Sortition, Rotation, and Mandate: Conditions for Political Equality and Deliberative Reasoning*

• DOI: 10.1177/0032329218789892
• Author: Graham Smith,David Owen
• Date: 01 September 2018
• Published date: 01 September 2018
• Subject Matter: Special Issue Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0032329218789892

Politics & Society

2018, Vol. 46(3) 419 –434

© The Author(s) 2018

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DOI: 10.1177/0032329218789892

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Special Issue Article

Sortition, Rotation, and

Mandate: Conditions for

Political Equality and

Deliberative Reasoning*

David Owen

University of Southampton

Graham Smith

University of Westminster

Abstract

The proposal to create a chamber selected by sortition would extend this democratic

procedure into the legislative branch of government. However, there are good

reasons to believe that, as currently conceived by John Gastil and Erik Olin Wright,

the proposal will fail to realize sufficiently two fundamental democratic goods, namely,

political equality and deliberative reasoning. It is argued through analysis of its historic

and contemporary application that sortition must be combined with other institutional

devices, in particular, rotation of membership and limited mandate, in order to be

democratically effective and to realize political equality and deliberative reasoning.

An alternative proposal for a responsive sortition legislature is presented as more

realistic and utopian: one that increases substantially the number of members, makes

more extensive use of internal sortition and rotation, and recognizes the importance

of establishing limited mandates.

Keywords

Athens, deliberation, equality, power, rotation, minipublics, sortition

Corresponding Author:

David Owen, Politics and IR, Social and Social Sciences, Highfield Campus, University of Southampton,

Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK.

Email: dowen@soton.ac.uk

*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.

789892PASXXX10.1177/0032329218789892Politics & SocietyOwen and Smith

research-article2018

420 Politics & Society 46(3)

The sortition chamber proposal laid out by John Gastil and Erik Olin Wright defends

extending sortition into the legislative branch of government and specifies how such a

body would work. We sympathize with the motivation for this enterprise: sortition

ought to be more widely institutionalized within contemporary democratic polities.

Nevertheless, reflection on the practice of antecedents of the sortition chamber—in

particular its historical use in ancient Greece and more recent application in contem-

porary minipublics—raises questions about its feasibility and desirability. Our critical

analysis considers primarily the democratic value of the proposal to replace one-half

of a bicameral elected system with a sortition chamber. We also offer general consid-

erations for situating a sortition chamber within a democratic ecology more favorable

to its operation.

Our central concern is that selection to the legislature by sortition in the form pro-

posed by Gastil and Wright will fail to realize sufficiently two fundamental demo-

cratic goods, namely, political equality and deliberative reasoning. As the proposal is

currently conceived, there is a failure to recognize that in both historical and contem-

porary practice sortition is combined with other institutional devices to achieve these

goods. First, the use of sortition for the selection of members has typically been

paired with sortition in allocation of offices within the institution, along with regular

rotation of membership and offices after short periods of service. Second, such insti-

tutions have had a limited mandate rather than broad agenda-setting powers. We con-

tend that there are good reasons to believe that, without the application of regular

rotation and a limited mandate, the sortition chamber is unlikely to be able to defend

its members against asymmetries in social and economic power to the extent neces-

sary for such a body to be democratically effective and to realize the goods of politi-

cal equality and deliberative reasoning. If cogent, this objection undermines the

feasibility and desirability of the proposed sortition chamber, both as a democratic

institution and as a means of advancing the longer-term cause of participatory or

deliberative democracy.

We conclude with an alternative proposal that envisions a responsive sortition leg-

islature that makes more extensive use of internal sortition and rotation and recognizes

the importance of establishing limited mandates. We also argue for a steep increase in

the number of members. As a first step toward infusing sortition into the legislative

branch, we argue that our alternative is both more realistic (from a democratic stand-

point) and more utopian (from a strategic standpoint).

Sortition and Institutional Design: Historical and

Contemporary Lessons

Before the rise of mass political parties in the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen-

turies, sortition was recognized as a more democratic mechanism of selection of rep-

resentatives than election. It was held to be less susceptible to the influence of

economic and social power than electoral processes and to enact a stronger commit-

ment to political equality. In this section, we offer a brief reconstruction of the circum-

stances of sortition in two contexts—Athenian democracy1 and the contemporary