I'm glad the Wikipedia summary ends with this line:
Today, sortition is commonly used to select prospective jurors in common law-based legal systems and is sometimes used in forming citizen groups with political advisory power (citizens' juries or citizens' assemblies).
People reading this are likely familiar with the use of sortition in jury selection. What is probably the single most well know thing about sitting on a jury?
It sucks. It's somehow boring and stressful at the same time, and the pay is very much token. Therefore, most people try to get out of it, with varying degrees of success. People have gone as far as not registering to vote in order to avoid jury duty. This is specifically why voter rolls are not used for that in many places.
The corollary to this is that juries aren't actually a random sample: people getting out of jury duty obviously causes selection effects. If the sample is not random, you lose a lot of the theoretical advantages of sortition. Unless we take strong steps to make sitting in a legislative body not suck, I see no reason it would be any better there.
I mean - ruling should suck. It shouldn't be an attractive position. Our rulers should be those that want to do good for the people, not because it is a comfy gig with lots of fame and de facto billionaire status.
If you want rulers to be selected on the basis of ambitions to do good for the people, eliminating any form of popular approval in favour of random selection is highly unlikely to be your best choice.
And the more uncomfortable you make it not to opt-out, the more you'll select for people who've figured out a strategy to benefit from all that power despite the lack of officially sanctioned perks.
Sortition only works if you can't opt out. It'd need to be a civic duty, as it was in ancient Athens. Clearly it should also be made to not suck, i.e. short terms, adequate pay, and layoff protection. But it really needs to be an actual representative selection of citizens or you're just doing very shitty voting.
(Also: see on other thread about using sortition for the non-voter part of an electoral system.)
I'd be fine serving on a jury were it not for the fact that I wouldn't get paid my regular salary. It's no coincidence that the ranks usually get filled up with the unemployed and retired.
Today, sortition is commonly used to select prospective jurors in common law-based legal systems and is sometimes used in forming citizen groups with political advisory power (citizens' juries or citizens' assemblies).
People reading this are likely familiar with the use of sortition in jury selection. What is probably the single most well know thing about sitting on a jury?
It sucks. It's somehow boring and stressful at the same time, and the pay is very much token. Therefore, most people try to get out of it, with varying degrees of success. People have gone as far as not registering to vote in order to avoid jury duty. This is specifically why voter rolls are not used for that in many places.
The corollary to this is that juries aren't actually a random sample: people getting out of jury duty obviously causes selection effects. If the sample is not random, you lose a lot of the theoretical advantages of sortition. Unless we take strong steps to make sitting in a legislative body not suck, I see no reason it would be any better there.