Sortition, Election and Democratic Participation

Over the past forty years, the idea of sortition—the selection of political officials by lot—has moved from the fringes of democratic theory to the forefront of conversations about real-world institutional reform. Witness, for example, the use of sortition in the electoral reform process in British Columbia and Ontario, as well as in the recent Irish Constitutional Conventions. Throughout most of this time period, the challenge for sortition advocates has been to establish the desirable process of random selection—to show that random selection, far from being an abdication of responsible decision-making, can actually enable critically important social values, including democratic values. This fight has not been completely won, to be sure, but at present most thoughtful observers of politics will concede the democratic credentials of sortition. The challenge for sortition advocates has thus shifted. It is no longer enough to make the democratic case for sortition; it is now necessary to consider the respective democratic contributions of sortition and other institutional devices, notably election. Some sortition advocates have shied away from this challenge, out of a conviction that sortition is the uniquely democratic selection mechanism. I call such advocates sortinistas, adapting (in an admittedly revisionist manner) a term employed in dialogues over sortition. Sortinistas typically adopt a Janus-faced attitude towards election. On the one hand, they accept Aristotle’s verdict that sortition is a democratic mode of selection, while election is an aristocratic one. On the other hand, they see sortition as the solution to the many problems facing contemporary democracies—implicitly recognizing that the democratic credentials of these political systems, which are of course based upon election. In this paper, I shall critique the sortinista approach to democracy, focusing upon David van Reybrouck’s recent book Against Elections.