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Sortition

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Sortition is the method of random selection, particularly in relation to the selection of decision makers also known as allotment.

Today, sortition is fairly commonly used in small groups (e.g., picking a school class monitor), but only rarely in relation to public decision making positions, where methods based on election are much more common. The only widespread example of public decision making positions filled in this way are court juries.

However, there are historical examples (for example classical Athens and Venice) where sortition was used to select the holders of key political and administrative offices, sometimes combined with an element of qualification or election. Moreover, some contemporary thinkers advocate greater use of the method in today’s political systems.{See James Fishkin's work}.Sortition proposals put forward in the modern world generally relate to the means for selecting a large legislative body (such as the U.S. Congress) from among the adult population at large.

Methods

Before the random selection can be done, the pool of candidates must be defined. It is possible to select from eligible volunteers, or from the membership or population at large.

The selection method should be carefully designed in order to preserve public confidence that it has not been rigged. One robust, general, public method for making random selections is RFC 3797: Publicly Verifiable Nomcom Random Selection. Using it, multiple specific sources of random numbers (e.g. lotteries) are selected in advance, and an algorithm is defined for selecting the winners based on those random numbers. When the random numbers become available, anyone can calculate the winners.


Advantages

Arguably, selection by lot is a more democratic process than election by vote, since sortition is less influenced by money and fame. Aristotle and other classical writers who discussed the subject took this view. And critics of electoral politics in the twenty-first century make a similar argument—that because the process of election by vote is subject to manipulation by money and other powerful forces, legislative elections are a less representative system than selection by lot from among the population.

Contemporary supporters add that sortition allows direct democracy to scale up to today's large populations: by reducing the number of people making a decision from the whole population down to an unbiased sample representative of that population, sortition alleviates the problems of voter fatigue and rational ignorance, which occur in general elections and referendums.

Disadvantages

The most common argument against sortition is that it is unable to select those best qualified to the job of government. Pure sortition as a means of selection takes no account of particular skills or experience that would be needed to effectively discharge the particular offices filled. To take an extreme case, most would agree that random selection from the general population would not be a good way of filling the role of medical surgeon or aircraft pilot due to the specialist skills that those roles require. The same could be argued for many political offices too. Conversely, under a system based on election, those manifestly lacking the requisite skills are unlikely to be put in office, either because they do not put forward their candidacy or are not elected.

According to Xenophon (Memorabilia Book I, 2.9), this classical argument was offered by Socrates:

"[Socrates] taught his companions to despise the established laws by insisting on the folly of appointing public officials by lot, when none would choose a pilot or builder or flautist by lot, nor any other craftsman for work in which mistakes are far less disastrous than mistakes in statecraft."

The same argument is also made by Edmund Burke in his essay Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790):

"There is no qualification for government but virtue and wisdom, actual or presumptive. [...] Everything ought to be open, but not indifferently, to every man. No rotation; no appointment by lot; no mode of election operating in the spirit of sortition or rotation can be generally good in a government conversant in extensive objects. Because they have no tendency, direct or indirect, to select the man with a view to the duty or to accommodate the one to the other."

This is essentially an aristocratic or professionalist argument preferring the rule of a select few over the rule of the average citizen. Arguably, this objection to sortition has similarities with the objections that were made to universal suffrage in previous centuries, and which are largely out of favour in the modern world.

Further arguments offered against sortition:

  • The process of voting in itself has value by providing the people with the right to engage with public policy and express their views on it in a binding manner. A related argument is that, because voting expresses the "consent of the governed", voting is able to confer a legitimacy that no random selection device could ever achieve. A counter-argument is that under sortition, the public has given its consent to the representatives up-front by accepting the sortition system.
  • A system of sortition in which those chosen are compelled to serve in a public role is less respectful of individual autonomy than is a system based on voluntary choice to serve. On the other hand, a system of sortition which allows selected but unwilling individuals to "opt out", might be seen as compromising the purely random nature of the selection system.

Examples

Quotes

  • "The suffrage by lot is natural to democracy, as that by choice is to aristocracy" - Montesquieu

See also

Template:Elections-small

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