Diverse citizens participating in a deliberative assembly meeting
Citizens' assemblies bring together randomly selected people to deliberate on complex policy questions

What if the next leader of your country was chosen the same way you pick jury duty? Picture waking up to find a notification on your phone: "Congratulations, you've been randomly selected to serve in parliament." No campaign ads. No fundraising dinners. No poll numbers. Just you and a group of ordinary people suddenly responsible for shaping national policy. It sounds like political science fiction, but this idea has roots stretching back 2,500 years and is experiencing a surprising comeback across the globe.

Democracy feels broken to many. Voter turnout slumps lower each cycle, political polarization splits families and communities, and ordinary citizens watch as wealthy elites dominate decision-making. Sortition, the practice of selecting political officials by lottery rather than election, offers a radical alternative that challenges everything we think we know about how democracies should work.

Ancient Wisdom, Modern Crisis

In the marble halls of ancient Athens, democracy didn't mean what we think it does today. Between the 5th and 4th centuries BCE, Athenians filled most government positions not through elections but through random selection from eligible citizens. The 500-member Boule (council) that set the agenda for the citizen assembly? Chosen by lot. Court jurors? Selected randomly each morning. Even magistrates and administrators who managed the city's daily affairs got their jobs through what amounted to a sophisticated lottery machine called a kleroterion.

The kleroterion itself was an engineering marvel. Citizens inserted bronze tokens with their names into slots arranged by tribe, and black and white dice were dropped through a tube to determine which rows would be selected. The whole process was visible to onlookers, ensuring transparency and preventing corruption. It wasn't perfect—women, slaves, and foreigners were excluded—but for eligible citizens, this system embodied a radical equality that elections could never match.

Why did Athenians trust randomness over campaigns and voting? They understood something modern democracies seem to have forgotten: elections naturally favor the wealthy, the well-connected, and the charismatic, not necessarily the wise or the public-spirited. Aristotle himself noted that choosing leaders by lot was democratic, while choosing by election was oligarchic. By removing the ability to campaign or build power bases, sortition theoretically stripped away the mechanisms through which elites dominate politics.

For nearly 200 years, this system worked remarkably well. Athens became one of the most powerful and culturally influential city-states in the ancient Mediterranean. The council changed every year, which meant power couldn't concentrate in the hands of a few families. Citizens gained practical experience in governance. Political office became a civic duty rather than a career ambition.

Then it all collapsed. Following military defeats and internal conflicts, Athens fell to authoritarian rule, and the practice of sortition faded into history. For the next two millennia, the word "democracy" would be redefined around elections rather than lotteries.

The Comeback Nobody Expected

Fast forward to January 2020. In conference rooms across the United Kingdom, 108 randomly selected citizens gathered for an unprecedented experiment. Recruited through a process designed to mirror the UK's demographic makeup by age, gender, ethnicity, education, geography, and even climate attitudes, these ordinary people had a monumental task: develop recommendations for how Britain could reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

They weren't climate activists or policy wonks. Some participants didn't even believe climate change was a serious concern when they started. Over six weekends, they listened to expert testimony, debated among themselves, and produced a 550-page report with detailed policy proposals spanning transportation, agriculture, energy, and consumption.

The results startled political observers. These randomly selected citizens endorsed policies that elected politicians considered politically toxic: frequent flyer taxes, reductions in meat consumption, rapid phase-out of combustion vehicles. Why could they embrace difficult trade-offs that career politicians avoided? Because they weren't worried about the next election. They learned, deliberated, and decided based on evidence rather than campaign contributions or party loyalty.

The UK Climate Assembly is just one example in a growing global movement. The OECD has documented nearly 600 citizens' assemblies worldwide, each using lottery-based selection to address thorny policy questions. Ireland used a citizens' assembly to navigate the politically explosive topic of abortion rights, ultimately leading to a successful referendum. France convened a Climate Citizens' Convention of 150 randomly selected people who proposed 149 measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Ancient Athenian kleroterion device used for random selection
The kleroterion was an intricate lottery machine used in ancient Athens to randomly select officials

In Brazil, the city of Porto Alegre pioneered participatory budgeting beginning in 1989, incorporating random selection alongside neighborhood councils to determine how to allocate portions of the municipal budget. The system has since spread to over 1,500 cities across Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa.

Even more experimental approaches are emerging. In September 2025, Nepal's Gen Z activists used the gaming platform Discord to randomly select a prime ministerial candidate from a pool of qualified nominees, arguing it would be more egalitarian than traditional party politics.

Why Lottery Might Beat Elections

Proponents of sortition point to a cluster of problems that plague modern electoral democracies and argue that random selection could address each one more effectively than incremental reforms.

Money out, people in. Campaign finance is democracy's original sin. Running for office in most countries requires either personal wealth or the ability to attract donations from wealthy interests. Once elected, officials face constant pressure to keep donors happy, creating systematic bias toward policies that favor economic elites. Sortition eliminates this entirely. You can't buy influence over a random selection process. You can't lobby someone who doesn't know they'll be in office until their name is drawn.

Diversity without quotas. Electoral systems consistently fail to produce legislatures that mirror their populations. Women, ethnic minorities, working-class people, and younger citizens are systematically underrepresented. Sortition, when properly designed with stratified random sampling, automatically generates representative bodies. The UK Climate Assembly's deliberate oversampling from deprived postcodes shows how random selection can be calibrated to ensure no voices are systematically excluded.

Cognitive diversity powers better decisions. Political scientists Scott Page and Hélène Landemore have developed compelling theoretical and empirical arguments that cognitively diverse groups outperform groups of experts on complex problems. Elections filter for a particular personality type: ambitious, charismatic, often from privileged backgrounds. Random selection brings in perspectives from teachers, plumbers, nurses, engineers, retirees, and students, each bringing different frameworks for thinking about problems.

Polarization loses its grip. Electoral politics runs on division. Candidates win by mobilizing supporters against the other side, creating incentives to demonize opponents and play to base emotions. Citizens' assemblies, by contrast, don't run on zero-sum competition. Participants focus on issues rather than identity politics, and because their selection is random rather than based on political affiliation, they have more freedom to change their minds based on evidence.

Long-term thinking becomes possible. Elected officials obsess over the next election cycle, making it nearly impossible to address challenges that unfold over decades. Climate change, demographic shifts, infrastructure decay—these all require sustained commitment beyond any single term. Randomly selected citizens serving fixed terms with no possibility of reelection can focus on long-term societal benefit rather than short-term political advantage.

The Skeptics Have a Point

If sortition is so great, why aren't we already doing it everywhere? Because the challenges are real, numerous, and in some cases potentially fatal to the whole enterprise.

Competence matters. Running a modern nation-state involves staggering complexity. Trade agreements, monetary policy, military strategy, public health infrastructure—these aren't areas where common sense alone suffices. Critics reasonably ask: do we really want amateurs making decisions that require specialized knowledge? The Athenian response was that only positions requiring technical expertise (like military generals) were elected, while administrative and deliberative roles went to lottery. But modern governance blurs these lines. Everything from education policy to environmental regulation involves technical details that can't be mastered in a few weekend sessions.

Time is a luxury. The UK Climate Assembly required participants to dedicate six weekends over several months. Who can afford that time? Working parents juggling multiple jobs, people with health issues, caregivers for elderly relatives—they face systematic barriers to participation even in a lottery system. Unless participants receive substantial compensation and support, "random" selection could become biased toward those with existing privilege.

Manipulation through framing. Citizens' assemblies don't exist in a vacuum. Someone decides which experts testify, how information is presented, which questions get asked. The Conservative Woman, a UK publication, has argued that assemblies function as "rubber-stamping for predetermined agendas", with organizers controlling the process to manufacture consent for policies they already support. This concern isn't paranoid—how deliberations are structured profoundly shapes outcomes, and that structural power remains concentrated in non-random hands.

Accountability gets fuzzy. In electoral systems, bad leaders can be voted out. But if your representative was chosen randomly and serves a fixed term, what recourse do citizens have if they perform poorly or make harmful decisions? The ancient Athenians had scrutiny processes before and after service (dokimasia and euthyna), but these mechanisms are difficult to translate to modern contexts without reintroducing the very political dynamics sortition aims to escape.

Legitimacy is earned, not automatic. Just because a system is theoretically fair doesn't mean people will accept it. Centuries of electoral democracy have created deep cultural expectations about how leaders should be chosen. A recent leader selected by lottery, no matter how well-designed the process, might face public skepticism and resistance that undermines their ability to govern effectively. Legitimacy is as much about perception as procedure.

Modern lottery-based selection system for democratic participation
Contemporary experiments blend traditional democratic values with random selection mechanisms

Building Better Lotteries

Sortition advocates aren't naive. Most don't propose immediately replacing all elections with random selection. Instead, they're experimenting with hybrid models that combine the best aspects of both systems while mitigating weaknesses.

Two-chamber legislatures could pair an elected house (maintaining accountability and legitimacy) with a randomly selected house (providing different perspectives and reducing corruption). This creates checks and balances between popular will and deliberative wisdom.

Rotating citizen juries could review specific policy domains—like the climate assemblies—without replacing the entire legislative function. These bodies would research, deliberate, and make binding recommendations within defined scopes, allowing for specialized focus and manageable time commitments.

Stratified selection ensures demographic representation by treating the population as subdivided groups rather than a uniform pool. You don't just randomly select 100 citizens—you ensure the group matches the population's distribution across age, gender, ethnicity, income, education, and geography. This approach addresses concerns about bias in who can actually participate.

Competence screening could establish basic eligibility criteria without creating the kind of barriers that elections naturally impose. Requiring literacy, minimal civic knowledge, or willingness to undergo training preserves the democratic leveling function while ensuring participants can engage meaningfully with complex material.

Expert facilitation means randomly selected citizens don't deliberate in isolation. Professional facilitators, diverse expert testimony, and access to research support allow ordinary people to make informed decisions without requiring them to become specialists.

Digital tools are expanding what's possible. Online platforms can help distribute information, facilitate deliberation across geographic distance, and even implement cryptographically secure randomization processes. Nepal's Discord-based experiment, whatever its other limitations, demonstrated how technology can make sortition more accessible to younger, digitally native populations.

A World Choosing Itself

Sortition forces us to confront uncomfortable questions about what democracy actually means. Do we believe in rule by the people, or rule by those people who are best at winning popularity contests? Do we want representatives who reflect our demographics and values, or professional politicians whose careers depend on pleasing powerful interests? Are we willing to trust our neighbors with power, or do we assume governance requires a special elite class?

The gap between democratic ideals and electoral realities has never been wider. Trust in democratic institutions continues to decline across developed nations. Voter participation drops while cynicism rises. The idea that a plumber, a teacher, and a nurse might make better policy than career politicians no longer sounds absurd—it sounds refreshing.

Sortition won't replace elections tomorrow, and probably shouldn't. But the experiments happening now in Ireland, France, the UK, and elsewhere are proving that ordinary citizens, given time, information, and proper facilitation, can tackle complex policy challenges that elected bodies have failed to resolve. They can balance competing values, embrace difficult trade-offs, and think beyond the next election cycle.

Maybe the question isn't whether sortition could work. Maybe it's whether we're brave enough to find out.

The ancient Athenians believed that eligibility for office should be universal among citizens and that competence emerges through participation rather than preexisting in special people. Two millennia later, after watching elections concentrate power in ever-smaller elite circles, we might be ready to test whether they were right all along. Democracy, it turns out, might be too important to leave to elections.

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