Selecting our political leaders by lottery seems at first sight to be a harebrained scheme. Leaving to chance who governs the country is surely a crazy idea anywhere in the world.
Or so I thought. However, reflecting on the quality of leadership in the West over the past few years, I’ve now come to the conclusion that the selection of leaders by lottery could hardly be any worse than the present system. Is Donald Trump versus Kamala Harris really the best that the United States can come up with? Were Boris Johnson and Liz Truss really the best candidates to be the United Kingdom’s prime ministers? It’s little wonder that people’s confidence in Western politics and electoral democracy itself is at a low point.
While I can’t imagine anyone seriously suggesting that selecting presidents or prime ministers by lottery would be a sensible solution, there is a case to be made for such a system in the lower ranks of government, where currently, legislators invariably toe the party line. Powerful party machines enforce their members’ loyalty to the party leader, irrespective of those leaders’ fitness for office or the merits of their policies. This is true in all forms of government, democratic or otherwise.
Selecting a proportion of legislators by lottery, rather than by election (in democracies) or by appointment (in meritocracies), would create a new dynamic in politics, reducing party dominance and allowing participants to speak and vote according to their consciences rather than their partisanship. Liberal electoral democracies and meritocratic one-party states could find common ground here in a practice that would strengthen both forms of government by helping to counter the flaws of each. In electoral democracies, contributions from legislators selected by lottery would weaken party domination, counter the prioritizing of short-term political objectives (always eyeing the next election), reduce partisan divisiveness, and prevent the president or prime minister from wielding almost autocratic powers. Similarly, in meritocracies or one-party states, a lottery system would also be beneficial, moderating a party’s tunnel vision and reducing the “echo chamber” effect often experienced in such states by introducing greater representation and broader perspectives.
This may seem like a radical idea, but it is firmly rooted in history. It’s only relatively recently that democracy has become synonymous with elections. Prior to the 19th century, electoral democracy was a rarity, and it wasn’t until the 20th century that universal suffrage became the main characteristic of democracies. Earlier in history, in ancient Athens and medieval Florence, for example, electing leaders was actually seen as distinctly undemocratic, as only wealthy or high-status people could be elected (just think of the US today). So can you guess what system they used to ensure that a wide range of opinions and ideas were garnered? That’s right: They used lotteries. For over 200 years, the ancient Athenians practiced their form of democracy by the random selection of legislators and officials, chosen by lot and permitted to serve for only a limited time. Moreover, anyone who had previously held office was excluded from immediate re-selection. Thus, everyone took turns in the process of government.
Of course, we don’t need to go all the way back to ancient times to see selection by lottery in action. In legal cases, trial by jury is an ancient practice that is still prevalent across the world. The selection of jurors is a random process, chosen by lottery rather than by election or appointment, and is generally acknowledged as an appropriate system by all democratic states.
Given the current disillusion with Western democracies, it’s not surprising that some political analysts are now looking to the lottery approach of the jury system and ancient Athenian government for inspiration. However, referring to a political system as a lottery would have severely negative connotations, which is why the term “sortition” is preferred. It means the same thing — to choose or “sort” by the random use of lots — but is much more politically acceptable.
In many countries, sortition is being promoted, albeit by a minority of political analysts, as a way to reclaim government from the control of powerful political parties and elites. The impressive British social anthropologist Professor Alpa Shah is one such advocate. She writes about sortition as follows: “In a world where money dominates political campaigns, often to manipulate public sentiment for particular interests, where the media is co-opted and focuses on sensation and not substance, and where partisan divides drive policy choices made for political reasons rather than for the common good, it is hardly surprising that people do not believe that elected leaders represent their interests and are searching for such alternatives.”
Sortition is rarely advocated as a complete replacement for either democratic or meritocratic government systems, but as a mechanism to enhance these systems and modify their worst characteristics, especially the alienation of citizens from parties. The idea is not to replace electoral democracy or a one-party meritocracy with a random selection of citizens, but to present a mix of the two systems. For example, this could be achieved through the creation of one legislative chamber by election and one by sortition. In the UK, this was actually mooted to the 1999 Royal Commission on the Reform of the House of Lords, proposing that the lower House of Commons continue as an elected entity, with the upper House of Lords selected through sortition. The proposal was rejected at that time, but may well be resurrected if the Labour Party’s promise to reform the Lords is followed through.
For such a system to be effective, before the random selection of citizens is carried out, the pool of suitable candidates has to be defined. Screening could include a range of criteria such as educational attainment, the lack of criminal record, or simply a willingness to serve. There would also need to be a mechanism to ensure a representative cross-section of the population in terms of age, gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status and regional location. An entity selected in this way would be much more genuinely representative of society than either elected or appointed bodies of partisan career politicians.
In imperial China, the advantages of sortition as an element of government had long been recognized. In the later period of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) and for much of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), a pool of government officials was initially selected through examination and then randomly selected for specific positions. Sortition was thus a means of broadening China’s traditional meritocratic form of government.
Currently, however, it is Belgium that is leading the world in this paradoxically ancient yet innovative approach to politics. On Feb 9, 2023, the Belgian Parliament passed a law allowing “citizens’ assemblies” and “deliberative committees” to be convened. Their purpose is to make politics more participatory by involving citizens in advising Parliament on its political decisions at a national level. This initiative is the first of its kind anywhere in the modern world, allowing ordinary, nonpartisan citizens to be involved in political decision-making. In the first stage of the process, people are randomly selected by sortition and invited to voluntarily participate in either citizens’ assemblies (consisting exclusively of randomly selected citizens) or deliberative committees attached to Parliament (consisting of both members of Parliament and citizens drawn by lot). In the second stage of the process, a final selection is made from the group of willing participants. This reflects the population by age, gender, place of residence and level of education. The citizens’ assemblies or deliberative committees are then tasked with formulating recommendations after deliberating on their respective topics with the help of MPs, experts and representatives of civil society.
Hong Kong, currently a hybrid of democratic and meritocratic government, is ideally placed for developing such a system. Like ancient Athens, its compact size and well-educated population would readily facilitate such a move. Introducing an element of sortition into the Legislative Council would answer the call for greater representation of the people without risking a return to the sort of partisan conflict and obstructionism that previously characterized the legislature. This would establish Hong Kong as a model of modern government, truly representing the people but without the vested interests and divisiveness of warring political parties. Such a system would also reflect Hong Kong’s unique amalgam of Western and Chinese influences, combining democratic values with the nonpartisan Confucian values of harmony and social cohesion. Indeed, this could provide an excellent model of government, not just for the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, but for any place wanting to enhance political participation, reduce partisan division, and ensure that the common good rather than party interests always prevails.
There’s never a magic bullet for creating a perfect governmental system, but the ancient method of sortition has much to offer in enhancing the quality and credibility of both electoral democracies and meritocracies, as well as hybrid systems like that in Hong Kong. The old ideas are often the best and this old idea of broadening political participation is one that needs resurrecting. As the former French general and president Charles de Gaulle once said, “I have come to the conclusion that politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.”
The author is a British historian and former principal of Sha Tin College, an international secondary school in Hong Kong.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
