A Transition to Sortition Democracy

Many advocates of sortition reform view it as a means for increasing citizen participation or improving the quality of decisions by providing the elected lawmakers with better advice through better deliberative mechanisms. Indeed, some see it as a tool to shore up the flagging reputations of elected politicians. Others, including me, see it as the central democratic tool and seek to replace some or all elected decision-makers by using empowered mini-publics. This final chapter is devoted to discussing the strategies for replacing elections with sortition—in whole or in part.¹

An idea that quickly comes to mind for many sortition advocates is to utilize the common bicameral legislative structure by having the members of one of the chambers selected by lot (Gastil and Wright 2019; Abizadeh 2016; Sutherland 2011; Barnett, and Carty 2008; Callenbach and Phillips 1985). The archaic House of Lords in the UK is particularly tempting as a vehicle for substituting a traditionally hereditary chamber with an allotted one. Some may hope this model might eventually lead to a fully sortition-based legislature—sort of a trial run or waystation to see if such a body can behave in a competent manner.

I think this is a mistake. As I discussed in Chapter 6, an all-purpose legislative chamber that deals with all issues and covers all law-making functions is a mismatch for sortition, whether in a unicameral or hybrid bicameral system. The all-purpose legislative chamber design would sabotage sortition’s hoped-for benefits and delegitimize a sortition chamber. Many of the points I will cover in this chapter I discussed in a previously published work (Bouricius 2019).

Throughout this book, I have presented reasons why reliance on elected politicians is fundamentally undemocratic. But for many theorists a hybrid system incorporating both election and sortition is the final goal. John Gastil and Erik Wright argued that despite the host of problems with election-based representation, there are important beneficial aspects of an elected chamber that would be lost in an all-sortition system. I will argue that the purported benefits of maintaining elections are illusory. I will conclude by arguing that there are better ways to transition into a virtually all-sortition lawmaking system.

Purported Benefits of Maintaining an Elected Chamber

First, I will examine several commonly asserted benefits of maintaining an elected chamber alongside a sortition chamber. Citizens would be loath to forfeit an elected chamber for fear of losing at least five presumed benefits: the societal benefits of parties; the utility of having elected officials as authorized negotiators; the political leadership cultivated by electoral politics; and the political expertise provided by elected officials. In turn, I will cast doubt on the existence, or importance, of each.

Benefits of Parties

Without elections, it is suggested that parties would atrophy. The belief is that parties can (ideally) play an important role in educating the public about policy alternatives, and formulating public policies. However, others and I argue that US parties “have become little more than political labels behind which well-financed candidates organize their electoral bids” (Fischer 2009, 61). The role of parties would certainly change in an all-sortition system, but they would not necessarily disappear. Active political parties have organized across the globe, even under non-electoral regimes. Rather than contesting in elections, parties would aim to educate and organize the general public, from whom the minipublics would be drawn. Political parties are not the only avenue for important social mobilization, with Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, or the Pro-Life movements in the US being examples.

But let’s focus on the effects of eliminating the competitive electoral function of political parties in an all-sortition democracy. Anthoula Malkopoulou argues that voting in elections “offers a real and continuous relationship between government and citizens that, aided by the excitement of competition, produces a higher incentive to stay informed and form an opinion about general political issues” (Malkopoulou 2014, 250). She speculates that “sortition does away with the momentum of discursive interaction and contestation, which the experience of election provides” (Malkopoulou 2014, 247).

But what is this “discursive interaction” of partisan politics? Is it inherently beneficial for society? Like most news coverage, this engagement focuses on the tactics of the partisan contest itself, rather than the ideas that are presumed to underlie that contest. Not all electoral democracies have the level of partisan animosity present in American politics, but the divisions within society into warring factions of us vs. them certainly have some negative consequences that would carry over into civil society and hence into a mini-public that existed within a partisan electoral environment.

We need to consider whether partisan antagonisms arise from incompatible interests, which political parties then express, or if political parties fan, or even manufacture, differences to frighten and mobilize constituencies to vote. Both occur, but as I discuss in the next section, elections are not the only—nor necessarily the best—way to manage incompatible interests. As I discussed in Chapter 7, researchers have found that people who are deeply engaged in partisan political issues and follow the news are also likely to have an elevated, yet false, sense of their own level of understanding of the issues (Nyhan and Reifler 2010). This short-circuits their ability to engage in meaningful give-and-take of deliberation.

Thus, even balanced presentations to a mini-public, in a partisan environment fueled by competitive elections, may not lead to a common understanding of reality by citizens, as each chooses which facts to accept and which to reject. Partisan loyalty trumps reality. This “discursive interaction and contestation” frequently consists of parroting talking points generated by partisan propagandists, and may have more in common with the insult-yelling of die-hard fans of sports teams than the republican virtues hoped for by some theorists. In sum, the vaunted “discursive interaction and contestation” in a party-based environment may make citizens less capable of learning and deliberating if selected to serve in a mini-public.

Authorized Negotiators

Some public policy choices pit incompatible interests against each other and will inevitably have winners and losers. Negotiated compromise between conflicting interests is widely seen as the better way of resolving such conflicts compared to simply counting heads. Parties and elected representatives are seen to have legitimacy as bargaining agents empowered to cut deals on behalf of conflicting interests, whereas randomly selected citizens, not being authorized agents for constituencies, do not.

Because negotiation is such a prevalent part of decision-making in elected chambers (and elsewhere), it is common to assume that negotiation is the appropriate way to resolve conflicting interests. However, negotiation is not the only, nor necessarily the best, alternative to deliberation.

As discussed in previous chapters, negotiation reflects relative power, and often involves threats as well as inducements. Should public decisions necessarily be a manifestation of relative power? Even when power is more equal, negotiation often devolves into horse trading on completely unrelated policy matters. Negotiation and bargaining among elected legislators can mean: you get that amendment, which benefits your group but hurts society as a whole, and I get this other amendment, which benefits my group but hurts society as a whole. Indeed, legislators are especially motivated to negotiate deals when their sought-after policies cannot be justified as beneficial to society.

One alternative to both deliberation and negotiation (when incompatible interests clash) is arbitration with an impartial entity serving as a judge in pursuit of fairness or justice. This tool is “off the table” as an option in elected chambers, which evince relative power (rather than fairness). One can imagine a dispute resolution process in which each interest group on a particular issue offered their optimal compromise and a mini-public selected from among the possible compromises offered, using fairness, rather than power, as its standard. This process might deliver poor outcomes from time to time, but there is no reason to think results would be as bad as negotiated settlements within elected chambers today.

Cultivating Political Leaders

Gastil and Wright also assert that “elections create the possibility for political careers and the development of skillful politicians as political leaders” (Gastil and Wright 2019, 33). As I argued in Chapters 2 and 8 above, the assumption that this variety of political leaders is, on balance, a positive thing for a democracy is questionable.² Even setting aside the inherent danger of leaders moving to authoritarianism, it is not clear if leaders more often lead in a good or bad direction.

Even if we accept, for the sake of argument, that good leaders are beneficial, elections are a poor mechanism for selecting and promoting desirable ones. The skills, motivations, and traits needed to win elections, including public relations skills and extreme self-confidence, are not necessarily the optimal attributes for socially beneficial leaders. Elections tend to entice and advance ego-driven men (meaning males). In the book, The Certainty Trap: Why We Need to Question Ourselves More—and How We Can Judge Others Less, sociologist Ilana Redstone argues that certainty and democracy are fundamentally incompatible (Redstone 2024). It is cliché to suggest that the accrual of power also has a tendency to corrupt, even if the candidate isn’t sociopathic at the outset. In Chapter 8, I discussed the psychology of elected representatives and subscribed to the assessment made by the former Foreign Secretary of the UK, David Owen. He wrote a book expressing his concerns about what he termed “hubris syndrome” that afflicts so many politicians in high office (Owen 2012). In terms of selecting political leaders, mass elections are better than violent seizure of power, but they are worse than almost all other plausible selection methods.

Political Expertise

Another argument for maintaining elections is the presumed political expertise of elected officials. I debunked this notion in Chapter 12, but a brief review would be useful here. I am not aware of any compelling evidence that elections are effective at selecting individuals with competence at governing. James Surowiecki, in The Wisdom of Crowds, points out that we shouldn’t believe people are more expert simply because they assert as much (Surowiecki 2005). As discussed in Chapter 8, a feeling of certainty that one is right just as often signals a lack of intellectual humility. Failure to recognize one’s ignorance impedes deliberation and stunts the growth of actual expertise. Studies have found no significant difference between liberals and conservatives in this regard, but it seems likely that the subset of individuals from across the political spectrum who are willing to run for office tend toward harmful “intellectual arrogance” rather than beneficial humility (Leary, et al. 2017). Moreover, we should not conflate political (campaign) expertise and policy expertise. Most expertise resides in the professional staff and lobbyists (who draft nearly all bills), rather than in the politicians themselves (Nourse and Schacter 2002). One problem with electing representatives is that they have a distorted interest in consulting fundraising and campaign experts more than genuine policy experts and shaping policies accordingly.

By contrast, members of a sortition mini-public would presumably recognize the need to employ and consult genuine policy experts. Just as legislators hand off the details of drafting and negotiating legislation to staff, the sortition body might do the same—but without giving special consideration to lobbyists who want to tailor those details to their own purposes. Even assuming allotted citizens start out with cognitive biases comparable to those of elected representatives, it is far more feasible for a mini-public to require a well-designed deliberative architecture to dampen “the known cognitive biases of human beings” (Landemore 2013, 122), rather than exacerbate them. Citizen deliberators can also more feasibly be required to have training that minimizes psychological traps. Carey Morewedge and colleagues found that training can successfully reduce cognitive bias in both the immediate and long term (Morewedge et al. 2015). Overcoming cognitive biases, motivated reasoning, and automatic judgments creates a more competent decision-making body.

Benefits of Sortition are Lost with Continued Elections

Even if maintaining elections provides nothing beneficial, however, some might reason that the benefits of sortition, if added to elections, would ameliorate elections’ harms and still result in a net improvement. Since eliminating elections is a daunting task, adding a sortition body in a hybrid bicameral system seems more achievable. The hope would be that adding a sortition element to elections could make at least marginal improvements. My concern is that the hoped-for beneficial effects of sortition in one chamber would be overwhelmed by negative bleed-through from the partisan loyalties and campaign effects of the elected chamber. In this next section, I will argue that if an elected chamber deals with the same bills as its sortition counterpart, this would not only sacrifice the potential benefits of sortition, but further, it could cause the discrediting of sortition, making any advance, and even the continuation of any sortition problematic.

Agenda-Setting

Politicians who are constantly preparing for the next election seek out (or manufacture) those issues that they believe will help them in the next election. Important long-term issues (but with less public salience) are regularly ignored, and fail to make it onto the public agenda—until they become a crisis that cannot be ignored any longer.

In a hybrid system, the agenda-setting priorities of the elected chamber will still monopolize the news, public awareness, and—unless painstakingly shielded—the attention of members of the sortition chamber as well. Unlike the members of the allotted body, the politicians are skilled at getting attention and will do everything they can to get the spotlight. Also, a substantial portion of the sortition chamber’s agenda will be automatically established by what bills the elected chamber chooses to send them. Indeed, a number of hybrid bicameral proposals imagine the elected chamber being the sole generator of legislation, with the sortition body being a review body, with authority to adopt or veto bills on offer from the elected politicians (Sutherland and Kovner 2020).

Even if the sortition chamber is empowered to initiate its own bills, the agenda will be warped by media and public attention shaped by partisan exigencies. In Chapter 3, I highlighted Murray Edelman’s analysis that news coverage of issues selected by politicians, skilled in public relations, will dominate public attention and effectively shield from view important issues, which politicians would rather ignore (Edelman 1988, 14). Many crucial issues are simply too problematic for campaign purposes. If allowed, some sticky issues may be raised by the sortition chamber, but political gravity will constantly draw it back to the agenda favored by elected politicians eager to select issues they can use to vilify partisan opponents.

Rational Ignorance and Active Aptitude

When paired with an elected chamber, the members of the sortition chamber are more likely to succumb to rational ignorance and fail to attain active aptitude. When people face a daunting cognitive task and experience uncertainty, it is common for us to defer to those who project a demeanor of certainty and may also have higher status (Lee and Ofshe 1981). The sortition chamber would suffer a cognitive “social loafing” or “free-rider” problem. When another chamber dealing with the same pieces of legislation, full of articulate and often charismatic people who insist they have figured out the right answer, is pushing members of an allotted chamber to follow their lead, independent, slow and rational thinking becomes far less likely. Within a partisan societal environment, where many members of a mini-public still support partisan politicians in regular elections, and a strong sense of team loyalty or tribalism is fomented, many members of an allotted chamber would adhere to their favored party leaders’ platforms. Indeed, unless prohibited in some manner, the elected politicians would also seek to recruit members of the sortition chamber into a partisan caucus within the mini-public. Team loyalty has an emotional draw that regularly trumps independent rational analysis.

The sortition chamber in a hybrid bicameral system may not degenerate to a mere rubber stamp for the elected chamber’s decisions, but the intended achievements of sortition will not be realized. This loss of active aptitude underlies a whole host of other losses of anticipated sortition benefits, including the tapping of diffuse knowledge and collective intelligence, as well as independent judgment and the wisdom of crowds.

Danger of Delegitimization

If we set aside the concerns raised above and assume that all of the negative consequences of maintaining an elected chamber could be dealt with through careful design, there are still other grave failings. If the sortition chamber is not a rubber stamp, what happens when the two chambers disagree about an important bill? In cases where both chambers are elected, they tend to have a nearly equal power relationship. But what would happen when one chamber is made up of people identified as “chosen leaders”, and one is made up of a random assortment of ordinary people? We can get an inkling by looking at countries where one chamber is elected, and the other is not, such as the House of Lords in the UK or the Senate in Canada. In these cases, the bodies are not equal. The elected chamber is preeminent, even though the lesser body has the ostensibly prestigious title of “upper house”.

What are some likely consequences of the sortition chamber rejecting a bill passed by the elected chamber? The two chambers would have a fundamentally different and conflicting basis for claiming legitimacy, which might be summarized as the “principle of distinction” (Manin 1997) in the case of an elected chamber, and what Aristotle termed “the principle of equality and likeness” (Aristotle [350 BCE] 2016), in the case of the sortition one. When in conflict with an allotted chamber, the members of the elected chamber would have a compelling strategic incentive to sidestep the details of the policy differences and instead seek to undermine the legitimacy of the sortition chamber itself. In contrast, the allotted members would not be protecting personal careers in politics, since they would shortly be “out of power” regardless. Unlike the allotted citizens, the elected members would tend to be highly practiced, articulate public speakers with exceptional public relations skills. Portraying themselves as champions for their constituents, the elected leaders would likely play the “natural aristocracy” card (but by a less arrogant name, of course). It is easy to predict the themes they might use—dismissing the sortition chamber as “a random gaggle of dishwashers and hairdressers who are completely unaccountable to you, the people, because they never have to face you in an election”.

Worse still, the natural hostility of politicians toward any sortition threat to their power in a hybrid system makes the evolution toward a sortition democracy along this bicameral path extremely unlikely. If they ever butt heads by disagreeing about some important bill, the professional politicians will demolish the allotted body of amateurs. If sortition begins in a hybrid system in which the chambers contend, it is more likely to die there than expand.

Other Ideas for Combining Sortition with Elections

A transition strategy, which occasionally occurs to people, is adding some randomly selected members to a body that is currently made up of elected members. Variants of this “mixed-member” idea are that voters could select “none of the above” on their ballot, or the ratio of non-voters in the population compared to voters could apportion the randomly selected seats. One proposal that occasionally surfaces is even to have a political party contend in the election that commits to appointing any seats won to random citizens, or have their party members in the legislature take direction from randomly selected mini-publics. All of these mixed-member chamber concepts are untenable. Having two classes of “members” in a chamber, one with no experience, often not a lot of self-confidence, and no agenda on the one hand; and the other class of members made up of self-confident professionals with partisan priorities, who would likely seek to recruit the allotted members into their partisan caucus, and who also have a career path, only exaggerates the problems of a hybrid bicameral system. The logic of their legitimacy is also starkly different and fundamentally incompatible in a mixed body.

Combining elected politicians and randomly selected citizens has been tried in at least a couple of jurisdictions. The first sortition constitutional convention in Ireland in 2012–2014³ included 33 sitting legislators along with 66 randomly selected citizens. Some sortition advocates feel that the inclusion of politicians went a long way to relieving any concerns the political class might have about the competence of the lay members. A key factor was that they were primarily dealing with issues for which the political parties did not have pre-established platforms. Interestingly, in the second such citizens’ assembly on the constitution,⁴ called following the 2016 legislative elections, the politicians decided not to include any sitting legislators.

In 2019, the Parliaments of the Brussels–Capital Region of Belgium institutionalized Deliberative Committees in which 36 to 45 lay citizens selected by lot sat alongside 12 to 15 Members of Parliament who served on the relevant legislative committees. Together, they deliberate and formulate recommendations on an issue that needs to be addressed by the Parliament.⁵ Having two different classes of members, with different experiences, motivations, and interests, turned out to be quite problematic. Researchers who studied the various Deliberative Committees noted that “power asymmetries clearly remained despite the facilitation” (Simon and Vrydagh 2023). Many legislators simply didn’t bother to attend, and others sought to exclude certain proposals from consideration or engaged in other backroom manipulations to advance their party’s platform. In short, actual deliberation, as I have defined it in this book, was not of interest to many of the politicians. At the end of each deliberation, the politician members vote on the proposals separately from the allotted citizens, with only the politician’s votes having any authority. Clearly, this is not the model that advocates of a hybrid election-sortition legislature have in mind, but the distinct style, interests, and motivations of the two classes of members make this design questionable at best.

Anthoula Malkopoulou notes that “lotteries may offer valuable improvement to current practices of democratic selection [election], but only if special measures are taken to compensate for the limitations they entail” (Malkopoulou 2014, 230). The special measures she proposes (limiting the role and power of mini-publics) are nearly the exact opposite of those I favor, but we agree that one must adjust the law-making design to fit the unique character of mini-publics. The Framers of the United States Constitution substantially copied the design and legislative form of the British House of Commons, since they were not making any fundamental change to the principles of an elected elite ruling over the populace. Even the Senate was largely modeled on the House of Lords, but substituting for its hereditary aristocracy, a “natural aristocracy” selected by the various state legislatures.⁶ The sort of fundamental shift in the locus of power envisioned by a sortition democracy precludes such rubber-stamp replication of design.

A Better Beginning for Sortition

To avoid all these problems, I propose a system that allows elections to coexist with sortition (whether permanently, or during a transition to an all-sortition system), though not in a bicameral or mixed-member design.

The Peeling Transition Strategy

Most of the experience with modern-day sortition has been through citizens’ assemblies that have had a single function and topic. Also, the vast majority of citizens’ assemblies have been asked to deal with issues where the elected politicians have not already staked out partisan positions, thus side-stepping the risk of “head-butting” I worried about in the section above. While recent citizens’ assemblies have been exceptionally successful in terms of deliberation and policy (though significantly less successful in terms of seeing follow-through on their recommendations by elected decision-makers), that internal success is irrelevant to how well a full-charge sortition chamber might function.

In this book, I have presented the concept of a sortition democracy with an interconnected network of mini-publics, each with a specific legislative function or a specific topic or issue. In addition to being a more desirable end state, unlike a full-charge allotted chamber (which handles all functions and issues in the way a standard elected chamber does), the means of transition is built into the model itself. I refer to this as the “peeling strategy”.

Peeling away issue areas one at a time from elected representatives and transferring those policy domains to allotted bodies allows communities to learn from the experience of recent experiments in terms of process. But, crucially, it also avoids the danger of an elected chamber and a newly established full-charge sortition chamber, as in a hybrid bi-cameral system, opposing each other head-to-head on a given bill, which could trigger the aforementioned sortition delegitimization.

The ultimate design using multiple single-issue and single-function minipublics not only solves the dilemmas of sortition design discussed in Chapter 16. It is also pragmatic, and provides a step-by-step path for evolution to an all-sortition democracy. By peeling away one issue area or function at a time from the traditional elected legislature and entrusting it to a compound sortition process, it might be possible to transfer power to a sortition wing of government in a sequential process.

There are certain inviting issue areas where this might begin, such as issues in which elected legislators either have an obvious conflict of interest (election laws, as in the case of the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly, ethics oversight, etc.), or “hot potato” issue areas that elected officials are happy to be rid of because they are no-win topics from a politician’s campaign perspective (such as the nuclear waste issue tackled by a mini-public in South Australia, or abortion in Ireland). Initially, bills with no substantial budget impacts are most appropriate, as coordinating conflicting budget requests is a higher-order challenge for a system based on separate mini-publics.

The goal is to institutionalize the transfer of an issue area on an ongoing basis. The authority of the sortition process must be decisive, rather than merely advisory. This must also be combined with verifiable independence, such that a mini-public is not subject to manipulation by the elected government through control of their staff or information flows. In the short term, this might be accomplished through facilitation by an impartial non-governmental organization, such as Australia’s new Democracy Foundation or a university. Ultimately, however, there must be a budget and staff not beholden to the elected politicians. For example, some institutions in certain jurisdictions are funded by a specific tax or other revenue stream that, once enacted, no longer needs annual appropriations. The staff and functioning of the sortition process should be overseen by a mini-public devoted to these tasks.

If the public appreciates the fruits of these mini-publics, governments could feel a growing pressure to try this model for other issues, especially following scandals that crop up among elected representatives. Imagine a scandal in which a developer was discovered to have bribed members of a city council for some favorable spot zoning to allow a profitable project. If the sortition option were well known, it is possible to imagine that all future zoning decisions would be removed from the city council and instead entrusted to a jury-like sortition process. Community groups might demand this reform, and the city council members might wish to be seen as permanently solving the problem of zoning bribes, while not having much interest in holding on to zoning authority in any event.

This approach allows for baby steps (likely at the municipal level first), with a gradual popular assessment that might grow more favorable with each process refinement along the way, cresting into a huge tsunami wave of reform. Creating an all-purpose sortition chamber paired with an elected chamber, dealing with all bills, would require a greater leap of faith all at once. With the peeling strategy, elections steadily become less and less significant. We can use the analogy of what happened to the monarchies of Europe. While many monarchs nominally still exist, they are virtually powerless today. I foresee a future in which elected chambers may still exist, but are reduced to passing resolutions naming post offices after local celebrities.

The key to the advance of a sortition-based democracy is the use of sortition in forming municipal charter review commissions and constitutional conventions. A randomly selected constituent assembly seems far more likely than an elected chamber to transfer powers from elected bodies to other sortition bodies. There have already been precedents that suggest this strategy has potential. When the legislature of British Columbia established the citizens’ assembly, it set up a process that allowed the Assembly’s recommendations to go directly to a referendum without further involvement of the elected legislators. Ireland and Iceland have incorporated random selection in recent constitutional review bodies, although in an advisory role, explicitly interposing the elected legislature between the mini-public and the opportunity for referendum on the mini-public’s proposals. Neither of these is the precise model needed, but they hint at the possibility.

The Danger of an Elected Executive

This book has primarily focused on the law-making side of government. But we must also consider the effects of maintaining elections for the executive branch of government. A severe weakening of sortition’s benefits within the legislative branch could also occur if elections were maintained for the executive branch. There would be a severe risk of charismatic elected executives dominating a sortition legislature even more than they might an elected one. Elected politicians in a legislative chamber, with typically elevated egos and concerns about pre-serving their own power, might jealously seek to defend the prerogatives of the legislative branch and resist a would-be authoritarian executive. This, of course, is not assured, as legislators frequently decide it is strategically beneficial to align with strongman chief executives of their own party. Elected legislatures frequently give up powers to a chief executive (e.g., the unconstitutional de facto war-making powers of US presidents).

This risk would be even more pronounced with an allotted legislature. A popularly elected charismatic chief executive with a penchant for self- aggrandizement would have the opportunity to accentuate the “principle of distinction” to claim a popular mandate resulting from the election, while belittling the unelected and unimposing members of the randomly selected legislative branch. A group of randomly selected ordinary citizens lacks the personal investment and political capital necessary to defend the limited prerogatives of a body they will soon leave anyway.

Candidates for executive office have an overwhelming incentive to portray themselves as leaders, which encompasses policy advocacy. But if the chief executive leads on policy, this can short-circuit a deliberative sortition process by encouraging mini-public members to prejudge policy decisions—favoring those advocated by their preferred executive candidate. This can either promote tokenism through followership or, if resisted, put the mini-public in opposition to the executive, leading to delegitimization efforts.

Thus, an optimal sortition democracy should establish mini-publics charged with recruiting and hiring a chief executive, who would have an administrative rather than policymaking role (akin to the city manager function advanced by the early twentieth-century Progressive Movement). Rather than evaluating self-selected or party-nominated candidates, I would suggest a full-spectrum recruitment process to find a person fully willing to serve, but who would not proactively seek the position. I concur with the witticism of Douglas Adams that “those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it” (Adams 1997, 201). On a regular basis, a new mini-public would be called to evaluate the executive’s performance and have the power to remove him or her. To avoid the motivation to remove a good executive just to choose a particular person as a replacement, the mini-public with removal authority would not be the same one charged with hiring a replacement.

Other reforms to the executive would also be desirable. Some sortition advocates have proposed that the executive be multiple—for example, three individuals— with distinct areas of responsibility, but with significant decisions needing at least two of the three concurring (Zeitz, Coccoma, and Goodman 2024).

Multiple executives have been used historically. Some US states (Pennsylvania, Maine, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Virginia, Massachusetts, and Vermont) have had an executive council, with more or less power. In most cases, this body worked alongside a separately elected governor, but in Pennsylvania the executive council elected a president and vice president for one-year terms from among their own members. As mentioned above, Revolutionary France also established a five-member executive Directory, followed by a three-member executive Consulate (ending with a lone emperor, Napoleon). These multiple executive schemes were not a good fit for elections, but might work much better with sortition and an administrative, rather than policy (leadership) role.

Chapter Summary

In summary, the model of a single all-purpose legislative chamber is not a good fit for sortition lawmaking. A hybrid bicameral system, with one chamber elected and one selected by lot, is a poor design and a faulty transition strategy. The supposed benefits of retaining elections are illusory, but their harmful effects on a complementary sortition body would be all too real. Most crucially, if the two chambers disagreed on a law, the elected politicians would have the motive and skills to delegitimize the sortition chamber.

Instead, I contend that sortition works best when a system separates different legislative functions and assigns them to bodies optimally designed for each task, with different bodies formed for each issue. Though generally relying on sortition, this design would also broaden participation through self-selected Interest Panels open to any and all citizens for the purpose of drafting proposals and arguments as raw material for mini-publics to consider.

Peeling away issue areas and transferring them one at a time from elected to sortition bodies with final authority provides a plausible path toward institutional change. Election campaigns and politicians would simply no longer deal with those issue areas that had been removed from their purview. Since they would not be going head-to-head on the same issue, this would reduce the motivation for elected legislators to challenge the legitimacy of the sortition model. At some point along this path, it is likely that the elected politicians would fear sortition bodies were becoming a real threat to their power and status, and efforts to delegitimize them would be embraced as a strategy. It is impossible to predict the public attitude toward sortition at this future juncture, but it can be hoped that positive performance over time (and continued disdain for professional politicians as a class) might protect sortition from late efforts at delegitimization. Reformers might also phase in the transition to maintain the limited authority and status of those elected for years, recognizing that politicians are more concerned with protecting their individual power and status than the power and status of future politicians and the institution of elections itself. Current politicians could even embrace the status of being the “last generation of powerful elected leaders”.

In this evolutionary vision, politicians and their elected chambers may never fully disappear—but could recede to the periphery, just as the once powerful Council of Areopagus of pre-democratic Athens endured, but ended up with severely restricted responsibilities once democracy was ascendant. In a similar way, essentially ceremonial monarchs persist in many modern electoral regimes, but with few remaining legal powers. Being a fundamentally oligarchic tool, elections should not be championed as necessary or beneficial for democracy, which is often the case with those advocating hybrid bicameralism.

Conclusion

The key takeaway from this book is that democracy does not mean elections. Elections are actually a tool of oligarchy, and a barrier to achieving genuine democracy. However, the “right to vote” is a widely cherished thing. Even those who regularly neglect voting might object to losing the option of voting. While each individual’s vote is effectively irrelevant, when an entire class of people are granted the vote, as in the case of the formerly enslaved or women, the vote might make a difference. The principle of distinction may end up resulting in the same sort of elites winning elections, but voting leaves open the possibility that ordinary citizens could win here and there. But more than that, the right to vote has great symbolic importance to many—attesting to their standing as formally equal members of society. So how can we expect people to freely give up the right to vote, even if we are replacing it with the equality of a lottery?

Changing attitudes toward voting will take time. Recognizing it as tokenism and a faulty tool for a democracy isn’t something that we can expect immediately. I would not advocate that people refrain from voting in the current elections. There are greater and lesser evils in the world, and collective voter campaigns can matter, even if they can’t deliver democracy or popular rule.

So, what realizations do people need to have to willingly give up elections and their right to vote? Seeing a successful and workable democratic alternative in the form of sortition in their associations and local governments is certainly instrumental. People can also come to appreciate that participation should be informed, rather than be “mob-like”. People understand why we don’t allow all to vote on the guilt or innocence of an accused person, without having been immersed in the carefully designed learning process of a trial. While the rules of evidence and specific court procedures may be faulty, simply “having an opinion” from having seen a post on social media is understood as insufficient for “having your say” in the verdict. Yet, mass elections, whether for candidates or a policy referendum, have no system for assuring that voters are even minimally informed. Such mass elections generally are more consequential in terms of their reach than the trial of a single individual. The multi-body sortition design maintains the right of anyone who wishes to participate in public decision-making in the form of preparing arguments and draft proposals. But this participation requires that those participating “do the appropriate and necessary work”.

The only way to allow for informed decision-making on the thousands of decisions that must be made in society is to delegate the task to subsets of the people. The only way to protect political equality is to have that subset regularly rotated. And, the only way to have those decisions reflect the interests and informed judgment of the population as a whole (rather than of an elite) is to have those subsets be randomly selected representative samples.

I have presented a possible strategy, but I don’t have a firm idea of how the transition to a sortition democracy might occur. It might be through the step-by-step peeling strategy I present here. It also could be that grassroots efforts and civil society will set up separate parallel sortition institutions outside of the official government, which eventually come to be accepted as the only legitimate decision-making system. It is also conceivable that a sudden national crisis, akin to the Arab Spring of 2010 and 2011, if the concept of sortition were already widely understood, could lead to a wholesale replacement of elected politicians. This seems to me to be the least likely transition, simply because in times of crisis, the human proclivity for followership is exacerbated, seeking a charismatic leader who can save us from the crisis.

Orchestrating a transition is the hard part. I have only touched on my idea of how to proceed. This book is not fundamentally a strategy book. As I said in the introduction, my goal here is to point to sortition as the North Star of democracy, and to help others see what I see about what direction we should aim to travel.