Other Uses of Sortition

Non-Governmental Sortition

Up to this point, I have focused primarily on sortition as it applies to governmental units, whether national, state, or municipal. However, there are many sorts of non-governmental associations that nominally operate (or seek to operate) democratically. These would-be democratic organizations include unions, consumer cooperatives, housing associations, credit unions, worker-owned businesses, and even global non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Even virtual associations such as internet platforms might seek to function democratically. There are also countless other organizations that do not currently seek to operate democratically, but perhaps should, including schools, charities, and even for-profit business firms. These would-be and could-be democratic associations have a pretty poor track record in terms of achieving equality, participation, and self-rule. Many of the failings that afflict nominal governmental democracies are also visited upon non-governmental democracies. Some problems, such as expensive election campaigns and gerrymandering, may not apply, but the more fundamental problems, such as rational ignorance and elite domination, are rampant.

Elections can work in very small organizations where members know most of the other members personally. Some small organizations may function using some variant of direct democracy. Think of the stereotypical worker-owned business that has frequent all-member collective meetings. These microdemocracies have their own problems. But the tougher issue is that neither elections nor direct democracy is scalable to huge organizations. Elections are the only familiar tool for representative selection in large organizations. The jury model of sortition never enters the minds of members as an alternative to consider. In this chapter, we will explore the advantages of sortition. Sortition can allow non-governmental associations to solve many of their democratic deficits. It is generally easier to make big reforms within private associations than within governments. But even some private associations may be chartered under state statutes that mandate the use of elections—so some legal research needs to be done before launching any specific reform effort. By experimenting with sortition in non-governmental associations, democratic reformers can amass a wealth of real-world experience that will also be useful for subsequent governmental reforms. Trial and error is an essential part of perfecting democratic procedures and design.

When is Sortition Appropriate?

It is important to note that sortition is not always the appropriate democratic tool. Dissatisfied members of an association have the classic choice of “voice or exit”—speak up or quit. Sortition is most useful for larger organizations with defined memberships, where exit by individuals would be a personal hardship. Governments meet this criterion, as do associations dealing with necessities like housing or employment. Simon Pek has argued that sortition might be a good tool for reviving democracy within labor unions (Pek 2019). While a person might technically be able to leave their union or job by quitting and looking for new employment, and a condominium owner might be able to leave a condo association by selling their unit and moving, the effort entailed makes this an impractical hardship. Exercising voice through some democratic process is fitting. In contrast, voluntary advocacy organizations with more porous membership boundaries (such as political parties or movement organizations seeking to make changes in society) do not satisfy this criterion. Members of such organizations have a wide range of commitment levels, with many members being peripheral. Members who disagree with the direction of their organization can easily quit. They can even help form a new organization more in keeping with their preferences. Such associations might prefer the principle that the more one contributes through personal effort to the project of the association, the more say one should get. Members who attend a lot of membership meetings and do lots of volunteer work get to have more say about how the organization is run. This is an alternative to the democratic principle of political equality.

The Iron Law of Oligarchy

All large membership organizations that seek to govern themselves democratically face the problem of how they can maintain member interest in matters of organizational governance year after year, and avoid elite or management “capture”? The crux of the problem is the nearly exclusive reliance on elections as the tool for selecting governing bodies. The problems of apathy, self-selection bias, and rational ignorance plague both election-based systems, as well as open participation direct-democracy attempts at democracy.

Early in the twentieth century, German sociologist Robert Michels wrote a landmark analysis, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy (Michels 1915). He asserted that any organization, regardless of intent, will sooner or later develop an internal “ruling class”. Even if these elite members share the goals of the general membership, they will also develop interests uniquely their own, which include preservation of their role as leaders. This governing elite may consist of paid staff or an elected board of directors. This is driven by the division of labor and specialization, along with the control over the flow of information to members, or control over the decision-making rules, combined with low participation rates and indifference among members.

This came to be known as the iron law of oligarchy. As Michels wrote, “the apathy of the masses and their need for guidance has its counterpart in the leaders’ natural greed for power” (Michels 1915, 127). Oligarchy can arise by default, rather than usurpation by power-hungry managers or elected elite. The managers of the would-be democratic organization may simply feel the need to step in and fill the vacuum of decision-making created by uninterested members. Everyone may wish that the organization were more democratic. It is the design of the governance system that is at fault, rather than necessarily the moral flaws of the staff, board, or general members.

Michels identified a powerful tendency, but myself and others (Diefenbach 2018) argue it falls short of an “iron law”. The tendency to oligarchy is shaped by institutional design and other factors. A key is to allow a division of labor but avoid specialization in the key domain of decision-making, through the use of regular rotation by means such as sortition.

The problem of rational ignorance is multiplied in the cases of non-governmental democracies, especially if a person is a member of more than one would-be democratic association—for example, a member of a food co-op, a union at one’s workplace, a credit union, and a number of charitable associations each seeking the engagement and attention of the member. The small minority of members of an organization who are deeply engaged may bemoan the “apathy” of the other members, but no amount of cajoling or mobilization tactics will overcome the reality that members have a limited amount of time and attention they are willing to offer on an ongoing basis, year after year.

Avoiding Oligarchy with Sortition

In the eighteenth century, English philosopher Jeremy Bentham used the term active aptitude to describe the conscientious attention to duty that a decision-maker needed to have (Elster 2013). He wasn’t referring to some inherent character trait of people, but rather the results of various possible procedures and designs of legislative bodies. It is this active aptitude that citizens will generally fail to exhibit when acting as a rank-and-file member of a large “democratic” association. While the pejorative term “apathy” may be applied, “rational ignorance” is a more appropriate term. It just isn’t reasonable to expect most people to devote the amount of effort needed to remain “up to speed” on the large number of issues that face every would-be democratic association, especially when their one vote as part of a mass is extremely unlikely to actually make any difference (especially when a slate is proposed that matches the number of seats to be elected).

Sortition can solve these problems. The solution that sortition offers is asking a subset of members to give full attention to the needs of their co-op for a relatively short period of time, with the understanding that another subset will take a turn subsequently, and then another, etc. Not all members can have active aptitude, but a group can for a limited duration. A large statistically representative sample might be needed on occasion (for very big decisions), but much smaller random samples may be sufficient for certain governance tasks. Unlike governmental mini-publics, which sometimes need to balance fundamentally incompatible societal interests, members of democratic associations generally have a common shared interest that permits a somewhat smaller sample to suffice. Also, members of a smallish board of directors are more akin to delegated agents, rather than constituting an accurately representative body. This concept is affirmed in the commonly used term “board of trustees”.

However, I need to be clear that my idea is not to randomly select a small board. There are many obvious problems with such an approach. If the only concern were impartiality and protection from corrupt manipulation (such as for a court jury), random selection of a small sample might suffice—but democracy also requires some degree of representativeness. Such a small sample size, typical of a board, has a high risk of being unacceptably unrepresentative of the membership. Statistical representativeness is tied to the law of large numbers. Another, perhaps more serious problem with selecting a small board by random selection, is the issue of commitment. A board would need to serve longer terms than a typical court jury—probably a year at an absolute minimum—and many members simply wouldn’t have the necessary level of commitment, free time, or energy to give adequate attention. Further, a typical board of directors ideally would have an assortment of traits, some of which might be fairly rare in the pool of members. These desired traits would probably be included in a largish mini-public, but could easily be missing in a small board. There is a distinction between a mini-public that only made broad decisions about policy direction, as opposed to the ongoing detailed oversight of a business’s finances, staff, etc., typically required of a board.

The better way to employ sortition, if a relatively small board is intended, is through a two-step process. A larger, more representative short-duration mini-public could be randomly selected to act as a sort of nominating or hiring committee to recruit and select a smaller board of directors, or, in lieu of a board of directors, adopt strategic plans while evaluating, as well as hiring and firing, a manager directly. My focus here is not whether a small board of directors or large member assemblies make policy, but rather how the general membership can exercise informed control of the organization. To maximize the willingness of ordinary members to participate in a mini-public, the jury should be of short duration (perhaps only a few meetings), and its members would be compensated in some manner (e.g., a discount, catered meals during meetings, or direct payments). Short-duration representative juries are an excellent way to ensure ultimate authority and regular oversight by the ordinary members as a whole. Very few members will keep on top of their co-op’s issues week by week, year after year, but most members would be willing to focus on their co-op governance matters for a small amount of time (perhaps with some compensation), knowing other regular members will do likewise in turn.

Relying on pure volunteerism for this task is dangerous, since self-selection bias can allow unrepresentative special interests to dominate. However, one impetus toward oligarchy, which Michels discussed, was the control of information by the existing staff or board. It is entirely possible that a temporary mini-public could be artfully manipulated if it were dependent on such “oligarchs” for its information. For this reason, an effort to use sortition as a democratic tool also necessitates independent facilitation and staffing, not selected by the existing staff or board. The procedure for ensuring independence needs to be institutionalized at the outset, and not be an ad hoc effort at the time of each lottery drawing. There are many possible ways of managing this. Perhaps a separate oversight board made up of members from previous mini-publics would be charged with arranging facilitation for the next mini-public. If sortition became widespread, a cottage industry of experienced mini-public facilitators might grow (indeed has grown in many countries) who would be crowd-source-evaluated for such things as competence and impartiality, etc. Chosen facilitators would need to have free access (with appropriate confidentiality commitments) to all of the co-op’s records and information, to assure the mini-public got fully informed. These facilitators would be evaluated by the staff and members of the mini-public, and file a report about problems and successes at the conclusion of the mini-public that the subsequent facilitator could use to make improvements.

To demonstrate another superiority of a sortition recruiting process for boards over elections, let’s take a hypothetical example of a cooperative whose members all want to have a balanced board that reflects the diversity of the membership. They all want a board that also includes a member with a legal background, one with budget and bookkeeping experience, and one with lots of media skills. Suppose plenty of candidates meeting these criteria decide to run for the board in an election. Because of the problem of voter coordination, regardless of whether a block plurality, ranked-choice preferential, or other voting method is used, it could easily turn out that the mix on the board that gets elected fails to meet most of these criteria that all of the members believe are important. The board may turn out to be all white males without any media or bookkeeping experience.

The way that some co-ops try to overcome this problem is by having a nomination committee select a favored “slate”. For this to work, the election itself must be nominal or token, and it is the selection of the nominating committee that is the point of democratic challenge. With the jury model, a large representative nominating committee can be selected by lot. This randomly selected minipublic could interview potential board members and seek to come to a consensus about the best mix of people to form a balanced board. The election could be dispensed with or maintained merely pro forma or to give the membership a veto option. While most democratic associations have bylaws that mandate the use of elections, they rarely mandate the details for the process of nomination, leaving the door open for easy implementation of a sortition process. Once the system has proven itself, however, it is desirable to amend the bylaws to institutionalize the sortition procedure, because the iron law of oligarchy will always remain a threat with some current group in authority seeking to cement their power.

However, even if the board is democratically selected using a sortition recruitment body, there is another locus of “elite control”. An executive director is generally hired and fired by the board. But the board is very part-time and gets most of its information from the executive director, developing a collegial “same-team” relationship. It is common for non-profits to actually have the executive director and staff manipulate the board and preserve oligarchic control. For this reason, it is better to have the executive director hired and fired not by the board, but by single-purpose lottery-selected review bodies that have no relationship with the executive director, but can interview supporters and detractors.

The lottery selection process itself must be completely transparent and public so that there is never any question within the membership whether the mini-public selection was honest or manipulated. In Classical Athens, a simple mechanical device was invented called a kleroterion, which used colored balls to randomly and publicly assign citizens to mini-publics tasked with making public decisions. It might be wise to display and honor this lottery drawing as the foundation of the organization’s democracy with some sort of public celebratory event.

Public Oversight Role for Sortition

The anti-corruption potential for sortition suggests new sorts of public oversight mini-publics. There are situations where some activity has a significant impact on the public, but where the public has no, or ineffective, input. Here I am discussing quasi-governmental functions, which are not currently handled by existing governments, but might be well-suited for sortition oversight. I will not present any fully formed proposals here, but merely suggest the sorts of things sortition could be used to address.

Some cities that have had serious problems with relationships between police departments and the community have appointed community oversight boards. Rather than having elected officials appoint a group of self-styled “community leaders”, a community panel that is fully representative of the community could be drawn by lottery. The goal would not be to assemble leaders or experts, but rather to facilitate the expression of community priorities and values. Any such oversight body obviously needs its own staff and control of information flows independent of the politicians and the entity being monitored. The body would also need to have real power over the organization they were overseeing.

Some examples of possible uses will help. As technology advances, we are entering an age in which aerial drones and public video cameras, linked to facial recognition software and identity databases, could make policing much more effective, but also subject to abuse and loss of privacy.¹ If such technology is to be deployed, it makes sense to ensure that it remains permanently under democratic control of the populace and that no government officials or police department can abuse it. The jury model is a natural fit here. In ancient Athens, public officials were subject to review by an auditing jury, as a further protection against corruption. A constantly refreshed body of ordinary citizens supported by their own independent staff could prevent or punish abuse today as well.

We have barely begun to scratch the surface of all the places where sortition could improve public life.

Student Governments

A valuable avenue for advancing sortition-based democracy is within schools and colleges. Student government is supposed to be both a (very limited) venue for democratic governance and an educational model for how democracy functions. In reality, of course, it is recognized that student government elections are generally a deeply flawed popularity contest (not that unlike the “real world”). While not effectively teaching the idealized vision of democracy, these student elections ironically come closer to teaching its actual defective character.

Under the typical existing high school student government with an elected student council, a handful of kids may learn democratic skills such as parliamentary procedure, tools of persuasion, and debate. These few students are effectively groomed to become future elites, while most students (those not on the student council) learn that democracy is about being relatively passive voters and then leaving decisions to those who are “better” or more popular than they are. As with so many pedagogical approaches, a common “lesson” can teach different students different things. A teacher with an authoritarian style may teach most of the students how to accept an authoritarian boss in a future job, while kids from more privileged circumstances may learn from that same experience how to act as an authoritarian boss themselves one day.

What if, instead of using elections, students were randomly selected to serve on a mini-public student council, with regular rotation, such that most or all students got a turn as policy-makers? In addition to teaching far more students about how to engage in democratic deliberation, this could open the door to this democratic process in other domains once they become adults. The selection could be a stratified sample to ensure an appropriate balance of classes, genders, etc. The executive officers could be selected by the student mini-public, rather than a mass popularity contest.

Of course, if the student government doesn’t have any meaningful authority, many of the selected students may not take the task seriously. For democracy education to have any hope of working, the student government would have to be empowered to make some decisions that actually mattered to the students.

The discouraging impact of not having much real authority doesn’t become apparent as an issue in traditionally elected student councils simply because the councils are self-selected candidates willing to run and participate in that largely symbolic and relatively powerless role if elected. Students may choose to run for student council for reasons of status, ego, resume-building, or similar motivations, even if it is a sham activity with no genuinely meaningful decision-making power. I haven’t seen any statistics on this, but I suspect that a disproportionate share of elected governmental politicians were elected members of some student government in their youth.

It is beyond the scope of this book to propose what sorts of decisions high school students themselves would deem worthy of their time and effort, but I am confident they exist. A fundamental question, of course, is whether administrators, faculty, and communities would agree to cede any such authority to children. It would have to be decision domains that wouldn’t put school finances, quality of student education, or safety at risk if poor decisions were made— because democracy can result in some bad decisions as well as good ones. It would need to go beyond choosing a school team mascot, however.

Starting in 2014, an organization called Democracy in Practice worked in multiple public schools in Bolivia to replace traditional student elections with voluntary lotteries. The lotteries were typically done in a way that ensured an even gender balance and a representation of different grade levels. Once formed, these student governments then employed a second round of sortition to determine individual roles, such as spokesperson and treasurer. The idea was to ensure that all students, regardless of popularity or charisma, had the same opportunity to enter student government and learn different roles as a way to develop civic skills. If a selected student did not take the position seriously or did not do an adequate job, they could be removed by their peers. Lotteries were also used in these student governments to assign necessary tasks that no one wanted to do, and to distribute occasional prizes that incentivized attendance and punctuality.

While there are some who hold that they should elect the “most capable” to form student government, most students and staff at these Bolivian schools have embraced the lotteries, seeing them as fairer and more equitable—resulting in more representative student governments, which are also more participatory. Although this particular project has come to an end, the practice may start to catch on, as in 2017 it was named one of the one hundred most inspiring educational innovations globally by the Finnish organization HundrED, and featured by the renowned author Malcolm Gladwell in one of his podcasts. Democracy in Practice published free PDF guides and videos on their website (www.democracyinpractice.org), to help educators and students around the world bring sortition and other democratic innovations into their schools.

When we graduate to universities, young adults can be trusted to seriously take responsibility for a raft of decisions that significantly affect them while at the university. Jeffrey Kennedy and Simon Pek published an important paper examining the inadequacy and failings of most existing university student participation systems, and argued that sortition is a promising tool for addressing the democratic deficit and enhancing the “deliberative capacity” of universities (Kennedy and Pek 2022). They propose using advisory mini-publics as a starting point, and point to the use of sortition at Queen Mary University of London School of Law and Victoria University in Canada as recent examples. Further, they suggest that universities often serve as transmission platforms for spreading ideas throughout society. Students who experience genuine democracy with sortition would be more likely to make those democratic demands and changes in wider society as adults.

On the Internet

In addition to long-existing member associations that seek to govern themselves democratically, there is a new sort of association made possible by peer-to-peer creations on the internet. As an example, suppose some large internet entity, such as Uber or Facebook, were owned by its users in a cooperative, rather than owned by stock investors. The term “platform co-op” can be used to describe such organizations. Many platforms can be developed with minimal upfront capital. The paradigm by which the founders eventually get to cash in with a public stock offering is not the only way such internet firms could mature. A democratic co-op option is possible. But how could an organization with members who may be spread across the globe, most of whom have minimal or no direct knowledge or interaction with other members beyond that mediated through the particular application, run the organization as a democracy? How could they hold elections in which members are well informed about issues and candidates (when even high-stakes governmental elections fail this standard)? Certainly, the internet could allow all members who wished to vote directly on policy in a sort of indirect–direct democracy, but the problem of rational ignorance would still dominate. Elections are only a responsible governance tool if the voters understand what they are voting on. Rather than throwing one’s hands up and concluding that a global democracy of a business or other sort of association with many millions of members is just too impractical, we need to consider sortition.

Imagine a cooperatively-owned ride-sharing service. It might be owned by the drivers, or by the riders, or both. Let’s take an example owned by the drivers. A feature of a lottery is that although for typical associations it is standard to give an equal probability for each member to be drawn in a governance lottery, it is also possible to tailor it to unique circumstances. We could assign drivers proportionate chances in the lottery based on how many hours per month they drive, for example. If a driver governing assembly is drawn, it could fairly reflect the interests of the drivers as a whole, including a balanced share of full-time and part-time drivers. These drivers might get a healthy salary to devote themselves to the issues of governance for a set period, in lieu of their regular driving time. But with regular rotation, these directors would know they were making decisions that would affect them once they returned to being drivers. There are numerous possible variations on this theme, in terms of what tasks mini-publics might be charged with, their terms of office, their size, etc. A worker-owned business might decide to use a stratified random sample to ensure each department gets an appropriate number of members (such as from the sales department, factory floor, human resources, etc.)

As I mentioned in Chapter 1, sortition could also play a vital role in oversight and regulation of such areas as artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and content moderation of social media. It is clear that control by either traditional government authorities or corporate profit-seeking interests can be extremely dangerous for such powerful technologies.

Sortition on a Global Scale

Whether democracy is achievable on a global scale is not immediately self-evident. Currently, politicians, autocrats, and various special interest experts negotiate global treaties and coordination protocols. In many cases, what is best for the politicians of nation-states is not what is best for the people of the world, or even best for the people of their particular countries. There is a range of challenges facing humanity on a global scale (climate change and artificial intelligence being two that are currently front and center), where democratic governance could make a fundamental difference. While enforcement procedures are an obvious hurdle (not even the UN can enforce its resolutions), a crucial initial step is to devise a means of making global decisions with sufficient moral weight. This is where sortition is key.

In 2017, sortition scholars and activists on four continents crafted a proposal for how sortition could be used on a global scale to dramatically improve global decision-making on tough problems with global reach. The plan was prepared for a prize competition sponsored by a Swedish charity, the Global Challenges Foundation, seeking innovative ways to improve the world’s fraught global situation. While the design did not win the competition (and the $5 million award), the effort did generate a design that really could make a difference in the world. I was one of those working on this effort. The team used the multi-body sortition design I had developed in 2013 (and discussed in this book) as its jumping-off place. The beginning of the abstract from that grant proposal nicely sums up the task:

Global cooperation and coordination on crucial pan-global problems have been stymied by parochial interests—either by national governments and their politicians, or business enterprises with short-term imperatives. No decision-making process currently exists that carries sufficient moral legitimacy to compel global action. This proposal can solve that crucial problem and generate that global, moral authority. This can be accomplished by facilitating decision-making by the people of Earth themselves, rather than as bickering national, religious, corporate, ethnic, or other factions. The key question is this: “What would the people of the world choose to do in addressing various global problems if they could somehow all focus on one particular problem, learn all about it, hear a wide range of possible solutions, deliberate and decide what to do?” By using networks of statistically representative mini-publics, we can actually answer this fundamental question.²

In 2021, the first actual global sortition project was conducted to coincide with the global climate change conference, COP 26 (Conference of the Parties). This global assembly convened one hundred ordinary people from around the world to discuss and make recommendations on issues of global concern, beginning with climate change. The citizens’ assembly was sponsored by a number of civic organizations, including Missions Publiques, as well as the Danish Board of Technology, the Scottish government, with support from the UN, and the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra acting as its secretariat.

The sampling method failed to meet the genuinely random standard, with the pool of representative people being submitted by local civic organizations around the world. Random selection on a global scale would always be challenging, with many governments having no central lists of residents, and many people living in makeshift shelters without addresses, etc. Even if the members were genuinely randomly selected, however, the sample size of one hundred was also inadequate to provide meaningful statistical representativeness. Thus, this first global assembly was largely symbolic. However, this was an initial step along a vital path.

In 2023, the Global Citizens Assembly Network (GloCAN) was founded. This consortium sought to learn from the experience of that first global assembly and do further research to lay the groundwork for future global democratic decision-making using sortition.

The goal of this chapter has been to prompt the reader to think of other possible circumstances in their own situations where sortition might be useful. There must be widespread every-day experience with sortition before it is likely to supplement or supplant elections at the governmental level.