Legislature by Lot: Transformative Designs for Deliberative Governance (The Real Utopias Project) - Softcover

Gastil, John; Wright, Erik Olin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1788736087 ISBN 13: 9781788736084

Publisher: Verso, 2019

Synopsis

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.

About this title

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.

Review

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

Edition details

• Publisher: Verso
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1788736087
• ISBN 13: 9781788736084
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 448