What if We Selected our Leaders by Lottery? Democracy by Sortition, Liberal Elections and Communist Revolutionaries

Abstract

What if we selected our leaders by lottery? Zooming out from the mud huts of indigenous communities in the forested hills of eastern India, this article compares three different models of leadership and democracy: liberal electoral democracy; Marxist-Leninist Maoist democracy; and democracy by sortition -the random selection of rotating leaders. The significance of sortition is introduced into discussions of democracy in India (showing connections with practices in Nepal and China) as part of a broader attempt to make scholarship on South Asia more democratic. The author also re-reads ideals of leadership among indigenous people, showing that we need a theoretical and practical vision arguing not for societies without leaders but for societies in which everyone may be a leader. In India, this compels us to push back against the critique of its indigenous communities for not producing leaders and enables a profound re-reading of the history of subaltern anti-colonial rebellions. The final aim of the article is to highlight the virtues of the potential of sortition in creating democratic society globally. How we think about democracy and leadership is thus turned on its head to provide a new vision for the future. Now the average CIO bureaucrat or Labor Member of Parliament in Britain would fall in a fit if it was suggested to him that any worker selected at random could do the work that he is doing, but that was precisely the guiding principle of Greek Democracy. And this form of government is the government under which flourished the greatest civilization the world has ever known.C.L.R. James (1956) 'Every Cook Can Govern' For David Graeber, who showered us with mountains of giftsThis article is an expanded version of the lecture delivered at the Development Studies Association Conference, which was held online, 17-19 June 2020. The ideas it contains are also shared as the inaugural David Graeber Memorial Lecture delivered by the author in May 2021.

The remoteness of democratic representation

“…Recent citizen mobilizations against social and economic inequality in Chile, which have resulted in a new constituent assembly, may portend emerging trends. It is even possible that forward-looking reformers may push for radical representative designs, such as electing a quotient of representatives by lot (or sortition) from a pool of qualified citizens (Landemore, 2013; Shah, 2021).…”

Sortition and its Principles: Evaluation of the Selection Processes of Citizens’ Assemblies

“…These theoretical concepts are to some extent reflected in practice. Although often-mentioned examples of using sortition in a political system are ancient Athens and renaissance Italian city-states (Dowlen 2008;Sintomer 2010), random selection of authorities can also be found today in some indigenous communities in India (Shah 2021). Moreover, the concept of random selection in decision-making has been implemented in modern Western societies as well, because participatory and deliberative processes based on random selection began to be organised in various countries in the second half of the twentieth century (Escobar & Elstub 2017;OECD 2020).…”

Enhancing Voting Security and Efficiency

“…Voting, in its most fundamental sense, is a means to express choice or preference from an array of options. It forms the backbone of democratic processes worldwide, deciding the leaders the populace entrusts with power [1,2]. This fundamental democratic process has undergone various transformations throughout history, from traditional paper ballots to more advanced Electronic voting machines (EVMs).…”