Sortition and Public Policy

Lotteries are widely used to decide places (seats) at schools, colleges and universities. Conall Boyle explores many examples to find out why. The emotional turmoil that the use of ballots can cause to students and parents alike is graphically described. But lottery selection teaches lessons too; now we can find proper answers to controversial questions like "Does choice work?" This book will be of interest to parents, pupils and teachers as well as educational administrators. Any student applying for admission to a university course should learn about the amazing weighted lottery for entry to medical schools in the Netherlands. There is a better way: it's a lottery!

Two essays, printed back to back in a single volume, offer complementary solutions to the democratic deficit in Britain and the USA. In his book The Party's Over: Blueprint for a Very English Revolution (2004), Keith Sutherland questioned the role of the party in the post-ideological age and concluded that it would be better for government ministers to be appointed by headhunters and held to account by a people's parliament selected by lot. This completely revised and updated edition includes a study of the recent literature on deliberative polling. The American founders proposed that their legislature should be 'an exact portrait, in miniature, of the people at large'. Whether or not this was true at the time, the exponential growth of the population, skyrocketing campaign funding, the power of pressure groups, the grease of the pork-barrel and the dominance of charisma and demagoguery means that the US Constitution could now better be described as a kleptocracy. This pioneering essay proposes selecting Congressional members by random lot (leaving the Senate and Presidency unchanged) to 'restore a direct, powerful voice in Washington to the whole of America'. Originally published in 1985, this new edition includes an introduction by political scientist Peter Stone.

This volume reflects the up-and-coming academic interest in sortition. It is based on contributions to the first international conference dedicated to the subject held at the University of Political Science (Sciences-Po) in Paris in November 2008. The papers explore important theoretical questions such as how we should recognize and define differing lottery forms; the relationship between sortition and different aspects and forms of democracy; and its potential benefits to current political and commercial practice. Contributors include: Hubertus Buchstein, Gil Delannoi, Oliver Dowlen, Gerhard Göhler, Barbara Goodwin, Michael Hein, Yves Sintomer, Peter Stone and Antoine Vergne.

Thomas Gataker was a disputatious Puritan divine. His The Nature and Uses of Lotteries (1627) was the first systematic exposition of a modern view of lotteries, not just as a form of gambling, but as a fair method of division. Gataker approved of these uses, but condemned divination and sorcery using random signs or spells. This important treatise is often referred to, but is generally inaccessible due to its rarity and old-style of language. The text of this edition has been fully modernised, with notes on important sources used by Gataker and includes a new introduction.

"What should you do when you have decided to use the drawing of lots in a procedure? What practical questions arise? What options are available? What are the details? What advantages and disadvantages should we expect from each option? What are the risks to be aware of and the precautions to take? The literature on sortition consists of three main genres: monographs, arguments for and against, and the history of the procedure in one or more dimensions. This book stands a little apart from this framework. Its method is largely deductive and theoretical in reasoning. It has a practical purpose which is aimed at specialists as well as naïve users and interested parties: precise enough to satisfy an informed public and simple enough to be accessible to citizens and practitioners. Gil Delannoi begins with a general theory of political procedures and its relations with the typology of political regimes. Sortitive democracy is also studied as a third option distinct from the familiar representative and direct types. Sortition is analysed through its main uses, effects, and objectives. Several detailed potential uses are proposed for political actors at the end of the book. Treating procedures like delicate flowers or rare birds is far from superfluous. To forget this aspect is to stick to generalities, and to ignore crucial details."

Sortition-also known as random selection-puts ordinary people in control of decision-making in government. This may seem novel, but it is how the original Athenian democracy worked. In fact, what is new is our belief that electoral systems are democratic. It was self-evident to thinkers from Aristotle to the Renaissance that elections always resulted in oligarchies, or rule by elites. In this distillation of a lifetime's thinking about the history and principles of democracy, Maurice Pope presents a new model of governance that replaces elected politicians with assemblies selected by lot. The re-introduction of sortition, he believes, offers a way out of gridlock, apathy, alienation and polarisation by giving citizens back their voice. Pope's work-published posthumously-grew from his unique perspective as a widely travelled English classicist who also experienced the injustice of apartheid rule in South Africa. His great mind was as much at home with the history of philosophy as the mathematics of probability. Governments and even the EU have tried out sortition in recent years; the UK, France and several countries have attempted to tackle climate change through randomly selected citizens' assemblies. The city of Paris and the German-speaking community of Belgium have set up permanent upper houses chosen by lot.

The central feature of every true lottery is that all rational evaluation is deliberately excluded. Once this principle is grasped, the author argues, we can begin to understand exactly what benefits sortation can bring to the political community. The book includes a study of the use of sortation in ancient Athens and in late medieval and renaissance Italy. It also includes commentary on the contributions to sortation made by Machiavelli, Guicciardini, Harrington and Paine; an account of the history of the randomly selected jury; and new research into lesser-known examples from England, America and revolutionary France.

Before New Labour came to power and when even the prospect of reform of Britain's House of Lords was regarded with skepticism, Anthony Barnett and Peter Carty developed the idea of selecting part of a new upper house by lot: creating a jury or juries, that are representative of the population as a whole while being selected at random, to assess legislation. This new edition of the original proposal includes an account of the reception of the idea, their evidence before the Commission on the Lords established by Tony Blair, and a response to the great advances in citizen-based deliberation that have taken place since the mid-1990s. It concludes with a new appeal to adopt their approach as efforts to reform the Lords continue.

The storming of the US Capitol building in January 2021 focused attention on the multiple threats facing contemporary liberal democracies. Beyond the immediate problem of Covid-19, the past two decades saw political polarization, a dramatic rise in inequality, global warming and other environmental threats, as well as the growth of dangerous cultural and political divisions. Western liberal democracies find themselves in the midst of what political theorists call a legitimation crisis: major portions of the population lack confidence in the ability of governments to address our most pressing problems. This distrust in government and traditional political parties opened the door to populist leaders and a rising tide of authoritarianism. Liberal democracies face major structural and normative challenges in the near future that require us to look beyond the traditional set of solutions available. Democracy in Crisis points back to the world's first democratic government, Ancient Athens, to see what made that political arrangement durable and resistant to both internal and external threats. The argument focuses on several distinctive Athenian institutions and practices, and considers how we might reimagine them in the modern world. The book addresses questions of civic ideology and institutions, with extended treatment of two distinctive Athenian institutions, ostracism and sortition.