Democracy means rule
by the people, but in practice even the most robust democracies
delegate most rule making to a political class. The gap between the
public and its public officials might seem unbridgeable in the modern
world, but Legislature by Lot presents a close examination of an
inspiring solution: a legislature chosen through “sortition”—the
random selection of lay citizens. It’s a concept that has come to
the attention of democratic reformers across the globe. Proposals for
such bodies are being debated in Australia, Belgium, Iceland, the
United Kingdom, and many other countries. Sortition promises to
reduce corruption and create a truly representative legislature in
one fell swoop.
In Legislature by
Lot, John Gastil and Erik Olin Wright make the case for pairing a
sortition body with an elected chamber within a bicameral
legislature. Gastil is a leading deliberative democracy scholar, and
Wright a distinguished sociologist and series editor of the Real
Utopias books, of which this is a part. In this volume, they bring
together critics and advocates of sortition who studied ancient
Athens, deliberative polling, political theory, social movements, and
civic innovation. The constellation of voices in this book lays out a
wide variety of ideas for how to implement sortition, without
obscuring its limitations, and examine its potential for reshaping
modern politics.
Legislature by Lot
includes sixteen essays that respond to Gastil and Wright’s
detailed proposal. Essays comparing it to contemporary reforms see it
as a dramatic extension of deliberative “minipublics,” which
gather random samples of citizens to weight public policy dilemmas
without being empowered to enact legislation. Another set of essays
explores the democratic principles underlying sortition and elections
and considers, for example, how a sortition body holds itself
accountable to a public that did not elect it. The third set of
essays consider alternative paths to democratic reform, which limit
the powers of a sortition chamber or more quickly establish a pure
sortition body.