The electoral imperative

Much of the case for sortition rests on a single diagnosis: the trouble with electoral politics isn’t bad people, it’s a bad incentive. Terry Bouricius calls it the electoral imperative — the constant, structural need to win the next election and keep office, which quietly bends almost everything an elected official does. As US Senator Tom Coburn put it, “careerism — the philosophy of governing to win the next election above all else — is the root of almost all that ails Washington.” The point is not that politicians are uniquely venal; the same pressure would act on anyone in the role. Pleading with candidates to run substantive, honest campaigns is futile, because they and their consultants know it is a recipe for losing.

The imperative shows up in four places.

It hollows out campaigns

Campaigns are marketing, not deliberation. The winning move is to say what voters already want to hear, find the emotional “hot buttons” and wedge issues that turn out your supporters, and project a likeable, confident image — message and stagecraft handled by hired consultants. As the historian Yuval Noah Harari notes, “a politician that in an election campaign would just tell people the truth … is unlikely to win many votes.” Once districts grow beyond door-knocking scale, party label and a vague impression do most of the work. (Bouricius, a former Vermont legislator, tells of a voter who promised him her vote because she recognised him — not as her representative, but as a singer in a local doo-wop group.)

It captures the agenda

Deciding which problems get addressed is as much a part of democracy as deciding them — and as Bouricius puts it, when elites control the agenda, democracy does not exist. Issues rise because they are useful for vilifying the other side or for attracting campaign money, not because they matter most. Lawrence Lessig’s example: bank debit-card “swipe fee” legislation — where banks and merchants both poured in contributions — got more of Congress’s attention in early 2011 than unemployment, climate change, or two ongoing wars. Conversely, issues that are vital but electorally inconvenient get ignored: infrastructure maintenance, the looming 2008 financial crisis (both parties were culpable, so neither could campaign on it), climate change for decades. It is no accident that two issues an Irish parliament would not touch — same-sex marriage and abortion — were put on the agenda instead by randomly selected citizens’ assemblies, or that a citizens’ convention grasped the urgency of climate action that elected politicians had found inexpedient.

It distorts policy toward the short term — and toward corruption

Because the horizon is the next election, long-term problems are discounted and inconvenient facts are massaged. The imperative rewards “bringing home the bacon”: earmarks, pork, defence contracts deliberately spread across districts, and tax loopholes — each a concentrated benefit whose costs are diffuse enough that no one fights them (the “ratchet effect”). And the very mechanism meant to fight corruption — voters throwing the bums out — instead breeds it, because concentrated, repeatedly re-elected power is what makes a bribe (a legal campaign contribution or otherwise) worth making. Bouricius calls the electoral system iatrogenic: like a treatment that causes the disease it is meant to cure.

It replaces deliberation with denunciation

Genuine deliberation means reasoning together, open to changing your mind in search of a better answer. Electoral politics is nearly devoid of it. Floor “debate” is theatre for the cameras and the base — the votes are already whipped — while the real bargaining happens among same-party insiders and lobbyists. The imperative makes it rational to frame every opponent’s proposal as evil: as Senator Joe Manchin described the daily rhythm, the question by three o’clock is “how can we blame [the other side] for that?” The “integrative” win-win deliberation that can dissolve apparent conflicts — Mary Parker Follett’s classic example of two people fighting over a window, until one realises she wants air and the other simply wants no draught, and they open a different window — is anathema to politicians who need an opponent to beat, but comes naturally to ordinary people chosen by lot, who carry no such agenda.

Why it matters

The electoral imperative is the load-bearing premise beneath the whole sortition argument. If the problem were merely which people we elect, better candidates or cleaner elections would fix it. Because the problem is the incentive the role creates, the proposed remedy is to change the incentive — to make decisions through bodies that have no next election to win. That is the thread connecting sortition, the multi-body design, and the objections and answers: remove the imperative, and most of these pathologies lose their engine. It is the same reason institutionalising deliberation matters — a one-off assembly leaves the imperative in charge of everything else.

Sources

• Terry Bouricius, Democracy Without Politicians (Routledge, 2026), ch. 3 (“Electoral Imperatives”). Quotes and examples drawn from Tom Coburn (The Debt Bomb), Lawrence Lessig (Republic Lost), Yuval Noah Harari, Joe Manchin, and Mary Parker Follett (Creative Experience, 1924), as cited there.