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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.

Contents

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

Classical writers discussing sortition, such as Aristotle, held that selection by lot is a more democratic process than election by vote, since sortition is less influenced by money and fame. 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. Sortition differs from having two pre-selected candidates draw straws or flip a coin to decide which of the nominees will take executive office. Typically, sortition proposals today are put forward as a method for selecting a large legislative body (such as the U.S. Congress) from among the adult population at large; the numbers involved make the logistics of such "random sampling" a practical approach.

Aristotle's appreciation of the power of sortition to reduce the influence of money in politics is still relevant. 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.

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. Under 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. A similar argument can be made (and was often made) against universal suffrage.

Additional arguments against sortition:

Selection by sortition has a drawback that resembles one of the philosophical objections to the military draft (selective service)—namely, that it is less respectful of individual autonomy than is a system based on voluntary choice to serve. A system of sortition could be adjusted to address this by allowing selected but unwilling individuals simply to "opt out", but this would seem to compromise the purely random nature of the selection system.

A final argument against sortition is that, even if one accepts that the method could be just as successful as election at capturing the "will of the people", there is a positive value in offering the people the right to engage with public policy and express their views on it, by means of casting a vote. 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. One reply might be that, under sortition, the "governed" have given their overall consent to their representatives up front by expressing their will to consent to the sortition system.

Examples

Quotes

See also

External links

 

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