Sortition, rotation and mandate: conditions for political equality and deliberative reasoning

Owen, David and Smith, Graham (2018) Sortition, rotation and mandate: conditions for political equality and deliberative reasoning. Politics and Society, 46 (3), 419-434. (doi:10.1177/0032329218789892).

Record type: Article

Abstract

The proposal to create a chamber selected by sortition would extend this democratic procedure into the legislative branch of government. However, there are good reasons to believe that, as currently conceived by John Gastil and Erik Olin Wright, the proposal will fail to realize sufficiently two fundamental democratic goods, namely political equality and deliberative reasoning. Through analysis of its historic and contemporary application, we argue that sortition needs to be combined with other institutional devices, in particular rotation of membership and limited mandate, in order to be democratically effective and to realize political equality and deliberative reasoning. We conclude with an alternative proposal for a responsive sortition legislature that we believe to be more realistic and utopian: one that increases substantially the number of members, makes more extensive use of internal sortition and rotation and recognizes the importance of establishing limited mandates.

Text

Owen and Smith Circumstances of sortition revised final - Accepted Manuscript

Available under License University of Southampton Accepted Manuscript Licence.

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