Further More Sortition

From "The Trouble With Elections: Everything We Thought We Knew About Democracy is Wrong," Chapter 14.4

The First Citizens’ Council in Ostbelgien

By 2015 sortition implementations were becoming so commonplace in dozens of countries all around the world (though still almost completely unknown in the United States), that a case by case recitation is happily now impossible. While some of the many hundreds of sortition panels were set up by civic organizations, a huge number were formally sponsored by local, regional, and national governments. Citizens’ assemblies have tackled a wide range of topics: from neighborhood concerns, to legalizing abortion in Ireland; from whether to locate a nuclear waste dump in Australia, to a huge number addressing climate change. I will highlight just a few examples.

The institutionalization of sortition within government is making progress around the world. Australia took some early strides. With impetus from the NewDemocracy Foundation, founded and financed by the industrialist Luca Belgiorno-Nettis, (with support from a number of leading “elder statesmen” — retired government leaders from across the political spectrum, and academics, such as Lyn Carson) there is growing interest in sortition in Australia. In 2009, the NewDemocracy Foundation organized a nation-wide Citizens Parliament among a representative sample of 150 randomly selected residents, to deliberate on issues of democratic reform. In 2012, with the assistance of the NewDemocracy Foundation, the city council of Canada Bay (a suburb of Sydney ) in New South Wales, established a 24-member Citizens’ Policy Panel by sortition to essentially decide on the council budget (“What services should we deliver in the City of Canada Bay, and how should we pay for them?”). While nominally advisory, the city council had committed to follow the recommendations prior to its commencement. Following the success of that initial use, in 2014 the city council established another Citizens’ Policy Panel to deal with the issue of leasing policy for city-owned properties. Largely due to the work of the NewDemocracy Foundation the sortition model has been spreading across Australia with large cities like Melbourne employing it for major budget decisions, and in 2016 the state of South Australia used sortition to advise on whether to establish a nuclear waste dump (the State Premier had favored this as a revenue source, but the citizens’ assembly rejected it). 

In response to the “yellow vest” protests in France, which began in 2018, President Emmanuel Macron initiated the creation of the Citizens’ Convention for Climate. Macron stated that “citizens have asked for more democracy because they do not simply want to be the people who respect laws: they now want to take part in developing laws themselves.” In 2019 and 2020 One hundred and fifty randomly selected citizens deliberated and adopted a long list of de-carbonization policy proposals. Although Prime Minister Edouard Philippe had committed to advancing all proposals without a filter, there did end up being some cherry-picking and watering-down.

In 2019, with the help of the G1000 organizers and others, the small German-speaking eastern region of Belgium, Ostbelgien, institutionalized sortition, with two sorts of lottery-selected bodies. The Citizens’ Council is a twenty-four member permanent body whose randomly selected members each serve for eighteen months. This body serves as the Agenda Council in my multi-body sortition design. It can select issues the members believe need attention, and call into creation a short duration, randomly-selected Citizens’ Assembly of around fifty members (akin to the Review Panels of my design) to deliberate and issue recommendations. While the government is required to respond to these recommendations, these sortition bodies do not have binding policy authority. 

The Brussels region of Belgium also formally institutionalized an ongoing sortition process, though the design is problematic. Committees consisting of 15 members of the area parliament combined with 45 randomly selected citizens each tackle an issue chosen by the Bureau of the Parliament from among those topics proposed by petition of at least a thousand residents. The parliamentarians and allotted members can deliberate together, but vote separately, with only the votes of the parliamentarians having legal force, with parliamentarians who abstain or vote against a proposal with majority citizen approval must explain their objection.

In France, which had a number of high visibility sortition panels, the city of Paris also established a permanent sortition arm of government with 100 randomly selected citizens. Like the Ostbelgien model, the proposals generated are merely advisory to the elected city council, though the expressed hope is that this body can help hold the electeds to account. 

The spread of sortition and its partial or possibly complete supplanting of elections will be a lengthy historical process. A first step is to spread awareness of sortition as a democratic tool – a goal of this book. This must certainly be followed by small scale or narrowly limited implementations so that people can become familiar with sortition and evaluate how it works. These steps are self-evident since nobody will demand a reform they have never heard of and have never seen in use. 

There are many possible types of implementation, including both governmental and non-governmental scenarios. Here is a sample of possible roles for random selection that may have beneficial effects in and of themselves as well as disseminating the model more widely.

• One time projects (as with the BC Citizens’ Assembly)

• Specific issue areas (e.g. zoning, healthcare)

• Advisory (to elected body or to voters in a referendum — as in Oregon)

• Budgets (as in Australian municipalities)

• An allotted chamber serving in conjunction with an elected chamber in a bicameral system, (in a later chapter I will explain why this is not a good use of sortition)

• Oversight of legislature (such as ethics rules enforcement, or redistricting)

• Single-issue short-term juries that can accept or reject legislation

• Total replacement of an elected legislative branch

• Departmental Oversight (e.g. community police commission)

• Hiring and firing chief executive (similar to the city manager concept, but selected by a jury rather than an elected city council)

• Rotation among a pool of qualified executives

• Rotation of Judges (e.g. from among a pool of qualified lawyers)

• Constitutional Convention (as in Ireland)

• Non-governmental associations (e.g. unions, co-ops)

• Workplace/enterprise governance - German co-determination labor law - seats on board of directors

• Home associations - whether low-income public housing or high-income condo and home-owners’ associations, or even prisons

• Voluntary Non-profits  

I will discuss in a later chapter, why straight sortition to select non-profit board members is less appropriate for purely voluntary associations in which the level of member commitment varies widely and members can simply leave if dissatisfied. However, juries of members serving for a short duration in order to recruit and “hire” a well-balanced board has many advantages over traditional elections.