Is Sortition Democracy Compatible with Capitalism?

Capitalism and democracy are inherently different principles, but in the mid-20th century, they became compatible as a combination of electoral representative democracy and welfare state capitalism. Then is sortition democracy, which has received much attention in recent years as another type of representation, compatible with capitalism? In recent years, the importance of the (critical) political economy perspective has been advocated in studies of democratic innovations. However, there is little investigation of the relationship between sortition democracy and capitalism, except for a short essay by Erik O. Wright. This paper, therefore, proposes to apply the power resource theory, elaborated by Walter Korpi and Gøsta Espin-Andersen in the field of comparative welfare state research, to the study of sortition democracy. The question to be clarified is whether sortition democracy can accumulate kinds of power resources to compete with capitalism.　 What is the problem with power resources in sortition democracy? In the case of the power resource theory, the ‘power resource’ means the power of numbers of the working class and labour unions, which social democratic parties used to win power through electoral representative democracy and finally to control capitalism. However, sortition democracy cannot rely on the same social base as the working class and labour unions. How, if at all, can it succeed in accumulating power resources and contribute to the democratization of capitalism? In response to this question, this paper, referring to Jürgen Habermas's idea of a ‘pool of reasons’, argues that the potential of sortition democracy lies in the possibility of the accumulation of ‘power of reasons’. Sortition democracy cannot rely on the power of numbers or the power of collectivity in society. However, the deliberations that take place in deliberative mini-publics based on sortition have the potential to generate the power of reason. Thus, controlling capitalism to realize compatibility through the accumulation of the power of reason is not necessarily impossible. In the second half of this paper, I will further explore the prospects for the democratization of capitalism through sortition democracy, referring to recent Nancy Fraser's critical consideration of capitalism. Fraser reconceptualized capitalism as the ‘institutionalized social order’ which depends on zones of ‘noncommodification’ such as social reproduction/care and nature/environment. This paper theoretically examines the role that sortition democracy could play in the ‘boundary struggles’ between these two and capitalism and explores its potential for the democratization of capitalism.