Daniel Leighton (London, Power Inquiry): For anyone thinking about how to involve ‘ordinary citizens’ in political decision making, Bettany Hughes’ TV documentary on Athenian democracy provides good food for thought. After seeing part one I want to alert people to the case for adding selection by lot to our own government. Part two goes out tomorrow, Saturday. It may not be easily digestible for moderns obsessed with elections as the alpha and omega of democracy. As Hughes reminded us, the Athenians opted for lotteries over elections as their primary method for appointing people to political offices. In the modern world elections are seen as the defining characteristic of democracies. In that part of the ancient world elections were seen as an aristocratic device. Although the Athenians used elections for a small minority of public offices, particularly for military and financial posts, lottery was considered the method that embodied the principle of political equality. Allotment spread the work of administration into the citizen body, engaging them in the crucial democratic experience of, to use Aristotle's words, "ruling and being ruled in turn".
Of course, Hughes, who seeks to show the “grit as well the glory” of ancient Athens, reminds us that the Athenian experiment in direct popular self-rule was premised on a slave economy and an exclusively male citizenship. For some this is enough to consign the Athenian polis and it's ideals to the history books. But modern voting in Britain also began when there was slavery and all women (and most men) were excluded. In the rush to dismiss direct democracy as unworkable in complex nation states, we so often miss the Athenians tenacious attempts to manage power fairly in their everyday political practice. My personal highlight of the programme was getting sight of the remnants of a kleroterion - the Flintsone-esque random selection machine that the Athenians used to pick jurors and magistrates.
Contrary to those that counterpose ‘representative’ against ‘direct’ democracy, the Athenian selection process combined randomness and frequent rotation of office within a system of representation that drew equally from the ten tribes into which the population was subdivided. It was representative as well as random, a point made by Anthony Barnett and Peter Carty in their Demos pamphlet on the House of Lords The Athenian Option (currently unavailable). Whatever the undesirable aspects of the Athenian experience, the positive lesson for today’s democrats is that the fair management of power requires a mixed ecology of mechanisms and processes. Selection by lot has survived in the form of the modern jury. Now the notion that people should be selected at random for the making of political decisions has resurfaced in the work of Jim Fishkin at Stanford and in major way with the British Columbia Citizens Assembly on electoral reform. The Canadian experiment shows that the tools for managing power crafted by the ancient Athenians can be dusted off and put to good democratic use in the 21st century. The problem, it seems, is that in our system it is the only elected that carry the keys to the democratic toolbox and I suspect they are in no hurry to unlock this particular padlock.
