Legislature by Lot: Transformative Designs for Deliberative Governance

by John Gastil, Erik Olin Wright

Overview

Democracy means rule by the people, but in practice even the most robust democracies delegate most rule making to a political class

The gap between the public and its representatives might seem unbridgeable in the modern world, but Legislature by Lot examines an inspiring solution: a legislature chosen through “sortition”—the random selection of lay citizens. It’s a concept that has come to the attention of democratic reformers across the globe. Proposals for such bodies are being debated in Australia, Belgium, Iceland, the United Kingdom, and many other countries. Sortition promises to reduce corruption and create a truly representative legislature in one fell swoop.

In Legislature by Lot, John Gastil and Erik Olin Wright make the case for pairing a sortition body with an elected chamber within a bicameral legislature. Gastil is a leading deliberative democracy scholar, and Wright a distinguished sociologist and editor of the Real Utopias series, of which this is a part. In this volume, they bring together critics and advocates of sortition who have studied ancient Athens, deliberative polling, political theory, social movements, and civic innovation. Without obscuring its limitations, the contributors offer a wide variety of ideas for how to implement sortition and examine its potential for reshaping modern politics.

Legislature by Lot includes sixteen essays that respond to Gastil and Wright’s detailed proposal. Essays comparing sortition to contemporary reforms see it as a dramatic extension of deliberative “minipublics,” which gather random samples of citizens to weigh public policy dilemmas without being empowered to enact legislation. Another set of essays explores the democratic principles underlying sortition and elections and considers, for example, how a sortition body holds itself accountable to a public that did not elect it. The third set of essays considers alternative paths to democratic reform, which limit the powers of a sortition chamber or more quickly establish a pure sortition body.

With contributions by Arash Abizadeh, Tom Arnold, Terrill Bouricius, Deven Burks, Lyn Carson, Dimitri Courant, Donatella della Porta, David M. Farrell, Andrea Felicetti, James S. Fishkin, Brett Hennig, Vincent Jacquet, Raphaël Kies, Tom Malleson, Jane Mansbridge, Christoph Niessen, David Owen, John Pitseys, Min Reuchamps, Yves Sintomer, Graham Smith, Jane Suiter, and Pierre-Étienne Vandamme.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781788736084
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	04/09/2019
Pages:	448
Product dimensions:	6.02(w) x 9.21(h) x 1.38(d)

About the Author

John Gastil is a professor in the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences at the Pennsylvania State University, where he is a senior scholar at the McCourtney Institute for Democracy. Recent books he has authored or coedited include The Jury and Democracy, Democracy in Motion: Evaluating the Practice and Impact of Deliberative Civic Engagement, and a second edition of Democracy in Small Groups.

Erik Olin Wright (1947–2019) was Vilas Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin. He authored many books, including Classes, Interrogating Inequality, Class Counts, Deepening Democracy (with Archon Fung), and Envisioning Real Utopias.

Table of Contents

Preface: The Real Utopias Series, Wright vii

I The Argument

1 Legislature by Lot: Envisioning Sortition "Within a Bicameral System, Gastil and Wright 3

2 Postscript: The Anticapitalist Argument for Sortition, Wright 39

II Contemporary Context

3 From Deliberative to Radical Democracy: Sortition and Politics in the Twenty-First Century, Sintomer 47

4 Random Assemblies for Lawmaking: Prospects and Limits, Fisbkin 75

5 Lessons from a Hybrid Sortition Chamber: The 2012-14 Irish Constitutional Convention, Arnold, Farrell, and Suiter 101

6 Intercameral Relations in a Bicameral Elected and Sortition Legislature, Vandamme, Jacquet, Niessen, Pitseys, and Reuchamps 123

7 Joining Forces: The Sortition Chamber from a Social-Movement Perspective, Felicetti and delta Porta 145

III Democratic Principles

8 Should Democracy Work Through Elections or Sortition? Malleson 169

9 Accountability in the Constituent-Representative Relationship, Mansbridge 189

10 How to Ensure Deliberation Within a Sortition Chamber, Carson 205

11 Sortition and Democratic Principles: A Comparative Analysis, Courant 229

12 In Defense of Imperfection: An Election-Sortition Compromise, Abizadeh 249

IV Alternative Paths Toward Sortition

13 A Gradualist Path Toward Sortition, Burks and Kies 259

14 Sortition, Rotation, and Mandate; Conditions for Political Equality and Deliberative Reasoning, Owen and Smith 279

15 Who Needs Elections? Accountability, Equality, and Legitimacy Under Sortition, Hennig 301

16 Why Hybrid Bicameralism Is Not Right for Sortition, Bouricius 313

V Conclusion

17 Sortition's Scope, Contextual Variations, and Transitions, Gastil and Wright 335

Notes 349

Bibliography 403

About the Authors 429

Acknowledgments 437

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Envisioning Real Utopias by Erik Olin Wright:

“[Wright] builds a strong case for an emancipatory social science.”
—Choice

“A benchmark contribution to necessary radical thinking.”
—Göran Therborn

“Encyclopedic in its breadth, daunting in its ambition, this is the culmination of Erik Olin Wright's revamping of Marxism … Only a thinker of Wright's genius could sustain such a badly needed political imagination without losing analytical clarity and precision.”
—Michael Burawoy, UC Berkeley

“Hugely rich and stimulating … An incisive diagnosis of the harms done by capitalism; a masterful synthesis of the best work in political sociology and political economy over the past thirty years; and innovative theoretical framework for conceptualizing both the goals of progressive change and the strategies for their achievement; and inspiring survey of actually existing challenges to capitalism that have arisen within capitalism itself; and a compelling essay on the relation between the desirable, the viable and the achievable. Anyone interested in the future of leftist politics has to read this book.”
—Adam Swift, Balliol College, Oxford

“This book is both a manifesto and a guidebook: an argument for taking institutional design seriously, and a guide to how to do that. It's a book that sociologists will want to read, but also, frankly, that everyone in political theory and philosophy should be reading too.”
—Crooked Timber

“A fascinating book.”
—openDemocracy

From the Publisher