The Political Potential of Sortition: A study of the random selection of citizens for public office Oliver Dowlen 300 pp., £30 / $58, 978-1845401375 (cloth), August 2008 Series: Sortition and Public Policy Search Inside the Book at Amazon.com Search Inside the Book at Amazon.co.uk order your copy

Sortition, also known as allotment, is an equal-chance method of selection by some form of lottery such as drawing coloured pebbles from a bag. It is used particularly to allot decision makers. In Ancient Athenian democracy sortition was the primary method for appointing officials, a system that was thought to be one of the principal characteristics of democracy. It is today commonly used to select jurors in Anglo-Saxon based legal systems.

The central feature of every true lottery is that all rational evaluation is deliberately excluded. Once this principle is grasped, Dowlen argues, we can begin to understand exactly what benefits sortition can bring to the political community – primarily a powerful weapon against corruption and factionalism.

This book includes a study of the use of sortition in ancient Athens and in late medieval and renaissance Italy. It also includes commentary on the contributions to sortition made by Machiavelli, Guicciardini, Harrington and Paine; an account of the history of the randomly-selected jury; and new research into lesser-known examples from England, America and revolutionary France.

“Following in the footsteps of Jorge Luis Borges and Barbara Goodwin, Oliver Dowlen makes a powerful case for a greatly increased use of the lottery (sortition) in selecting citizens for public office. Although some National Lottery funds are redistributed by local bodies on a lottery basis the originally ancient Athenian democratic principle for filling most – not all – public offices has never been seriously tried in a Western democracy since. If we take Dowlen as well as courage in our hands, this may change, for the better.”
Paul Cartledge, Professor of Greek History, University of Cambridge

The DPhil thesis on which this book was based was joint recipient of the Sir Ernest Barker Prize in Political Theory for 2007 from the Political Studies Association.

“Dowlen addresses a somewhat neglected topic – the use of lot to allocate political office.  He provides a fresh and careful theoretical analysis of its functions and worth and traces these through a series of historical case studies, drawing on contemporary materials.”
PSA Sir Ernest Barker Prize panel