Sortition: Past and Present

Free printed copy of the journal available on request from imprint.co.uk/sortition-hub JoS Editorial Board Sortition: Past and Present Abstract: Since ancient times sortition (random selection by lot) has been used both to distribute political office and as a general prophylactic against factionalism and corruption in societies as diverse as classical-era Athens and the Most Serene Republic of Venice. Lotteries have also been employed for the allocation of scarce goods such as social housing and school places to eliminate bias and ensure just distribution, along with drawing lots in circumstances where unpopular tasks or tragic choices are involved (as some situations are beyond rational human decision-making). More recently, developments in public opinion polling using random sampling have led to the proliferation of citizens’ assemblies selected by lot. Some activists have even proposed such bodies as an alternative to elected representatives. The Journal of Sortition benefits from an editorial board with a wide range of expertise and perspectives in this area. In this introduction to the first issue, we have invited our editors to explain why they are interested in sortition, and to outline the benefits (and pitfalls) of the recent explosion of interest in the topic. Keywords: sortition, deliberative democracy, democratic theory, social justice, statistical theory, rationality, ancient Greek history. Arash Abizadeh Department of Political Science, McGill University. Democratic theory, as I understand it, is committed to two fundamental values: political agency (meaning people’s power and participation in political decision making) and political equality (meaning their equal political agency). I am interested in elections as a mechanism for political agency and in sortition as a mechanism for political equality; I am also interested in the tension and tradeoffs between these two fundamental democratic values (Abizadeh, 2019, 2021). Josine Blok Department of History and Art History, Utrecht University. & Irad Malkin Department of History, Tel Aviv University. Our book on sortition among the ancient Greeks, Drawing Lots: From Egalitarianism to Democracy in Ancient Greece (Oxford University Press, 2024) contains some lessons for today, especially focusing on why sortition, with its emphasis on equality and mixture, is as efficient as it is just. Drawing lots was a central institution of ancient Greek society. An egalitarian mindset guided selection, procedure, distribution, and mixture by lot; after three centuries of practice (eighth through the sixth centuries BCE), drawing lots was introduced for governance, a Greek innovation that is relevant today. Drawing lots presupposes equality among participants deserving equal ‘portions’ (a significant concept) and was used for distributing land, inheritance, booty, sacrificial meat, selecting individuals, setting turns, mixing and integrating groups, and divining the will of the gods. It was a self-evident method broadly applied.  Drawing lots would crystallize, exclusively, community boundaries and emphasize its sovereignty. The guiding values were equality and fairness. With the foundation of the Athenian democracy, the random distribution of equal, concrete portions moved to the abstract level of the political: isonomia (the first term by which democracy was known) now signified an equal portion of the law to each citizen. Drawing lots was introduced into oligarchies and democracies at an uneven pace and scale. The scope of the application of the lot in the classical Athenian democracy, an eye-catching case both in antiquity and today, was exceptionally wide.  Conall Boyle Department of Economics, University of Wales at Swansea. It was teaching and learning about statistical theory that drew me to the charms of randomness — specifically the concept of BLUE (Best Linear Unbiased Estimator). Could this also be applied to human endevours? How might randomness be used to strengthen existing democratic procedures in constitutional contexts (besides citizens’ juries)? A snappy definition of politics is that it decides ‘who gets what, when, how’ (Lasswell, 1936). These decisions are normally implemented by government, or its agencies, via human administrators, following rules and exercising judgement. Sometimes the market decides, sometimes a lottery can be part of the allocation process. Laws governing fairness in allocation limit the freedom of action of private as well as public organisations. This involves another statistical concept — ‘fairness’ as in ‘a fair die’. Although examples of allocation by lottery exist, the potential for their beneficial and widespread uses abound. I would like to see more investigation and maybe even advocacy of random selection as part of the allocation of school and university places (Boyle, 2010) and housing, but above all for that most significant citizenship-defining activity, paid employment, using lotteries as a part of the hiring, firing and promotion procedures. Because all administrative decisions rely in part on human discretion — which may be biased, unfair or even corrupt — protecting citizens from such ills would be greatly to their benefit. Hubertus Buchstein Universität Greifswald, Institut für Politik-und Kommunikations-wissenschaft. As a student of political science and author of a book on secret and public voting (2000) I came across the many uses of lotteries in political systems twenty years ago. Starting from an ironic use of postmodern theories I wanted to figure out the meaning of ‘Let’s take contingency seriously’ for modern politics. In my book Demokratie und Lotterie (2009) I contested Bernard Manin’s interpretation of lotteries as a primarily democratic device. On the other hand, I defended some uses of lotteries in the context of modern deliberative democracy. As sortition has moved into the mainstream of democratic theory, political theorists and historians of political ideas will increasingly need to bring to attention the full range of functional uses of lotteries. Thus, I am happy to register and contribute to the resurgence of serious scholarly interest in the use of lotteries in modern political systems. Daniela Cammack Charles & Louise Travers Department of Political Science, UC Berkeley. The ancient Greeks often filled positions of civic authority by selection by lot from qualified volunteers (not fully random sortition), not only democracies but oligarchies too. Why? As far as I can tell, they took it to be a fair way of proceeding when it was clear that there were more than enough adequate candidates; competition for spots would inflate egos, undermine group solidarity, and waste time; the trust of followers in the commanding authority personally was not essential for the authority to do its job; and it seemed worth hindering the capture of the activity by an elite. These conditions did not hold in the case of generals, for example, so they were always elected. But they frequently applied in the context of judicial and administrative activity, including staffing councils and various offices. I’d be happy to experiment along these lines, although I’m not nearly as enthusiastic about mini-populi being given legislative powers unless their decisions were made subject to periodic votes of approval by the public at large. I think an essential ingredient of a flourishing political community is that we all genuinely want to do what most of us want to do, once we know what that is. We already — most of us — adopt that stance in elections, but I think it should apply to laws as well (at least those Rousseau called ‘fundamental’ laws, meaning the norms and regulations that structure our common association). That means regular all-comers referenda as a reality check: Are most people OK with how things are currently managed and arranged? Are the rest of us OK with that? If not, what can we do about it? Paul Cartledge Clare College, University of Cambridge. As a historian of ancient Greece and author of a book on democracy in ancient Greece and its legacies (Cartledge, 2018), and as the reviewer for JoS of a masterly new bi-authored tome on  the modes and meanings of  ‘drawing lots’ in the ancient world (Malkin & Blok, 2024), I’m delighted to register and contribute to the resurgence of serious scholarly interest in sortition. And not only scholarly but also activist interest: what’s the point of just studying it, when the real point is to change the political world? Maurice Pope (2023) showed the way long ago, though it was only recently that his excellent volume was published. Ruth Chang Faculty of Law, University of Oxford. Sortition is typically thought to be a mechanism whereby an institution or polity can treat its members with equal respect and achieve justice when confronting difficult decisions — difficult either because the relevant facts are so complex that an appropriate decision seems beyond our rational ken or because the normative facts at stake conflict in ways that lead us to be reasonably certain that neither of two options is better than the other and nor are they equally good. Is sortition the right response to such difficult cases? I doubt it, and think that sortition is appropriate only if a very restrictive condition is met, namely, that the entity with authority over the decision commits to it as the right way forward. In short, I worry that the interest in sortition is based on a misunderstanding of practical reason. Enthusiasm for it is akin to what I regard as misplaced enthusiasm for flipping coins when the going gets tough in individual decision-making. Sortition has an important role among the tools of collective decision-making, but it should be put in its proper place. Dimitri Courant Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University My interest in sortition came from visiting Athens as a child. If the lottery was such an important part of democracy, according to its inventors, then why not use it today? After considering archaeology in 2009 as an undergraduate option, my path led me to study sortition through political science, both theoretically and empirically. On the theoretical side, sortition is best understood via a comparison with other modes of selection: election, nomination and certification. While the deliberative frameworks may vary, a well-organized sortition could foster four democratic principles: equality, impartiality, inclusivity, and representativeness. These principles contribute to a specific type of ‘humility-legitimacy’ (Courant, 2019). The randomly selected representatives cannot claim a form of superiority over the represented as they have not passed a ‘test’, such as winning an election. Therefore, they need to rely on other actors as part of the decision process instead of replacing them. The institutionalization of randomly selected assemblies is subject to tensions between models promoting a connection with either elected officials or with direct referendum (Courant, 2022). On the empirical side, the development of deliberative mini-publics (DMPs) and citizens’ assemblies offers the opportunity to study sortition in the real world. My comparative case studies and qualitative fieldwork in Ireland (Courant, 2021), France (Courant & Reber, 2025), and Switzerland, revealed a deep political ambiguity — these innovations are claimed as ‘bottom-up’ by social movements aiming at renewing democracy, but they are also strategic tools to aid elites facing a crisis. Second, in their organization, DMPs are a space for citizen empowerment but also tightly controlled devices. Third, in terms of impacts, citizens’ assemblies drive political transformations but have relatively restricted outputs. Whether the contemporary approach to sortition will deepen or hollow out democracy remains an open question.   Gil Delannoi CEVIPOF/Sciences Po, Paris. In the practices of drawing lots, nothing today can resemble ancient Athens. Any imitation could only be attempted on a very small scale without the sovereignty enjoyed by the city-state, but forgetting, disdaining and prohibiting the potential of sortition would be equally ill-advised. In Politics of Random Selection (Delannoi, 2025) I show that sortition is not particularly related to democracy and even less inherently democratic. There is no serious bone of contention here, because the same must be said about every procedure (vote, test, auction, legacy, volunteering as active member etc). No procedure is inherently this or that. All its effects stem from the way the procedure is designed, operated and finalized. The strange idea of using a lotttery to decide whether to use the lottery rather than some other procedure mischievously shows that no procedure exists in its own right. For many reasons that would take too long to develop here, I recommend taking as many paths as possible to reinvent the draw and also turning back for a while when the experience is not conclusive. This means testing (and tasting indeed) sortition in all kinds of institutions, groups, associations, even in companies, which implies internal initiatives and not new top-down legislation. If you are interested in sortition, start by setting an example. Be the change you wish to see in the world. Without this, the suspicion of manipulation is justified. Treading many paths is ultimately more promising than the assault on sovereign institutions alone. This broader agenda will involve more people. Rehabilitating a procedure without imposing or restricting it begins by avoiding waving its flag in the midst of the skirmishes of the political battlefield. Nor should we leave this field. It is more important, in every respect, to combine than to oppose and exclude. A procedure works best if it is used often. Individuals must be acclimatised to procedures, and procedures must be acclimatised to a social environment. The use of direct democracy is superior when it is based on frequent and diversified referendums. The same will be true in the uses of sortition. Oliver Dowlen Centre de Recherche Politique de Sciences-Po, Paris. My main interest in the random selection of citizens for public office is based on my view that democracy needs to be extended and defended. This was my motivation when I first started to look at sortition in the 1990s, and, if anything, this has become a more urgent and a more pressing need in today’s world. While it is encouraging to see such a surge of academic interest in sortition, it is also somewhat worrying that so few contributions to the contemporary discourse are based on an analysis of the properties of the lottery process itself, and that so few seem to have grasped the importance of its historical political role as a means of limiting potentially harmful factional power (Dowlen, 2008; Stone, 2011). It is also quite remarkable how the wider understanding of sortition appears to be based so firmly on the citizens’ assembly model with so little consideration of how it might be used to strengthen existing democratic procedures in other constitutional contexts. James Fishkin Department of Communication and Political Science (by courtesy) and Director of Deliberative Democracy Lab, Stanford University. I am a firm believer in the wisdom of combining random selection with deliberation. In my view, the deliberating samples should be both attitudinally and demographically representative and they should be large enough that both their representativeness and their opinion changes can be assessed in a statistically meaningful way. We have conducted more than 160 of these projects around the world, many of them with pre–post control groups. In all cases, we collect the opinions in confidential questionnaires to safeguard their integrity from the social pressures of consensus-seeking. These Deliberative Polls have been employed for many actual decisions around the world, bringing wind power to Texas, making decisions on nuclear power in Japan and South Korea, and changing the constitution in Mongolia (twice). I set out the criteria these projects should satisfy in Democracy When the People Are Thinking (OUP, 2018). In my new book Can Deliberation Cure the Ills of Democracy? (OUP, March 2025) I show how deliberations by random samples can help us respond to two fundamental challenges facing democracies around the world: extreme partisan polarization and the difficulties of public will formation in a world of propaganda and disinformation. We are now employing the same model of deliberation with an AI-Assisted Automated Moderator to make Deliberative Polls more frequent and practical and to scale the deliberative process to larger numbers. Barbara Goodwin School of Politics, Philosophy and Area Studies, University of East Anglia. There are situations where a decision must be made but the arguments for and against each choice are so finely balanced as to make a justified choice impossible; similarly, the competing arguments may be so different in content and reference points that they cannot be weighed against each other. In such ‘beyond reason’ cases, sortition provides a solution. For example, random selection can be used as a device for allocating scarce goods such as social housing, where no rational adjudication can be made between claimants because their claims are so similar and of equal merit. It is also appropriate in cases where the grounds for the claims are incommensurable, so that a justified choice between claimants is impossible. In the instance of a case concerning custody of a child the two parents may offer qualitatively different advantages and tossing a coin may be the only fair way to choose between them. Sortition can be the fairest procedure to determine ‘tragic choices’ such as the selection of an individual for a dangerous mission, or the allocation of scarce life-saving medical treatment such as organ transplants between equally needy patients. In the awarding of contracts, sortition might be used to disrupt quasi-oligopoly situations where the same few contractors always win the lucrative contracts while other equally competent companies cannot break into the charmed circle of favoured suppliers. More broadly, I am interested in lottery as an instrument for achieving a new form of social justice via random distribution of scarce resources and positional goods — in contrast to market allocation, which reinforces social inequality (Goodwin, 2005). Nicholas Gruen Lateral Economics. Most, if not all, functioning democracies have institutionalised the voice of the people in three ways. Ancient Athenians had a direct voice in their Ekklesia or citizens’ assembly. Modern citizens have a direct say when they vote. Beyond that, the people’s voice is present by having their representatives speak or act for them. These representatives can be selected by election — which is ubiquitous in modern electoral democracies and was also the mechanism used to select generals and some financial officials in ancient Athens. But citizens can also be represented by sampling from among their number — typically via random or modified random selection. This was how many governing bodies were constituted in ancient Athens and also how juries are constituted in legal cases.  There are huge differences between these methods. Representation by sampling is less easily corrupted, it is not competitive and this gives it great benefits in framing social decision making around compromise rather than competition and its modern manifestation — endless culture war. And there are other quite different ways in which sampling and randomisation can be and have been used not simply to ensure egalitarian representation, but also to identify those most worthy of promotion to leadership positions — for instance in Venice. The more I’ve thought about such things, the more I’ve thought of this other way of eliciting the wisdom of the crowd as opening up a new hemisphere in our political, social and organisational brain. Baogang He Deakin University. Baogang He is a distinguished scholar in the fields of political science, public administration, and international relations, with a particular focus on deliberative democracy, participatory governance, and Chinese political reform. His work has significantly contributed to understanding the dynamics of democratic practices within the Chinese context and their implications for global theories of governance. One of He’s most notable contributions is his research on deliberative democracy in China (He, 2011, 2019, 2024). He has been at the forefront of studying innovative governance mechanisms such as deliberative polling, participatory budgeting, and local consultation processes in Chinese communities. His exploration of deliberative practices in Wenling, Guangdong, and other regions has demonstrated how grassroots-level participation can coexist with an authoritarian framework, reshaping global theories about the compatibility of deliberation and non-democratic regimes. Cristina Lafont Department of Philosophy, Northwestern University. & Nadia Urbinati Department of Political Science, Columbia University. We are interested in the role that sortition can play in improving democratic institutions. We believe that inserting citizens’ assemblies and similar deliberative minipublics in the political process could have a positive democratic impact. However, we fear that current thinking about how best to institutionalize deliberative minipublics is deeply misguided. In our forthcoming book The Lottocratic Mentality: Defending Democracy against Lottocracy (Oxford University Press), we analyze the mentality that drives many proposals for institutionalizing minipublics, and highlight some of its anti-democratic elements. The most ambitious proposals aim to maximize the impact of minipublics by giving them decision-making authority on some (or all) political questions. However, it is hard to understand how empowering a few randomly selected participants to think, deliberate, and decide while expecting the rest of the citizenry to blindly defer to their decisions could increase the citizenry’s democratic control over the political process. Far from having a positive democratic impact, this strategy could exacerbate the very problem that minipublics are meant to solve. Citizens’ alienation from the political process would predictably grow rather than shrink. We advocate for a change of perspective. In our view, the important question that such proposals need to focus on is not how much power deliberative minipublics ought to have, but who should be empowered. Why should a few randomly selected individuals be empowered to make political decisions while bypassing the citizenry? Shouldn’t the citizenry be empowered instead? In the book, we discuss several proposals that follow the latter approach. Deliberative minipublics are not a panacea. But, given the current crisis of democracy, it would be a shame to waste the potential of minipublics for civic empowerment by letting these institutions become yet another ‘shortcut’ that bypasses the citizenry and further cements the rule of the few. Hélène Landemore Department of Political Science, Yale University. My interest in sortition was ignited by Bernard Manin’s masterpiece The Principles of Representative Government and reinforced by the literature on collective intelligence and social epistemology. I have become convinced that we made a mistake in the 18th century in reinventing democracy on an electoral basis and that we would be better off — both democratically and epistemically — with randomly selected legislatures. My work on the governance committee of the French Citizens’ Convention on End-of-Life issues has shown me the theoretical and practical difficulties of this alternative, lot-based and deliberative vision of democracy. It has also revealed its unexpected beauty, in the way it bonds people beyond partisan and other divides, reconciles majorities and minorities, and brings out the shy. Ethan J. Leib Fordham Law School. In graduate school, I had the privilege to work on one of James Fishkin’s “deliberative polls” (Fishkin 1995).  Although he was most interested in public opinion formation at the time, too much reading of Habermas (1998) pushed me to care more about public will formation and to look for institutional design opportunities to build a less elite-driven deliberative democratic polity.  Because I was studying direct democracy—both its possibilities and its pathologies—I started seeing forms of sortition as a possible pathway for improving direct democratic functioning.  That led to a book proposing a ‘popular branch of government’ (Leib, 2004), an idea that seemed to get traction among some political theorists looking to embed institutional mechanisms into political systems that cannot be deliberative all the time (e.g., McCormick 2006; Landemore 2020).  There was also global interest in seeing whether mini-publics could be a part of democratization movements in non-democratic regimes (Leib & He, 2006).  Further work has sought to figure out how to think of those who participate in lottocratic government as representatives themselves (Leib & Ponet, 2012) — and whether that representative role can be helpfully be framed by ideas in fiduciary governance (Leib & Galoob, 2016).  As a law teacher, I continue to study what can be learned from extant legal institutions using lottocracy such as the jury and participatory budgeting processes. Laurence Morel Department of Political Science, Université de Lille. As a scholar of direct democracy, I had never paid much attention to sortition until I read Bernard Manin and, a few years later, my colleagues Gil Delannoi and Oliver Dowlen. I was immediately fascinated by the challenge this posed for modern democratic theory and the possibility that sortition constitutes a sort of ‘third way’ between representative and direct democracy. But as a scholar of direct democracy, I was also intrigued from the start by a seemingly irrational and marginal use of sortition, certainly not the one for which it was recently rediscovered: sortition for choosing policies. Still, I haven’t done any research on this, but it has been on my research agenda for a long time. Perhaps I'm afraid of where this might lead me, somewhere between rational theory, mathematics, astrophysics and religion. I guess I need to think carefully about it before embarking on this journey. I believe this would be worth doing and should probably start with something like a theory about the type of situations or policies where there is no rational reason to formulate a choice, i.e. where chance is the most appropriate way to make a decision. Josiah Ober Department of Political Science, Stanford University. I have devoted much of my career to thinking about what we might be able to learn from the ancient Athenians’ long experience of practicing democracy. Ancient Athens offers a case study in sortition as an integral part of a democratic system that included elections of certain state officials. So, despite Aristotle’s comment that selecting officials by lottery is ‘held to be democratic’ and elections oligarchic (Politics 1294b7-9), election and sortition were conjoint features of Athenian democracy. Sortition was used (among other purposes) to select jurors (in practice judges), 500 Councillors who set the agenda for the citizen Assembly, and hundreds of other state officials. Elaborate selection procedures ensured impersonality (exclusion of irrelevant characteristics), equal opportunity, and proportional equality (equal numbers from each of ten multi-regional artificial ‘tribes’). The selection was, however, made from among citizens who presented themselves as candidates. A high percentage of Athenian citizens experienced service as a paid, lottery-chosen official, but no one was required to do so. Throwing his pinakion in the pot was each individual’s choice. And so, despite procedures that ensured equal numbers of jurors and Councillors from each tribe and proportionate numbers from large and small neighbourhoods, lottery-chosen officials never constituted a descriptive representative sample of the adult male citizenry, much less of the residents of Athens. Athens’ democratic system expressed multiple values: Respect for merit was expressed in the election of generals, finance officials, and hydraulic engineers. Decisive popular voting in the Assembly expressed the political equality of each individual citizen, and the collective agency of ‘all’. Sortition expressed the conviction that ordinary citizens, not privileged elites, can and should manage state business. The absence of a requirement to stand for election, attend the Assembly, or enter the lottery expressed individual freedom. Athens offers a challenge to lottocrats (and their critics): Specify roles for lotteries within a dynamic, robust, adaptive democratic system that expresses and instantiates, in practice, an equally diverse set of attractive political values. David Owen Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Southampton. My interest in sortition comes from two different directions. The first concerns lotteries as a mechanism for just decision-making in a range of types of case where either there is no compelling reasons to favour ANY OF the different alternatives and the use of sortition acknowledges the claims of all affected by the decision or there is good reason to introduce chance into the decision-making process to service some other valuable social purpose. I have a particular interest in the use of lotteries with reference to issues of migration (for example, the US Diversity Visa aka Green Card Lottery). The second is from the perspective of democratic theory and concerns the roles that sortition can play (as well as its limitations and problems) within a complex democratic ecology and how it might best be integrated into our democratic lives.  Joanna Podgórska-Rykała University of the National Education Commission, Krakow, Poland Even in the most extreme variant of rule by the people, everyone cannot govern at the same time. Also, attempts to base public government on unanimity alone are more likely to bring disappointment. And yet, decisions must be made by someone. Therefore, there are many ways to efficiently choose one option among many others, and the methods used to do so are being systematically improved. Leading the way in modern times, however, majority and representative governments based on various electoral arrangements leave much to be desired. Can lotteries to some extent replace ballot-based elections? This question seems to have a certain irrationality due to the treatment of lotteries as too radical and too innovative a method of selection. But are these objections justified? Although at first glance it seems that the lottery is a very irrational method, upon further reflection it turns out that lotteries are present in our lives very often, and just as often we rely on their results, accepting them without protest and treating them as fair (e.g., in games, sports, redistribution in the area of social policies and many others!). So, what stands in the way of reaching for them more intensively in the political sphere as well? I believe that the blockage is mainly imposed by closed political elites accustomed to the status quo. An analysis of the deliberative mini-public experiments that have taken place so far and like a snowball are pulling new institutional designs in all corners of the world proves that good decisions and effective solutions can come from random laypeople. And after all, that's what politics is all about! I firmly believe in the fundamental value of deliberation in politics, which, when coupled precisely with random selection, can revolutionize modern democracy, plagued by political corruption and growing inequality. The democratic lottery points to a new path, one that is fairer and more effective than elite representative power. What we need to consider now is the extent of the institutionalization of the lottery in politics. This will be a major step toward a qualitative change in the models of modern representative democracy (Podgórska-Rykała, 2024). Ben Saunders Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Southampton My interest in lotteries goes back twenty years, to my days as a postgraduate student interested in democratic reform. I found the idea of ‘lottery voting’ proposed by Akhil Reed Amar (1984). This is a sort of halfway house between random representation and traditional elections. Everyone votes for their favoured candidate, but then a lottery is held to pick a winning vote. This gives minorities a proportional chance of representation. This idea became the basis of my doctoral dissertation, though I departed from Amar’s proposal in focusing on direct decision-making, rather than electing representatives. While I found most people’s initial reactions to be sceptical, the combination of voting and a lottery offers a novel alternative to majoritarian democracy, with a number of potentially appealing properties (for instance, it would not only incentivize participation but also eradicate tactical voting). This research on potential uses of lotteries as part of a democratic voting procedure brought me into contact with others working on sortition and lotteries more generally, such as Oliver Dowlen and Peter Stone. While I have published papers on lotteries in other contexts (e.g., Saunders, 2008, 2009), I regard my main interest as being democratic politics, rather than lotteries themselves. Nonetheless, I still think that lotteries have much to offer, as part of a democratic procedure. I’m delighted to see growing interest in this area over the last couple of decades and to be part of this new journal. Yves Sintomer Department of Political Science, Paris 8 University. The Western political system based on elections, as it stabilized during the two of decades after World War II, has entered a deep legitimacy crisis. It rested on mass political parties which have nearly disappeared; it developed within the nation states, whose power tends to disminish with globalization; it was based on a short-term electoral agenda (rather than planning for the future); and it implied a vertical delegation to elected politicians which is contradicted by the spread of social networks. In the 21st century, we have to reset democracy. In this context, reintroducing the old method of sortition in politics is part of the answer. In the past (Lopez-Rabatel & Sintomer, 2020; Sintomer, 2023), it was a powerful tool for promoting impartiality and equality in the circle among which sortition took place. In the present, with random sampling, a strong coupling with deliberation, and the inclusion of all citizens in the circle, it could become a new way of representing the people at different scales, from the local to the global. Legislature by lot (Gastil & Wright, 2019) could help to reduce political distrust, provide a voice to citizens from subaltern groups and offer a countervailing power against corporate interests and elites. Combined with powerful social movements, citizens’ initiatives and a stronger inclusion of civil society organisations (CSOs) in governance, it could be quite useful for democratizing democracy, representing non-humans and facing the global ecological challenge. Graham Smith Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster. My research and activist interests lie in how to create political spaces for everday citizens to collectively exert control over those issues that structure their lives, particularly in the face of the climate and ecological crisis. Back in the mists of time when I was working on my PhD, I was fortunate to meet Ned Crosby and Peter Dienel, respectively the inventors of citizens’ juries and planning cells. I was struck how the work they were doing resonated with more theoretical debates in participatory and deliberative democracy. The way that sortition (or democratic lottery) can generate diversity and act as a bulwark against entrenched interests is a much-needed antidote to much of what we see in contemporary politics. What academics inelegantly term ‘deliberative minipublics’ is one amongst many forms of ‘democratic innovation’ (Smith, 2009) that have captured my attention. In recent years, climate assemblies have come to the fore (Smith, 2024) and I was invited by the European Climate Foundation to play a more practical role in developing and leading the Knowledge Network on Climate Assemblies (KNOCA). My experience is that so much of what is happening in the field is poorly reflected in academic debates — and academic analysis does little to foster more robust practice. My hope is that we can facilitate more nuanced theoretical and empirical analysis of how sortition bodies function in our current context and the conditions under which they can be more effectively integrated into democratic systems. Paolo Spada Centre for Democratic Futures, University of Southampton. My interest in sortition stems from two different directions. On the practical side, I am interested in exploring the anti-capture and anti-domination features of sortition when applied to the selection of decision-makers, the feasibility of claims regarding the representativeness of randomly selected samples of the population, and the potential for using sortition-based mechanisms in voting systems to better evaluate population preferences on multidimensional topics and to scale up deliberation. On the research side, I am interested in the use of research methods that leverage sortition to overcome biases and to innovate data collection mechanisms. Peter Stone Department of Political Science, Trinity College Dublin. Sortition is a powerful way to express political equality for public functions that cannot be performed by the people as a whole. This is clearly one of the reasons it has been regarded since Aristotle as a democratic way of making decisions. But even in Aristotle’s day, democracies resorted to other decision-making mechanisms. They elected officials (such as generals) to make some decisions, and they reserved other decisions for the people as a whole (as with referendums today). These three decision-making methods — aleatory, electoral, and direct democracy — all have democratic credentials in some sense; they all express some sort of commitment to political equality (Stone, 2021). But how do they fit together? When should a well-functioning democracy resort to one rather than another? Does overreliance upon any one of them compromise a system’s democratic credentials? As sortition moves into the mainstream, democratic theorists will increasingly need to confront these questions if they are to innovate in productive and helpful ways. Keith Sutherland Department of Politics, University of Exeter. My research for the last twenty years has been on the potential of sortition as a form of ‘descriptive’ representation (Sutherland, 2004, 2008, 2017). More recently I have been working on the interconnection between preference election and sortition, and the challenges of putting such a hybrid system into practice (Sutherland & Kovner, 2020, 2024). Although I still feel that sortition has a key role to play in democratic renewal, I’m concerned that the representative claims made for the tiny samples generally used (two orders of magnitude less than polls employed by the public opinion industry) will bring the sortition movement into disrepute, especially given that voluntary participation is likely to be a highly significant population parameter. Elected officials in a 2009 Deliberative Poll claimed that the ‘perceived’ legitimacy of the poll results gave them ‘the cover to do the right thing’ (Fishkin, 2009, p. 151), but the enthusiasm of progressive activists (such as Extinction Rebellion) for citizens’ assemblies to further their chosen projects might well be viewed as an attempt to undermine majoritarian democracy. Gerard Vong Emory Center for Ethics. While lotteries have been used to allocate scarce goods for thousands of years, I am particularly interested in the increasing sophistication of recently-implemented allocative lotteries. This includes using lotteries with the dual purpose of fair allocation and rigorous randomized research (Allen et al., 2013; Barnett et al., 2024; White & Angus, 2020), weighted lotteries for equity-focused allocation of scarce healthcare goods (Leider et al., 2023; McCreary et al., 2023), as well as lotteries embedded in different priority tiers of an allocative system. Sophisticated lotteries are both a powerful tool for policy and a rich area for future research. That said, such lotteries risk (though do not necessitate) undermining or detracting from one or more of the fundamental ethical reasons for conducting lotteries. Given that, it is especially important and timely to better understand the varying justifications for lotteries and how they relate to different lottery implementations. It is my hope that papers that contribute to these important goals appear in the Journal of Sortition. References Abizadeh, A. (2019) In defence of imperfection: an election-sortition compromise. In J. Gaskil and E.O. Wright (eds.), Legislature by Lot. London & New York: Verso. Abizadeh, A. (2021) Representation, bicameralism, political equality, and sortition: Reconsti-tuting the second chamber as a randomly selected assembly. Perspectives on Politics, 19:3. Allen, H., Baicker, K., Taubman, S., Wright, B., & Finkelstein, A. (2013). The Oregon health insurance experiment: when limited policy resources provide research opportunities. Journal of health politics, policy and law, 38(6), 1183-1192. https://doi.org/10.1215/03616878-2373244. Amar, A.R. (1984) Choosing Representatives by Lottery Voting. Yale Law Journal, 93:7, pp. 1283-1308. Barnett, A., Blakely, T., Liu, M., Garland, L., & Clarke, P. (2024). The impact of winning funding on researcher productivity, results from a randomized trial. Science and Public Policy, 1-9. https://doi.org/10.1093/scipol/scae045. Boyle, C. (2010). Lotteries for Education. Exeter: Imprint Academic. Buchstein, H. (2009). 2009: Demokratie und Lotterie. Das Los als politisches Entscheidungsinstrument von der Antike bis zur EU. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag. Cartledge (2018) Democracy: A Life, new edition (Oxford University Press) Courant, D. (2019). Sortition and Democratic Principles: A Comparative Analysis. In Legislature by Lot, edited by John Gastil and Erik Olin Wright, 229–48. The Real Utopia Project. London/New York: Verso. Courant, D. (2021). Citizens’ Assemblies for Referendums and Constitutional Reforms: Is There an ‘Irish Model’ for Deliberative Democracy? Frontiers in Political Science 2 (591983): 1–20. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2020.591983. Courant, D. 2022. Institutionalizing Deliberative Mini-Publics? Issues of Legitimacy and Power for Randomly Selected Assemblies in Political Systems. Critical Policy Studies 16 (2): 162–80. https://doi.org/10.1080/19460171.2021.2000453. Courant, D., and Bernard Reber, eds. (2025). Deliberative Democracy and Ecological Transition. The French Citizens’ Convention for Climate. New York: Wiley. Delannoi, G. (2025) Politics of Random Selection: Making Good Use of Sortition. Exeter: Imprint Academic. Dowlen, O. (2008). The Political Potential of Sortition: A Study of the Random Selection of Citizens for Public Office. Exeter: Imprint Academic. 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(2016). “Fiduciary Political Theory: A Critique.”  Yale Law Journal 125: pp. 1820-78. Leider, J. P., Lim, S., DeBruin, D., Waterman, A. T., Smith, B., Ghimire, U., ... & Hick, J. L. (2023). Using a web platform for equitable distribution of COVID-19 monoclonal antibodies: a case study in resource allocation. Frontiers in Public Health, 11, 01-10.  https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2023.1226935. Lopez-Rabatel, L. & Sintomer, Y. (eds.). (2020). Sortition and Democracy. Practices, Tools, Theories, Exeter: Imprint Academic. Malkin & Blok: I. Malkin & J. Blok Drawing Lots. From Egalitarianism to Democracy in Ancient Greece (Princeton U.P.) McCreary, E. K., Essien, U. R., Chang, C. C. H., Butler, R. A., Pathak, P., Sönmez, T., ... & White, D. B. (2023, September). Weighted lottery to equitably allocate scarce supply of covid-19 monoclonal antibody. In JAMA Health Forum (Vol. 4, No. 9, pp. e232774-e232774). https://doi.org/10.1001/jamahealthforum.2023.2774. Podgórska-Rykała, J. (2024). Deliberative Democracy, Public Policy, and Local Government London: Routledge. Pope 2023: M. Pope The Keys to Democracy: Sortition as a New Model for Citizen Power, ed. H. Pope (Imprint Academic). Saunders, B. (2008). The Equality of Lotteries. Philosophy, 83:3, pp. 359-372. Saunders, B. (2009). A Defence of Weighted Lotteries in Life Saving Cases. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 12:3, pp. 279-290. Lopez-Rabatel, L. & Sintomer, Y. (eds.). (2020). Sortition and Democracy. Practices, Tools, Theories, Exeter: Imprint Academic. Smith, G. (2009). Democratic Innovations: Designing Institutions for Citizen Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, G. (2024). We Need To Talk About Climate: How Citizens' Assemblies Can Help Us Solve the Climate Crisis. University of Westminster Press. Stone P. (2011). The Luck of the Draw: The Role of Lotteries in Decision Making. New York: Oxford University Press. Stone, P. (2021). Democracy in Ireland: Theory and Practice. In David M. Farrell and Niamh Hardiman, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Irish Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sutherland, K. (2004). The Party’s Over: Blueprint for a very English revolution. Exeter: Imprint Academic. Sutherland, K. (2008). A People’s Parliament. Exeter: Imprint Academic. Sutherland, K. (2018). The Triumph of Election: A Pyrrhic Victory? Revista di Storia delle Idee, 7:1, pp. 135-152. Sutherland, K., and Kovner, A. (2020). Some Problems of Citizens’ Assemblies. Academia Letters, Article 23. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL23. Sutherland, K., and Kovner, A. (2024). Superminority: Sortition and the Democratic Diarchy. In G. Grandjean (ed.) Against Sortition? The Problem With Citizens’ Assemblies. Exeter: Imprint Academic. White, D. B., & Angus, D. C. (2020). A proposed lottery system to allocate scarce COVID-19 medications: promoting fairness and generating knowledge. JAMA, 324(4), 329-330. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2020.11464. 19 JOS EDITORIAL BOARD SORTITION: PAST & PRESENT 21 Journal of Sortition, 1, No. 1, 2025, pp. 8–23 DOI: 10.53765/3050-0672.1.1.008