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The article examines the democratic legitimacy of randomly selecting legislators through minipublics, discussing arguments for and against this concept. Eric Shoemaker defends the use of empowered minipublics as a "micro-deliberative shortcut," countering criticisms from Cristina Lafont. Lafont's participatory democracy emphasizes public deliberation and participation, challenging the legitimacy of second-best alternatives like empowered minipublics. The text delves into the complexities of democratic theory and political philosophy surrounding the use of empowered minipublics in decision-making processes, highlighting the challenges in aligning public opinion with decision-making processes. [Extracted from the article]

In times of crisis it is even more important to ensure that political decisions have broad, popular and trusted support from a wide range of people than in normal, non-crisis times. We argue that the best way to achieve this is through the use of deliberative mini-publics, as leaving a crisis response only to our political leaders presents them with almost irresistible opportunities for the arrogation of power, possible corruption, and the use (or abuse) of emergency measures for partisan political point scoring. Having demonstrated the theoretical basis for our argument, which builds on the foundation of deliberative democratic theory, we then address the practical aspects of using informed deliberation within a mini-public during a crisis, when efficacy and speed are the most urgent and challenging aspects of decision making. The obvious solution, to us, is to institutionalize deliberative mini-publics in our democratic structures so that they are ready and able to rapidly address any crisis as it arises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Modern democracies have long faced several problems often described as a crisis of representative democracy. This review essay addresses the debate regarding the possible return and implementation of sortition as a tool to solve or mitigate many problems facing modern democracies. The review essay follows three authors who address this return to sortition, representing three distinct approaches. While two of the books under review think through the possible return and implementation of sortition, the third one presents a criticism of these efforts and finds such a return problematic. This review essay thus asks whether a return of this historically democratic tool is even possible and whether it can provide a solution for some of the problems associated with what we refer to as the crisis of representative democracy.

As part of the ongoing Common Knowledge symposium "Antipolitics," this essay replies to an article by Nadia Urbinati: "The Sovereignty of Chance: Can Lottery Save Democracy?" Urbinati's piece expresses reservations about the tendency of symposium contributions to support what she terms "lottocracy." Gastil's response argues (1) that random selection in politics can take many forms, none of which need resemble a lottocracy; (2) that a randomly selected body with some measure of influence or authority can complement electoral democracy without replacing it; (3) that prohibiting democracies from experimenting with random selection would undermine their claim to being democratic; and (4) that evidence from experience with random selection warrants continuing to experiment with it as a means of revitalizing imperiled democratic systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on deliberative mini-publics (DMPs) establishes a link between political dissatisfaction and support for DMPs. However, little is known about the sources of political dissatisfaction that trigger this support. Our research tackles this specific question and claims that citizen dissatisfaction is rooted in a position of 'losers of representative democracy', which leads citizens to be more open to reforms that move away from the representative model. Building on the literature on loser's consent, we focus on the effect of voting for a party not associated with the government and of descriptive and substantive (under)-representation in support of DMPs. We rely on a comparative survey conducted across fifteen Western European countries. Supporters of opposition parties and those who are badly represented, both descriptively and substantively, are more supportive of DMPs. These findings have important implications for understanding the public appeal for deliberative democracy instruments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I argue that on an equality-based theory of democracy's value, randomly selecting legislators is more democratic than electing them. In sections 1 and 2, I describe how a legislature composed of randomly selected legislators might operate and what an equality-based theory of democracy's value consists in. In section 3, I evaluate arguments made in support of election-based democracy by democratic theorists and demonstrate why these arguments fail on their own terms. In section 4, I argue that when compared to electing legislators, randomly selecting legislators better answers to four democratic ideals embedded in equality-based theories of democracy's value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can democratic innovations (DIs) offer a cure for the widespread loss of support for electoral institutions? This widely held assumption among advocates of DIs should be questioned more thoroughly. Insufficient attention has been paid so far to the impact of different types of DIs on electoral legitimacy, defined as the support for the principles grounding electoral representation. What is at stake is the compatibility and equilibrium between different parts of the new democratic systems that are developing in many political contexts. To address this issue, the article offers an innovative typology, distinguishing five types of DIs based on their relationship with traditional representative institutions. This allows to identify DIs that do have the potential to strengthen electoral legitimacy (initiative, recall, abrogative referendums, deliberative town-halls) from others overtly attacking it (lottocracy, liquid democracy) or potentially challenging it (citizen-initiated referendums and empowered citizens' assemblies). The article shows that it is not because an innovation is conceived as complementary to electoral representative institutions that it cannot challenge the latter's foundations. Finally, it identifies several issues on which empirical knowledge is lacking, opening perspectives for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at Alexander Guerrero's epistemic case for 'lottocracy', or government by randomly selected citizen assemblies. It argues that Guerrero fails to show that citizen expertise is more likely to be elicited and brought to bear on democratic politics if we replace elections with random selection. However, randomly selected citizen assemblies can be valuable deliberative and participative additions to elected and appointed institutions even when citizens are not bearers of special knowledge or virtue individually or collectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Democratic innovations aim to involve the citizenry in public decision-making and have taken on various forms. This research assesses a participatory budgeting initiative that incorporates random selection and places emphasis on deliberation in its design. This pilot experience is conducted at the University of Malaga and focuses on the inclusion of the LGTBIQ+ community within the faculty. The objective is to analyze the effects of this design on participant profiles, as well as on polarization and the perceived quality of the deliberative process. Thirty-six students participate in the deliberative phase. A quantitative investigation with surveys is carried out, employing a pretest and posttest design with a single group. The results indicate that random selection allows for the inclusion of profiles somewhat less aligned with the demands of the LGTBIQ+ community, as well as with more diverse attitudes and emotions. Furthermore, concerning polarization, the process heightens positive attitudes toward investing resources in raising awareness about non-binary identities. Simultaneously, participants perceive a high deliberative quality in the dimensions studied. These results are exploratory, as they pertain to a pilot study with a small sample size. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Random selection for political office—or "sortition"—is increasingly seen as a promising tool for democratic renewal. Critics worry, however, that replacing elected and appointed officials with randomly selected citizens would only exacerbate elite manipulation of political processes. This article argues that sortition can contribute to democratic renewal, but that its genuine promise is obscured by the excessive ambition and misplaced focus of prevailing models. Casting random selection as a route to accurate representation of the popular will, most contemporary proposals require randomly selected citizens to perform legislative tasks, whose open‐endedness grants substantial discretion to elite agenda setters and facilitators. The real democratic promise of sortition‐based reforms, I argue, lies in obstructing elite capture at critical junctures: a narrower task of oversight that creates fewer opportunities for elite manipulation. In such contexts, the benefits of empowering ordinary people—resulting from their immunity to certain distorting influences on career officials—plausibly outweigh the risks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent proliferation of AI scandals led private and public organisations to implement new ethics guidelines, introduce AI ethics boards, and list ethical principles. Nevertheless, some of these efforts remained a façade not backed by any substantive action. Such behaviour made the public question the legitimacy of the AI industry and prompted scholars to accuse the sector of ethicswashing, machinewashing, and ethics trivialisation—criticisms that spilt over to institutional AI ethics boards. To counter this widespread issue, contributions in the literature have proposed fixes that do not consider its systemic character and are based on a top-down, expert-centric governance. To fill this gap, we propose to make use of qualified informed lotteries: a two-step model that transposes the documented benefits of the ancient practice of sortition into the selection of AI ethics boards’ members and combines them with the advantages of a stakeholder-driven, participative, and deliberative bottom-up process typical of Citizens’ Assemblies. The model permits increasing the public’s legitimacy and participation in the decision-making process and its deliverables, curbing the industry’s over-influence and lobbying, and diminishing the instrumentalisation of ethics boards. We suggest that this sortition-based approach may provide a sound base for both public and private organisations in smart societies for constructing a decentralised, bottom-up, participative digital democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conceived as an alternative form of democratic representation, the random selection of citizens for a political task comes in tension with the logic of electoral representation. The idea, carried by random selection, that anyone can be a good enough representative challenges the assumption that we need to choose the most competent among ourselves. And the fact that citizens' assemblies are sometimes tasked to draft legislation may undermine the authority of elected representatives. This article tests this hypothesis of tension between competing forms of representation on a recent case: the French Citizen Convention for Climate (CCC) in 2020. Drawing on parliamentary hearings and questions as well as public political reactions to the CCC, we find indications that elected representatives may feel threatened in their legitimacy even when most randomly selected citizens do not see themselves as representatives. This may be due to the fact that the CCC was seen by some as stepping on the prerogatives of the Parliament. This suggests that future experiments of the sort could benefit from a clearer functional division between the two forms of representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The presence of women in elected assemblies has been argued to transform the political agenda so that it better addresses the needs and interests of women. In this article, I reflect on women's political representation by starting from democratic theories that point to the inadequacy of electoral democracy. I argue that, compared to including women in the political elite, dissolving the division of political labor between professional politicians and 'ordinary' citizens has a greater potential to challenge status quo gender relations. I suggest that political assemblies consisting of randomly selected citizens would better serve women's self-determination and emancipation for three reasons: 1) allotted representatives would be more willing and able than elected representatives to critique social norms and practices, 2) the idea of allotted representatives better supports the idea that knowledge is situated, and 3) it better accommodates the notion that political merit is a gendered, racialized and class-based concept. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In democracies around the world, the rich exercise a disproportionate share of political power. Democratic theorists universally condemn this. The current paper brings balance to this conversation by mustering a defense of limited oligarchy. I have two goals. First, I shall argue that we need not be overly despondent about the wealthy's outsized influence, for overrepresentation of the wealthy performs some good for us—good which might not be entirely obvious at first glance. Second, I hope to temper reform efforts that seek to limit the wealthy's influence. While the people should have a greater say than they currently do, the wealthy's influence should still be greater than what their numbers suggest. I ultimately embrace oligarchic bicameralism, an old idea that proposes ordinary persons be represented in the lower chamber of the legislature, and property be represented in the upper. This is accomplished through a combination of sortition and elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recoiling from the power that Athenian democracy placed in the hands of the poor, the founding fathers of the United States took Athens as primarily an anti-model, whereas nineteenth-century defenders of slavery found Athens a very congenial model indeed, seeming as it did to lend a mantle of legitimacy to an unspeakable practice. After a "honeymoon period" in which democracy was idealized as the only legitimate form of government, now at the outset of the twenty-first century the alliance of democracy with a capitalism that often proves heartless to the less fortunate has raised some troubling questions about democracy itself. Despite its small size, classical Athens offers valuable guidance for tempering current difficulties in both the United States and elsewhere by adopting and adapting the selection of some officials by sortition, direct election by popular vote of elected officials, a rigorous system of accountability, and the fostering of civic and community values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As representative democracy is increasingly criticized, a new institution is becoming popular among academics and practitioners: deliberative citizens' assemblies. To evaluate whether these assemblies can deliver their promise of re‐engaging the dissatisfied with representative politics, we explore who supports them and why. We build on a unique survey conducted with representative samples of 15 Western European countries and find, first, that the most supportive are those who are less educated and have a low sense of political competence and an anti‐elite sentiment. Thus, support does come from the dissatisfied. Second, we find that this support is for a part 'outcome contingent', in the sense that it changes with respondents' expectations regarding the policy outcome from deliberative citizens' assemblies. This second finding nuances the first one and suggests that while deliberative citizens' assemblies convey some hope to re‐engage disengaged citizens, this is conditioned on the expectation of a favourable outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to explore the claim that lotteries are more democratic than elections. The paper starts by looking at the two main forms of equality that give lotteries their democratic appeal: an individually equal chance to be selected for office, and the proportionate representation of groups in the legislature. It shows that they cannot be jointly realized and argues that their egalitarian appeal is more apparent than real. Finally, the paper considers the democratic reasons to value randomly selected assemblies, even if claims about their distinctively egalitarian properties are exaggerated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Part 1 of this article, which appeared in the first installment of the Common Knowledge symposium "Antipolitics," presented reasons why elections are an inappropriate method for selecting representatives in a democracy. Part 2, published in the symposium's second installment, offers arguments for why sortition — the selection of shorter‐duration representatives by lottery from the general population — is the best procedure for democracy. Random selection can assure broad diversity and descriptive representation, and it allows those people selected to overcome the rational ignorance that plagues elections. Concerns about the competence of ordinary people who are randomly selected are addressed. The issues of corruption and policy accountability are examined to show that elections cannot provide the genuine accountability ensured by random selection. Some specific design considerations for an optimal sortition‐based democracy are also presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In consonance with the view of Aristotle in book 4 of the Politics, Montesquieu wrote that "selection by lot is in the nature of democracy; election by choice is in the nature of aristocracy." Although the drawing of lots was a marker of classical Athenian democracy, Socrates — according to Xenophon's Memorabilia — was strongly opposed to it as irrational. According to Socrates and Plato, the citizen of a democracy exists in a moral anarchy, and every choice he makes is random, as if drawn by lot, hence the appropriateness of random choice as a principle of Athenian democracy. And yet, despite this negative assessment of the institution, Socrates was willing to participate in a lottery that made him a member of the Council of Five Hundred, the supreme political body of Athens. This essay — a contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium "Antipolitics" — attempts to explain this paradoxical stance, with reference to Plato's allusions to it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introducing part 2 of the Common Knowledge symposium "Antipolitics," this essay summarizes the "untold story" of the random recruitment of citizens for political office in Western Europe. Although sortition was used extensively in ancient Athens and in late medieval Europe, it is now (except for the randomly selected jury) a largely discontinued practice. While a good deal is known about when and where this procedure was used, there is little surviving documentation of exactly why it was used and of what it was thought to contribute to the political systems in which it was deployed. This untold story, therefore, is not simply about historical instances of use but must also be an analysis and critique of its use. Key points that emerge are that (1) a lottery takes the decision to appoint or elect away from partisan protagonists, so it therefore acts as a mechanism that can break up and disperse power; and (2) a lottery can serve as a trusted mediation or agreement between parties, because the resultant decision is anonymous. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are two important dimensions to the membership of mini-publics that are distinct from the membership of conventional representative institutions: the selection mechanism (sortition) and the profile of the body's eligible membership ('ordinary' citizens). This article examines the effects of these design features on perceived legitimacy. A survey experiment in the deeply divided context of Northern Ireland finds no evidence that variation in mini-public selection features has an overall effect on perceived legitimacy, but there are important individual-level differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I will argue that Bernard Manin's book The Principles of Representative Government is a central reference for understanding the current debates on the recovery of formulas for greater popular self-government, fundamentally those in which the introduction of sortition as a tool for the selection of political offices is proposed. To this end, I will examine the sources of ancient democracy recovered by Manin and argue in favor of the different possibilities of appropriation of his work. The work will thus appear open to different readings, thus showing that its reception has been conditioned by singular events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sortition is sometimes seen as a means of addressing some weaknesses of the electoral system. Advantages of sortition are related to its three principles—randomness, representation and equality. Nowadays, we are witnessing the growing popularity of the citizens' assembly—the most expanded form of deliberative process based on sortition. The methods of selection of assembly members are very diverse. Theoretically, they should ensure that the selection process fulfils the principles of randomness, representation and equality, but in practice there are many factors that can disturb their implementation. The aims of the paper are to investigate what selection methods are used in citizens' assemblies and to evaluate the processes of selection of assembly members from the perspective of principles of randomness, representation and equality. For this purpose, selection processes from 29 citizens' assemblies organised in the years 2020–2021 in 9 European countries were analysed. Then the selection processes were compared with an evaluation model prepared on the basis of theoretical concepts concerning randomness, representation and equality. The study was conducted using a desk research method whose subjects were reports and methodology descriptions regarding each citizens' assembly, as well as the assembly members' data. The study shows the selection methods used in citizens' assemblies are very diverse. Although almost all of the analysed assemblies were representative of the given population, in some of the cases, the selection processes were far from the ideal of randomness and did not provide everyone with even near equal chances of being selected to participate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does an established institution incorporate deliberation by randomly selected citizens? Can they deliberate on an equal footing with interest group representatives? How do the latter envision citizen participation? This article attempts to answer these questions by analysing the deliberative mini-public 'New Generations' set up by the French Economic Social and Environmental Council (ESEC) in 2020. A socio-economic consultative assembly, the ESEC was the subject of a legislative reform adopted in January 2021, which establishes the possibility for the Council to have randomly selected citizens deliberate alongside representatives of interest groups. Relying on semi-structured interviews (n = 15), surveys at multiple points in time (n = 190), direct observation (11 days) and content analysis, we illustrate the limits of the integration of citizen deliberation within the ESEC. Articulating a longitudinal macro perspective (on the institutional and legislative transformations of the Council) with a sociological microanalysis (of the 'New Generations' experiment) allows us to underline that in the current implementation of citizens' participation in the ESEC, the institution seems to be 'flying without instruments'. Indeed, with few references to legal frameworks or scientific guidelines, the Council relies mainly on private consultants to implement deliberative practices. We thus worry that within the current political context, citizen deliberation is on its way to become an ad hoc resource, used by interest groups and institutions to defend their causes in the public sphere, but not leading to a direct implication of citizens in the decision-making process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the greatest challenges to be overcome by contemporary electoral representative democracies is to alleviate citizen disaffection and, consequently, bridge the gap between the rulers and the ruled. A certain consensus could be reached if we affirmed that the professionalization of politicians is becoming one of the obstacles that citizens face when it comes to trusting the political system. I In this sense, the main objective of this article is to reflect on the harmful effects of the professionalization of the political class and analyze the potential of the sortition as a neutralizing mechanism. In turn, find out if this, through deliberative mini publics, has or not the ability to minimize its harmful excesses and, with it, increase the degree of trust of citizens with their political representatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium "Antipolitics," this article examines the diverse types of imaginary that support sortition, which is currently at the heart of important debates on the reform of existing democratic institutions. Different and often diametrically opposed actors now advocate sortition as a tool for addressing crises of political representation. How are we to understand this convergence? Over the past two decades, the field of experience and the horizon of expectation of citizens in the global North have profoundly changed, and this article seeks to assess those changes in the context of three ideal types that advocate the use of randomly selected minipublics. This article analyzes, each in turn, the attraction of sortition for supporters and theorists of deliberative democracy, antipolitical democracy, and radical democracy, outlining the elements that unite and divide these imaginaries to help explain the astonishing convergence of voices in defense of sortition in politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While elections are, today, widely considered a fundamental feature of democracy, the argument of this two‐part article, published in the Common Knowledge symposium "Antipolitics," is that elections are a problematic and even inappropriate way of choosing representatives. Part 1 focuses on factors that make elections ill suited for democracy. These include a variety of human traits studied intently by contemporary psychologists. Part 1 assesses many studies of this type. Discussed as well are the ignorance and inattention of voters, which can be rationally justified by the improbability of a single vote deciding the result of an election. Part 1 deals not only with the psychology of voters but also with the harm that winning an election does to the psyche of the victor and to bodies and offices that are composed of winners. The essay concludes that democracy would be better served by sortition — selection by lottery — than by elections when forming its representative bodies and selecting its leaders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this piece, the editor of Common Knowledge introduces a long‐term project titled "Antipolitics: Symposium in Memory of György Konrád." Konrád, who died in 2019, was a founding member of the Common Knowledge editorial board, and the symposium is meant to find present‐day applications for the arguments of his book Antipolitics, published in 1982 in Hungarian. Although written under Cold War conditions and to that extent dated, the book is directed against politics and politicians as such: "What Machiavelli's Prince is to would‐be rulers, Antipolitics should be for those resistant to being ruled — a treasury of axioms and apothegms," which this editorial collects, updates, and analyzes. Given that democratic systems and constitutions are "open and subject to further development," Konrád urges us to devise and run experiments in governance that apply "creative imagination" to problems that, in better times, we might leave to politicians to resolve. "The crisis for democracy today," Perl argues, "is that bad government (as Konrád, Václav Havel, and Adam Michnik defined it in the 1980s) appears to be what various electorates crave and therefore choose." Realizing that elections produce, as Aristotle said, oligarchy rather than democracy, we should rethink majority rule and experiment with sortition as a counterpolitical means of self‐government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I argue that the consensus view that one must never level down to equality gives rise to a dilemma. This dilemma is best understood by examining two parallel cases of leveling down: one drawn from the economic domain, the other from the political. In the economic case, both egalitarians and non-egalitarians have resisted the idea of leveling down wages to equality. With no incentives for some people to work hard social productivity will likely decline, further lowering people's wages and thus leaving everybody all-things-considered worse off as a result—hence "never level down." On the other hand, however, the argument against leveling down does not appear to pass muster in the political sphere: denying political equality in the form of "one person, one vote" (OPOV), for example, by giving a higher share of voting power to people with, say, more education seems straightforwardly objectionable, even if such a voting scheme would improve the outcomes of all people, including those who are ultimately left with fewer votes. Thus, a fundamental tension arises: we can either endorse the widely-affirmed "never-level-down" thesis, which says that sacrificing people's well-being exclusively for the sake of promoting equality can never be the right thing to do, or we can endorse the principle of "one person, one vote." But we cannot do both. I defend this dilemma against a view I call the compatibility view: roughly, that because OPOV is strictly necessary to advance some weighty, non-egalitarian interest people have, accepting OPOV as a principle of justice is compatible with one's rejection of leveling down. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the prospects of an increasingly debated democratic reform: assigning political offices by lot. While this idea is advocated by political theorists and politicians in favour of participatory and deliberative democracy, the article investigates the extent to which citizens and MPs actually endorse different variants of 'sortition'. We test for differences among respondents' social status, disaffection with elections and political ideology. Our findings suggest that MPs are largely opposed to sortitioning political offices when their decision-making power is more than consultative, although leftist MPs tend to be in favour of mixed assemblies (involving elected and sortitioned members). Among citizens, random selection seems to appeal above all to disaffected individuals with a lower social status. The article ends with a discussion of the political prospects of sortition being introduced as a democratic reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the greatest challenges facing current generations is the environmental and climate crisis. Democracies, so far, have not distinguished themselves by their capacity to bring about appropriate political responses to these challenges. This is partly explicable in terms of a lack of state capacity in a globalized context. Yet we also argue that election-centered democracies suffer from several flaws that make them inapt to deal with this challenge properly: youth is not appropriately represented; parliaments suffer from a lack of diversity; elected representatives' time-horizon is too narrow; anti-regulation lobbies have too much influence. Considering this, we argue for rejuvenating our democratic systems by introducing a randomly selected legislative chamber, which would be permanently integrated to our political systems and would play a deliberative and scrutinizing role. We have identified four eco-political arguments in favor of such reform. The generational rebalancing argument, which we examine first, has some plausibility but is not the strongest. The other three arguments – its eco-epistemic promises; its wider time horizon; and the independence of its members from short-term corporate interests – however, appear to us to be much more convincing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to growing debates over the decision-making ability of democracy by considering the epistemic value of deliberative democracy. It focuses on the benefits democratic deliberation can derive from its diversity, and the extent to which these benefits can be realised with respect to the complexities of political problems. The paper first calls attention to the issue of complexity through a critique of Hélène Landemore and the Diversity Trumps Ability Theorem. This approach underestimates complexity due to its reliance on an 'oracle assumption' and this is shown to highlight more general difficulties for applying the benefits of diversity to the realities of political problems. The paper then develops a new model of deliberation—based on an relationship between cognitive diversity and diminishing returns to cognitive type—which does not involve an oracle assumption and can therefore support the epistemic value of deliberative democracy even for complex problems. The benefits of diversity are also argued to be better realised though sortition than either democratic elections or epistocracy, pointing to the value of deliberation between randomly selected citizens. Finally, and contrary to past work, the new account suggests that diversity cannot alone establish the superiority of democratic deliberation over all non-democratic alternatives, and that it is insufficient to mount a purely epistemic argument for deliberative democracy. The paper therefore furthers our understanding of the epistemic value of deliberative democracy by clarifying when and to what extent diversity is a benefit to political problem solving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses two great global challenges of the 2020s. On one hand, the accelerating climate crisis and, on the other, the deepening crisis of representation within liberal democracies. As temperatures and water levels rise, rates of popular confidence in existing democratic institutions decline. So, what is to be done? This article discusses whether sortition – the ancient Greek practice of selecting individuals for political office through lottery – could serve to mitigate both crises simultaneously. Since the 2000s, sortition has attracted growing interest among activists and academics. Recently it has been identified in countries like the UK and France as a mechanism for producing legitimate political answers to the climate challenge. However, few theoretical reflections on the potentials and perils of sortition-based climate governance have yet emerged. This article contributes to filling the gap. Based on a critique of the first successful case of sortition used to enhance national environmental policy – in Ireland in 2017–18 – we argue that sortition-based deliberation could indeed speed up meaningful climate action whilst improving the health of democratic systems. However, this positive outcome is not preordained. Success depends not only on green social movements getting behind climate sortition but also on developing flexible, context-specific designs that identify adequate solutions to a number of problems, including those of power (providing citizens' assemblies with clear agenda-setting prerogatives beyond non-binding consultation); expertise (allowing assembly participants to influence which stakeholders and experts to solicit inputs from); and participation (engaging wider parts of the citizenry in the deliberative process). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sortition, historically used in classical Greece, seems to be facing a process of resurgence, in an attempt to alleviate citizen disaffection and to improve the functioning of representative systems. The main objective of this article is, precisely, to reflect on the use of the sortition and the potential of deliberative mini-publics, and to analyze whether or not they have the capacity to increase the degree of citizens' in their representatives and institutions. It is concluded that there are certain conditions, which go through the implementation of random deliberative mini-publics, under which sortition could be combined with elections to try to alleviate citizen disaffection and to improve the functioning of representative systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does it actually take to run a deliberative mini-public (DMP)? This article unmasks the taken-for-granted assumptions of one of the most popular democratic innovations in the past decade by applying their design features in fragile political contexts. Drawing on 3 years of fieldwork in communities recovering from armed conflict and police brutality in the Philippines, we identify foundational challenges to DMPs in relation to their core design features: sortition and long-form deliberation. Our goal in documenting these challenges is not to devalue DMPs but to spotlight limitations that cannot be overcome despite the best intentions. In so doing, this article hopes to advance an honest conversation about what these DMPs can reasonably achieve, as well as the harms they can potentially cause, especially in societies where precarity is the norm rather than the exception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under the current confessional system, representative democracy in Lebanon suffers from a double crisis. At the institutional level, the prolonged presidential and cabinet vacancies combined with the slowness of the governmental machine reveal a considerable efficiency deficit. At the structural level, the current electoral representative system increasingly supports the organization of an oligarchic Lebanese regime where the concentration of power in a small number of people serves to benefit the interests of the confessional political elite. In this paper, I consider the establishment of a randomly selected senate as an alternative political answer to the crisis facing representative democracy in Lebanon. I identify the structural and political inadequacies of one of the dominant proposed resolutions, the "referendum solution," to deal with the current representative crisis. I argue that the introduction of sortition in Lebanese political procedures could be considered an evolution toward further deliberative democratization of the system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]