Call For Papers

Call for Papers

Little more than a decade ago the word ‘sortition’ (random selection by lot) went largely unrecognised in social science and humanities departments, other than classics. Fast forward to 2023 and a Google search for (randomly-selected) ‘citizens’ assembly’ generates over 200 million results. What is responsible for this remarkable turn-around?

Although most of the recent activist and media focus has been on the political potential of sortition, much of the ground-breaking scholarship dealt with social justice. The pioneering sortition literature discusses random allocation of scarce goods such as social housing and school places to eliminate bias and ensure just distribution. For example, in 2003 one London medical school allocated limited places among suitably qualified candidates randomly. Drawing lots in circumstances where ‘tragic choices’ are involved has been advocated because some situations are beyond rational human decision-making.

Moving beyond social justice, the theme of Oliver Dowlen’s Political Potential of Sortition (2008) is how the ‘blind break’ of the lottery can constrain the power of appointment. In this way the arational is used purposefully and rationally to break up concentrations of power and help to protect the political system from corruption and factionalism. Peter Stone’s Luck of the Draw (2011) extended this ‘lottery principle’ to decision making in general. Both Dowlen and Stone, in different ways, could be said to have developed Immanuel Kant’s idea that the first task of reason is to recognize its own limitations. Paradoxically, there are many situations in which tossing a coin may be the most rational thing to do.

The selection of political officials by lot, a procedure largely ignored since the eighteenth century, has undergone a recent revival, as reformers search for new innovations to re-invigorate democracy. There are many possible approaches to this subject. Dowlen and Stone’s focus on arationality suggests that lotteries can protect democracies by shielding the selection of officeholders from corruption and venality. By way of contrast, many sortition innovations (such as James Fishkin’s deliberative polls) presuppose that a randomly-selected minipublic will embody the ratio of politically-salient characteristics in the population that it represents. The claim is based on developments in public opinion polling using random sampling. This idea raises both theoretical issues (e.g., what is the significance of obtaining such a random sample?) and practical considerations (how can a truly accurate sample be attained?) that require further exploration.

A parallel focus – going back to Aristotle, but recently popularised by James Surowiecki and developed further by Hélène Landemore – is on the ‘wisdom of crowds’ and ‘collective wisdom’, There is now a considerable theoretical, experimental, and empirical literature on the ways in which large randomly-selected assemblies can reach ‘wise’ decisions, and much hard-won experience on the ways they can go wrong (e.g. via information cascades). This literature has generated much interest in the problem of structuring assemblies (in terms of briefing materials, expert witnesses, moderators, etc.) to ensure collective wisdom, although all of these generate problems of their own. Who guards the guardians?

The Journal of Sortition is dedicated to the exploration of all aspects of sortition, particularly (but not necessarily) as a contribution to democratic reform. The journal welcomes contributions from all sides of the debate – including sceptical voices. Above all, it seeks to clarify the role of sortition in public life, in full recognition of both its virtues and its limitations.

The development work on sortition was enhanced by the 2008-2012 Tirage au Sort workshop series at Sciences Po in Paris, and this will be the home of the Journal of Sortition, under the editorship of CEVIPOF Senior Research Fellow, Gil Delannoi. It will be published in Exeter, UK by Imprint Academic, alongside the book series Sortition and Public Policy (edited by Barbara Goodwin), and the journal History of Political Thought (edited by Janet Coleman and Iain Hampsher-Monk). All submissions will be peer reviewed.

Submissions and enquiries to jos@imprint.co.uk

Please see the PDF of our Call For Papers here:Call For Papers PDF