Sortition
What has changed in recent years is the increased number of citizen groups with political advisory power,[7][8] along with calls for making sortition more consequential than elections, as it was in Athens, Venice, and Florence.
Most Athenians believed sortition, not elections, to be democratic[13][page needed] and used complex procedures with purpose-built allotment machines (kleroteria) to avoid the corrupt practices used by oligarchs to buy their way into office.
Those selected through lot underwent examination called dokimasia to ensure citizenship and consider life, character, and at times, property; capacity for a post was assumed.
[citation needed] James Wycliffe Headlam explains that the Athenian Council (500 administrators randomly selected), would commit occasional mistakes such as levying taxes that were too high.
Headlam found minor instances of corruption but deemed systematic oppression and organized fraud as impossible due to widely (and randomly) distributed power combined with checks-and-balances.
Headlam found the Athenians largely trusted the system of random selection, regarding it as the most natural and the simplest way of appointment.
[14][page needed] By reducing intrigue and power moves within the Great Council, lot maintained cohesiveness among the Venetian nobility, contributing to the stability of this republic.
[26][Note 8] Bernard Manin, a French political theorist, was astonished to find so little consideration of sortition in the early years of representative government.
He wonders if perhaps the choosing of rulers by lot may have been viewed as impractical on such a large scale as the modern state, or if elections were thought to give greater political consent than sortition.
He suggests that the relatively limited knowledge about Athenian democracy played a major role, with the first thorough examination coming only in 1891 with Election by Lot at Athens.
He also argues that wealthy enlightenment figures preferred to retain more power by holding elections, with most not even offering excuses on the basis of practicality but plainly saying they preferred to retain significant elite power,[27] citing commentators of 18th century France and the United States suggesting that they simply dislodged a hereditary aristocracy to replace it with an elected aristocracy.
[33] According to numerous scholars such as Page and Landemore,[34] this diversity is more important to creating successful ideas than the average ability level of a group.
[28] Some studies show an overrepresentation of psychopathic and narcissistic traits in elected officials, which can be solved through sortition by not selecting for people who seek power.
[43] Legitimacy does depend on the success in achieving representativeness, which if not met, could limit the use cases of sortition to serving as consultative or political agenda-setting bodies.
[47] The introduction of a variable percentage of randomly selected independent legislators in a Parliament can increase the global efficiency of a legislature, in terms of both number of laws passed and average social welfare obtained[48] (this work is consistent with a 2010 paper on how the adoption of random strategies can improve the efficiency of hierarchical organizations[49]).
[51] Most societies have some type of citizenship education, but sortition-based committees allow ordinary people to develop their own democratic capacities through direct participation.
[2] Sortition is commonly used in selecting juries in Anglo-Saxon[54] legal systems and in small groups (e.g., picking a school class monitor by drawing straws).
Citizens' assembly is a group of people selected by lottery from the general population to deliberate on important public questions so as to exert an influence.
[69] Its members form a representative cross-section of the public, and are provided with time, resources and a broad range of viewpoints to learn deeply about an issue.
Through skilled facilitation, the assembly members weigh trade-offs and work to find common ground on a shared set of recommendations.
[78][79][80][81] John Burnheim envisioned a political system in which many small citizens' juries would deliberate and make decisions about public policies.
[85][86] While Burnheim preferred using only volunteers,[87] Christopher Frey uses the German term Lottokratie and recommends testing lottocracy in town councils.
Lottocracy, according to Frey, will improve the direct involvement of each citizen and minimize the systematical errors caused by political parties in Europe.
[100][101][26] Simon Threlkeld proposed a wide range of public officials be chosen by randomly sampled juries, rather than by politicians or popular election.
