Sortition and Mini-Publics

Abstract

In recent decades liberal democracies have begun to experiment with sortition—the selection of citizens by lottery for engagement in political or policy discussions. A notable development has been the emergence of randomly selected deliberative mini-publics that can take different forms. These have occurred in the context of wider debates in political theory over the potential of deliberative democracy, and also from a desire to bring citizens into the heart of debates over constitutional and institutional reform. We develop a normative case for sortition focused on how it can contribute in a negative sense—helping to shield the process of selecting officials from forces that could compromise it—and also in a positive sense in how it can deliver more effectively on the ideal of descriptive representation. We then consider empirical evidence of how the most significant examples of sortition today (the citizens’ assemblies) have performed against those normative ideals.