The Government of Chance: Sortition and Democracy from Athens to the Present

"This book is amazing. It’s really rich in research. What I find fascinating is that Yves Sintomer had never heard or read anything by my father, but chose roughly the same kinds of examples to show how sortition moved through the ages. It’s much more detailed, however. He’s not trying to make it an easy read. He’s trying to make sure that everyone understands what each historical stage of sortition meant at the time and could mean now. Unlike my father, he’s not favoring one use of sortition over another. It’s lots of lists of ways you could think about each phase of sortition. The thing that I really like about The Government of Chance is that it shows how, throughout history, elections and sortition have been mixed at some level. This is all a big spectrum and each country does things differently. I learned an incredible amount from it, because he’s got so many examples and it’s done with such common sense. The Government of Chance came out in February in English. This is going to be the textbook of sortition that people will keep referring back to to know what happened in the past. He’s been working on the topic for 20 years and he goes through all the history. It’s just random selection. The word isn’t well-known, yet, but it’s nice and precise. And it’s not sortation, as was once written in the august publication Politico (sortation just means grouping things together!). Sortition comes from the Latin sores , which originally referred to the bits of parchment that used to have volunteers’ names written on them. It has acquired overtones of fate. The Government of Chance has an excellent discussion of this. Sintomer discusses too what the church thought of sortition as a method—whether it was finding the will of God or getting in the way of the will of God. He shows that sometimes there was a faith-driven justification for sortition. Then there’s a justification for sortition that sees it as a way of sharing things more equally, especially government posts. Even in imperial China, the qualified mandarins, once they’d passed their exams, would be sent to provincial posts by lot. This is something that human beings have done a lot and it’s not from any one particular culture. The jury system is the ultimate example of how sortition has been with us in Britain for 1000 years, even if their use and composition has changed. In Norman times, for instance, they were groups of local experts who adjudicated based on their knowledge. The funny thing is that in the 19th century, juries really took off at the same time as sortition faded from political life. Even so, they weren’t randomly selected from a wide base of the population until the 1960s, actually. Very few court cases now go to a jury trial. It’s around 1%. But it’s still there. It’s very important for major cases. And it’s a wonderful example of how, at least in legal context, when it comes to judgment of facts, English-speaking populations really do trust ordinary people to come to a collective decision. In my father’s book there is a whole chapter explaining the mathematics of juries getting things right. For him, it was a very big inspiration in believing that a randomly selected system could work."