Selection by Lot and Democracy: New Trend, Ancient Model
Advances in Historical Studies, 2021, 10, 7-20 https://www.scirp.org/journal/ahs ISSN Online: 2327-0446 ISSN Print: 2327-0438 Selection by Lot and Democracy: New Trend, Ancient Model Ephraim David University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel How to cite this paper: David, E. (2021). Abstract Selection by Lot and Democracy: New Trend, Ancient Model. Advances in Historical Stu- Though considered the most democratic method of allocating citizens to of- dies, 10, 7-20. fice in Classical Greece, sortition (selection by lot) has never been adopted on https://doi.org/10.4236/ahs.2021.101002 a large scale by modern democracies (except for juries) and has fallen into oblivion. Recently, however, some political theorists, motivated by deep dis- Received: January 12, 2021 appointment with current electoral practices, have been advocating a return Accepted: March 5, 2021 Published: March 8, 2021 to sortition without being sufficiently aware of the complexities involved in their ancient Athenian model. This study tries to explain the roots and ideol- Copyright © 2021 by author(s) and ogy of sortition, the ways in which it operated in Athens and the causes of its Scientific Research Publishing Inc. functional success there for almost two centuries. Proposals of returning to a This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution International similar system should pay due attention to the significant role played by elec- License (CC BY 4.0). tions alongside the lottery in Classical Athens and the precautions taken there http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ to prevent possible harm. In my view, the optimal formula for reform would Open Access be a political compromise combining, in one way or another, elections with sortition among volunteering candidates from various quarters of the civic society, selected in due proportions so as to be statistically representative of the demos.
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