We Should Let a Lottery Decide Our Government (2019)

Summary

In ancient Athens, citizens—free adult men—would gather in the assembly, thousands at a time. At the peak of Athenian democracy, in the fourth and fifth century BCE, every citizen had the right to speak in this legislature on issues of the state, which ranged from finances to military matters and even the impeachment of generals. After these discussions, they could vote on final decisions, either with a show of hands or by secret ballot. In this popular image of Athenian direct democracy, we often overlook another institution: rule by lot. Members of the council, responsible for the administration of Athens, were selected randomly from a group of willing and eligible candidates to serve for a year-long term. Members were tasked with setting the assembly’s agenda along with other administrative duties, such as managing the finances and foreign affairs of the city-state. Only motions that had been approved by the council could be discussed by the larger assembly. The juror-judges of political courts, too, were randomly selected; among other prerogatives, they could strike down laws that had been passed by the assembly. The use of lot—also called sortition—embodied the democratic principle of rotation: Athenians regarded elected office as an oligarchic or aristocratic institution because not everybody had an equal chance of occupying it, while sortition allowed citizens to take turns ruling and being ruled. Through most of the fourth and fifth centuries BCE, the state even paid office-holders so that ordinary citizens, otherwise constrained by economic need, could freely participate in politics. By some calculations, between one-third and one-half of all citizens in fourth-century-BCE Athens could have been part of the council during their lives. If the gathering of citizens in one large assembly seems unrealistic to us, then assigning political office by lottery may seem even more so. Yet political activists and scholars across Western democracies have proposed that w...