Sortition
Based on Wikipedia: Sortition
What if the solution to corrupt politicians, gridlocked legislatures, and the corrosive influence of money in politics was simply this: pick random people instead?
It sounds absurd. It sounds like something a frustrated voter might mutter after watching yet another scandal unfold. But here's the thing—this "radical" idea was once the cornerstone of the world's most celebrated democracy. Ancient Athens, the birthplace of democratic governance, considered elections to be fundamentally undemocratic. To the Athenians, if you wanted real democracy, you picked your leaders by lottery.
They had a word for it: sortition.
The Athenian Experiment
Picture yourself in Athens around 500 BCE. You're a male citizen over thirty—one of perhaps forty thousand men who hold this privileged status. Your city has developed something unprecedented in human history: a system of government where ordinary people actually rule.
But here's what might surprise you. When it comes time to fill most government positions, nobody campaigns. Nobody fundraises. Nobody makes promises they won't keep. Instead, you walk to a large marble device called a kleroterion—essentially a sophisticated lottery machine—and you take your chances.
The kleroterion was an ingenious contraption. Citizens who wanted to serve inserted bronze identification tokens into slots on a stone slab. Then an official released black and white balls through a tube attached to the side. Black meant you weren't selected. White meant you had just become a government official.
This wasn't some minor administrative process. The Athenians used sortition to select most of their magistrates, their governing committees, and their juries—which typically consisted of 501 citizens. Five hundred and one, not five hundred, because an odd number prevents ties.
Why Lottery Beats Elections
The Athenians weren't naive about why they preferred random selection. They had watched other Greek cities closely, and they understood something that modern democracies often forget: elections can be bought.
Wealthy families and oligarchs—the ancient equivalent of today's billionaire donors—could pour resources into electoral campaigns. They could cultivate relationships, build patronage networks, and essentially purchase political power. Sound familiar?
Sortition made all of that irrelevant. You can't bribe your way into office when office is determined by falling balls. You can't build a political machine when there's no predictable path to power. The randomness itself was the anti-corruption mechanism.
Aristotle, one of history's greatest philosophers, was explicit about this. Elections, he argued, are inherently aristocratic—they favor those with name recognition, wealth, and connections. Only sortition truly embodies democratic equality, because only sortition gives every citizen an equal chance at governance regardless of their social standing.
Not everyone agreed, of course. Socrates and his student Isocrates raised a reasonable objection: what about expertise? Shouldn't decision-makers actually know something about what they're deciding? This tension—between democratic equality and competent governance—haunts discussions of sortition to this day.
The Safeguards
The Athenians weren't reckless idealists. They built substantial checks into their system.
First, you had to volunteer. Sortition drew from a pool of willing participants, not the entire population. This meant that those who truly had no interest in governance simply opted out.
Second, before taking office, selected citizens underwent an examination called dokimasia. This wasn't a competency test exactly—the Athenians assumed that any citizen was capable of serving. Rather, it verified citizenship and examined the candidate's character and conduct. Were you actually Athenian? Had you committed any disqualifying offenses? The system trusted citizens, but it verified first.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, officials were monitored constantly. The Assembly watched them throughout their terms. And when their year of service ended—yes, terms were limited to one year—officials faced a process called euthynai: a thorough accounting of their conduct in office. Any citizen could request the suspension of a magistrate at any time for good cause.
The historian James Wycliffe Headlam, who wrote the first comprehensive study of Athenian sortition in 1891, examined the system's track record. He found occasional minor corruption and administrative mistakes—once, the Council set taxes too high. But systematic oppression? Organized fraud? These were essentially impossible when power was so widely and randomly distributed.
There's another benefit that Headlam noted, one that cuts against much of what we assume about politics: power didn't go to those who sought it. In our electoral systems, the drive to acquire power is almost a prerequisite for obtaining it. You have to want it badly enough to campaign, to fundraise, to make compromises, to build coalitions. Sortition inverts this. The people who govern are, by definition, not the people who worked hardest to govern.
When Elections Did Make Sense
Even the lottery-loving Athenians recognized that some jobs required specific expertise. Military commanders—the strategoi—were elected, not selected by lot. When you're leading soldiers into battle, "average citizen" isn't a sufficient qualification. The Athenians were democratic, not foolish.
This distinction matters. It suggests that sortition's proponents, ancient and modern, aren't arguing for randomness in all things. They're arguing that sortition is appropriate for the fundamentally political decisions that don't require specialized technical knowledge—decisions about values, priorities, and the distribution of resources in society.
Italy's Hybrid Approaches
After Athens fell and Rome rose and fell and the medieval period churned through its centuries of kingdoms and empires, the idea of selecting leaders by lot didn't entirely disappear. It re-emerged in the Italian city-states, though in modified forms.
Venice developed perhaps the most baroque system of governance in history. Selecting the Doge—the duke who served as head of state—involved multiple rounds of nomination, voting, and lottery, all carefully structured to prevent any faction from gaining control. The process was so convoluted that historians still debate whether it was brilliantly designed or simply accumulated accretions from political compromises over centuries.
But Venice's use of sortition was limited. The lottery selected only the members of nominating committees, not the final officeholders. The point was to break up political factions and discourage intrigue within the Great Council, the city's aristocratic governing body. By randomizing who got to nominate candidates, Venice prevented the kind of bloc voting and deal-making that typically corrupts electoral politics.
The result? Venice maintained its republican government for over a thousand years—an almost unmatched run of political stability. Of course, this stability coexisted with oligarchy. The top positions still tended to go to elite families. Venice demonstrated that sortition could be a tool for stabilizing existing power structures, not just for democratizing them.
Florence went further. Beginning in 1328, the city used a system called scrutiny. Citizens from different sectors of the city were nominated and voted upon, creating a pool of qualified candidates. Then their names went into a sack—literally—and magistrates were drawn by lottery.
This was genuinely more democratic than Venice's approach. Over time, Florence expanded eligibility to include members of the minor guilds, the artisan classes who didn't rank among the city's elite. During the years 1378 to 1382, Florence achieved what historians consider the peak of Renaissance citizen participation, with the lottery drawing from a remarkably broad pool.
It didn't last, of course. Florence eventually fell under the control of the Medici family, demonstrating that no system is immune to determined accumulation of power. But for a century, Florence showed that sortition could work at the heart of government in a major city.
The Enlightenment's Strange Silence
Here's a puzzle that haunted the French political theorist Bernard Manin: when the American and French revolutions established their new republics, they barely discussed sortition at all. Why?
These revolutionaries knew their ancient history. They had read Aristotle and Plato. They invoked Athens and Rome constantly. Montesquieu, whose writings profoundly influenced the American founders, explicitly stated that "sortition is natural to democracy, as election is to aristocracy." Rousseau argued that a mixture of sortition and election would be healthier for democracy than either alone.
Yet when it came time to design actual governments, the founders of modern democracy chose elections almost exclusively. The lottery that ancient democrats considered the essence of their system became a historical curiosity, mentioned occasionally in political philosophy but never seriously implemented.
Manin wondered if sortition simply seemed impractical at the scale of a nation-state. Athens had perhaps forty thousand citizens. The United States, even in 1787, had millions of people spread across a vast territory. Perhaps the founders thought you couldn't run a lottery across such distances.
The historian David Van Reybrouck offers a more cynical explanation. He points out that the first comprehensive modern study of Athenian sortition wasn't published until 1891—more than a century after the American and French revolutions. The founders may simply not have understood how central sortition was to ancient democracy.
But Van Reybrouck goes further. He argues that the wealthy men who led these revolutions had every reason to prefer elections. Elections allowed them to replace hereditary aristocracy with what you might call elected aristocracy—a system where power still flowed to the wealthy, the connected, and the prominent, just through a different mechanism.
Many of these founders, Van Reybrouck notes, didn't even bother making excuses about practicality. They simply stated that they preferred elite governance. John Adams openly worried about "the multitude." Alexander Hamilton praised the British monarchy. These were not committed democrats in the Athenian sense. They were republicans who wanted government by the best people—and they assumed they knew who those people were.
The Swiss Exception
One place did remember sortition during the early modern period: Switzerland. Between 1640 and 1837, several Swiss localities used random selection to choose their mayors.
The motivation was thoroughly practical: mayors could enrich themselves through their position, and elections had become corrupted by bribery and influence-peddling. Random selection removed the incentive to bribe voters—what's the point if luck determines the outcome anyway?
Switzerland eventually moved away from sortition, but the logic behind its adoption remains relevant. When corruption is the problem, randomness is a solution.
The Modern Revival
Sortition never entirely disappeared from modern life. You've probably encountered it, in fact, even if you didn't think of it that way.
Jury duty is sortition. When you receive that summons in the mail, you're experiencing the same basic principle the Athenians applied to governance: random selection of citizens to make important decisions. The logic is identical—we want jurors who aren't professionally invested in the outcome, who represent a cross-section of the community, who can't be systematically corrupted. We trust random people to decide guilt and innocence, imprisonment and freedom.
Why, then, do we consider it absurd to trust random people to decide tax policy or healthcare or foreign affairs?
This question has animated a growing movement of political theorists, activists, and reformers. Over the past few decades, sortition has moved from obscure academic interest to serious policy proposal. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development—a major international body—has counted nearly six hundred examples of citizens' assemblies using lottery selection to make or advise on public decisions.
These assemblies go by various names: citizens' juries, deliberative panels, mini-publics. The format varies, but the basic structure is consistent. Random citizens are selected, given time and resources to study an issue in depth, and asked to deliberate together before making recommendations or decisions.
Why It Might Work Better
The political scientist John Burnheim identified a fundamental flaw in representative democracy: voters must choose a package deal. When you vote for a candidate, you're voting for their positions on hundreds of issues at once. You might agree with your representative on healthcare but disagree on immigration, support their economic policy but oppose their stance on civil liberties.
Sortition allows something different: groups of citizens focused on single issues, with the time and resources to study those issues deeply. Instead of electing professional politicians who must have opinions on everything, you could have rotating groups of ordinary people who develop genuine expertise on one thing at a time.
There's also the diversity argument, which the political scientist Scott Page has formalized mathematically. Page's research suggests that cognitive diversity—having people who think differently, not just people who are individually brilliant—produces better collective decisions. A group of randomly selected citizens of average intelligence, his models suggest, can outperform a group of experts who all think the same way.
This "diversity trumps ability" theorem has become central to modern arguments for sortition. Elections, by their nature, select for certain types of people: those who are comfortable with public speaking, who can raise money, who have the ambition and ego to seek power. This produces legislatures that are remarkably homogeneous—wealthy lawyers, mostly, in most democracies—when what we might need is heterogeneity.
There's even evidence that elections select for personality disorders. Multiple studies have found elevated rates of narcissistic and psychopathic traits among elected officials. This makes sense if you think about it: running for office rewards self-promotion, manipulation, and a certain indifference to others' opinions. Sortition, by contrast, doesn't select for any personality type. It selects randomly.
The Objections
None of this means sortition is a simple fix. The objections raised by Socrates twenty-four centuries ago remain relevant.
Expertise matters. Modern governance is vastly more complex than ancient Athens. We regulate nuclear power plants, manage international financial systems, conduct diplomacy with nations possessing weapons that could end civilization. Do we really want random citizens making decisions about these matters?
The defenders of sortition offer several responses. First, they note that elected officials aren't experts either—they rely on professional staff and advisors, just as sortition-selected citizens would. Second, they argue that citizens' assemblies can be given time, resources, and access to expert testimony, allowing them to develop informed opinions. Third, they suggest that sortition might be most appropriate for value-laden decisions—how much risk is acceptable? how should resources be distributed?—while leaving technical implementation to professionals.
Legitimacy is another concern. Would citizens accept decisions made by randomly selected neighbors? Would such decisions carry the same weight as those made by elected representatives who can claim a popular mandate?
Here the evidence is somewhat encouraging. Citizens' assemblies that have been tried generally receive high marks from participants and observers alike. People who serve on them report becoming more engaged with civic life. The deliberative process—actually sitting down with fellow citizens, hearing different perspectives, working through disagreements—seems to create legitimacy in a way that the theater of electoral campaigns does not.
But there's a chicken-and-egg problem. Sortition might generate legitimacy once people experience it, but how do you get people to accept it in the first place? Electoral politicians have little incentive to promote a system that would make them obsolete. And voters, conditioned by lifetimes of electoral politics, might view sortition as strange or threatening.
Incremental Possibilities
Some reformers suggest a gradual approach: introduce sortition as a supplement to existing systems rather than a replacement for them.
The political scientist Robert Dahl proposed what he called "minipopuli"—groups of about a thousand randomly selected citizens who would study specific issues in depth. These groups wouldn't replace legislatures. They'd inform them. They'd provide a kind of considered public opinion, more thoughtful than polls but more representative than interest groups.
Others have suggested reserving some legislative seats for randomly selected citizens. Research suggests that even a small percentage of independent, randomly selected legislators can improve legislative efficiency—more laws passed, better outcomes for average welfare—by disrupting the predictable dynamics of partisan blocs.
Claudia Chwalisz, a leading advocate for deliberative democracy, argues for making citizens' assemblies a routine part of governance, convened regularly to advise on major policy decisions. Not a one-time experiment, but an ongoing institution.
Beyond Government
Sortition has applications beyond traditional politics. Any large organization that wants democratic governance faces the same problems that afflict electoral democracy: participation rates are low, elections favor the connected and the ambitious, and ordinary members feel disconnected from leadership.
Consider cooperatives, employee-owned businesses, housing associations, even large online platforms. These organizations often have thousands or millions of members who don't know each other personally. Elections in such contexts tend to be formalities, with low turnout and predictable winners. Sortition could provide more genuinely representative governance.
Some organizations have already experimented with this. The Samaritan Ministries health plan uses a panel of thirteen randomly selected members to resolve disputes. The New Zealand Health Research Council awards funding by lottery among applicants judged equally qualified—a recognition that, past a certain threshold of merit, random selection is fairer than pretending evaluators can distinguish fine gradations of excellence.
The Deeper Question
Ultimately, debates about sortition force us to confront a fundamental question: what do we actually want from democracy?
If we want the best possible decisions, we might prefer technocracy—government by experts. If we want accountability, we might prefer elections—at least voters can throw the bums out. If we want representativeness, sortition might be superior—a randomly selected body will, by definition, look like the population from which it's drawn.
But if we want citizen engagement—if we believe that democracy is valuable not just for its outputs but for what it does to the people who participate in it—then sortition has a unique advantage. Serving on a citizens' assembly isn't just voting every few years. It's actually governing, at least for a time. It's deliberating with fellow citizens, wrestling with difficult tradeoffs, taking responsibility for collective decisions.
The Athenians understood this. For them, democracy wasn't just a system for making decisions. It was a way of life, an education in citizenship, a practice that developed the capacities of those who participated. The lottery wasn't just a tool for selecting leaders. It was an expression of the radical equality at the heart of democratic life: anyone might rule, and therefore everyone must be prepared to.
Whether modern societies are ready for such radical equality remains to be seen. But as frustration with electoral politics grows—as polarization deepens, as trust in institutions erodes, as money plays an ever-larger role in campaigns—the ancient idea of selecting leaders by lottery looks less like a historical curiosity and more like an idea whose time might come again.
After all, if the choice is between politicians who spend their lives seeking power and neighbors chosen by lot, the Athenians knew which option they trusted more. Perhaps, eventually, we'll remember why.