Should Democracy Work through Elections or Sortition?*

• Published date: 01 September 2018
• Date: 01 September 2018
• Author: Tom Malleson
• DOI: 10.1177/0032329218789891
• Subject Matter: Special Issue Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0032329218789891

Politics & Society

2018, Vol. 46(3) 401 –417

© The Author(s) 2018

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DOI: 10.1177/0032329218789891

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Special Issue Article

Should Democracy Work

through Elections or

Sortition?*

Tom Malleson

King’s University College at Western University

Abstract

Are democratic ideals better served by elections or sortition? Is the ideal national

legislature one that is elected, chosen by lot, or some combination thereof? To

answer these questions properly, it is necessary to perform a careful, balanced,

and systematic comparison of the strengths and weaknesses of each. To do so,

this article uses foundational democratic values—political equality, popular control,

deliberative nature, and competency—as measuring sticks. On the basis of these

values a purely elected legislature is compared with a purely sortition one, on the

assumption that each has the full decision-making powers normally possessed by

national legislatures. This big picture will provide a clearer view of the strengths

and weaknesses of the respective systems and their trade-offs, as well as the open

questions that remain.

Keywords

deliberation, democracy, elections, radical democracy, representative democracy,

real utopias, sortition

Corresponding Author:

Tom Malleson, Social Justice & Peace Studies, King’s University College at Western University, 266

Epworth Avenue, London, ON N6A 2M3, Canada.

Email: tommalleson@gmail.com

*This special issue of Politics & Society titled “Legislature by Lot: Transformative Designs for Deliberative

Governance” features a preface, an introductory anchor essay and postscript, and six articles that

were presented as part of a workshop held at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, September 2017,

organized by John Gastil and Erik Olin Wright.

789891PASXXX10.1177/0032329218789891Politics & SocietyMalleson

research-article2018

402 Politics & Society 46(3)

The current state of representative democracy in many countries is deeply troubling.

For many progressives, reforming the national legislature has meant establishing pro-

portional representation and strict campaign finance regulation. The former serves to

increase the representativeness of the electoral system, and the latter tries to limit the

distorting effects of money on politics.

Yet in recent years, a number of bolder proposals have emerged, whose advocates

argue that the defects of representative democracy would be better addressed by

establishing a legislature by lot. As with Gastil and Wright’s lead essay in this issue,

such proposals would have us select members of the legislature at random from the

population at large. Some have argued for a bicameral system involving an elected

chamber alongside a sortition chamber.1 Others have argued more radically, and

often more polemically, for the exclusive use of sortition, with the abolition of elec-

tions altogether.2

On hearing such suggestions, most contemporary democrats will be skeptical of the

idea of a legislature by lot, as they share the conventional view that democracy funda-

mentally means elections. Yet it is instructive to recall that for more than 2,000 years,

from Pericles to Montesquieu, democracy was associated with lot, whereas elections

were thought to go hand in hand with oligarchy. It is only in the last couple of hundred

years that our culture has become certain that democracy means elections.3 One of my

central goals in this article is to help us unlearn this relatively recent certainty.

The question for progressives, and really for everyone who believes in democracy,

is this: Are democratic ideals better served by elections or sortition? Is the ideal

national legislature elected, chosen by lot, or some combination thereof?

To answer the question properly, I hope to provide a careful, balanced, and system-

atic comparison of the strengths and weaknesses of each alternative. In particular, I

will emphasize the tensions and trade-offs that may exist when institutions are designed

to satisfy a variety of democratic values.

There is too little comparative work in the contemporary literature. Of course,

almost all of the discussion of sortition involves at least some commentary on its sup-

posed advantages vis-à-vis electoral democracy, but there are very few attempts to

compare the two systematically.4 Moreover, much of the work on sortition that involves

a contrast with elections suffers from the deep methodological flaw of comparing the

contemporary empirical reality of the US electoral system, warts and all, with a future

ideal of sortition.5

Thus, to understand the pros and cons of elections and sortition, I will contrast an

imaginary, well-functioning, realistic, and imperfect electoral body (with propor-

tional representation and strong campaign finance regulation) with an imaginary,

well-functioning, realistic, and imperfect sortition body (with a membership drawn

from the population randomly, who undertake carefully moderated learning, delib-

eration, and public consultations).6 In doing so, I will distinguish between features

of these rival systems that are contingent (i.e., those that good institutional design

might mitigate) and aspects that are inherent (i.e., those that flow from the logic of

the system itself).7