18 Democracy
Coccoma
In a poll conducted in January 2020, 65 percent of respondents said that everyday people selected by lottery—who meet some basic requirements and are willing and able to serve—would perform better or much better compared to elected politicians. In March last year a Pew survey found that a staggering 79 percent believe it’s very or somewhat important for the government to create assemblies where everyday citizens from all walks of life can debate issues and make recommendations about national laws.
The idea—technically known as “sortition”—has been spreading. Perhaps its most prominent academic advocate is Yale political theorist Hélène Landemore. Her 2020 book Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century explores the limitations of both direct democracy and electoral-representative democracy, advocating instead for government by large, randomly selected “mini-publics.” As she put it in conversation with Ezra Klein at the New York Times last year, “I think we are realizing the limits of just being able to choose rulers, as opposed to actually being able to choose outcomes.” She is not alone. Rutgers philosopher Alex Guerrero and Belgian public intellectual David Van Reybrouck have made similar arguments in favor of democracy by lottery. In the 2016 translation of his book Against Elections, Van Reybrouck characterizes elections as “the fossil fuel of politics.” “Whereas once they gave democracy a huge boost,” he writes, “much like the boost that oil gave the economy, it now it turns out they cause colossal problems of their own.”
Sortition got a popular, if perhaps unwitting, shout-out in the summer of 2020, when Andrew Yang—then in the thick of a run for president—tweeted, “There are times when I think one could replace our leaders with citizens chosen at random and get a better result.” The message went viral.
Elections reward well-positioned insiders who have the connections and war chest to wage a campaign. They also attract ambitious social climbers. Today even the most virtuous candidates have to solicit truckloads of money—anywhere from $500,000 to $2 million for a credible run. Once in office, winners spend much of their time raising revenue for reelection. The amount of actual legislating—investigations of issues, research into policy, seeking the common good—is small, and legions of lobbyists exercise influence to the tune of $3.5 billion a year.
Modern liberal governments are not democracies; they are oligarchies in disguise, overwhelmingly following the policy preferences of the rich.
Even if democracy by lottery worked for Athens, could it work today in the massive states of the modern world? A growing body of empirical work on citizens’ assemblies suggests it could. (As Trinidadian Marxist historian C. L. R. James put it in his 1956 essay “Every Cook Can Govern,” whose title he took from Lenin, “We must get rid of the idea that there was anything primitive in the organization of the government of Athens.” “On the contrary,” he wrote, “it was a miracle of democratic procedure.”)
Meanwhile, democracy by lottery has exploded onto the practical political stage elsewhere in the West. The turning point came in 2004 in British Columbia, where the government convened a full-blown citizens’ assembly. Through lotteries, over 150 people representative of the general population came together to study the province’s electoral system. They heard from experts, consulted with the public, and deliberated as a group before voting on recommendations. They put their proposals to a referendum, gaining about 57 percent support—just shy of the 60 percent supermajority imposed on them by the legislature. Despite coming up short, the undertaking marked a watershed in democratic practice.
Citizens’ assemblies comprised of everyday people boast many virtues. Take two traits Americans say they revere: equality and representation. Lotteries realize the ideal of equality in ways that elections can’t even begin to approach. The latter favor the already powerful; lotteries, by contrast, give every citizen the exact same chance at selection. Moreover, by employing democratic lotteries to select members, assemblies channel the public’s beliefs much more accurately than elected legislatures.
The key to the success of citizens’ assemblies lies in their impartiality and balance, along with their integration with expert testimony and counsel. Rather than going by gut or brute opinion, assembly members develop a comprehensive understanding of issues. They engage in meaningful conversations, challenging each other’s assumptions and working together to find common ground. Because of their diversity, citizens’ assemblies bring people of very different backgrounds together to search for answers. Facilitators work to ensure that every voice gets heard, and participants discover—often to their surprise—a new understanding for people on the other side. Partisan electoral politics looks very different today, of course. And surprisingly, as Landemore has found, everyday people even arrive at smarter decisions than panels of specialists. The process is at once more democratic—respectful discussions where everyone’s ideas matter—and more effective, resulting in better policy.
A party is just a machine for getting votes. Democracy Without Elections: The foundation is currently conducting a campaign in Scotland to create a second house in the regional parliament populated by everyday Scots; this chamber would work alongside elected MPs, the way it now does in the German-speaking province of Belgium. Down the road, the group envisions a campaign to reform the British House of Lords into a similar allotted body.
The final goal is ambitious: the end of politicians.
In a 2013 article for the Journal of Deliberative Democracy, Bouricius offers a bold alternative: using multiple groups of citizens to pass legislation, each one filled by lottery. The first, an assembly of up to 400 representatives, would act as an agenda council. With the aid of professional staff, they would investigate social problems and set topics for legislation. Members would serve one three-year term before rotating out. The second chamber would consist of 150 different members, chosen by lot and randomly assigned to panels of three to five citizens. Each panel would be responsible for a particular policy area. They would take expert testimony, solicit proposals from the public, and work together to produce a bill. Again, representatives would serve one term of three years. Final passage of the law, however, would fall to a third body, dubbed the policy jury. Numbering some 400 people, this group would meet for just a few days to consider the proposed bill. After hearing from advocates and opponents of the legislation, they would vote by secret ballot on whether to adopt it as law. Not stopping with the legislature, Bouricius also imagines using citizens’ assemblies to select qualified chief executives.
Bouricius’s vision is just one among many; still others are explored in the recent Verso collection Legislature by Lot (2019), edited by political scientist John Gastil and late Marxist sociologist Erik Olin Wright. How exactly to implement any of these proposals remains an open question. Some think such a transformation could come about gradually, with citizens’ assemblies stripping power from politicians bit by bit over time until the latter become figureheads. Others propose swifter action. Either way, democracy by lottery would amount to a revolution, and like all revolutions, it begins in the mind.
Our political culture conditions us to believe that democracy is predicated on suffrage, but the legacy of the Athenian assembly reminds us that another system is possible: one where everyday people actually make the decisions determining their lives.
80 million eligible voters didn’t vote in 2020’s presidential contest. When asked why in a poll, two-thirds of respondents stated that elections have little to do with the way decisions get made in government.