Objections to Sortition

This chapter will examine a variety of reasons why people may be skeptical or critical of the concept of sortition. While many concerns about sortition are merely off-the-cuff reactions that can be addressed through careful explanation, others are deep-felt or thought-through criticisms. This chapter won’t address all objections (for example, from supporters of religious theocracy, etc.), but I will try to tackle the common ones I have encountered.

Randomness versus the Cherished Right to Vote

When sortition is presented to people for the first time, a common reaction is that randomness should not play a role in public policymaking. Even if it is carefully explained that the randomness in selecting decision-makers is applied in order to enhance both the representativeness and the rationality of the overall decision-making process, many people have a gut-level distaste for any abandonment of rationality in the choosing of decision-makers. As uniquely rational creatures (even if emotions are calling the shots below the surface), we give the employment of rationality pride of place. Why would one give up the potential for making the best possible choices for decision-makers, in favor of an arational, amoral, random process? One answer, of course, is that the ability to use rational and moral reasons for selecting decision-makers also inevitably opens the door to the use of manipulative, bullying, and immoral reasons as well (or preferentially).

A related, though distinct concern, is that the right to vote—the right of every citizen to play a role (even though minuscule) in the selection of policy makers—is felt to be a fundamental right, which much blood has been spilled in order to secure. Any reform that can be seen as giving up this cherished right will be suspect. A mathematical explanation of the inconsequential or de minimis power of a single vote in a mass election generally doesn’t sweep aside this emotional homage, especially when it is thought of as a collective voice, rather than an individual act. Sortition advocates would be wise to promote sortition first and foremost as an alternative to politicians and elite power brokers, rather than as an alternative to voting. Sortition enhances the real political power of ordinary people, as a group, more effectively than voting, rather than taking that power away.

The underlying reason for this devotion to voting is the general assumption that elections are the only alternative to tyranny and dictatorship. Recognizing that there is a third option—actual democracy, through sortition, will take time. It might take years, or generations of positive experience with sortition as a partial, or smaller-scale endeavor, before voting could be abandoned completely. Elections and politicians must come to be understood as an inferior and oligarchic arrangement. For the foreseeable future, sortition is likely to be part of a hybrid system that maintains elections for certain functions, while embracing sortition for others. In the final chapter, I will examine transition strategies.

Apathy

The issue of political apathy occurs to many people upon hearing about sortition. If half the population won’t even vote, how can you expect them to do even more by participating in citizens’ assemblies? It is true that the uptake rate of citizens receiving a random invitation to join existing citizens’ assemblies is quite low (thus the need to resort to stratified sampling to approach something like representativeness). It should be noted that this low rate of participation in currently existing sortition bodies is within an environment where the concept is strange and unfamiliar to most people, and nearly all existing mini-publics have no real power, playing only advisory roles.

One theory suggests apathy results from satisfaction with the status quo. Why spend time with politics if things are going along fine without your involvement? Indeed, studies have shown that anger over political corruption can prompt some people to vote when they might not vote otherwise. Other theories suggest apathy is the result of alienation and frustration. Anecdotal evidence indicates that such disaffection is the dominant factor. Of course, it is also possible non-voters are merely rationalizing their apathy by asserting a plausible cause—disdain for politicians who are all a bunch of crooks—for some other reason that they themselves may not even recognize.

However, a disdain for politicians and politics, and even a history of non-voting, does not necessarily mean an unwillingness to engage in political deliberation. One study conducted by a team of political scientists led by Michael Neblo of Ohio State University found that apathetic Americans, including non-whites and young people—groups especially prone to political apathy— would willingly participate in political deliberation, given a meaningful opportunity. The authors of the study concluded that “If the political process could be rendered more rational and responsive in their eyes, then they would be more inclined to engage in it robustly” (quoted in University of Colorado at Boulder 2011).

Political apathy is also associated with the lower classes. The racial and class disparities in terms of apathy are largely an American phenomenon that is not matched in many other democracies. To some extent, this may reflect the lack of a European-style working-class-based political party in the US two-party system. The Democratic Party received most of the available labor union energy by default, while working-class voters (those who bother to vote) have increasingly voted Republican in recent years. But the causes of political apathy are more complex than the party system alone.

By “apathy”, I do not mean simply “not voting”. Voting is a minimalist measure of engagement. As can be demonstrated mathematically, a single vote, by itself, is a virtually inconsequential political act. I am speaking of a deeper political apathy. With no opportunity to participate in any meaningful democratic deliberation, there is no real point in investing effort in informing oneself. Political information just feels irrelevant and useless to most people.

In his book Saving Democracy: A Plan for Real Representation in America, Kevin O’Leary summarizes the views of numerous political scientists:

Apathy is sometimes a consequence of a nation’s political institutions and thus, instead of being an immutable quality, can be changed. Simply because we observe patterns of behavior does not mean they are inevitable. The apathy we see, particularly in the less educated and less affluent, for example, may, in fact, be consequences of political institutions or the lack thereof. (O’Leary 2006, 216)

Democratic engagement may be a self-reinforcing feedback loop that can lead to higher and higher levels of civic-mindedness, only if citizens engage in political participation that leads to consequences. If members of the public knew that their participation genuinely mattered, as in a policy jury, they would have an incentive to learn and act earnestly, as they generally do when serving on court juries. In other words, people overcome apathy when they need to. By creating intensive deliberative bodies, sortition creates decision-making institutions that make it rational for participants to climb out of ignorance.

Basic Competence

The American jury system allows us to gain certain insights into the issue of civic apathy, but also basic competence. It should be noted at the outset that the existing jury system is deficient compared to democratic sortition. Procedures such as peremptory challenges, which enable lawyers to shape a jury to their side’s advantage, and the rules of evidence, etc., can manipulate a jury. While we are all aware of criminal cases in which we disagree with a given jury’s decision, on the whole, juries are highly regarded by both the general public and judges. Juries ward off both apathy and incompetence.

According to Valerie Hans and Neil Vidmar, two of the nation’s leading experts on the American jury system, hundreds of studies suggest that actual jury incompetence is rare (Hans and Vidmar 2013, 250). They note that bad decisions, which inevitably do occur, stem from factors unrelated to competence (Hans and Vidmar 2013, 129). A 2012 Rasmussen Reports public opinion survey found that 65 percent of Americans put more faith in a jury of their peers than in a judge, while just 21 percent have more faith in a judge, with the rest undecided (Rasmussen Poll 2012).

Likewise, several studies confirm that jurors themselves generally get a sense of satisfaction from serving, despite common grousing about the inconvenience of jury duty. One study of jurors’ satisfaction, which covered six courts in the UK, concluded:

Despite some particularly negative experiences, many jurors left the court for the last time with positive points to make about their time as a juror. Key among these were the positive learning experience it afforded, meeting new people and the feeling that their civic duty had been done. Nearly three-quarters of jurors said they would be happy or ‘wouldn’t mind’ repeating their duty. Over 95 percent of respondents considered juries very important, essential, quite important, or necessary to our system of justice. Engagement in this important role played a part in generating a sense of satisfaction. “The sense of social solidarity that arose from participating in jury service was an important factor generating a sense of satisfaction for some jurors. Others found their service enhanced or helped to forge a sense of national identity or citizenship. (Matthews, Hancock, and Briggs 2004)

Even if juries are highly respected, and serving on a jury (or a citizens’ assembly) prompts ordinary citizens to prevail over civic apathy, that does not necessarily mean that such participation is competent. Beyond mere apathy, the issue of basic competency is the cudgel that has been used to bash democracy for millennia. From Greek anti-democrats such as Plato, through countless aristocratic political theorists around the world, to some modern political scientists, every form of democracy has been challenged on the issue of competency. While the notions that we may rely on hereditary nobility or property-owning maleness as indicators of competence have fallen into disfavor, the ignorance of ordinary voters still gives many people pause. Even the minimal task of casting a competent (informed) vote for a presumably more competent representative is questioned.

While many modern political theorists view electoral governance in a triumphalist way, as the pinnacle, or end point of human political maturity, there is often an underlying unease about popular competence. Many people actually favor a democratic veneer provided by elections that masks actual rule by a competent elite. While it is considered indiscreet to express this attitude, I suspect it is actually quite widespread. Many people who hold this belief haven’t expressly admitted it to themselves. They also probably don’t put themselves in the bucket with the incompetents they worry about. Among politicians, especially, it is much more judicious to maintain the pretense that voters are wise (especially if they elected you).

In Jason Brennan’s book, Against Democracy, he proposes a “competence principle,” according to which

it is deemed presumptively unjust, and to violate a citizen’s rights, to forcibly deprive a citizen of life, or property, or to significantly harm their life prospects, as a result of decision made by an incompetent deliberative body, or decisions made in an incompetent way or in bad faith. (Brennan 2017, 157)

He essentially argues that it is unjust to have others suffer because of the choices of politically incompetent individuals. He uses empirical data on voter ignorance to condemn electoral democracy. A solution he offers is to require a competency test to qualify as a voter, and perhaps some sort of “epistocratic council” with the power to veto unwise decisions. While his critique of electoral democracy is well supported by facts (indeed, this book presents a plethora of corroborating details), there is no empirical data to support his speculative hope that disqualifying some voters through a knowledge test would improve the competence of the remaining electorate, who would still suffer from rational ignorance about candidates and issues, partisan tribalism, and cognitive biases. He also, stunningly, gives no consideration to how the interests of these privileged “more competent” voters might differ from the interests of the general population.

His assertion of a “competence principle” may have merit, and indeed, the bulk of this book has impeached the competence of voters as voters (and also the competence of politicians as decision-makers). But this book has also lauded citizens’ competence as citizens, when convened in mini-publics with good process and appropriate supports. A key distinction needs to be made between the competence of the atomized single voter in a mass, partisan, competitive environment, contrasted with the competence of a diverse group, as a group, when incentivized to deliberate. A more effective solution to Brennan’s “competence principle” would be giving a representative sample of citizens the time, resources and motivation to become well informed—and thus more competent than uninformed voters, whether able to pass Brennan’s proposed test or not.

Education for Competency?

The attitude of Thomas Jefferson, that democracy’s remedy for incompetent citizens must be education, is well known. Jefferson wrote in a letter to William Jarvis,

I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion with education. (Jefferson 1820)

But “civics education”, which has been in steady decline since the 1960s in the US, is not what is needed. Critical thinking, problem-solving skills, and the skills to participate effectively in groups are key. Schools can and should teach these things, but too often do not. As Frank Fischer noted, “Americans are first and foremost socialized into the role of consumer, rather than citizen” (Fischer 2009, 59).

It would be foolhardy to blindly rely on hoped-for improvements in competence from education, or experience through democratic participation, or, as Barber expresses it, “faith not in what men are, but in what democracy makes them” (Barber 2009, 237). Theodore Roosevelt said, “the majority of the plain people will day in and day out make fewer mistakes in governing themselves than any smaller body of men will make in trying to govern them” (quoted in Barber 2009, 151). Of course, politicians, presumably Teddy included, are wont to “suck up” to the people with insincere praise. So we can’t be certain if this was a genuine assessment.

But sortition-based democracy asks much more from citizens than the electoral system does, which simply asks them to accept or reject representatives as their would-be rulers. Many people might figure voters can handle that minimal task, but worry about giving these avowedly incompetent voters the more arduous task, and real power, of crafting and adopting legislation, as proposed in this book.

Are Random Groups Competent?

Are everyday people competent enough to understand policy implications, or do we actually need superior individuals—an elite—at the helm? As Hélène Landemore puts it: “The traditional aristocratic prejudice against democracy stemmed from the belief that the people were neither wise nor virtuous enough to rule. The contemporary version of the same belief is that the people are irrational, uninformed, and apathetic” (Landemore 2013, 31). Some sortition advocates sidestep the concern by suggesting some sort of minimal competency test, perhaps comparable to the test immigrant applicants for USA citizenship are required to pass. Alternatively, simply allowing citizens to remove themselves from the sortition pool, or, as in ancient Athens, requiring them to proactively add themselves to the pool by volunteering, might remove many of those with no capacity or willingness to serve the community in this manner.

Here is a fundamental point of this entire book: It is not the competence of individuals (whether selected by lottery or by election) as individuals that is key. It is the competence of the group as a whole that they constitute that matters. I argue that such one-by-one filtering approaches would do more harm than good by limiting diversity. Ordinary, diverse citizens within well-designed mini-publics are not only adequately competent as a group (not each as an individual), they are demonstrably more competent than relatively homogeneous groups of elites.

When examining mini-public competence, it is important that we not conflate the incompetence of some individual members of a group with the incompetence of the group as a whole. The sortition proposal seeks to have typical citizens act in groups, where the poor judgment of a few members with weak cognitive abilities will not (with proper institutional design) spoil the group decisions. Within deliberative groups, individuals who are significantly incompetent tend to be recognized as such by those working with them and are not persuasive. Thus, the real concern is not whether any incompetent individuals would be selected using a lottery system, but whether a ruinous quorum of a large group would be incompetent. The evidence from the study of court juries shows that this wouldn’t be a problem for even a relatively small mini-public. But beyond this limited corrective notion of a group’s competence or intelligence, the cognitive sciences recognize the existence of distributed intelligence within groups that can generate an emergent intelligence (referred to as collective intelligence in previous chapters) that surpasses the intelligence of the best individuals.

Two studies with 699 participants conducted by researchers from MIT and other universities, led by Prof. Thomas Malone, found that groups of people exhibit a sort of “group intelligence”, which predicts their ability to successfully tackle a range of tasks. The interesting thing, as they reported in the October 1, 2010, issue of Science magazine, is that this group intelligence was not strongly correlated with either the average or maximum individual intelligence within the group. Instead, much to their surprise, the researchers found that it was more correlated with “the average social sensitivity of group members, the equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking, and the proportion of females in the group”. As one of the researchers concluded, “Having a bunch of smart people in a group doesn’t necessarily make the group smart” (Woolley et al. 2010).

So, what if a group of average citizens had the relevant information, opportunity, and incentives to tackle complex policy questions? Could they do as well, or better than, politicians in Congress? The results of numerous studies conducted by the Program for Public Consultation, affiliated with the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, are promising. Unlike a traditional “off the top of the head” poll, for decades they have presented a representative sample of about two thousand Americans with information on challenging policy issues, such as the budget deficit challenge, but also give respondents key information and a wide range of arguments on the issue. Their goal is for respondents to have a deliberative experience like that of a policymaker. In one of these surveys, for example, through a combination of budget cuts, particularly to the defense department, and tax increases, such as income taxes on the wealthy and the estate tax on large estates, participants were able to dramatically reduce the deficit.¹ This consultative exercise did not involve deliberative discussions among participants (though they did engage in internal deliberation within their own minds), and there were no lobbyists present. The unanticipated consequences of their proposals were unknown, so this experiment was too simplistic to carry great weight. Yet, Steven Kull, director of PPC, observed that, “when given information and a chance to sort through their options, most Americans do a pretty good job of dealing with America’s budget problems—better than most politicians” (Kull et al. 2011).

A more comprehensive experiment that included small group face-to-face deliberation was conducted in June 2010 with 3,500 participants at 57 sites across the US The project, called “The People Speak: Our Budget, Our Economy”, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, was evaluated by researchers from Harvard and two California Universities. Organizers brought together a representative sample of Americans to evaluate a broad range of federal deficit reduction proposals. The groups’ recommendations were strikingly similar to those produced by the PPC project mentioned above. The researchers reported that “Both liberals and conservatives appear to have moderated in their policy views regarding spending cuts and tax increases” (America Speaks 2011).

Professor James Fishkin has conducted many experiments with “deliberative polling”, in which random samples of citizens engage in carefully structured deliberation on complex public policy issues. The insights he has gleaned about competence are worth noting. He points out that “Whether or not ordinary citizens appear competent may well depend on whether they have reason to pay attention, whether they think their voice will matter, how discussions and interactions are conducted, and how any data about their views is collected” (Fishkin 2009, 68).

Fishkin concludes that “The picture that emerges from Deliberative Polling and indeed from other deliberative consultations is that the public is indeed capable of dealing with complex issues, once it believes its voice matters, once it believes there is reason to spend time and effort in public discussion, listening to alternative points of view” (Fishkin 2009, 119). After examining the dozens of citizen deliberative processes around the world, including citizen juries, citizen assemblies, planning cells, participatory budgeting, etc. Frank Fischer observes in Democracy and Expertise that “they have shown that citizens are capable of much more involvement in thinking about and assessing technical questions than is conventionally presumed” (Fischer 2009, 90). He goes on to cite multiple studies by various researchers who studied the Citizens’ Assembly in British Columbia, showing that the “intellectual and deliberative capacities of the ordinary citizens to have been impressively high … Citizens not only made good, reasoned choices, but that they did at least as well as the experts on the topic” (Fischer 2009, 96–97).

Mobs

There is a worry about sortition that is related to the fear of incompetence, but somewhat distinct. Even if people act competently in jury settings, some people fear that ordinary people are easily provoked into mob thinking or behavior. Does this propensity make sortition dangerous? Thoughtless mob behavior is a stereotype that is common fare on comedy programs (it is a recurring motif in the Simpsons cartoons, for example). Mob behavior is known by psychologists as deindividuation (thinking and behaving as part of a group, rather than as an individual). Even before Scottish journalist Charles Mackay popularized the phrase “the madness of crowds” in his mid-nineteenth-century book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, distrust of people’s herd behavior had been common (MacKay [1852] 2018).

One fear (frequently mentioned by the US Founders), which has echoed down the ages, is that the general public is prone to mob-like intemperate passions. This line of reasoning can lead to the conclusion that perhaps it is better if they are preoccupied by celebrity, pop culture, and current “Internet influencers”, instead of governance. Mob psychology and conformity are real, as shown by scientific research and devastating historical examples (such as lynchings).

The fear that sortition would empower “the mob” is not grounded in a thoroughgoing definition of what a mob is, so it is tricky to refute. It is a visceral fear. Mob “madness” is typically driven by a sort of positive feedback loop from people observing the attitudes or behaviors of others. It is an exaggerated form of groupthink. Mob behavior is often a response to a leader of some sort, though not always. While the word “mob” is pejorative, such deindividuation can also be neutral or praiseworthy. Examples include an emotionally powerful theater or concert performance, a religious sermon, a mass protest against some injustice, or a crowd rushing to the aid of victims of an earthquake. These all hinge on thinking fast (system one in Kahneman’s terminology). But good policymaking requires more careful assessment, and thinking slow (system two) in order to avoid horrible mistakes.

Mob behavior is not inevitable. It is contingent on circumstances that can be promoted or guarded against. Many scholars, from Condorcet and his “Jury Theorem” of the eighteenth century, Francis Galton with his discovery of the uncanny accuracy of the average guess of the weight of an ox at a country fair in the early twentieth century, to vast amounts of current research by countless psychologists, have examined this. They have all found that protecting the independence of individual assessments is essential to avoid lopsided swings, which can occur when people become aware of the assessments of others. These and related issues were discussed in previous chapters, where I presented conditions necessary for good decision-making—separating active give-and-take deliberation (tapping collective intelligence) in the crafting of proposals, and independent internal deliberation (harnessing the wisdom of crowds) in the judging of those proposals.

What About Mobs and Elected Politicians?

It is important to recognize that elected representatives within a legislature can also be subject to the same deindividuation mob psychology as any other group of citizens (though often divided into separate partisan mobs). Even Schumpeter, who was quite pessimistic about the abilities of average citizens in terms of political reasoning, did not limit this assessment to public “mobs” in the classic sense.

It must not be forgotten that the phenomena of crowd psychology are by no means confined to mobs rioting … Every parliament, every committee, every council of war composed of a dozen generals in their sixties, displays in however mild a form some of the features that stand out so glaringly in the case of the rabble, in particular a reduced sense of responsibility, a lower level of energy of thought and greater sensitiveness to non-logical influences. (Schumpeter 1942, 257)

Candidates, parties, and certain media outlets also have a vested interest in promoting mob behavior. Election campaigns and politicians frequently seek to foster mob mentality as a useful get-out-the-vote tool. But the obverse is also true—when the population is denied any meaningful policymaking role, protests and mass mobilizations (mobs) are seen as a tactical necessity, in order to threaten or appeal to the designated decision-makers. Elections promote the madness of crowds both coming and going.

Politicians also have an interest in deceiving and misinforming voters, which can foment mob thinking if misinformation aids the election of the “right” candidate. Sometimes it is sufficient to degrade facts into “he-said-she-said” opinions. As Dartmouth Professor Russell Muirhead wrote:

Those who crave office inevitably will find that certain facts get in the way. They wish for a world that embraces their ambitions and makes their distinctive claims persuasive, but the world always contains certain facts that are not accommodating. They may wish, for instance, for a world in which tax cuts increase government revenues, or for one where they are judged by their best intentions rather than their gaffes. When the facts do not comply, they face a standing incentive to contest and massage the facts in order to convert them into mere opinions—or eradicate them wholly. (Muirhead 2010)

Often it is enough for elites to provide selective anecdotes and information with high salience, rather than resort to outright lying, in order to create a false public understanding. The prevalence of the belief that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks or that weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq were commonly cited examples.

Indeed, the competitive partisan environment within the electoral environment increases the likelihood of mob thinking and behavior. If one’s concern is mobs, then citizens’ assemblies are probably the best antidote that exists. Unlike mobs in the street or politician “mobs” constantly in campaign mode, well-designed sortition bodies cultivate slow thinking, which is anathema to creating mobs. Slow thinking and deliberation with conflicting arguments may still lead to groupthink, but not the extreme form represented by “the madness of crowds”, which is based on thinking fast.

In the next section, we will redirect our examination of competence from the common people to the elite politicians. Do elections return competent policy decision-makers?

Politicians and Competence

It is universally recognized that good government requires competence. In the US Founders’ vision, elections would help create an elite meritocracy in which the wise, virtuous, and competent would govern. Members of Congress are indeed elite—but not in the positive sense many of the Founders and Framers had hoped. Those who observe the regular occurrence of corruption and occasional scandals emerging from national and state capitols have reason to doubt the efficacy of the Federalists’ approach. As I noted in Chapter 6, most people disagree with the notion that the members of Congress are the “best and the brightest” our nation has to offer. While some individual members of Congress are certainly brilliant, it is debatable whether they, as a group, have above-average intelligence or competence. What’s more, the character traits in which they rank higher than the average are predominantly ones that are not beneficial for society.

Competence consists of many distinct attributes. While some individuals may have high intelligence and a broad range of competencies, nobody is omnicompetent. A person or group that is competent with regard to A and B may be totally incompetent in dealing with C and D. The more homogeneous a group is, the more likely it will exhibit gross incompetence with regard to some important tasks. As presented in this book, the issue of group competence is far more complicated than many people imagine—it is not simply the sum of individual competencies. But to aid in examining the whole issue of competence, for the moment let’s gloss over this reality and pretend for the sake of argument that there is some fundamental human characteristic called “general competence”, which different people have to different degrees.

Politicians are widely mocked as incompetent, egotistical, manipulative, or spineless. Politicians are stereotyped not only in America but around the world to varying degrees. Stereotypes are often false, of course, and this could be simple jealousy—inferiors who enjoy bad-mouthing their betters. However, even if this stereotype is valid, pointing out the flaws of elected officials is fruitless if there isn’t a better alternative. Was the aphorism that Winston Churchill referenced in his 1947 speech to parliament fundamentally correct—that electoral democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time?

What can we say about how well elections perform at selecting for competence and other attributes that might be desirable in our rulers? My twenty years of experience as a lawmaker convinced me that elected legislators don’t stand out as more competent than average citizens. The selection process applies a powerful filtering process, but it is not one that selects for policy or deliberative competence.

The filtering process of partisan elections clearly selects legislators who are unlike the general population they are supposed to represent. First, elected politicians must be the sort of people who are willing to consider serving in such an office. Many people would not want to do this, whether because of shyness, time commitment, or countless other reasons. Second, they must be people who are willing to put themselves through the stressful process of running for office, which requires both a large amount of public exposure as well as thick enough skin to suffer through attacks. Candidates can be subjected to smears and false accusations. Third, to become an elected official, one must have a financial, employment and family situation that allows one to devote the necessary time to running for office (let alone serving if elected). Fourth, people must have personal networks and/or party connections that make a campaign feasible. Fifth, in jurisdictions without public campaign financing, candidates must also have financial backers. Sixth, successful candidates tend to be people who are able and willing to do the sorts of things (sometimes unsavory) that are needed in order to win an election. These filters can apply to local, state and national offices. They are simply more powerful for higher offices. Relatively few people are willing or able to pass through all these layers of filtration, and those who do are not like most of the rest of the members of the community.

The election process imposes a strong bias favoring economically and culturally advantaged individuals with a magnified sense of self-importance. This sense of self-importance often crosses the line to narcissism. Research by Chin Wei Ong of Bangor University and others has found that “followers were initially attracted to narcissistic leaders’ charisma and vision, and these factors were responsible for narcissists’ initial rise as leaders. In other words, groups of people initially preferred the narcissist over others as their leader” (Bangor University 2015). However, they also found that narcissists did not perform well over time and were ineffective as leaders.

The common-sense view that narcissism is not conducive to constructive public policy deliberation feeds the notion that an eagerness to run for office should be a disqualification from serving. There are good reasons this quip resonates with many people. Putting people through the filter of elections before they are empowered to make decisions clearly distorts the nature of the legislative body, but not only by favoring egotists. The people I know, who I would most want to have making important decisions for society, are people who would never consider running for office, while many of the successful politicians I know are exactly the kind of people whom I wish were not in control. I don’t want to paint every politician with this brush and overstate this point; some elected officials are, of course, humble, brilliant individuals with only the best of intentions. But as a general rule, tolerant, open-minded people, who are well-suited to the task of deliberation, are also the type of people unlikely to seek or win political office. Electoral politics tends to attract and reward “true believers”, who are often intolerant and closed to others’ new perspectives.

There is no compelling evidence that elections are effective at selecting individuals with competence at governing. The skills and personality required for winning elections are not the same, and are in fact often in conflict with those needed for competent governing. James Surowiecki in The Wisdom of Crowds points out that we shouldn’t believe people are more expert simply because they confidently assert their competence. There is no evidence of a positive correlation between the level of confidence exhibited by elected officials and the actual level of competence. This is the Dunning–Kruger effect (mentioned at the end of Chapter 8) in action. A feeling of certainty that one is right (a lack of humility and recognition that one might be wrong) is associated with “getting into politics” and deciding to run for office. This certainty and misplaced self-confidence probably also help with mobilizing supporters, money, and winning elections.

Surowiecki relays the story of a series of experiments with groups of military fliers who were given some logic problems to solve. Higher status pilots spoke more and more convincingly than navigators, even when the pilots were wrong and the navigators were right. But there is no correlation between confidence and competence. “In fact, as the military-flier studies suggest, people who imagine themselves as leaders will often overestimate their knowledge and project an air of confidence and expertise that is unjustified”. What’s more, others (in this case, navigators) tend to accept and defer to the self-defined experts.

There is also the fundamental matter of alignment of interests that may supersede the question of competence. The interests and policy preferences of those who win elections do not necessarily align with those of the population they are supposedly representing. We have already established that there is a huge class divergence between the elected elite and the average citizen. Of course, some individuals rise above their class interests and work for the common good. However, most people conveniently rationalize that policies that are in their interests are probably also good for the nation as a whole. It’s just human nature. I don’t see any convincing evidence that Congress as a whole acts constructively toward the interests of the average citizen (and polls show most citizens don’t either). Some readers may disagree, but the burden is on them to find evidence of this, rather than to simply assert that Congress acts for the general good, merely because that’s how representative democracy is supposed to work. If there is a divergence, competence in office may mean competence to effectively work against the interests of the people purportedly being represented. Frequently, candidates stress their effectiveness, or ability to “get things done”, while neglecting to detail exactly what things they want to do. Is it better to have a representative who is competent at defeating the interests of a community, or a representative with uncertain competence who shares the interests of the community? Fortunately, with sortition we don’t need to answer this conundrum, because the evidence from hundreds of citizens’ assemblies indicates that lottery selection, combined with good process, can select competent bodies that genuinely represent the interests of the population.

Political Expertise

One concern some people express about sortition is the loss of political expertise, which elected politicians are assumed to possess. While people typically have only a very vague idea about what constitutes “political expertise”, they presume it must exist.

A belief in political expertise dates back at least to Plato and his analogy of the ship pilot I brought up in Chapter 6. In arguing against democracy and the selection of political decision-makers by lot, Plato presented the analogy that it would be foolish to choose a ship pilot by lot, because expert pilots should be sought out. However, it is important to appreciate that the political expert is not necessarily suited to judging political decisions. In a virtual response to Plato’s analogy of the ship pilot, Aristotle gives two counter-arguments in his Politics, writing of non-experts that first

each individual will indeed be a worse judge than the experts, but collectively they will be better, or at any rate no worse. Secondly, there are tasks of which the actual doer will be neither the best nor the only judge, cases in which even those who do not possess the skill form an opinion on the finished product. An obvious example is house-building; the builder can certainly form an opinion on a house, but the user, the household-manager, will be an even better judge, So too the user of a rudder, the helmsman, is a better judge of it than the carpenters who made it; and it is the diner not the cook that pronounces upon the merits of a dinner. (Aristotle [350 BCE] 1981)

Most policy and law drafting expertise resides in professional staff, rather than the legislators themselves. As noted at the beginning of Chapter 11, Senator Edward Kennedy estimated that 95 percent of the drafting and negotiating in Congress is done by staff rather than legislators. A sortition democracy should also employ a professional staff. Most of the political expertise within Congressional offices² is actually oriented toward public relations, fund-raising and the campaign implications of policy, rather than focused on actual policy substance. Such pseudo-expertise can enhance re-election chances, but may be distinctly detrimental to good policymaking.

It is not necessarily the case that political expertise is even a meaningful concept, simply because political decisions inevitably range so widely. Since political judgment involves anticipating the effect of policies and world events on future outcomes, it is possible to assess the performance of political experts by comparing their past predictions with subsequent reality through hindsight. Philip Tetlock conducted an exhaustive study over twenty years of “expert” political forecasting, looking at the accuracy of 284 recognized political experts, and published his findings in his 2006 book, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Could We Know? He had political experts make predictions about future events within their spheres of expertise, as well as give a confidence rating indicating how sure they felt about each prediction. As history passed over twenty years, he was able to compare these predictions with what really ended up happening. While a few experts did somewhat better than the guesses of non-experts, his research showed that there is little to recommend the predictions of most experts over “dart-throwing chimps”. Regardless of liberal or conservative leanings, professional background, or status—as a whole, political experts did not perform particularly well. He laments that the evidence shows: “there is something wrong with existing mechanisms for getting to the truth, both in the media-driven marketplace of ideas and in the top-secret world of intelligence analysis. Indeed, one of the more disconcerting results of this project has been the discovery of an inverse relationship between how well experts do on our scientific indicators of good judgment and how attractive these experts are to the media and other consumers of expertise” (Tetlock 2005, 217). Most alleged political expertise may simply be an illusion (promoted by those who claim to have it). If it does exist, the evidence indicates we are not good at recognizing it.

So if we can’t count on elections to empower individuals with meaningful political expertise, or superior political judgment, do elections select for other desirable traits? Elections may (or may not) screen out people with extreme intellectual deficiencies, but experience proves that they do not screen out individuals with extreme ethical deficiencies (in fact, just the opposite).

Executive Function and Expertise

I discussed the role of the executive at the end of Chapter 2 (and briefly in a legislative context at the start of Chapter 11), but now want to expand that examination in a sortitional context. We should first make a distinction between the legislative functions of government—deciding “What goal should be pursued” and “what policy might best achieve that,” and the executive function of government—competently administering the policy decisions of the legislature. In many electoral democracies, these functions are more or less intertwined. This is especially true in parliamentary systems where the governing party or party coalition in the legislature takes on the executive role as well.

In this chapter, I am primarily focusing on competence in the legislative realm, rather than the executive. However, I should say a bit about the problems of assuring the competency of an executive, and how sortition can play a useful role there as well. Electoral democracies are often undone by placing both policy and administrative roles onto a single individual. It is not possible to use elections to hold one person accountable for two separate attributes or functions. The American presidential election is a classic example. A voter may like the policy direction of candidate A, but find that person to be untrustworthy or incompetent, while candidate B is trustworthy and competent, but advocates horrible policies. Genuine democratic accountability requires that an executive serve an administrative role primarily, with policy matters handled by the legislative branch. While there may occasionally be an individual who seems to excel at both roles, whether we are speaking of Napoleon or the modern American “imperial presidency”, the merging of these functions opens the door for authoritarianism and is fundamentally undemocratic.

In ancient Athens, most executive functions were carried out by a large number of lottery-selected boards, with ten citizens each. These boards of magistrates were administrative rather than policymaking. The issue of competency was handled by having the members of these boards work together so they could watch each other, protecting Athens from any incompetent or corrupt member. The magistrates were also subject to a review and settling of accounts at the end of their service by randomly selected review panels. While there was a single individual who served as the nominal head of state in Athens, this position was basically ceremonial (receiving foreign dignitaries and the like). That individual was chosen by lot from among the Council of 500, but each served only a single day before being rotated out. Various democracies used a collective executive, rather than a single “ruler”, in an attempt to defend against the danger of dictatorship. The initial Pennsylvania state constitution established a twelve-member Supreme Executive Council along with a president, and the early French Constitutions also established multi-person executive bodies (which were steadily winnowed down until Napoleon became the sole executive).

Policymaking is the essence of politics, and as Hélène Landemore of Yale University points out in her book Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many, that

politics is unlike administration, precisely because, unlike for administrative tasks, when it comes to solving political problems, we cannot tell who the experts are. Administrative tasks are those tasks for which we can a priori determine whose knowledge and opinions matter. In politics, however … we do not have that luxury. Most of the time, because of the unpredictable and ever-changing nature of problems that the community will have to deal with, the relevant knowledge, perspective, or information are simply unknown. (Landemore 2013, 13)

A key to democracy is to avoid blending policymaking and administration. This was a basis for the council-manager municipal government reform proposals of the Progressive era in the US at the start of the twentieth century. This separation was seen as crucial for governmental competence and fighting the rampant corruption of party machines and their spoils system. Under these reforms, which were adopted by many cities, the position of mayor was eliminated or made largely ceremonial, with a city council elected using proportional representation, hiring a city manager to handle administration and carry out the policies adopted by the council. Many US cities still use a city manager, but no longer with a council elected by PR, let alone fully representative legislative bodies selected by lot.³

If there is a single chief executive (rather than a collective executive), it is essential that this person serve exclusively an administrative function, like a city manager. Unlike “political expertise” (which is likely illusory), “administrative expertise” is real and quantifiable. As with a city manager, it is appropriate for a representative body (in a sortition-based democracy, one selected by lot, rather than an elected city council) to essentially conduct an in-depth hiring process, rather than through a popular election that hinges on partisan tribalism, advertising or campaign techniques. A relatively small representative group can overcome the rational ignorance that sabotages all large election processes. They can spend the time to genuinely understand the past performance of the candidate and recruit a competent individual with genuine administrative expertise. This is far better than electing a chief administrator who is somebody who toots his or her own horn, and puts themselves forward due to narcissistic megalomania, as with so many politicians. Likewise, it would be desirable to use a jury model for evaluating an incumbent or firing a chief executive as well. Multi-body sortition principles suggest that each of these bodies should be separate. A review panel should not have the corrupting incentive to remove an incumbent just so those same people get to pick a replacement.