While the use of lotteries has become a standard mechanism to select citizens for deliberative democracy forums or citizens' juries, advocates of such uses often fail to define what special qualities the lottery brings to the process of recruitment.
By defining the lottery as a mechanical means of selection that excludes all human attributes from the choice, the author argues that this method of recruitment can bring important qualities to the political process. Principally it excludes partisan interference and control from the process of recruitment to public office.
This would suggest that randomly-selected citizens could be best employed in those offices that require impartiality: as scrutineers and monitors of political procedures, elected officers or state institutions.
The challenge is twofold: first, institutional design; second, understanding the possible democratic implications of the systematic use of randomly selected citizens in public offices.
This paper summarises the political potential of recruitment by random selection with reference to the qualities of the lottery process and its historical use in Ancient Athens and elsewhere. It then discusses the modern problem-solving value of random selection - especially in relation to democratic consolidation. The author also offers some suggestions about how random-selection recruitment could operate in a practical political setting.
