Sortive Democracy
Abstract
After two centuries of silence, the last twenty years have witnessed renewed interest in the use of random selection (or sortition) as a political device. This interest manifests itself through several approaches: political theory, history of democracy, theory of knowledge, democratic thinking, deliberative democracy and local experiments.
My aim in this paper is to address the following issues. First, to define a sortive kind of democracy in comparison with the direct and indirect kinds and then to devise possible combinations between these different kinds of democracy. Second, to recapitulate, similarly to a short instruction book or user’s manual, the different practical options for any implementation of a procedure including random selection (size of the pool and size of the sample, mandatory or facultative participation, short or long terms, training etc). Third, to provide examples of institutional design for public consultation and democratic decision-making.