The Luck of the Draw – Sortition and Public Policy

Keith Sutherland (Exeter, Imprint Academic): Imprint Academic’s new book series on political lotteries and citizen juries is launched this week. The series is our response to the growing sense that the institutions of liberal party democracy are damaged beyond repair.

The 1997 election was a watershed as it was quite obvious that Labour was prepared to say anything in order to win power. From then on political parties would no longer ‘represent’ anything other than the whims of a few thousand swing voters in key marginals, leaving everybody else, in effect, disenfranchised.

David Cameron’s postmodern ‘Conservative’ party has demonstrated that the 1997 revolution is irreversible. According to a poll in Grazia more women now want to see David Cameron prime minister because they admire his stylish wife and would fancy marrying him. As 25-45 year old women are key floating voters, perhaps the anti-suffragettes had a point after all.

The books in this series propose sortition (the selection of citizens for public office by lot) as a corrective to this idiocy. The lead title, Oliver Dowlen’s The Political Potential of Sortition, has just won the annual prize for political theory from the Political Studies Association. The book is a groundbreaking survey of the use of the lot in polities as diverse as Ancient Athens, Renaissance Italy and the early American colonies. This book will appeal to a wide readership, whereas Conall Boyle’s new edition of Thomas Gataker’s 1627 Nature and Use of Lots will be primarily of interest to historians and political theorists.

Of greater interest to activists will be the new edition of Anthony Barnett and Peter Carty’s The Athenian Option: Radical Reform for the House of Lords. Although this was originally published in 1998, the new edition includes the media and Royal Commission reaction as well as an extended commentary on the Government’s new green paper on Lords reform.

My own book, A People’s Parliament, takes a more radical view. The problem is the Commons, not the Lords, and the last thing we want is to reform the one chamber of parliament that Burke might still have described as a ‘deliberative assembly of one nation’. If you want to see which chamber is broke then all you need to do is to compare and contrast the debate over the Prevention of Terrorism Bill. My proposal is to select the members of the voting chamber (the Commons) by lot, leaving a residual role for the political party in the chamber of informed advocacy (the Lords). The book is printed back to back with Callenbach and Phillips’ parallel proposal for the US House of Representatives, A Citizen Legislature.

Excerpts, search-inside-the-book and Our Kingdom discount prices at www.imprint-academic.com/ourkingdom