Sortition as anti-corruption: popular oversight against elite capture
Random selection for political office—or “sortition”—is increasingly seen as a promising tool for democratic renewal. Critics worry, however, that replacing elected and appointed officials with randomly selected citizens would only exacerbate elite manipulation of political processes. This article a...
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| Format: | Journal article |
| Language: | English |
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Wiley
2022
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| _version_ | 1797112353777516544 |
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| author | Bagg, S |
| author_facet | Bagg, S |
| author_sort | Bagg, S |
| collection | OXFORD |
| description | Random selection for political office—or “sortition”—is increasingly seen as a promising tool for democratic renewal. Critics worry, however, that replacing elected and appointed officials with randomly selected citizens would only exacerbate elite manipulation of political processes. This article argues that sortition can contribute to democratic renewal, but that its genuine promise is obscured by the excessive ambition and misplaced focus of prevailing models. Casting random selection as a route to accurate representation of the popular will, most contemporary proposals require randomly selected citizens to perform legislative tasks, whose open-endedness grants substantial discretion to elite agenda setters and facilitators. The real democratic promise of sortition-based reforms, I argue, lies in obstructing elite capture at critical junctures: a narrower task of oversight that creates fewer opportunities for elite manipulation. In such contexts, the benefits of empowering ordinary people—resulting from their immunity to certain distorting influences on career officials—plausibly outweigh the risks.
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| first_indexed | 2024-03-07T08:23:01Z |
| format | Journal article |
| id | oxford-uuid:4c005649-e132-416b-a5a2-d2ae3a789a09 |
| institution | University of Oxford |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-03-07T08:23:01Z |
| publishDate | 2022 |
| publisher | Wiley |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | oxford-uuid:4c005649-e132-416b-a5a2-d2ae3a789a092024-02-08T08:07:06ZSortition as anti-corruption: popular oversight against elite captureJournal articlehttp://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_dcae04bcuuid:4c005649-e132-416b-a5a2-d2ae3a789a09EnglishSymplectic ElementsWiley2022Bagg, SRandom selection for political office—or “sortition”—is increasingly seen as a promising tool for democratic renewal. Critics worry, however, that replacing elected and appointed officials with randomly selected citizens would only exacerbate elite manipulation of political processes. This article argues that sortition can contribute to democratic renewal, but that its genuine promise is obscured by the excessive ambition and misplaced focus of prevailing models. Casting random selection as a route to accurate representation of the popular will, most contemporary proposals require randomly selected citizens to perform legislative tasks, whose open-endedness grants substantial discretion to elite agenda setters and facilitators. The real democratic promise of sortition-based reforms, I argue, lies in obstructing elite capture at critical junctures: a narrower task of oversight that creates fewer opportunities for elite manipulation. In such contexts, the benefits of empowering ordinary people—resulting from their immunity to certain distorting influences on career officials—plausibly outweigh the risks. |
| spellingShingle | Bagg, S Sortition as anti-corruption: popular oversight against elite capture |
| title | Sortition as anti-corruption: popular oversight against elite capture |
| title_full | Sortition as anti-corruption: popular oversight against elite capture |
| title_fullStr | Sortition as anti-corruption: popular oversight against elite capture |
| title_full_unstemmed | Sortition as anti-corruption: popular oversight against elite capture |
| title_short | Sortition as anti-corruption: popular oversight against elite capture |
| title_sort | sortition as anti corruption popular oversight against elite capture |
| work_keys_str_mv | AT baggs sortitionasanticorruptionpopularoversightagainstelitecapture |