Objections to sortition

Sortition — choosing decision-makers by lot — provokes strong objections, and the honest ones deserve honest answers rather than hand-waving. The fullest set of replies comes from Terry Bouricius’s Democracy Without Politicians (chapters 12–13), which works through the criticisms he has met over decades of advocacy. The recurring move is a comparison: the real question is rarely “is sortition perfect?” but “does it do this better or worse than elections?” — and on most of these objections, elections quietly fail the same test.

”Randomness shouldn’t decide who governs”

The first reaction is often a gut distaste: policymaking should be rational, and the vote is a hard-won right not to be surrendered to a lottery. The reply is that the randomness is not in the deciding but in the selecting — and choosing decision-makers “for reasons” opens the door to manipulative and moneyed reasons just as much as good ones. Bouricius also reframes the worry: sortition is best understood as an alternative to politicians and power-brokers, not to voting, and it raises the real political power of ordinary people as a group more than a single vote in a mass election does. For the foreseeable future he expects a hybrid — elections for some functions, sortition for others.

”People are too apathetic to take part”

If half the public won’t even vote, how will they sit on assemblies? The answer is that apathy is largely a product of institutions that give people no meaningful role, not a fixed human trait. Where participation genuinely matters — a court jury, or a Policy Jury with real power — people show up and take it seriously. A study led by Ohio State’s Michael Neblo found that even habitually disengaged citizens would deliberate “if the political process could be rendered more rational and responsive in their eyes.” People overcome apathy when their participation actually counts.

”Ordinary people aren’t competent enough”

The oldest charge against democracy, from Plato onward. The central answer shifts the unit of analysis: what matters is not the competence of each individual but the competence of the group as a whole. Diverse groups, given information, time, and motivation, regularly outperform homogeneous elites — Bouricius marshals MIT’s “collective intelligence” research (a group’s performance tracked its members’ social sensitivity and equal turn-taking, not the smartest individual), the budget-deliberation experiments of the Program for Public Consultation, James Fishkin’s deliberative polling, and the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly, where ordinary citizens “did at least as well as the experts.” And the charge cuts both ways: the same evidence impeaches the competence of voters choosing candidates — and of politicians as a group.

“It is not the competence of individuals … as individuals that is key. It is the competence of the group as a whole that they constitute that matters.” — Bouricius

”Random crowds turn into mobs”

A cousin of the competence fear: that ordinary people are easily whipped into herd thinking. The reply is that mob behaviour is contingent — it feeds on people reacting to each other’s reactions, and is avoided by protecting independent judgement (the insight behind Condorcet’s jury theorem and Galton’s ox-weight experiment). Well-designed sortition deliberately cultivates “slow thinking,” the opposite of the fast, emotional dynamics that produce mobs. If anything, the competitive partisan environment of elections promotes mob psychology, “coming and going”; a deliberative assembly is among the best antidotes to it.

”You can’t hold a lottery body accountable”

Accountability is the headline argument for elections — you can vote the bums out. Bouricius first shows how weak that tool actually is: US congressional incumbents are re-elected at rates above 90%, an incumbent is “more likely to die in office than be defeated in a primary,” and voters generally cannot monitor what representatives do — or, more consequentially, what they quietly avoid doing. Electoral accountability is retrospective, “like driving while using only the rear-view mirror.” Sortition relies on a different kind. Because a mini-public is a microcosm of the public — John Adams’s “exact portrait of the people at large” — it has built-in “congruent” accountability: it tends to decide as the whole public would if it could deliberate. That is reinforced by design — separating who drafts a law from who decides it (no body is “a judge in its own cause”), short single-issue juries that rotate so power and corruption can’t accrue, secret ballots and anti-tampering protections (with the Athenian touch of pretend-bribers who reward those who report them), and the self-correction of fresh juries that carry none of a politician’s pride of authorship.

”A lottery body has no mandate or legitimacy”

Can a government chosen by lot be legitimate? The argument is that electoral “consent of the governed” is itself largely a myth — many people vote against the eventual winners, or don’t consent at all (Hume made the point in 1742; Bernard Manin argued the consent-through-elections mythology is precisely what blocked sortition at the American and French foundings). On a pragmatic view, legitimacy is about whether people actually defer to a government — and a representative, well-informed mini-public has a strong claim to deserve more trusted deference than an elite filtered through an expensive electoral process. Bouricius takes seriously the “shortcut” objection — that decisive mini-publics ask the public to defer blindly — and answers that an informed, statistically representative body reaching the decision the public itself would reach if it could deliberate is the most democratic shortcut available, provided the body still “gives an account,” explaining its reasoning to the public.

Sources

Terry Bouricius, Democracy Without Politicians (Routledge, 2026), ch. 12 (“Objections to Sortition”) and ch. 13 (“Accountability and Legitimacy”). Studies cited there include Woolley et al. on collective intelligence (Science, 2010), Fishkin’s deliberative polling, the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly, and Jane Mansbridge on models of accountability.