Sortition for School Democracy

From "The Trouble With Elections: Everything We Thought We Knew About Democracy is Wrong," Chapter 15.4

At one of the schools, Bolivian students take turns drawing a red or white bean from covered clay pots for lottery selection of student council members.

A valuable avenue for advancing sortition-based democracy is within schools and colleges. Student government is supposed to be both a (very limited) venue for democratic governance and an educational model for how democracy functions. In reality, of course, it is recognized that student government elections are generally a deeply flawed popularity contest (not completely unlike the “real world"). While not effectively teaching the idealized vision of democracy, these student elections ironically come closer to teaching its actual defective character.

At a large number of colleges and universities students have attempted to improve the quality of student government elections by moving beyond winner-take-all plurality election, by incorporating ranked choice voting (discussed briefly in chapter 2). But as I have discussed in this book, such reforms may be better than the status quo but don’t allow genuine self-government. In a few places, however, schools are beginning to experiment with sortition. 

Under the typical existing high school student government with an elected student council, a handful of kids may learn democratic skills such as parliamentary procedure, tools of persuasion, and debate. These few students are effectively groomed to become future elites, while most students (those not on the student council) learn that democracy is about being relatively passive voters, and then leaving decisions to those who are “better” or more popular than they are. As with so many pedagogical approaches, a common “lesson” can teach different students different things. A teacher with an authoritarian style may teach most of the students how to accept an authoritarian boss in a future job, while kids from more privileged circumstances may learn from that same experience how to act as an authoritarian boss themselves one day. 

What if, instead of using elections, students were randomly selected to serve on a mini-public student council, with regular rotation, such that most students got a turn as policy-makers? In addition to teaching far more students about how to engage in democratic deliberation, this could open the door to this democratic process in other domains once they become adults. The selection could be a stratified sample to assure an appropriate balance of classes, genders, etc., rather than selecting from a single unified pool containing all students. The executive officers could be selected by the student mini-public, rather than a mass popularity contest. 

Of course, if the student government doesn’t have any meaningful authority, many of the selected students may not take the task seriously. For democracy education to have any hope of working, the student government would have to be empowered to make some decisions that actually mattered to the students. 

The discouraging impact of not having much real authority doesn’t become apparent as an issue in traditional elected student councils simply because the councils are self-selected candidates willing to run and participate in that largely symbolic and relatively powerless role if elected. Students may choose to run for student council for reasons of status, ego, resume-building, or similar motivations, even if it is a sham activity with no genuinely meaningful decision-making power. I haven’t seen any statistics on this, but suspect that a disproportionate share of elected governmental politicians were elected members of some student government in their youth.

It is beyond the scope of this book to propose what sorts of decisions that high school students themselves would deem worthy of their time and effort, but I am confident they exist. A fundamental question, of course, is whether administrators, faculty, and communities would agree to cede any such authority to children. It would have to be decision domains that wouldn’t put school finances, quality of student education, or safety at risk if poor decisions were made – because democracy can result in some bad decisions as well as good ones. It would need to go beyond choosing a school team mascot, however.

Starting in 2014, an organization called Democracy In Practice worked in multiple public schools in Bolivia to replace traditional student elections with voluntary lotteries. The lotteries were typically done in a way that ensured an even gender balance and a representation of different grade levels. Once formed, these student governments then employed a second round of sortition to determine individual roles, such as spokesperson and treasurer. The idea was to ensure that all students, regardless of popularity or charisma, had the same opportunity to enter student government and learn different roles as a way to develop civic skills. If a selected student did not take the position seriously or do an adequate job, they could be removed by their peers. Lotteries were also used in these student governments to assign necessary tasks that no one wanted to do, and to distribute occasional prizes that incentivized attendance and punctuality. 

While there are some who hold that they should elect the “most capable” to form student government, most students and staff at these Bolivian schools have embraced the lotteries seeing them as fairer and more equitable — resulting in more representative student governments, which are also more participatory. Although this particular project has come to an end, the practice may start to catch on, as in 2017 it was named one of the one hundred most inspiring educational innovations globally by the Finnish organization HundrED, and featured by the renowned author Malcolm Gladwell in one of his podcasts. Democracy In Practice published free PDF guides and videos on their website (www.democracyinpractice.org), to help educators and students around the world bring sortition and other democratic innovations into their schools.

When we graduate to universities, young adults can be trusted to seriously take responsibility for a raft of decisions that significantly affect them while at the university. Jeffrey Kennedy and Simon Pek published an important paper examining the inadequacy and failings of most existing university student participation systems, and argued that sortition is a promising tool for addressing the democratic deficit and enhancing the “deliberative capacity” of universities. After surveying the shortcomings of existing student participation methods, including self-selection bias, and the lack of descriptive representativeness, they offer sortition as an alternative tool. They propose using advisory mini-publics as a starting point, and point to the use of sortition at Queen Mary University of London School of Law, and Victoria University in Canada as recent examples. As with the strategy expressed throughout this book, such one-off uses can serve as proof-of-concept experiments that could eventually fundamentally transform university democracy and the core of what university life could be. Further, the authors suggest that universities often serve as transmission belts for spreading ideas throughout society. Students who experience genuine democracy with sortition, would be more likely to make those democratic demands and changes in wider society as adults.