Yves Sintomer

Electoral democracies are struggling. Sintomer, in this instructive book, argues for democratic innovations. One such innovation is using random selection to create citizen bodies with advisory or decisional political power. 'Sortition' has a long political history. Coupled with elections, it has represented an important yet often neglected dimension of Republican and democratic government, and has been reintroduced in the Global North, China and Mexico. The Government of Chance explores why sortation is returning, how it is coupled with deliberation, and why randomly selected 'minipublics' and citizens' assemblies are flourishing. Relying on a growing international and interdisciplinary literature, Sintomer provides the first systematic and theoretical reconstruction of the government of chance from Athens to the present. At what conditions can it be rational? What lessons can be drawn from history? The Government of Chance therefore clarifies the democratic imaginaries at stake: deliberative, antipolitical, and radical, making a plaidoyer for the latter.

The article discusses the lessons to be learned from Claudia Moatti’s Res publica. Histoire romaine de la chose publique from a political science perspective. The first part focuses on the conceptual method. Against positivist uses of language and perspectives that essentialise concepts, history which takes contexts and semantic variations seriously is crucial. This semantic multiplicity must, in turn, be understood as political. Although the oscillations of the expression res publica require analyses focusing on the short term, the long term and the comparative perspectives imply conversely to identify ideal-types. The second part of the article analyses the contemporary interpretations of the republic, and the uses of the word. The different terms inherited from res publica have lost their political centrality, with two important exceptions: on the one hand, political theory and the history of ideas that claim to be republican; on the other hand, the French political-intellectual sphere. In both cases, the “republic” at stake is closer to the second ideal-type identified by Moatti, which emphasises unity and consensus, and considers res publica firstly as a public power. Contemporary supporters of the first ideal-type, which promotes collective action, revolt, active citizenship and the diversity of the commonwealth, tend to abandon the term republic and turn to different ones, especially democracy.

After two centuries during which it had nearly disappeared in Western countries, sortition is used again as a method of selecting people who could speak for, and in certain cases decide for, all the citizenry. What is the meaning of this comeback? To answer this question, this book offers a historical analysis. It brings together a number of the best specialists on political sortition from antiquity to contemporary experiments, in Europe but also in the Ancient Middle East and in imperial China. With a transdisciplinary perspective, this volume demonstrates that sortition has been a crucial device in political history; that the instruments and places where sortition was practised matter for the understanding of the social and political logics at stake; and that these logics have been quite different, random selection being sometimes an instrument of radical democracy and in other contexts a tool for solving conflicts among elites. Will sortition in politics helps to democratize democracy in the twenty-first century?

A contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Antipolitics,” this article examines the diverse types of imaginary that support sortition, which is currently at the heart of important debates on the reform of existing democratic institutions. Different and often diametrically opposed actors now advocate sortition as a tool for addressing crises of political representation. How are we to understand this convergence? Over the past two decades, the field of experience and the horizon of expectation of citizens in the global North have profoundly changed, and this article seeks to assess those changes in the context of three ideal types that advocate the use of randomly selected minipublics. This article analyzes, each in turn, the attraction of sortition for supporters and theorists of deliberative democracy, antipolitical democracy, and radical democracy, outlining the elements that unite and divide these imaginaries to help explain the astonishing convergence of voices in defense of sortition in politics.

¿Cuáles han sido las funciones de la utilización política del sorteo en la República de Florencia y qué tipo de relación tiene con la deliberación? ¿Por qué este mecanismo vuelve a aparecer, en las últimas décadas, en muchos dispositivos de deliberación? La invención del representante muestra una diferencia decisiva entre el uso antiguo y moderno de la selección al azar. Manteniendo una función de imparcialidad, su lógico pasado de autogobierno republicano, donde cada ciudadano era gobernante y gobernado a la vez, a la democracia deliberativa, donde un mini-público representativo habla por el pueblo. A través de esta comparación histórica, se puede comprender mejor los experimentos reales de deliberación y destacar los diversos desafíos que hay que encarar.

This article defends four claims. The first is that in the last few decades, two waves of democratic innovation based on random selection must be differentiated by their partly different concrete devices, embodying different social dynamics and pointing toward different kinds of democracy. The second claim is that the rationale of the first wave, based on randomly selected minipublics, largely differs from the dynamic of political sortition in Athens, as it points toward deliberative democracy rather than radical democracy. Conversely, empowered sortition processes that have emerged during the second wave capture better the spirit of radical Athenian democratic traditions. The third claim is normative: these empowered sortition processes are more promising for a real democratization of democracy. The last claim is that any proposal of a legislature by lot must rely on this lesson when trying to defend a normatively convincing and politically realistic perspective.

La selección por sorteo ha tenido un renacimiento político, permitiendo la creación de mini-públicos cuyos miembros pueden deliberar en condiciones cercanas a las ideales. ¿Hay un resurgir parcial del ideal de la democracia radical ateniense? El artículo, en primer lugar, resume el papel de la selección por sorteo en Atenas, enfatizando su lógica democrática radical y destacando su singularidad en el mundo pre-moderno. El segundo apartado argumenta que los experimentos actuales suponen una racionalidad política sustancialmente diferente, basada en la muestra representativa, y ofrece una tipología general de los distintos usos del sorteo político. La conclusión expone las condiciones bajo las cuales los mini-públicos deliberativos contemporáneos podrían combinarse con la democracia radical.