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The Paradox of Sortition

Democracy
Political Theory
Political Activism
P06

Wednesday 16:00 - 17:00 BST (31/03/2021)

Abstract

Speaker – Peter Stone, Trinity College Dublin | Sortition – the selection of political officials by lot – is attracting increasing attention in politics. Both political theorists and political activists argue that randomly-selected citizen assemblies can play an important role in revitalising democracy for the twenty-first century. But what precisely is this role, and why should bodies selected via sortition be well-placed to make it? This paper draws attention to an apparent paradox generated by contemporary arguments for sortition. On the one hand, randomly-selected citizen assemblies are praised for their impartiality—for standing above fights within the body politic as a whole, and providing a cool deliberative ‘outsider’ perspective on them. Such assemblies thus appear apolitical, in much the same manner as the Anglo-American jury, and are thus well-suited for tasks calling for an apolitical perspective (such as drawing legislative district boundaries). On the other hand, citizen assemblies are often regarded as embodying an authentic ‘voice of the people’ – one superior in some ways even to the voice generated by consulting the people directly (as in a referendum) due to the deliberative quality they enable. This argument makes these citizen assemblies sound entirely political, and thus well-suited for tasks where the ‘people’ need to speak. Somehow, then, randomly-selected citizen assemblies wind up being regarded as both highly apolitical and highly political. The stakes generated by this paradox are quite high, as the two sides of sortition seem to recommend it for completely opposite roles in the body politic. This paper investigates this paradox, arguing that it is generated by different features of the practice of sortition. The paper concludes that randomly-selected citizen assemblies will sound either political or apolitical depending upon the foundational story about democracy to which appeal is being made. A lack of clarity regarding that story renders the proper place of sortition in contemporary democracy unclear.