The Re-Emergence of Sortition

Despite the glaring flaws of elections,¹ by the end of the eighteenth century, they came to be thought of as the only alternative to monarchy. Democratic sortition had virtually evaporated from both the public’s and political theorists’ consciousness. For nearly two centuries, hardly any published proposals for sortition appeared. A couple of exceptions include a humorous 1926 article by H. L. Mencken entitled “A Purge of Legislatures”, and a serious essay by the Trinidadian anti-Stalinist Marxist, C. L. R. James in 1956, entitled “Every Cook Can Govern: A Study of Democracy in Ancient Greece; Its Meaning for Today” (James 1956).

In recent years, however, advocacy and real-world implementations of sortition have been mushrooming around the globe. In this chapter, I will look at a few of these. They range from unofficial advisory “deliberative polls” to formal public policy decision-making bodies. A number of sortition theorists started experimenting with real-world applications toward the end of the twentieth century. The modern reinvention of sortition can be traced to several parallel developments in Europe and North America.

German Professor Dr.  Peter C. Dienel in 1972 developed what are called “Planning Cells” to better connect average citizens with government decision-making. A random sample of 25 people directly or indirectly affected by some policy issue is paid to study an issue and deliberate over a five to seven-day period. They are provided with background material, and then gathered to listen to presentations from experts and various competing advocates. The participants then break into small groups for discussion. At the end of the process, the planning cell adopts final policy recommendations. These Planning Cells are typically convened by governmental entities that are willing to adhere to the recommendations that come out of the process, and participants are generally very engaged and pleased with the deliberative process. First employed in the town of Schwelm, in the Ruhr District of Germany, Planning Cells have since been used more than a hundred times in Germany, Spain and even the United States.

A similar model has been employed in Austria through what are called “Wisdom Councils”. The Office of Future Related Issues (OFRI) in the State of Vorarlberg, Austria, has facilitated local governments in convening dozens of Wisdom Councils. These are randomly selected groups of 12 to 15 residents who tackle an issue of their choosing, using facilitation in an attempt to reach a consensus position. In some cases, issues are pre-selected by government officials, in which case they are referred to as “Creative Insight Councils”.

In the United States, Ned Crosby, apparently unaware of this German invention, founded the Jefferson Center in 1974 to facilitate the development of a similar model he called a “Citizens Jury”.² Pulling together a random sample of average citizens, various Citizens Juries, initially in Minnesota and in later decades across the country, tackled a variety of thorny issues such as health care reform, presidential elections, agricultural impacts on water quality, physician-assisted suicide, global climate change, etc. The goal was to see if a deliberative process in which participants heard all sides could uncover common ground and discover a sort of group wisdom. The juries were generally small (a dozen or more participants), but were often conducted multiple times to gauge the consistency of decisions. Both participants and organizers were happy with the process and outcomes. But these were essentially academic exercises demonstrating the validity of the deliberative model, rather than having an actual impact on public policy.

A few books began to appear with proposals for selecting at least some legislators by lot, including Un-Vote for a New America in 1976 (Becker, Szep, and Ritter 1976) and A Citizen Legislature by Ernest Callenbach and Michael Phillips in 1985 (Callenbach and Phillips 1985). The renowned political scientist Robert Dahl, in the conclusion of his important book, Democracy and Its Critics, proposed sortition to create a set of deliberative bodies (what he termed a “minipopulus”), each dealing with a defined issue area, as a possibility for a future democracy. In his proposal, a minipopulus would complement, rather than replace, conventional democratic institutions. Each minipopulus could be attended by “an advisory committee of scholars and specialists and by an administrative staff. It could hold hearings, commission research, and engage in debate and discussion” for perhaps a year before rendering a judgment (Dahl 1989, 340). By creating a microcosm of the full citizenry through sortition, as in the case of jury service, the participants suddenly have an interest in becoming informed and attentive because there is a substantial possibility that their vote, or their contribution to debate, will actually matter.

The Modern Revival of Sortition in British Columbia

The sortition model that has become the predominant design in the early twenty-first century is known as the citizens’ assembly. It was launched in 2004 in British Columbia (BC) when the provincial government appointed Dr. Jack Blaney to chair and coordinate the creation of a representative body of non-politicians to examine and propose any needed reforms to the province’s election system.³ The creation of the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly was perhaps the most significant advance for the worldwide awareness of sortition as an alternative democratic tool. I agree with the chair of that Citizens’ Assembly, who stated in a public address to municipality leaders in BC, “In the histories of democracies, this will not be a footnote. This will be something very, very important” (Blaney 2004b).

In 2002, the new Liberal government appointed a respected former legislator, Gordon Gibson, to propose a format and process for an assembly. Recognizing that politicians had an inherent conflict of interest when it came to evaluating election systems (naturally favoring those methods likely to favor their party), Gibson recommended setting up a body containing no politicians, and not appointed by any politicians. He proposed the innovative concept of using sortition. Average citizens would be paid to work (mostly on weekends) over a ten-month period on behalf of the entire citizenry. The Citizens’ Assembly was authorized and financed by a unanimous vote of the legislature in 2003, to be convened early in 2004.

To assure a body that was “broadly representative of the adult population”, it was decided to supplement the ancient Athenian lottery process by adding modern scientific stratified sampling. An equal number of men and women, stratified according to age, were randomly selected from the voter lists of each of the province’s 79 districts. These people were invited to attend a local selection meeting where they could ask questions and learn more about the process. Out of 23,000 people invited, 1,700 expressed interest in participating, and a little under 1,000 attended the final selection meetings. Thus, unlike mandatory jury duty, there was a substantial self-selection element within the random selection process; 158 people (half male, half female) were selected by lot from this pool. One notable small minority, the Aboriginal (called “Native American” in the US), was unrepresented, so a special random drawing from among all the Aboriginal people who had attended any of the meetings was held to select one additional man and woman, making a total of 160 members. The Assembly had professional staff and was chaired by a former University president and experienced facilitator, Dr. Jack Blaney.

The citizens’ assembly had three phases:

1) An education phase: Over six weekends from January through March, the

members met in plenary sessions and small groups to learn all about the variety of election methods used around the world. Staff gathered a vast amount

of balanced and impartial information reviewed by a committee of academics and experts, and arranged presentations. The Assembly members not only attended meetings but ate many meals together and developed an esprit de corps based on respect and a common purpose.

2) A public hearings phase: In May and June, members of the Citizens’ As-

sembly participated in 50 public hearings across the province. The hearings were two-way, with presentations for the public and input from British Co-lumbian individuals and organizations. The Citizens’ Assembly also received some 1,600 written submissions. At the time, I was working with FairVote promoting proportional representation, and I submitted one of those 1,600 documents.

3) A deliberation phase: From September through November, the Assembly

used a variety of means to identify the most important values they wanted from an election system. The group quickly reached a consensus that some sort of proportional representation system would be superior to the plurality winner-take-all single-seat district system currently in place (the same as that widely used throughout the United States). The options were narrowed to two. In a secret vote, 123 members favored the single transferable vote (STV) method of PR used in Australia and Ireland, while 31 preferred the Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) form of PR used in Germany. In the final vote, the members agreed to recommend that the province adopt STV by a vote of 146 in favor and 7 against.

This proposal for a new election system, according to the legislative act creating the Citizens’ Assembly, then went directly to the voters in a referendum, bypassing the provincial parliament (as provided for in the enabling legislation—again recognizing that the politicians had a conflict of interest). The reform recommendation was approved by 57.7 percent of the vote, following a campaign in which both supporters and opponents received equal government funding for voter education. Unfortunately, the parliament had imposed a supermajority 60 percent requirement, thus preventing the new system from taking effect. Ironically, that 57.7 percent was just larger than the 57.6 percent majority the Liberal Party, which had imposed the supermajority requirement, had received in the previous election, and substantially more than the 45.8 percent the Liberal Party received to win a majority of seats in the 2005 election.

Despite the fact that the product of their work did not pass into law, the competence, commitment of the participants in this sortition deliberative process were inspirational. As Jack Blaney noted in a public address near the end of the process, praising the work and civic-mindedness of this random selection of residents, the politicians “invited 160 British Columbians—ordinary British Columbians, they called them … [T]hese 160 British Columbians feel a great sense of responsibility to all British Columbia. They have become the most extraordinary British Columbians the government could have created … Attendance at the meetings is about 98 percent. This is a Guinness-Book-of-Records kind of statistic. I have not in my life belonged to an organization where there has been such dedication and commitment” (Blaney 2004b). The members of the Citizens’ Assembly were extremely positive about the experience. Many of those attending the final wrap-up clearly felt that this democratic experiment would not only have a profound impact on those who participated but on society as a whole.

The Spread of Modern Sortition

Following the momentous British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly, a similar sortition assembly, also looking at election reform, was impaneled in Ontario in 2006. After extensive study and deliberation, this citizens’ assembly recommended a Mixed Member Proportional system for the province. However, in the ensuing referendum, which was held in conjunction with the regular election, Assembly members complained of inadequate general voter education about the relatively complex reform proposal, and the plan was rejected by the voters in the 2007 referendum. While education and deliberation by average citizens in the Citizens’ Assembly led to a decision in favor of a system of proportional representation for parliamentary elections, rational ignorance resulted, as usual, in an electorate that lacked an understanding of the pros and cons of what they were voting on. It appears that most voters simply followed the lead of politicians from their preferred political party. Only the NDP and Green Parties, which together garnered under 25 percent of the vote, formally endorsed the reform proposal in Ontario. In British Columbia, none of the political parties formally endorsed that proposal, so it may have lacked the partisan flavor of Ontario’s referendum.

Also in 2006, a Netherlands’ Citizens’ Assembly (Burgerforum) was established by sortition to advise the parliament on election reform as well. This panel proposed maintaining the existing system of proportional representation, but reforming some details of the election law, which were subsequently passed by the parliament. The proliferation of sortition had begun.

In 2009–2010, in response to the economic crisis of 2008, an Icelandic civic organization, with the eventual endorsement of the national government, sponsored a randomly selected forum to address constitutional revisions. An early step in the process involved the convening of a one-day National Forum of randomly selected citizens to discover “principal viewpoints and points of emphasis” of the public concerning the organization of the country’s government and constitution. Roughly 20 percent of those randomly selected agreed to serve, and the sample was adjusted to ensure the age, gender, and residency makeup of the sample matched the general population’s. Ultimately, a gathering of 950 citizens was convened in 2010.

In 2011–2012, an innovative and grand sortition implementation known as G1000 took place in Belgium in response to the partisan electoral stalemate in that country. Again, this was initiated outside of government. More than 700 randomly selected citizens attended a summit, and thousands more participated online and in other ways. The final report contained concrete proposals on issues such as employment policy and garnered substantial media attention, notice from politicians, and general interest in this deliberative model. Support for sortition within Belgium grew rapidly.

In Ireland, the government convened a Constitutional Convention, with 66 out of its 100 members chosen by lot, to discuss possible amendments. The Convention met periodically between December 2012 and March 2014. Like most of the other citizen assemblies, it was granted only an advisory role, with the government not bound to accept its recommendations. The government failed to respond to the Convention’s recommendations by the proposed deadline, suggesting the government clearly saw the Convention as ancillary. But one particular item that emerged from the Constitutional Convention was the proposal to legalize same-sex marriage that was put to a national referendum in 2015—which passed by a wide margin (62 percent in favor). A deeply Catholic country, it seems unlikely such a proposal could have been enacted so soon if left to cautious politicians. The fact that this was the first time in the world that a country had adopted same-sex marriage through a referendum was widely reported. But what was less well known, though perhaps more fundamental, was that this marked the first time a national constitution had been amended based on recommendations of a Convention primarily drawn by lot.

In 2011, the Citizens Jury model of Ned Crosby was institutionalized in the state of Oregon, USA. The government adopted a law establishing a Citizens’ Initiative Review Commission. Under this law, prior to each statewide referendum on a proposal initiated by petition, the Commission can appoint a Review Panel of between 18 and 24 people. The Commission uses random sampling methods, stratified according to various demographic factors, to assure representativeness, to select the members of each panel. Each Review Panel meets for five days, studies the ballot measure, hears from supporters and opponents, and issues a report of its findings, which is published in the voter guide that is made available to all voters. Such reports typically present a majority report and a minority report summarizing the reasons some participants were for and others against the proposal at the end of the deliberation. These reports are obviously just advisory, with the referendum voters having the final say. In the initial run in 2012, it appears that most voters did not read, or even know about, this guidance, but awareness has grown in subsequent referendums. This sortition model of deliberative advice leading up to a referendum was also used in the Valsamoggia region of Italy in dealing with a proposed amalgamation of five municipalities (Felicetti, Niemeyer, and Curato 2015).

Variants of the citizens’ assembly and citizens jury were not the only sortition models that began to spread. A model similar to the German Planning Cells, called a “consensus conference”, was developed in Denmark in the 1980s. It is used specifically for issues of new technology, where it was recognized that policy implications extend outside the technological realm (such as genetically modified food and electronic surveillance). The goal was to open the debate beyond just technology experts and politicians. These Danish consensus conferences invited a random sample of Danes with no particular technological background to read and hear presentations from a range of experts and issue findings to help guide government policy. The Danish Board of Technology invites 2,000 randomly selected residents to participate, and from those who step forward, the board selects a demographically representative group (in terms of age, gender, employment, and geographic residence) of between 14 and 16 participants. After a couple of educational preparatory weekend sessions, the participants engage in an intense four-day deliberation in which they ask questions of expert witnesses on different sides of the issue and draft a final report, which is provided to policymakers and members of parliament. This model has been replicated in Holland, England, France, Switzerland, Norway, Canada, Australia, Japan, Korea, and Israel.

Deliberative Polls

In 1987, another political scientist, James Fishkin of Stanford University, developed the concept of “deliberative polling”. In summary, the deliberative opinion poll works like this: A statistically representative random sample of people is surveyed on some public policy question. The respondents are then given “carefully balanced” background materials to read before being gathered to listen to a series of presentations by competing experts. They develop questions for the experts in small group discussions to clarify their understanding, but do not directly debate among themselves. Finally, participants are surveyed again to see how their opinions change. As Fishkin contends that the changes in opinion reflect the changes and conclusions that the public in general would reach if people had the opportunity and motivation to become better informed and more engaged.

Participants are paid for their time and may need to travel and be put up in hotels, so this isn’t cheap. Fishkin and colleagues have received funding from a variety of governmental and non-governmental organizations to conduct many such deliberative polls around the world. One high-visibility deliberative poll in Brussels in 2007 was billed as “Europe in One Room”. A 362-member representative sample from all 27 EU countries gathered to deliberate on public policies such as European pensions and retirement. The product of this deliberation was informative but had no binding effect.

In China, in 2008, Fishkin and colleagues implemented an effectively binding deliberative poll to decide on infrastructure investments in Zeguo Township in Wenling City. Government officials are committed to funding the projects favored by a representative random sample of households. By sampling households, instead of adults, a male bias was introduced, as most households chose to have a male member participate. But this bias was nowhere near as extreme as that of the party and government. The goal was to avoid any appearance of corruption and gauge public support for 30 different projects, including bridges, roads, schools, sewage treatment plants, community gardens, etc. Party and government officials were pleasantly surprised by the results of the public deliberation. According to Fishkin and colleagues:

Jiang Zhaohua, the Zeguo Town party secretary, expected neither the high ratings for sewage treatment and other environmental projects nor the low ratings for “image” or road projects … More generally, he was surprised at the difference between the local leadership’s perception of what the people would want and what they actually wanted after deliberating. (Fishkin, He, Luskin, and Siu 2010, 12)

The use of democratic sortition within a non-democratic government system creates interesting discomfiture in terms of democratic ideals. As Jiang Zhaohua noted,

Although I gave up some final decision-making power, we gain more power back because the process has increased the legitimacy for the choice of priority projects and created public transparency in the public policy decision-making process. Public policy is therefore more easily implemented. (quoted in Fishkin, He, Luskin, and Siu 2010, 12–13)

A number of other jurisdictions followed suit and invited Fishkin to conduct several additional deliberative polls in China. In 2017, the nation of Mongolia adopted a law requiring this method of in-person deliberative polling, using a large random sample of citizens, to review any proposed constitutional amendments. The second implementation took place in 2023.

The Mushrooming of Citizens’ Assemblies

However, the citizens’ assembly model of sortition, derived from the British Columbia implementation, has been implemented many hundreds of times around the world in the past couple of decades. By 2015, sortition implementations were becoming so commonplace in dozens of countries all around the world (though still almost completely unknown in the United States) that a case-by-case recitation is happily now impossible. While some of the many hundreds of sortition panels were set up by civic organizations, a huge number were formally sponsored by local, regional, and national governments. Citizens’ assemblies have tackled a wide range of topics: from neighborhood concerns to legalizing abortion in Ireland; from whether to locate a nuclear waste dump in Australia, to a huge number addressing climate change. I will highlight just a few examples.

The institutionalization of sortition within government is making progress around the world. Australia took some early strides. With impetus from the NewDemocracy Foundation, founded and financed by the industrialist Luca Belgiorno-Nettis (with support from a number of leading “elder statesmen”— retired government leaders from across the political spectrum, and academics, such as Lyn Carson), there is growing interest in sortition in Australia. In 2009, the NewDemocracy Foundation organized a nation-wide Citizens Parliament among a representative sample of 150 randomly selected residents, to deliberate on issues of democratic reform. In 2012, with the assistance of the NewDemocracy Foundation, the city council of Canada Bay (a suburb of Sydney) in New South Wales, established a 24-member Citizens’ Policy Panel by sortition to essentially decide on the council budget (“What services should we deliver in the City of Canada Bay, and how should we pay for them?”). While nominally advisory, the city council had committed to following the recommendations prior to its commencement. Following the success of that initial use, in 2014 the city council established another Citizens’ Policy Panel to deal with the issue of leasing policy for city-owned properties. Largely due to the work of the NewDemocracy Foundation the sortition model has been spreading across Australia with large cities like Melbourne employing it for major budget decisions, and in 2016 the state of South Australia used sortition to advise on whether to establish a nuclear waste dump (the State Premier had favored this as a revenue source, but the citizens’ assembly rejected it).

In response to the “yellow vest” protests in France, which began in 2018, President Emmanuel Macron initiated the creation of the Citizens’ Convention for Climate. Macron stated that “citizens have asked for more democracy because they do not simply want to be the people who respect laws: they now want to take part in developing laws themselves”. In 2019 and 2020, 150 randomly selected citizens deliberated and adopted a long list of de-carbonization policy proposals. Although Prime Minister Edouard Philippe had committed to advancing all proposals without a filter, there did end up being some cherry-picking and watering down.

The Beginnings of Sortition Institutionalization

In 2019, with the help of the G1000 organizers and others, the small Germanspeaking eastern region of Belgium, Ostbelgien, institutionalized sortition, with two sorts of lottery-selected bodies. The Citizens’ Council is a twenty-four-member permanent body whose randomly selected members each serve for 18 months. This body serves as the Agenda Council in my multi-body sortition design. It can select issues the members believe need attention, and call into creation a short-duration, randomly selected Citizens’ Assembly of around 50 members (akin to the Review Panels of my design) to deliberate and issue recommendations. While the government is required to respond to these recommendations, these sortition bodies do not have binding policy authority.

The Brussels region of Belgium also formally institutionalized an ongoing sortition process, though the design is problematic. Committees consisting of 15 members of the area parliament, combined with 45 randomly selected citizens, each tackle an issue chosen by the Bureau of the Parliament from among those topics proposed by a petition of at least a thousand residents. The parliamentarians and allotted members can deliberate together, but vote separately, with only the votes of the parliamentarians having legal force. Parliamentarians who abstain or vote against a proposal with majority citizen approval must explain their objection.

In France, which had a number of high-visibility sortition panels, the city of Paris also established a permanent sortition arm of government with 100 randomly selected citizens. Like the Ostbelgien model, the proposals generated are merely advisory to the elected city council, though the expressed hope is that this body can help hold those elected to account. Similar truncated multi-body sortition designs have since been institutionalized in other jurisdictions around Europe.

Going Forward

The spread of sortition and its partial or possibly complete supplanting of elections will be a lengthy historical process. A first step is to spread awareness of sortition as a democratic tool—a goal of this book. This must certainly be followed by small-scale or narrowly limited implementations so that people can become familiar with sortition and evaluate how it works. These steps are self-evident since nobody will demand a reform they have never heard of and have never seen in use.

There are many possible types of implementation, including both governmental (municipal, state, national, or international) and non-governmental scenarios. Here is a sample of possible roles for random selection that may have beneficial effects in and of themselves, as well as disseminating the model more widely.

➔ One-time projects (as with the BC Citizens’ Assembly)

➔ Specific issue areas (e.g., zoning, healthcare)

➔ Advisory (to elected body or to voters in a referendum—as in Oregon)

➔ Budgets (as in Australian municipalities)

➔ An allotted chamber serving in conjunction with an elected chamber in a

bicameral system (though I published a paper explaining why this would be a mistake) (Bouricius 2018)

➔ Oversight of legislature (such as ethics rules enforcement, or redistricting)

➔ Single-issue short-term juries that can accept or reject legislation

➔ Total replacement of an elected legislative branch

➔ Departmental Oversight (e.g., community police commission)

➔ Hiring and firing a chief executive (similar to the city manager concept, but

selected by a jury rather than an elected city council)

➔ Rotation among a pool of qualified executives

➔ Rotation of Judges (e.g., from among a pool of qualified lawyers)

➔ Constitutional Convention (as in Ireland, or advocated by organizations like

Assemble America)

➔ Non-governmental associations (e.g., unions, co-ops)

➔ Workplace/enterprise governance - German co-determination labor law—

seats on board of directors

➔ Home associations—whether low-income public housing or high-income

condo and home-owners’ associations, or even prisons