Product Code Database
In governance, sortition is the selection of public officer or jurors at random, i.e. by lottery, in order to obtain a representative sample.OECD (2025). 9789264837621, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. . ISBN 9789264837621
In ancient Athenian democracy, sortition was the traditional and primary method for appointing political officials, and its use was regarded as a principal characteristic of democracy. Sortition is often classified as a method for both direct democracy and deliberative democracy.
Today sortition is commonly used to select prospective jurors in common-law systems. What has changed in recent years is the increased number of citizen groups with political advisory power, along with calls for making sortition more consequential than elections, as it was in Athens, Venice, and Florence.
Most Athenians believed sortition, not elections, to be democratic and used complex procedures with purpose-built allotment machines ( kleroterion) to avoid the corrupt practices used by oligarchs to buy their way into office. According to the author Mogens Herman Hansen, the citizen's court was superior to the assembly because the allotted members swore an oath which ordinary citizens in the assembly did not; therefore, the court could annul the decisions of the assembly. Most Greek writers who mention democracy (including Aristotle,Aristotle, Politics 1301a28-35Aristotle, Politics 4.1294be Plato,Plato, Republic VIII, 557a Herodotus,Herodotus The Histories 3.80.6 and PericlesThucydides, The Peloponnesian War. The Funeral Oration of Pericles.) emphasize the role of selection by lot, or state outright that being allotted is more democratic than elections (which were seen as oligarchic). SocratesXenophon. Memorabilia Book I, 2.9 and IsocratesIsocrates. Areopagiticus (section 23) however questioned whether randomly-selected decision-makers had enough expertise.
Past scholarship maintained that sortition had roots in the use of chance to divine the will of the gods, but this view is no longer common among scholars. In Ancient Greek mythology, Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades used sortition to determine who ruled over which domain. Zeus got the sky, Poseidon the sea, and Hades the underworld.
In Athenian democracy, to be eligible to be chosen by lot, citizens self-selected into the available pool, then onto lotteries in the kleroteria machines. The magistracies assigned by lot generally had terms of service of one year. A citizen could not hold any particular magistracy more than once in his lifetime, but could hold other magistracies. All male citizens over 30 years of age, who were not disenfranchised by atimia, were eligible. Those selected through lot underwent examination called dokimasia to ensure citizenship and consider life, character, and at times, property; capacity for a post was assumed. Rarely were selected citizens discarded. Magistrates, once in place, were subjected to constant monitoring by the Assembly. Magistrates appointed by lot had to render account of their time in office upon their leave, called euthynai. However, any citizen could request the suspension of a magistrate with due reason.
A Kleroterion was used to select eligible and willing citizens to serve jury duty. This bolstered the initial Athenian system of democracy by getting new and different jury members from each tribe to avoid corruption. James Wycliffe Headlam explains that the Athenian Council (500 administrators randomly selected), would commit occasional mistakes such as levying taxes that were too high. Headlam found minor instances of corruption but deemed systematic oppression and organized fraud as impossible due to widely (and randomly) distributed power combined with checks-and-balances. Furthermore, power did not tend to go to those who sought it. The Athenians used an intricate machine, a kleroterion, to allot officers. Headlam found the Athenians largely trusted the system of random selection, regarding it as the most natural and the simplest way of appointment. While sortition was used for most positions, elections were sometimes used for positions like for military commanders (strategos).
Lot was used in the Venetian system only in order to select members of the committees that served to nominate candidates for the Great Council. A combination of election and lot was used in this multi-stage process. Lot was not used alone to select magistrates, unlike in Florence and Athens. The use of lot to select nominators made it more difficult for political sects to exert power, and discouraged campaigning. By reducing intrigue and power moves within the Great Council, lot maintained cohesiveness among the Venetian nobility, contributing to the stability of this republic. Top magistracies generally still remained in the control of elite families.
In Florence, lot was used to select magistrates and members of the Signoria during republican periods. Florence utilized a combination of lot and scrutiny by the people, set forth by the ordinances of 1328. In 1494, Florence founded a Great Council in the model of Venice. The nominatori were thereafter chosen by lot from among the members of the Great Council, indicating an increase in aristocratic power.
Montesquieu's book The Spirit of Laws provides one of the most cited discussions of the concept in Enlightenment political writing. In which, he argues sortition is natural to democracy, just as elections are to aristocracy. He echoes the philosophy of much earlier thinkers such as Aristotle, who found elections as aristocratic. Montesquieu caveats his support by saying that there should also be some mechanisms to ensure the pool of selection is competent and not corrupt. Rousseau also found that a mixed model of sortition and election provided a healthier path for democracy than one or the other. Harrington, also found the Venetian model of sortition compelling, recommending it for his ideal republic of Oceana. Edmund Burke, in contrast, worried that those randomly selected to serve would be less effective and productive than self-selected politicians.Edmund Burke (1790), Reflections on the Revolution in France
Bernard Manin, a French political theorist, was astonished to find so little consideration of sortition in the early years of representative government. He wonders if perhaps the choosing of rulers by lot may have been viewed as impractical on such a large scale as the modern state, or if elections were thought to give greater political consent than sortition.
However, David Van Reybrouck disagrees with Manin's theories on the lack of consideration of sortition. He suggests that the relatively limited knowledge about Athenian democracy played a major role, with the first thorough examination coming only in 1891 with Election by Lot at Athens. He also argues that wealthy enlightenment figures preferred to retain more power by holding elections, with most not even offering excuses on the basis of practicality but plainly saying they preferred to retain significant elite power, citing commentators of 18th century France and the United States suggesting that they simply dislodged a hereditary aristocracy to replace it with an elected aristocracy.
David Chaum proposed selecting a random sample of eligible voters to study and vote on a public policy, while Deliberative opinion polling invites a random sample to deliberate together before voting on a policy.
As participants grow in competence by contributing to deliberation, they also become more engaged and interested in civic affairs.. Talk by Etienne Chouard. At 0:17:10 Most societies have some type of citizenship education, but sortition-based committees allow ordinary people to develop their own democratic capacities through direct participation.
Sortition is commonly used in selecting juries in Anglo-Saxon legal systems and in small groups (e.g., picking a school class monitor by drawing straws). In public decision-making, individuals are often determined by allotment if other forms of selection such as election fail to achieve a result. Examples include certain hung elections and certain votes in the UK Parliament. Some contemporary thinkers like David Van Reybrouck have advocated a greater use of selection by lot in today's .
Sortition is also used in military conscription, as one method of awarding US green cards, and in placing students into some schools, university classes, and university residences.
Michael Donovan proposes that the percentage of voters who do not turnout have their representatives chosen by sortition. For example, with 60% voter turnout a number of legislators are randomly chosen to make up 40% of the overall parliament. A number of proposals for an entire legislative body to be chosen by sortition have been made for the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Denmark, and France.
Etienne Chouard advocates strongly that those seeking power (elected officials) should not write the rules, making sortition the best choice for creating constitutions and other rules around the allocation of power within a democracy.. Talk by Etienne Chouard. 0:43:03 He and others propose replacing elections with bodies that use sortition to decide on key issues.
|
|
