Some Benefits of Sortition

From "The Trouble With Elections: Everything We Thought We Knew About Democracy is Wrong," Chapter 12.3

Photo by Hannah Busing - Unsplash

Anti-Corruption 

Sortition (combined with regular rotation in office) was historically employed as a defense against corruption and tyranny. This was the case in ancient Greece, and later in the Italian city republics from the medieval era through the Renaissance.¹ It is worth thinking through exactly why sortition increases the ability to resist corruption using a small scale example. Run of the mill corruption, such as giving a bribe to a public official in order to get prompt action on some needed permit, is a sort of market transaction in a monopoly situation. Only one office can issue the permit and the implied threat of moving an application to the bottom of the pile can be lucrative for the official, while the opportunity to move it to the top of the pile can be beneficial to the citizen. The corrupt official’s superior, and elected politicians, may even be in on such corrupt deals — taking a cut. In many countries such penny ante corruption is standard practice. At this retail level, the briber, the official being bribed, and perhaps the supervisor, have an immediate interest in the success of the bribe. An official elected or appointed to put a stop to the corruption is subject to the temptation to instead participate in the ongoing corruption. The common perception of certain Mexican police taking bribes while nominally fighting drug cartels is an example. 

But viewed from a distance, even bribers (when the potential bribers have no application pending), and society as a whole, have an interest in ending such corruption.  Giving oversight authority, with the power to fire corrupt officials, to a randomly selected group of citizens allows this societal interest to overcome the individual interest of a briber or ongoing official to engage in corruption. In other words, when facing a corrupt situation at a retail, one-on-one, level there is a compelling interest for each citizen to participate, if that is the local “norm.” But when gathered in a collective capacity, these same average citizens have an overriding interest in ending such corruption. Random selection in this circumstance can solve what economists term a “collective action problem.” This same anti-corruption potential of sortition can also be employed on a grand scale throughout a society.

Participation

The term participatory democracy is often used to refer to a system in which all citizens can vote in numerous referendums. Sortition is not “participatory” in this sense. In order to overcome rational ignorance, it is essential that a relatively small number of citizens be deeply engaged in investigating and then deciding on each piece of legislation. Thus, sortition can be considered a form of representative democracy. However, compared to a traditional electoral “representative democracy,” sortition can be structured so as to spread not only participation, but power, widely throughout the population.

The number of citizens participating depends on the details of how the system is designed. If policy juries meet for relatively short duration, on a single bill, for example, the turnover would be substantial. On the other hand, if a lottery selected legislature simply replaced an elected legislature (a design that many people imagine when they first hear about sortition, but that I strongly oppose for many different reasons), in terms of numbers and terms of office, the only increase would be due to the improbability of serving multiple terms.

Sortition democracy can also open the flood gates for citizen participation by allowing all who wish to, to work on designing draft legislation for sortition review panels to consider and possibly pass on to randomly selected policy juries to adopt. Since this “raw material” participation would be self-selected, and thus unrepresentative, it is essential that such efforts be limited to coming up with drafts and arguments, rather than deciding —  proposing rather than disposing. Such open participation would also be substantially more significant, in terms of developing democratic culture, than the kind of mass participation available to citizens in an electoral representative democracy. In a competitive democracy, participation is largely confined to putting up campaign signs, giving campaign donations, or writing letters to editors or to elected officials. Only the letter writing, or social media posts may have any meaningful civic thought involved. The vast majority of citizen “participation” beyond mere voting, in electoral systems, is limited to marketing tasks.

A sortition system, especially if it exists at local, state, and national levels on an issue by issue basis, could involve orders of magnitude more citizens in meaningful democratic deliberation and decision-making. Such democratic participation spreads democratic skills and appreciation of the challenges of good decision-making — fostering the “civic virtue” that republican theorists hoped for.

Rational ignorance of mass participation

An Achilles’ heel of mass participation schemes, whether electing candidates or voting on referendums, is the inevitable fact that most voters will simply not be adequately informed about the choices the elites present to them. This then links to the ability of campaigns to influence voters based on factors totally unrelated to merit. It is not rational, nor even possible, that millions of people will devote the amount of time needed to adequately understand the ramifications of the options, when their single vote is like a drop in the bucket. By reducing the number of decision makers on a particular issue to those who could fit in a single room, the evidence from hundreds of citizens’ assemblies suggests that most of the participants will have sufficient motivation to devote the effort and focus necessary to learn facts and use Kahneman’s “slow thinking.”  Manipulation of inevitably ill-informed voters in elections by those with access to wealth and with control of media has always been a problem, but has now become a precise scientific endeavor. The attention garnered by social media algorithms, disinformation, and AI generated fakes has made this a topic of discussion. But in mass elections, this problem of manipulation has always existed. It has never not existed, simply due to voter rational ignorance combined with determined partisans and special interests. Rather than tapping the “wisdom of crowds” through deliberation, mass elections elicit the cliché herd-like “madness of crowds.”

With sortition, there is still a danger that members of even a relatively small body might fall back on blind following of “leaders,” from inside or outside the body, whether from partisan, ethnic, religious or other “tribes.” Thus, while sortition offers the best chance for overcoming rational ignorance or default heuristics, which plague elections, the exercise of deliberative thought will depend on the structure, culture, and various supports that are provided.

One small practice that might have some value is having those who are randomly selected commit to some sort of juror oath, such as this:

“I agree to treat all those present with respect. I will listen with an open mind, and delay making any final decision on the matters under consideration until I have heard all of the evidence and arguments. I recognize that some things that I believed to be true may turn out to be wrong, and that other things that I did not accept may turn out to be valid. I commit to making a final decision that on balance I genuinely believe is in the best interests of all.”²

Diversity

Diversity is a companion trait with representativeness, but not synonymous. I have stressed the tremendous value of diversity for policy drafting and filtering bodies previously. Sortition assures wide-ranging diversity in the deliberative process. Elections return individuals who, despite substantive political and philosophical differences, exhibit significant homogeneity in other attributes. In chapter 11, I examined how the collective intelligence of a diverse group can be more beneficial than a group made up of experts, who will be homogeneous. From the time of Aristotle to the most recent scholarly research, diversity has been shown to ramp up group creativity and problem solving ability. 

Self-Selection Bias

A frequent problem with electoral democracy is self-selection bias among decision makers. The electoral nomination process is based on self-selection of those with inflated egos, partisan loyalty and a tendency toward overconfidence and a level of certainty making them less open-minded and thus poor deliberators. Those who advise the elected legislators (lobbyists) are also self-selected, often based on how much money stands to be made or lost from some public policy decision. Through random selection, sortition can virtually eliminate this problem, (or sharply reduce it, if stratified sampling is used). The dynamic is not eliminated completely simply due to the fact that certain people are also more likely to participate intently if selected, while meeker individuals may play a less active role. This self-selection bias can be further minimized in a sortition system that features a semi-mandatory jury system (like the existing criminal jury duty), with short duration service for those voting on final passage of bills. A system for professional advisory staff can also be structured to avoid self-selection (self interest) bias, with a professional civil service that structures balanced presentations to juries, rather than by reliance primarily on lobbyists, as in the existing electoral system.

1. Since only the elite, upper class families could participate in the lotteries, sortition was not used in these “republics” to achieve democracy, diversity or representativeness.

2. I composed this juror oath in 2017 while working with leading sortition scholars and facilitators from four continents on a proposal for a system of permanent/rotating global citizens’ assemblies that would be affiliated with the United Nations. While some behavioral priming psychology experiments have come into question, with numerous study replication failures, such overt attestation of assembly expectations couldn’t hurt.