Representation

Delegate versus Trustee

Hanna Pitkin’s 1967 book The Concept of Representation is a foundational book for many political scientists. A key point that she makes is that there are many different kinds of representation, with different functions and expectations. Representation typically involves some principal (whether an individual or group, or other thing), and an agent (the representative). Representation may be formal (with authorization and accountability), symbolic, descriptive (resemblance), or substantive (action taken). Electoral representation is primarily concerned with the formal and substantive aspects. The proper role of an elected politician has been a topic of debate for centuries, and that role remains ambiguous today.

One of the quandaries in the realm of electoral representation is whether a representative should act as a “delegate” who faithfully transmits the opinions and wishes of their constituents into the legislative body, or should serve more as a trustee, exercising independent judgment, free to vote as they think is best for the welfare of either the constituents, or the nation as a whole. After all, representatives might gain information and insights that their constituents do not have. In 1789, in France the representatives of the Third Estate (the commoners) were intended to be delegates, but they quickly took on a different role.

The person most commonly associated with this debate is Edmund Burke, a political theorist and member of the British Parliament. Born in Ireland in 1729, he moved to England and ended up representing various districts as an MP. He was seen as a friend of the American revolutionaries and Ireland, though a severe critic of the French revolutionaries. While he did not favor democracy, nor giving average citizens the vote, he was a stalwart advocate of a representative government among the well-to-do.

Burke famously argued that “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion” (Burke 1774). What is the purpose of legislative debate if representatives are mere delegates, locked into their positions? Those attending the US Constitutional Convention were referred to as “delegates”, but certainly did not see their role as merely transmitting the views of their respective state legislatures. As Madison argued, no “delegate” attending could confidently state what view his constituents might have today, or six or twelve months hence, nor what they would think if they possessed the information and insights the members in attendance might gain. Thus, he argued, even the dictates of the amendment process specified in the Articles of Confederation, or the wishes of the state legislators, should not restrict the Philadelphia Convention representatives: “We ought to consider what was right and necessary in itself” (quoted in Rosen 2001).

Unlike this Convention, which was seeking to craft something completely new, where members often had no preset opinions, it should be noted that modern legislative chambers rarely exhibit any meaningful give and take or deliberation. As political scientist John Dryzek stated in describing a modern legislative chamber, it is

not a deliberative assembly in Burke’s sense [but] rather a theatre of expression where politicians from different sides talk past each other in mostly ritual performance. Party politicians do not listen, do not reflect and do not change their minds. (Dryzek 2016)

As a 20-year lawmaker myself, I can confirm his description, with just the rare exception to the rule.

In no country are national legislators legally bound to keep their campaign promises, let alone directives from the electorate. Yet politicians who veer too far from their constituents’ wishes presumably can face retaliation at the ballot box. While some legislators may fear retribution and act accordingly, with overwhelming re-election rates, there is little evidence that voters effectively punish “misbehaving” legislators except in the most extreme circumstances.

Modern American legislators generally seek to have it both ways, claiming one or the other motivation (exercising independent judgment or following constituents’ wishes), depending on which is most useful in a particular context. When they agree with the polls of their constituents, they trumpet the fact that they are doing their constituents’ bidding. But when they would prefer not to vote that way, whether for corrupt or principled reasons, they latch onto the wiggle room provided by the Burkean view. In many cases, politicians act neither according to the wishes nor the welfare of the people—neither as a delegate nor a true trustee.

A third possible role of representatives is that of a reliable representative of their party and its platform. This view is extremely unpopular in the US but commonplace in multi-party democracies. Indeed, in some modern democracies, using what is known as “party list” voting systems, voters do not even see the names of individual candidates on the ballot, but instead simply select a party preference. This is intended to move representation from the realm of personality to that of policy and party manifesto. An individual representative exercising independent judgment, or the wishes of constituents as revealed in a poll, under this system, could be seen as undermining its integrity. Many of the concepts that fit under the umbrella term “representative” are mutually exclusive, and politicians may pick the meaning that suits their needs at the moment.

We are accustomed to referring to the person elected from our district as “our representative”, even if we voted against him or her. Indeed, this “representative” may be working in direct contradiction to everything we believe in. This is an almost Orwellian twisting of the meaning of the word. If this person does not in fact represent my views or interests, and I did not approve of this person’s selection, it would be more accurate to say that I do not have an actual representative in the legislature. I am deemed to be “represented”, or in the Enlightenment concept—giving consent to the government—even if the party I supported is in a minority in government, and I abhor all policies enacted by my government. Even if I despised all of the nominated candidates on the ballot and voted for the least terrible one, to limit harm, or didn’t vote at all—I am still deemed to be “represented”. By applying the title “representative”, the system masks the fact that most people have in fact no representation in our legislative bodies.

These unrepresentative elected politicians are accepted as our “representatives” because those are the rules passed down from previous generations. By participating in an election, we are thought to be tacitly accepting the outcome and the designation of an unrepresentative winner as our representative. And if we don’t participate in the election, we are also deemed to be tacitly accepting the election outcome—as the saying goes, “you have no right to complain if you didn’t vote”. So the focus turns to how we might improve the representativeness of our representatives through improving the election process—or replacing it. A key aspect of sortition is that it is not the individual members of the deliberative body who are individually “representatives”. Each individual member has no specific constituency. It is the body as a whole that represents the population as a whole.

Merit versus Mirror

Another fundamental disagreement on representation is whether representatives should be like ordinary citizens or should be exceptional. In Plato’s Republic, while criticizing democracy and proposing rule by philosopher kings, Plato famously used the analogy of a ship’s pilot. It was as foolish to use a lottery to pick one’s rulers as to select the captain of a ship. He asserted that there was a set of specific skills and traits appropriate to each task that average citizens wouldn’t possess. The debate about the merits of popular democracy versus rule by an elite political class (whether royalty or an elite political class of “guardians”) has persisted for eons. The analogy of the expert ship captain steering the ship of state, coined by Plato, is still used.

Edmund Burke also believed that representatives should be men of superior wisdom and ability. Like many aristocrats of his time, he believed such men were to be found in the upper classes. It wasn’t intellectual ability or knowledge he sought, but rather moral virtue, good judgment and reason, which he felt were derived from experience. Burke imagined that political questions had morally correct answers, which wise representatives could ascertain. While the people were suited for identifying oppression, Burke used a medical analogy to explain the role of the elite in government. The ordinary people “are the sufferers, to tell the symptoms of the complaint; but we know the exact seat of the disease, and how to apply the remedy” (quoted by Pitkin 1967, 184). The irony, of course, is the fact that a physician of that time would be likely to use bloodletting to drain bad humors, harming or even killing the patient. Such elevated, but faulty self-assessments of the abilities of political elites continue today.

But, ever since the Ancient Greek democracy, there has also been a very different view of representation. A leading orator and statesman of the French Revolution, the Count of Mirabeau, used a map analogy, rather than Adams’s portrait analogy, in stressing the importance of a legislature mirroring the people. In 1789, he said:

A representative body is to the nation what a chart is for the physical configuration of its soil: in all its parts, and as a whole, the representative body should at all times present a reduced picture of the people—their opinions, aspirations, and wishes, and that presentation should bear the relative proportion to the original precisely as a map brings before us mountains and dales, rivers and lakes, forests and plains, cities and towns. The finer should not be crushed out by the more massive substance, and the latter not be excluded; the value of each element is dependent upon its importance to the whole and for the whole. (quoted by Hoag and Hallett 1926, 162)

A few delegates to the Philadelphia Convention advocated for mirroring. James Wilson stated that the government ought to possess “the mind or sense of the people at large. The legislature ought to be the most exact transcript of the whole society. Representation is made necessary only because it is impossible for the people to act collectively” (Notes on the Debates in the Federal Convention—June 6, 1787 [1787] 2006). But, Bernard Manin observed that the bulk of the Framers of the US Constitution, like Hamilton and Madison, did not, in fact, see representation “as an approximation of government by the people made technically necessary by the physical impossibility of gathering together the citizens of large states” (Manin 1997, 2). Manin points out that they believed that representatives ``should rank higher than their constituents in wealth, talent, and virtue” (Manin 1997, 94). Madison partially shared Burke’s view, arguing that elected representatives (being the “natural aristocracy”) would act as a filter, refining public opinion, and coming to superior decisions that the less-informed public might not.

During the ratification debates for the new Constitution, Federalists and Anti-Federalists alike saw the election process as naturally favoring men of wealth, especially from “large” districts, regardless of whether there were property requirements for being a representative or for voting. Federalists often favored both large electoral districts as well as property requirements specifically to make it more likely that the wealthy and successful would be elected. Many of those who opposed the proposed Constitution preferred keeping power at the individual state-level with the argument that average men, the “yeomanry”, had a better chance of winning elections there.

While sortition itself was not debated during the Constitutional Convention, during the ratification debates, the Anti-Federalists did object to the oligarchic nature of large elective districts provided for in the Constitution (and by “large” they meant Congressional districts with just 30,000 residents). They feared that farmers, mechanics and small merchants could never get elected to the House of Representatives. Writing under the pseudonym “Brutus”, a leading New York Anti-Federalist anticipated Manin’s “principle of distinction” in writing in 1787:

According to the common course of human affairs, the natural aristocracy of the country will be elected. Wealth always creates influence, and this is generally much increased by large family connections: this class in society will for ever have a great number of dependents; besides, they will always favour each other—it is their interest to combine—they will therefore constantly unite their efforts to procure men of their own rank to be elected. (Brutus 1787)

As the nation grew, additional seats were added to the House of Representatives. But in 1911, Congress fixed the size at the current 435 seats, regardless of population growth. As a result, Congressional districts have grown in population size and now must represent around 750,000 residents. This is one of the most extreme constituent-to-representative ratios among the world’s national legislatures, and average citizens have effectively no chance of serving.

With near universal suffrage today, Americans seem to have embraced a more democratic vision of who should grant consent. But this does not necessarily apply to the issue of whether the actual rulers should be elite, even if not a class of propertied white men as intended by the Framers of the Constitution. Yet, the notion that the winners should earn their seats through “merit” is deeply ingrained. America is often referred to as a “meritocracy”, even if we doubt the merit of those actually elected to Congress or appointed by the president. The very idea that we should be represented by merely “average” fellow citizens is subject to ridicule, akin to when US Senator Roman Hruska defended President Nixon’s nomination of Harold Carswell to the US Supreme Court, saying, “Even if he is mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they, and a little chance?” (Hruska quoted by Will Fassuliotis 2019). This is a key argument offered against sortition, and will be a focus of subsequent chapters.

In modern times, many people associate merit and education, and indeed, typically over 95% of the members of European parliaments and the US Congress have a college education, often from prestigious universities. However, Michael Sandel, in his book The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?, notes that practical wisdom and civic virtue are not developed in such institutions.

And recent historical experience suggests little correlation between the capacity for political judgment, which involves moral character as well as insight, and the ability to score well on standardized tests and win admission to the elite universities. The notion that ‘the best and the brightest’ are better at governing than their less-credentialed fellow citizens is a myth born of meritocratic hubris. (Sandel 2020, 99)

Even if one accepted that it was desirable to select representatives who were better than the average citizen, is it safe to assume that elections actually select for “superior” citizens? Approval ratings of Congress commonly sink into single digits, and a poll conducted by Rasmussen Reports in April 2013 found that just five percent of likely voters believed that Congress and its staff could be described as the “best and brightest” (Rasmussen Poll 2013b).

There is plenty of anecdotal evidence, however, that elections tend to attract candidates with what psychologists term the “Dark Triad” of personality traits— narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy (Paulhus and Williams 2002). These and other psychological tendencies of politicians will be a major focus of later chapters.

Elections, as opposed to random selection, allow for the use of rational thought and good reasons in selecting rulers. But elections also allow for the use of irrational bias and bad reasons—or corruption. It is this relief from bad reasons and corruption that is central to historical decisions to use sortition. This tension between being typical and being the best is generally glossed over today. But I would argue that elections fail to satisfy either vision (neither merit nor mirror) of who we should have representing us.

The Mirror—Descriptive Representation

Perhaps the most widely referenced work on representation is the previously mentioned book by Hanna Pitkin, The Concept of Representation. Representation can be symbolic, as a king “represents” the nation as a whole (or a flag represents a nation). A representative might be an authorized agent, such as a lawyer who speaks or acts on behalf of a client as an expert, as Burke favored.

Elections promote this authorized agent concept with Manin’s principle of distinction. Representatives might instead be descriptively representative—as in Adams’s simile of an “exact portrait”—or Mirabeau’s of a map—describing the population in terms of gender, race, class, ideology, interests, and so on.

Jane Mansbridge, of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and past president of the American Political Science Association, notes that

When the U.S. Constitution was being debated in 1787–88, and the Federalists advanced their principle of distinction, the Anti-Federalists opposed that principle, arguing that representation required “likeness” and “resemblance” to constituents so that representatives could “possess their sentiments and feelings”. (Mansbridge 2009, 387)

The New York state Anti-Federalist using the pen-name Brutus wrote: “The idea that naturally suggests itself to our minds, when we speak of representatives, is that they resemble those they represent; they should be a true picture of the people: possess the knowledge of their circumstances and their wants; sympathize in all their distresses, and be disposed to seek their true interests” (Storing and Dry 2008, 17). He also wrote:

The very term, representative, implies, that the person or body chosen for this purpose, should resemble those who appoint them—a representation of the people of America, if it be a true one, must be like the people … In this assembly, the farmer, merchant, mecanick. and other various orders of people, ought to be represented according to their respective weight and numbers. (Storing and Dry 2008, 379–380)

Alexander Hamilton expressly challenged the notion that the legislature should come from all classes in Federalist Paper No. 35. He wrote:

It is said to be necessary, that all classes of citizens should have some of their own number in the representative body, in order that their feelings and interests may be the better understood and attended to. But we have seen that this will never happen under any arrangement that leaves the votes of the people free. Where this is the case, the representative body, with too few exceptions to have any influence on the spirit of the government, will be composed of landholders, merchants, and men of the learned professions. But where is the danger that the interests and feelings of the different classes of citizens will not be understood or attended to by these three descriptions of men? (Hamilton 1788)

This assertion that the elite can be expected to fairly represent the interests of the lower classes could theoretically be true, but on the whole, has not been borne out by reality. Back in Chapter 2, I discussed the research of Martin Gilens that revealed Congressional “responsiveness to the affluent remains strong while responsiveness to the poor and middle class is completely absent” (Gilens 2012, 84).

Descriptive representation can have a direct impact on how well representatives perform in terms of knowing the true interests of their constituents and evaluating what action the represented population would take if they had all of the information possessed by the representative. It is natural to perceive and evaluate information in a way that is consistent with one’s own prior biases, class, racial, and other interests. While specific representatives in specific cases may rise above this natural bias, it is undoubtedly the norm. Thus, the failure of descriptive representativeness is likely to result in failures of substantive policy representation as well.

Studies have also found that ethical beliefs vary according to wealth. For example, a 2023 study by University of Michigan researchers found that people in the top 5 percent income bracket are significantly more likely to accept societal income inequality as fair than are the lower 95 percent of income earners. One of the researchers, Alain Cohn, said, “In other words, wealthy individuals are more likely to consider unequal incomes as fair even if the inequality arises from chance” (Wadley 2023). The fact that elected representatives skew strongly toward the wealthy likely has an impact on what they perceive to be problems that need addressing, and the policies they consider.

As an example of how the lack of descriptive representation can distort the public agenda (deciding which issues need addressing), a series of studies by Michael Kraus and others at Yale found that Americans dramatically overestimate the progress made in racial economic equality since World War II. There have clearly been improvements in statutory discrimination. However, in terms of wages for college-educated Black employees vs. college-educated white employees, high school-educated Black employees vs. high school-educated white employees, and accumulated assets (wealth), the gap between Black and white communities has actually increased today compared to 1945.

The wealth gap can be credited to such things as historic low levels of assets among Black citizens from “red-lining” policies, and other discrimination, that prevented them from getting mortgages, etc., such that even if no further discrimination occurred, wealth passed intergenerationally and compounded means the wealth gap has actually grown. This misperception of progress, having been made that is “wildly discrepant from reality”, isn’t evenly or randomly distributed among Americans. The researchers found that it is much greater among high-income Whites than for any other group. Thus, the significant overrepresentation of high-income Whites elected to legislatures exacerbates the distortion of agenda-setting and policy. The authors note:

One implication of the present findings is that policy discussions about the detrimental effects of economic inequality, as well as potential ways to reduce it, are unlikely to contend with the racial economic gaps that are contributing to these overarching economic trends. That is, solutions for persistent racial economic inequality might never enter discussion if policymakers and the public believe these racial divides are already closing. (Kraus, Rucker, and Richeson 2017)

Representation can be any mixture of Pitkin’s concepts, as well as being more or less substantive or accountable. But unlike the other concepts of representation, descriptive representation can only apply to the whole. While an individual representative may be an authorized agent, no individual representative can be descriptive of a diverse population. But it is a mistake to think simplistically of the Jewish representative representing Jewish perspectives, the Black representative representing Black perspectives, and the labor union representative representing workers. Citing various political theorists from the eighteenth to twenty-first centuries, political scientist Joel Parker, in his doctoral dissertation, points out that:

An emphasis on resemblance does not hinge on the assumption that we can represent only those of our “own” group, but the opposite. Just as a nation is more than the sum of its citizens, a representative body is more than the sum of its members. Since we are all affected by the actions taken by political bodies en toto, we should think of the entire body making decisions that affect us as being representative. The representative body as a whole must stand for the nation as a whole. (Parker 2011, 171)

It is not sufficient for descriptive representation to be nominal. Depending on the goal of those making the selection, it is possible to assemble a group of token representatives that is superficially descriptive. For example, it is possible to carefully select a group of African American “representatives” who act in a manner diametrically opposed to the interests of the vast majority of African Americans. Hand-picked descriptive representatives offer no guarantee of comprehensive representation. But the use of scientific sampling can overcome this failing. Random selection will generate a body that is not only roughly similar in appearance, or other identifiable demographic measures, but also in terms of invisible characteristics such as perspectives, interests, values, class, and political beliefs. With sortition, the visible similarity is essentially a “double check” for the overall representativeness of the sample. It is necessary to move beyond seeing an individual delegate as one’s representative, to seeing the representative body as a whole as being representative (or failing to be representative) of the community as a whole. This jury model of representation using sampling methods, or “representation by sample”, was proposed as far back as 1913 by A. Lawrence Lowell in his book Public Opinion and Popular Government (Lowell 1913).

But many people reject descriptive representativeness as a good thing. The competing vision is of average people being ruled by the best among them. This was certainly Plato’s and Madison’s view. Henry J. Ford (no relation to the motor company tycoon), an ally of President Wilson and also a former president of the American Political Science Association, wrote in 1924 that the notion of a reflection or resemblance is as ridiculous in politics as in corporate governance:

No one would regard it as a correct principle in the organization of a joint stock company that the management should be such as would fairly reflect such knowledge as the shareholders might have about the business the company is to carry on. The principle universally relied on there is a grant of power to men of special knowledge and capacity, subject to responsibility for results. (Ford 1924, 148)

As discussed earlier, the opposing preferences for representation by mirror, or by merit, were debated in both America and France at the time of their revolutions. But the overwhelming sentiment among the wealthy men who led both revolutions was that representatives should be elite men like themselves. This debate about typical vs. superior, or the related clash between representativeness and expertness, may actually be a false dichotomy. Being a mirror that adds diversity can make the deliberative body, as a whole, superior to a body made up of individually “superior” members, and a descriptively and genuinely representative body may bring forth kinds of expertise that a body of individual experts couldn’t muster. I will examine this in great detail in subsequent chapters.

Representation by Sortition

The court jury is a useful analog for beginning to think about how randomly selected policy-making bodies might earn legitimacy. But there would need to be major differences in terms of selection methods, size, procedures, and functions. They should not hew too close to the current court jury model. Policy jurors must be free to ask questions and bring in experts of their own choosing, rather than being limited by exposure only to the information pre-selected by lawyers seeking to shape the jury decision. Sortition uniquely allows for the melding of deliberative and participatory democracy, so long as there are numerous allotted bodies at national, state and local levels. Some might be short-duration single- issue policy juries, while others might review executive performance, set agendas, deliberate to craft draft proposals, oversee the lottery process and mini-public procedures and staff, etc. Anyone who is willing could be able to participate directly in actual self-government at various times throughout their life.

Potential transition strategies to a sortition-based democracy will be addressed in a later chapter. However, the fact that the vast majority of citizens’ assemblies convened in the past two decades have been single-issue focused is not coincidental. Institutionalizing sortition will likely begin in one policy domain at a time, rather than in a broad sweep. For example, a city is more likely to initially just move decisions like zoning regulations to sortition panels than replace the city council altogether. There are distinctly separate decision-making tasks of government that are typically all mixed together, that could (and should) be separated out. There is agenda-setting, adopting internal rules and procedures, crafting proposals, amending and narrowing to a final draft bill, advocacy for and against a bill, judging whether to adopt the bill, executing the new law, and evaluating the performance of the new law and of the executive.

In standard elective governments, a single set of legislators takes on all of these lawmaking tasks.¹ Having the same set of people handle all these functions is a very bad design for lawmaking. The mere act of crafting a bill and the act of advocating for or against the bill make those people unfit to then judge their own handiwork. Pride of authorship, information cascades, or groupthink warps their ability to judge the final product or to evaluate its performance. They become biased. When a law isn’t working well, those who adopted that law are unable to fairly evaluate its performance, as they want to save face by asserting that their law is working well. Failing policies are continued for years after impartial people recognize they are a failure. Perhaps most egregious, the leaders of the controlling faction in a chamber write the rules and procedures for how business will be done, which promotes corruption and the concentration of power.

This design of a chamber that takes on all functions has been passed down from repurposed advisory chambers created to advise the monarchs in Europe. Elected legislatures were not designed for democratic nor competent lawmaking. This all-function design would be even worse for a sortition-based democracy. Simply substituting lottery selection for election in filling such an all-functions legislative body would be a mistake. I’ve written a journal article on this topic, entitled “Why Hybrid Bicameralism is Not Right for Sortition” (Bouricius 2018). A sortition-based lawmaking process needs to be designed from the ground up. For example, the committee structure in elected chambers would be extremely problematic with sortition. The sample of members in a body as small as a committee would not be very representative. Also in elected chambers, the committee system means that most members do not study or understand most bills they eventually vote on. Instead, they rely on the opinions of the committee members from their particular party who serve on the committee of reference. This poor design is completely inapplicable in a non-partisan sortition system.

Different lawmaking functions should be taken on by different sortition bodies. One might be limited to deciding, after consultation with a variety of experts, what bills should be proposed to a large policy jury, or evaluating the effectiveness of an existing law. These are two decision-making steps that have a powerful subjective aspect and cannot be decided purely based on expertise. Referring to Plato’s ship pilot analogy, an expert can be hired to pilot the ship, but the passengers should decide where the ship is going to go. For example, a society might decide that a goal of full employment for all who want to work should be pursued. No amount of expertise can establish definitively whether this is a good goal. The evaluation step simply examines whether this has been achieved and whether the unintended consequences are acceptable. Again, no expert can decide whether the cost of achieving this goal is acceptable to the people. Sortition can be beneficially incorporated into almost all phases of the lawmaking process.

A crucially important fact about sortition, which is often ignored by deliberative democracy sortition advocates, is that this tool can be used for a variety of tasks other than creating descriptively representative deliberative bodies. As Oliver Dowlen pointed out in his book The Political Potential of Sortition: A Study of the Random Selection of Citizens for Public Office, using its non-rational (not irrational) “blind break”, sortition is also useful for its impartiality and anti-corruption characteristics (Dowlen 2008). The current jury system that selects only 12 jurors is too small a sample to have much probability of creating an accurately descriptive representation. But that is not the goal. Random selection in this case is seeking to select a panel of impartial citizens who are diverse and only roughly typical of the population. Indeed, it is common to have judges randomly assigned to particular cases to avoid corruption. Depending on the function, not all panels in a sortition-based democracy would necessarily need to achieve, or even seek, descriptive representation. The final decision-making policy juries, however, should be accurately representative in order to achieve the needed legitimacy.

When people first learn about sortition, some suggest there would need to be some minimum competency requirement, some education level, or at least the ability to read. For some functions, this may make sense, but the notion springs from conflating the individual mini-public members with individual politicians in an electoral system. Remember, the goal is to have the body as a whole represent the community as a whole, including its disabilities. For example, the inclusion of a person with Down’s syndrome in the room (who perhaps needed to listen to audio versions rather than read background material) may spark empathy and insights among other members that lead to better legislation, because it anticipates and accommodates the needs of such people in society. In short, the inclusion of nominally “incompetent” members may increase the competency of the group. We will examine design considerations in a later chapter.

Modern Sortition

The modern resurrection of sortition took a major step in Canada, starting in the province of British Columbia. Sortition was used to form a deliberative body to consider making changes to their electoral system. Canada is one of the few modern democracies, along with the UK and the United States, that uses the archaic single-seat, winner-take-all election system (discussed previously). Recognizing that elected politicians had an inherent bias when it comes to fiddling with the election rules that got them elected, some far-sighted political leaders in British Columbia decided to establish an independent Citizens’ Assembly to consider reforms and place a referendum proposal directly on the ballot. This Assembly of 160 members (80 men and 80 women), which met throughout 2004, was created using stratified random selection of one man and one woman from each district, with the addition of randomly selected male and female Aboriginal (First Nations) members.

In his speech at the opening ceremonies of the Citizens’ Assembly, the Chair, Dr. Jack Blaney, stated

Starting today, we have an incredible and unique opportunity, and an equally incredible and unique responsibility. To our knowledge, nowhere, at any time in a democracy, has a government asked non-elected citizens to undertake such a commitment, and then give those same citizens such potential power over an important public policy question. (Blaney 2004a)

In fact, far from being unique, this was the standard practice in the mature Athenian democracy, and it is only in modern electoral “democracies” that this is novel, and in subsequent essays Blaney specified that it was unprecedented in “modern democracies”.

Following British Columbia’s historic and precedent-setting adoption of sortition with its Citizens’ Assembly, Ontario copied this procedure. Similar citizen assemblies, selected by lot, were also created in Australia, Belgium, and in Iceland in response to the financial crises. In the two decades that followed, nearly a thousand such citizens’ assemblies have been impaneled around the world, though very few in the United States so far. These have nearly all been advisory bodies, rather than final decision-making bodies. However, they are demonstrating the validity of sortition as a democratic tool, hopefully encouraging further expansion and authority down the road. Details about some of these and other remarkable experiments in sortition-based democracy are discussed in a later chapter.