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Paul S's avatar

"This method was based on the belief that all citizens had an equal right to office and that random selection is more impartial than elections, which tend to favor the wealthy or well‑connected."

From what I can tell, this is the standard assumption among contemporary democratic theorists. And from what I am able to work out, there is good reason to think that it is wrong.

Sortition amongst the Greeks was more likely to be favoured in democracy because it was a way of constraining the power of the rich, who could otherwise disproportionately use their influence to control the constitution vis-a-vis the poor. After all, if office is assigned by lot, then it is pure luck, and the rich can't do things like e.g. buy votes (or equivalent, given that office is undertaken directly not through representation). If you are an ancient Greek living in a small city state, if democracy is to continue and to function tolerably well as a democracy, it needs to ensure that it *remains* a democracy, and that means that the many must not become extensions of the desires and ambitions of the few.

It is at times like this that reading Aristotle is I think really helpful. The ancient Greeks were really not like us. The central question at the heart of their constitutional arrangements was deciding who gets to make decisions, based on their class allegiances. The rich, or the poor? So it is not just that they did "direct" democracy, whereas ours is representative. It is that the nature of polis politics was explicitly about class based confrontation. Sortition was not about giving everybody an equal "right" participate, it was a mechanism for preserving democracy in the face of oligarchy.

I think modern democratic theorists are really missing a trick here...

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Arturo Macias's avatar

I have the opposite view of Sortition: It is an excellent mechanism to chose among experts, and specially necesary for the supreme court:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/PyqPr4z76Z8xGZL22/sortition

However, for human groups with a homogeneous degree of knowledge and a common training (that eases communication and the division of intellectual labor) the lottery is the best tool to achieve homogeneous, replicable and impartial decisions. Both the ancient Romans and John Rawls represent justice behind a veil of ignorance: the just decision is one that does not depend on proper names or special circumstances, but on the application of general laws and principles to the particular case.”

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