In governance, sortition is the selection of public officials or jurors at random, i.e., by lottery, in order to obtain a representative sample. In ancient Athenian democracy, sortition was the traditional and primary method for appointing political officials, and its use was regarded as a principal characteristic of democracy. Sortition is often classified as a method for both direct democracy and deliberative democracy. Today, sortition is commonly used to select prospective jurors in common-law systems. What has changed in recent years is the increased number of citizen groups with political advisory power, along with calls for making sortition more consequential than elections, as it was in Athens, Venice, and Florence.
History
Ancient Athens
Athenian democracy developed in the 6th century BC out of what was then called isonomia (equality of law and political rights). Sortition was then the principal way of achieving this fairness. It was utilized to pick most of the magistrates for their governing committees, and for their juries (typically of 501 men).
Most Athenians believed sortition, not elections, to be democratic and used complex procedures with purpose-built allotment machines (kleroteria) to avoid the corrupt practices used by oligarchs to buy their way into office. According to the author Mogens Herman Hansen, the citizen's court was superior to the assembly because the allotted members swore an oath which ordinary citizens in the assembly did not; therefore, the court could annul the decisions of the assembly. Most Greek writers who mention democracy (including Aristotle, Plato, Herodotus, and Pericles) emphasize the role of selection by lot, or state outright that being allotted is more democratic than elections (which were seen as oligarchic). Socrates and Isocrates however questioned whether randomly-selected decision-makers had enough expertise. Past scholarship maintained that sortition had roots in the use of chance to divine the will of the gods, but this view is no longer common among scholars. In Ancient Greek mythology, Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades used sortition to determine who ruled over which domain. Zeus got the sky, Poseidon the sea, and Hades the underworld. In Athenian democracy, to be eligible to be chosen by lot, citizens self-selected into the available pool, then onto lotteries in the kleroteria machines. The magistracies assigned by lot generally had terms of service of one year. A citizen could not hold any particular magistracy more than once in his lifetime, but could hold other magistracies. All male citizens over 30 years of age, who were not disenfranchised by atimia, were eligible. Those selected through lot underwent examination called dokimasia to ensure citizenship and consider life, character, and at times, property; capacity for a post was assumed. Rarely were selected citizens discarded. Magistrates, once in place, were subjected to constant monitoring by the Assembly. Each magistrate appointed by lot was required, upon completion of his term, to render an account of his time in office, called a euthyna. Any citizen could request the suspension of a magistrate with due reason. A Kleroterion was used to allot officers and select eligible and willing citizens to serve jury duty. This bolstered the initial Athenian system of democracy by getting new and different jury members from each tribe to avoid corruption. James Wycliffe Headlam wrote that the Athenian Council, which consisted of 500 randomly selected male citizens, would commit occasional mistakes such as levying taxes that were too high. Headlam wrote that power did not tend to go to those who sought it, and deemed systematic oppression and organized fraud impossible due to widely and randomly distributed power combined with checks and balances. He stated that the Athenians largely trusted the system of random selection, regarding it as the most natural and the simplest way of appointment. Sortition was used for most positions, except for military positions such as strategos that were elected.
Lombardy and Venice – 12th to 18th century The brevia was used in the city states of Lombardy during the 12th and 13th centuries and in Venice until the late 18th century. Men, who were chosen randomly, swore an oath that they were not acting under bribes, and then they elected members of the council. Voter and candidate eligibility probably included property owners, councilors, guild members, and perhaps, at times, artisans. The Doge of Venice was determined through a complex process of nomination, voting and sortition. Lot was used in the Venetian system only in order to select members of the committees that served to nominate candidates for the Great Council. A combination of election and lot was used in this multi-stage process. Lot was not used alone to select magistrates, unlike in Florence and Athens. The use of lot to select nominators made it more difficult for political sects to exert power, and discouraged campaigning. By reducing intrigue and power moves within the Great Council, lot maintained cohesiveness among the Venetian nobility, contributing to the stability of this republic. Top magistracies generally still remained in the control of elite families.
Florence – 14th and 15th century Scrutiny was used in Florence for over a century starting in 1328. Nominations and voting together created a pool of candidates from different sectors of the city. The names of these men were deposited into a sack, and a lottery draw determined who would get to be a magistrate. The scrutiny was gradually opened up to minor guilds, reaching the greatest level of Renaissance citizen participation in 1378–1382. In Florence, lot was used to select magistrates and members of the Signoria during republican periods. Florence utilized a combination of lot and scrutiny by the people, set forth by the ordinances of 1328. In 1494, Florence founded a Great Council in the model of Venice. The nominatori were thereafter chosen by lot from among the members of the Great Council, indicating an increase in aristocratic power.
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