The Duty to Serve

Sortition, or the selection of political decision-makers by lottery, is increasingly proposed as an alternative selection mechanism to elections for assigning roles in democratic decision-making (see Sintomer 2023). One of the main advantages of sortition is that it provides citizens with an equal chance of being selected for political office. At the same time, sortition places a heavy burden on those selected, especially in terms of time and effort to learn about political issues and processes. In practice, experiments show that the response rates to invitations to serve in sortition assemblies are extremely low, even where significant incentives are provided (Jacquet 2017). Previous literature on sortition has mostly focused on its benefits and disadvantages from a democratic perspective. Scholars have mainly argued that sortition enhances descriptive representation and political equality and decreases corruption and elitism (e.g. Guerrero 2014, Landemore 2020, Sintomer 2018). Opponents have claimed that it circumvents the voices of the masses, prevents the citizenry from holding decision-makers accountable, and devaluates collective agency (e.g. Fishkin 2009, Lafont 2020, Lafont & Urbinati 2024). Less attention has been directed to the moral burden, or duty, sortition places on the citizenry. In this paper, we therefore ask whether there could be a duty to serve in a sortition assembly. To answer this question, we explore previous arguments for the duty to vote in electoral democracy and analyze whether these apply to a duty to serve in sortition democracy. More specifically, we focus on the duty to vote and serve 1) as an obligation that comes with being a citizen, 2) as an obligation that prevents free riding on fellow citizens, and 3) as an obligation to contribute to creating good political outcomes.