Democracy and lottery: Revisited

In the Italian republic of Genoa the members of the city council were selected by random selection from the 12th century on. Over time, the gambling-crazed residents of the city began to bet on who would win a seat and called this a lottery. A few decades later, this developed into the numbers games that have remained popular to this day. From Italy the original Old Germanic word11 Meaning fortune telling and fate in Old Germanic. slowly found its way to the Netherlands and later into the English vocabulary and (as a kind of reimportation with a different meaning) into German as well, to denote all sorts of games based on a random mechanism. It is, however, worth reminding political theorists that the word lottery has a political origin and that the recent comeback of lotteries as a means for democracy fits nicely into this etymology. This complex etymology also reminds us to be open to a broad and many faceted understanding of the role of lotteries in politics. It seems that recently, however, the role of sortition22 In the following I use the terms lottery, sortition, and random mechanism interchangeable. in politics has been narrowed to its instrumental function of selecting members of deliberative opinion polls’ respective mini-publics.33 I use the terms deliberative opinion poll and mini-publics interchangeably in this article. As it is well known today, the selection of political offices by lottery—even though they were named kleros in those days—had a traditional place in ancient Greek democracies. In contrast to that tradition, modern democracies rely on elections as the main means of fill political positions. Over the last 20 years we can observe an impressive renaissance of the lottery as a democratic device. Taking inspiration from the early contributions of authors like Robert Dahl, Peter Dienel, and Ned Crosby in the 1970s,44 On these forerunners, see Sintomer (2007); Setälä and Smith (2018). a growing body of literature today highlights the benevolent impact of randomly selecting citizens for deliberative opinion polls’ respective mini-publics55 The deliberative opinion poll is today mostly connected to the work of James Fishkin. See Fishkin (2009, 2018a, 2018b); Brown (2018); Floridia (2018). or even for selecting them for certain political offices.66 See Carson and Martin (1999); Dowlen (2008); Delannoi and Dowlen (2010); Lopez-Rabatel & Sintomer (2018); van Reybrouck (2016); Sintomer (2018). Reform proposals that include lotteries have lost their marginal status, at least in the academic milieu of modern democrats, and have even become a centerpiece of many current political reform proposals. In particular, the format of mini-publics has become attractive to some authors as an alternative to pure electoral democracy; for them mini-publics and other bodies of selected by lot citizens are presented not only as supplements to existent electoral democracy but also as institutions that are supposed to substitute them.77 See Barnett and Carty (2008); Callenbach and Phillips (2008); O'Leary (2006); Reybrouck (2016); Sutherland (2008). Ten years ago I started to propagate lotteries as a means to democratize modern democracies and to transfer the political competence to make binding political to those by See (2009, Over the last years has an even a of political the use of lotteries to on the of many political has and to a of and is the political of the comeback of the lottery in the democratic today, years the of ancient its comeback in political and as a in the of mini-publics to be of a to traditional the of the lottery in this a and to from the political at a of growing and political in democracies and of that democracy is in it as a to this or is it to the of the lottery for is it the of the in the academic on deliberative I not be to this of in this article. 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