Sortition and Democracy : History, Tools, Theories

After two centuries during which it had nearly disappeared in Western countries, sortition is used again as a method of selecting people who could speak for, and in certain cases decide for, all the citizenry. What is the meaning of this comeback? To answer this question, this book offers a historical analysis. It brings together a number of the best specialists on political sortition from antiquity to contemporary experiments, in Europe but also in the Ancient Middle East and in imperial China. With a transdisciplinary perspective, this volume demonstrates that sortition has been a crucial device in political history; that the instruments and places where sortition was practised matter for the understanding of the social and political logics at stake; and that these logics have been quite different, random selection being sometimes an instrument of radical democracy and in other contexts a tool for solving conflicts among elites. Will sortition in politics helps to democratize democracy in the twenty-first century?

Liliane Lopez-Rabatel is an associate researcher at the Research Institute on Ancient Architecture (IRAA, Lyon, CNRS - AMU). She has written a PhD thesis on sortition in Ancient Greece and has co-edited Voter en Grèce, à Rome et en Gaule: pratiques, lieux et finalités (Lyon: Maison de l'Orient et de la Méditerranée, 2019).

Yves Sintomer is professor of political science and researcher at the Paris Center for Sociological and Political Research (CRESPPA, CNRS/Paris 8 University), and Associate Member, Nuffield College, Oxford University. He has been deputy-director of the Marc Bloch Center Berlin, and senior member, French University Institute. His most recent books include Participatory Budgeting in Europe; Democracy and Public Governance (with C. Herzberg and A. Röcke; London: Routledge, 2016), and Between Radical and Deliberative Democracy: Random Selection in Politics from Athens to the 21st Century (Cambridge University Press, 2020 (forthcoming)).