There is a great book on that matter: Against Elections: The Case for Democracy from David Van Reybrouck<p>It argues that it would be better and more democratic to randomly sample parliament instead of voting. It also describes how a transition could look like and how mixed systems could work.<p>The biggest issue I see is that such a system would need a very strong and well-designed bureaucracy and very well educated and moral public servants. You would have a state run by technocrats, who prepare options for decisions that the randomly drawn parliament would need to make. These technocrats could get all-powerful quickly.
I'm glad the Wikipedia summary ends with this line:<p><i>Today, sortition is commonly used to select prospective jurors in common law-based legal systems and is sometimes used in forming citizen groups with political advisory power (citizens' juries or citizens' assemblies).</i><p>People reading this are likely familiar with the use of sortition in jury selection. What is probably the single most well know thing about sitting on a jury?<p><i>It sucks.</i> It's somehow boring and stressful at the same time, and the pay is very much token. Therefore, most people try to get out of it, with varying degrees of success. People have gone as far as not registering to vote in order to avoid jury duty. This is specifically why voter rolls are not used for that in many places.<p>The corollary to this is that juries aren't actually a random sample: people getting out of jury duty obviously causes selection effects. If the sample is not random, you lose a lot of the theoretical advantages of sortition. Unless we take strong steps to make sitting in a legislative body <i>not suck</i>, I see no reason it would be any better there.
I've always thought that sortition should play a greater role in democratic systems, as a counterbalance to the flaws of voting, namely: <i>the ability of money and power to influence elections</i> and <i>the advantage that charismatic people have over uncharismatic ones.</i> Technology plays a pretty big historic role here, too: there are definitely American presidents from before radio/television that wouldn't have <i>become</i> presidents if they ran today. E.g. some of the Founding Fathers were fantastic writers but awful public speakers.<p>Edit: adding some more details:<p><i>Yet for every Washington or Adams, there is a Thomas Jefferson — a president who was such a bad public speaker that he declined to deliver a State of the Union address to Congress, instead beginning a century-long tradition of sending congressional members a letter...</i><p><a href="https://www.pbs.org/speak/seatosea/standardamerican/presidential/voices/" rel="nofollow">https://www.pbs.org/speak/seatosea/standardamerican/presiden...</a>
One argument against sortition is that you might occasionally get someone who was hopelessly unsuited to the job, whereas, proponents of conventional elections might argue - their system would obviously never do that. But now we know they're wrong, so that's one more reason to consider sortition.
I'm reminded of how lottery voting, a.k.a. random ballot, is immune to any kind of tactical voting. [0] Either your vote counts for nothing (the most likely outcome), or it is the only vote that matters. Either way, you just vote for your favourite. See also [1].<p>I suppose it may also have the effect of reducing incentive to compromise, as well as the obvious effect of opening the door to fringe candidates.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_ballot" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_ballot</a><p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...</a>
A great advantage of sortition is that it removes the need for campaigning and political parties, so the lobbyists have nothing to grasp on. Another one is that it is scalable - if you have 10 separate issues, you can draw 10 groups to work on them.
Michael Schulson's 2014 <i>Aeon</i> essay, "If You Can't Choose Wisely, Choose Randomly", is an excellent exploration of this concept:<p><i>... Above all, chance makes its selection without any recourse to reasons. This quality is perhaps its greatest advantage, though of course it comes at a price. Peter Stone, a political theorist at Trinity College, Dublin, and the author of The Luck of the Draw: The Role of Lotteries in Decision Making (2011), has made a career of studying the conditions under which such reasonless-ness can be, well, reasonable.</i><p><i>‘What lotteries are very good for is for keeping bad reasons out of decisions,’ Stone told me. ‘Lotteries guarantee that when you are choosing at random, there will be no reasons at all for one option rather than another being selected.’ He calls this the sanitising effect of lotteries – they eliminate all reasons from a decision, scrubbing away any kind of unwanted influence. As Stone acknowledges, randomness eliminates good reasons from the running as well as bad ones. He doesn’t advocate using chance indiscriminately. ‘But, sometimes,’ he argues, ‘the danger of bad reasons is bigger than the loss of the possibility of good reasons.’ ...</i><p><a href="https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-can-t-choose-wisely-choose-randomly" rel="nofollow">https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-can-t-choose-wisely-choose-ran...</a>
Oh, seeing Venice mentioned here does not do justice to how weird the process was: 10 steps at each either enlarging or reducing the number of people involved, all to prevent a single family from controlling the outcome (but still allowing negotiations to happen at every step, apparently).<p><a href="https://constitution.org/elec/venetian_selection_system.html" rel="nofollow">https://constitution.org/elec/venetian_selection_system.html</a>
I really like calling it "Demarchy". Mostly because I came upon this by reading Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space novels (which use the term with a somewhat different meaning, everyone is continuously polled through cybernetic implants. But that's just an extreme form of sortition IMHO, by "randomly choosing everyone".)
The most powerful in-between solution is to randomly select a ballot per electoral district instead of a constituent.<p>This gives the best of both worlds of electoral districts and popular voting: Everyone is locally represented but the national representation is neatly distributed over ideologies instead of having just two parties.<p>As the most import benefit, it completely removes the incentive for strategic voting.
A lot of people are scared of sortition because they are worried that the average person is not up to it - but I think there are ways round that. The best property of sortition is that it prevents clique influence on the selection of representatives. This can be preserved in systems which combine sortition with other mechanisms, for example:<p>- arrange for the electorate to be formed into groups of 100..200 however they wish.<p>- each group elects a candidate<p>- representatives are selected from the candidates by sortition.<p>This has two beneficial features over pure sortition:<p>- The electorate has the opportunity to weed out unsuitables<p>- Learning is still possible (if some rep is manifestly unsuitable, the lectorate can resolve to select no-one like that in the future)<p>(Allowing groups in the range 100..200 makes it simpler to form the groups, because once a list reaches the upper bound it can split into two, allowing everyone to just join the group they like rather than the last % having to scramble for a place).
This is how I think it should work.<p>Electors are picked randomly for every election. Lets say 50 for every house seat. They are sequestered like a jury for several days. They listen to every candidate, they (may) deliberate in private, they vote, until they have choice. Then they are dismissed. The chosen candidate holds the seat for three years and votes to choose a head of government.<p>The advantage is that there are no campaigns, less money involved, less 30 second ads, electors are given the time to focus on every candidate.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_convention_for_ecological_transition" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_convention_for_ecolog...</a><p>"For the first time, a panel representative of the diversity of French citizens, will be directly involved in the preparation of the law."<p><a href="https://www.conventioncitoyennepourleclimat.fr/en/" rel="nofollow">https://www.conventioncitoyennepourleclimat.fr/en/</a>
Interesting idea. One thing I will point to is that in the Euro Champions League, they randomly draw small plastic balls with the names of teams inside it to set up fixture match ups. People still regularly question whether its free of tampering because one could use heated or rough edged balls influencing which ball is chosen by the person making the drawings, in this case for a more favorable match-up for a team.
I believe this is how elections were held in Athens, with eligible citizens being selected for office via first a vote, to limit the number of candidates to a hundred or so, and then a random draw.