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Abstract: Hélène Landemore’s Open Democracy (2020) offers both a normative conception of popular rule and an institutional schema intended to advance it. This schema is grounded in a normative conception of popular rule that associates democracy with the values of inclusion and equality. But this association misses a historically important dimension of popular rule—popular sovereignty—which requires the people as a whole to play a critical part in decision making. Landemore’s dismissal of popular sovereignty informs her institutional schema, which relies upon both sortition and self-selection. It leaves no significant room for the people as a whole to act, either directly (via referenda) or indirectly (via election). Landemore never explicitly defends this dismissal of popular sovereignty from her conception of popular rule. Given the historical importance of this dimension of popular rule, and its continuing intuitive appeal, any such dismissal requires careful justification.
Although the focus of this forum is articles published in the Journal of Sortition, Peter Stone’s paper just published in Democratic Theory is so closely related to topics raised in the JoS launch issue as to warrant debate on Sortition Agora. According to Hélène Landemore, the basic pillars of democracy are inclusiveness and equality – anyone who chooses to should be able to participate and in a lottocratic system everyone is equally (un)likely to be selected. However, as Peter points out, this does nothing to ensure the sovereignty of the people as a whole, as the vast majority will not participate (either through choice or numerical exclusion).
Lottocrats claim that those selected by lot will broadly represent the target population, but the JoS paper by Spada and Peixoto casts serious doubt on this claim, especially if participation is voluntary – typically only a tiny proportion of those selected accept the invitation to participate, and voluntarism is the only population parameter that cannot be corrected by stratified sampling. It might well be argued that those who accept the sortition invitation and those who choose to participate in an ‘open’ democracy are also members of a self-selecting elite, albeit of a cognitive, rather than socio-economic nature.
Peter Stone argues that popular sovereignty can only be ensured via plebiscitary or electoral mechanisms and this is the focus of the JoS paper by Daniela Cammack. The paper by Keith Sutherland advocates a third way – a large citizens’ jury constituted by sortition would enable decision-making without the alienation of popular sovereignty, as the ‘collective being’ of the sovereign would be represented [in microcosm] ‘by himself’ (Rousseau, SC, II:1) via a synecdochical form of representation. This would only be true if different samples of the same population were to decide in the same way (within a given margin of error) and that would presuppose a combination of election (for policy advocates) and large quasi-mandatory citizens’ juries. As Matt Simonton argues in JoS, this is not entirely dissimilar to fourth-century Athenian practice.
Such an approach focuses on the representation of the overwhelming majority excluded by lot or who do not choose to participate. In the age of Trump, Orbán, Erdogan, Putin and Xi, the pressing question is whether a democratic alternative to populist autocracy is even feasible, so the focus, pace Landemore, has to be on popular sovereignty rather than inclusiveness and equality. For better or worse, half the US electorate endorsed the representative claim of a charismatic populist over the liberal democratic alternative, and the populist critique of elite rule shares many of the same tropes as lottocratic rhetoric.
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