A people's branch of government

Aristotle defined democracy as “everyone taking turns in being governed and in governing.” By that test, the economist Nicholas Gruen points out, elections are an aristocratic device — they are designed to produce a governing class. The thing that actually gives people a turn at governing is the lottery: sortition.

The three-legged stool

Gruen describes every real democracy as a three-legged stool of distinct institutions:

• Direct participation — the assembly in Athens; voting in ours.
• Representation by election — a small group made knowledgeable enough to decide for us. Powerful, but mediated, and prone to a “fast-foodified” politics (the average US presidential soundbite shrank from 42 seconds in 1968 to 9 by 1988 — long before social media).
• Representation by sampling — grabbing people who resemble the population, as we do every day in juries and as Athens did with its Council of 500.

We trust the third leg with verdicts in court but never with legislation. A people’s branch — a permanent chamber chosen by lot — would add that leg as a standing check on the elected ones.

Why a sampled chamber behaves better

What such a body represents is not raw opinion but considered opinion — what people think after they deliberate, which is steadier and often saner. In a Texas citizens’ jury, willingness to pay slightly more for renewable energy rose from 54% going in to 82% coming out. And citizens will defend democratic norms their representatives won’t: 88% of Republican voters oppose partisan gerrymandering, which is exactly why a sortition body like the Michigan redistricting commission could clean it up.

Claimed space, not invited space

Most assemblies today, Claire Mellier (co-founder of the Global Assembly) notes, are invited spaces: a power-holder sets the framing, agenda and budget, so their legitimacy is borrowed. The more radical move is a claimed space that generates its own legitimacy through transparent governance and doesn’t ask permission — the Global Assembly for COP26, or Armenia’s independent Convention of the Future Armenian. Gruen’s activist proposal is exactly this: privately fund a standing assembly (philanthropy, then crowdfunding, while campaigning for a constitutional role), which could petition the elected houses to re-take a vote by secret ballot — a mechanism that, he argues, would have stopped a hard Brexit and impeached a president whom senators feared to cross in public. The Sortition Foundation’s campaign to replace the House of Lords with a House of Citizens is a concrete version; Venice governed itself stably for 500 years on random-selection-plus-secret-ballot conclaves.

But Mellier’s caution matters: a robust process whose recommendations land in a system unsuited to change can breed disempowerment if nothing happens. “Power literacy” — understanding where the vested interests sit between recommendation and law — is part of the craft. See binding or advisory? and, for making such bodies permanent, institutionalising deliberation; for citizens running the body themselves, letting citizens govern the assembly.

Sources

• “How citizens can take back power” — Nesta panel with Nicholas Gruen (Lateral Economics), Martin Wolf (The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism) and Claire Mellier (Iswe Foundation / Global Assembly), 2024: youtube.com/watch?v=j7i72bJSBZE
• newDemocracy Foundation — Independent Citizens’ Assemblies (Gruen): newdemocracy.com.au
• Sortition Foundation — “Replace the House of Lords with a House of Citizens”: sortitionfoundation.org