Seven Things Wrong With Sortition

Sortition is the proposal to replace elected representatives with citizens chosen at random, as juries are chosen. It has serious advocates and a respectable pedigree, Athens used it, and it is often offered as the sensible middle path between representation, which has failed, and direct democracy, which is said to be impractical.

I am against it, and since I argue for direct democracy I should say why the middle path is not the one I want. Seven reasons.

1. It Gives the Population No Reason to Learn

Under sortition a few hundred people are drawn, briefed by experts, and deliberate. They learn a great deal. Everybody else learns nothing, because nothing depends on their knowing anything.

The goal is a population that understands its own affairs, not a rotating sample that does. Direct democracy, whatever its costs, gives every citizen a reason to find out, because the vote is theirs. Sortition removes that reason as thoroughly as election does; it merely changes who the few are.

2. The Public Will Not Trust the Chamber's Decisions

Imagine the drawn chamber decides something the public, on the whole, disagrees with. This will happen regularly, and for a reason the advocates regard as a feature: the chamber has spent weeks on the problem and the public has not, so the chamber's view has moved.

From outside, that looks like capture. The public will suspect that the members were got at, lobbied, flattered, or bribed, and will notice that the chamber keeps reaching conclusions the public does not share. Whether or not the suspicion is fair, a body whose decisions routinely diverge from the population's will not be trusted by it, and a decision-making body that is not trusted is not doing the job the reform was for.

3. The Public Will Not Trust the Draw

Nor will it trust the selection. Who draws the names? From what list? With what stratification, and who decided the strata? Every one of these is a lever, and every lever will be suspected of having been pulled.

Elections at least have the virtue of being visible: you watched the count. A random draw is exactly the kind of process that is easy to rig and impossible to prove honest, and a public that already distrusts its institutions will assume the worst.

4. The Members Are Easy to Corrupt

Elected politicians are corruptible, and I have written about how the system selects for it. But they are at least known quantities: they have a record, a party, a career they want to keep, and journalists who follow them.

A citizen drawn for six months has none of that. A few hundred anonymous people, with no institutional protection and no future in politics, holding decisions worth billions, are a lobbyist's ideal. The advocates reply that the members are shielded. Shielding a legislature has never worked, and a shielded body is also a body nobody can watch.

5. The Members Will Flinch From Hard Choices

Put an ordinary person in a room and ask them to decide whether the country goes to war, or whether an industry is shut down, or whether a benefit is withdrawn from a million people. The natural response is: who am I to decide this?

It is a decent response, and it is fatal to the mechanism. People who feel they have no right to the decision will make the decision that requires least of them, which is the cautious one, the deferential one, the one the expert in the room recommended. The chamber will do what its briefers suggest, and the briefers are chosen by the institutions the reform was meant to check.

6. The Members Will Flinch Because of the Backlash

There is a second reason the hard choice will not be made, and it is worse. Suppose the chamber does decide something unpopular. It has no mandate the losing side recognises; nobody voted for these people. A decision to withdraw a benefit or wage a war, taken by a few hundred strangers, is the kind of thing that puts people in the streets.

The members know this in advance. So even the ones who would decide boldly are pushed toward the decision that will not break the country apart, and that is again the decision that changes nothing.

7. Nobody Has the Right to Govern

This is the objection I care most about, and it is the one advocates of sortition do not answer, because their theory does not contain it.

The right to take part in governing yourself is a basic right, in the same class as speech and property. It is what distinguishes a free person from a subject. Under sortition, the overwhelming majority of citizens never exercise it; they live their whole lives under decisions made by people who happened to be drawn. Their position is not improved over representation; they have merely exchanged a ruler they chose for one they did not.

Sortition is the liberal theory of government taken to its extreme: it treats governance as a service to be provided competently, and asks only that the providers be unbiased. It does not treat it as something people have a right to do. Direct democracy does. That is the difference, and it is not a small one.

Where I Do Use It

None of this means random selection has no place. I have argued for juries to inspect technical decisions, and for sortition as a way of injecting outsiders into a failing organisation in an emergency. Random selection is a fine instrument for checking power. It is a poor instrument for holding it. The advocates want it to hold it, and that is where I part company with them.