democracy should look like!”

Sortition in an Electoral World

While this book will constantly contrast election and sortition, it is not simply a matter of replacing elected legislators with members selected by lot. A sortition-based democracy would need an entirely different set of institutions and processes. A multitude of randomly selected panels would each deal with distinct policy domains and different aspects of the lawmaking process, rather than having a single group of legislators that handles all issues and legislation— setting agendas, drafting bills, advocating for or against those bills, and then judging whether to adopt them.

The existing all-issue legislative design is an antiquated hand-me-down from the elite parliaments constructed to advise, and later to counterbalance the monarchy. It was not designed nor intended to be used for a democracy. The expansion of the franchise over time, to include men without substantial property, women, and people of all races, is often described as “democratizing” legislatures. However, expanding the franchise has not changed the fundamental nature of such chambers. They remain to this day a bastion of rule by elites over a population. This book will demonstrate why such bodies are incapable of genuine deliberation or democratic lawmaking.

It is hard to imagine a society advancing to sortition without maintaining a parallel system of elections for a substantial time. While I have published several journal articles and book chapters describing how a democratic system could function without any elections (Bouricius 2013, 2017a, 2018), a step-by-step replacement seems the most plausible transition. Countless events of the past, including the Macedonian Empire’s destruction of Greek democracy, and the decision of the leaders of the American colonies to use election and not sortition, have restricted what next steps we can realistically take today. This “path dependence”, as social scientists call it, simply means we must start from where we are. Societies rarely get a blank slate on which to write a completely new design. Familiarizing more people with the concept of sortition as an alternative democratic tool and expanding its use is a good near-term goal. It is tempting to focus on Congressional elections as an archetype of electoral failure. However, sortition could play a beneficial and more immediate role in state and local government, enterprise democracy at the workplace, homeowners’ associations, oversight of non-governmental organizations, and even of supra-national (international) entities. Sortition is also being advocated by researchers such as Aviv Ovadya as a tool for governing emerging artificial intelligence (AI) systems (Ovadya 2023) and social media content moderation (Ovadya 2021). A survey of 3,000 Americans asked how content moderation to remove harmful false information from social media should be done. The researchers found that content moderation done by nationally representative juries, or juries of domain experts, was much preferred over teams of journalists, algorithms, or the corporate owners of the social media site (Martel et al. 2025).

Sortition is rapidly becoming mainstream globally. In a 2017 speech, Kofi Annan, the former Secretary General of the United Nations, identified random selection as a potential means of fostering inclusion and “prevent[ing] the formation of self-serving and self-perpetuating political classes disconnected from their electorates” (Annan 2017). Sortition may seem radical, but in many places around the world, it is rapidly becoming a reality.

A Word About Words

Certain words and terminology will occur frequently in this book. The meaning of the word democracy is contested ground. The ancient Greeks, who invented the word, used it to describe a system based on lotteries and direct participation. But today it generally refers to elected rulers. Sometimes a modifier is attached, such as representative, developed, liberal, or Western, but “democracy” often appears without any qualifying adjective.¹

It would be reasonable to refer to these systems as elective oligarchies, rather than democracies, since so few members of society are actually involved with ruling the rest. Elected lawmakers are roughly one-tenth of 1 percent of the population. The other 99.9 percent of the population only get to play a de minimis role in helping to choose between the teams of elites on offer who would rule over them. They do not engage in actual self-rule. The overwhelming majority of that minuscule pool of elected lawmakers are at the local level, such as city councils and school boards. They have very limited powers and authority, as set by state and federal lawmakers, or the Constitution.

Many elected lawmakers serve term after term, constituting a political class. This squarely fits the definition of an oligarchy as the rule by a few over the many. Of course, this ignores the largely hidden and unofficial powers of the wealthy and large corporations, who effectively determine, or at least powerfully influence, the boundaries of what laws and policies the elected lawmakers will even consider. Thus, the term plutocracy, rule by the wealthy, may also fit.

However, constantly referring to what are commonly called “developed democracies” as “elective oligarchies” would come off as strident and frankly confusing (“is he referring to countries with token elections like North Korea?”). Since this book is about competing concepts of democracy, for the remainder of this book, when I am referring to existing electoral systems of selecting rulers, I will generally use some term that makes this clear, such as “electoral governments”. However, when I am quoting or paraphrasing others who have written about such elective systems by using the word democracies, I will let the word stand, rather than constantly dispute their terminology.