Athenian Democracy Picked Most Officials by Lottery, With a Stone Machine Called the Kleroterion

Athenian democracy in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE filled most of its officeholders not by election but by random lottery. Citizens placed their identification tokens (pinakia) in a kleroterion, an upright limestone slab perforated with slots arranged in columns; an attendant poured colored balls — black or white — into a tube on the side, and which color came out determined which row of names won the day's appointments. The system filled juror panels and most magistracies, on the explicit theory that elections favored the well-connected and the wealthy and that a real democracy meant any qualified citizen had to be willing to take a turn. Most Athenian magistracies were one-year terms, you couldn't repeat the same office, and you had to undergo a public audit at the end of your year.

The Athenian model fell out of fashion almost everywhere. The Roman republic preferred elected magistrates. Medieval Florence revived sortition in 1328 with a system called scrutinio, in which qualified candidate names went into a sack and were drawn for office; Venice and several Lombard cities ran similar lotteries through the eighteenth century. The American and French revolutionaries, despite Montesquieu's praise of sortition as "natural to democracy," mostly skipped the idea in favor of elections. Bernard Manin's The Principles of Representative Government (1997) traced the elision in detail.

The modern revival has been quieter and more international. Citizens' assemblies — randomly selected groups of ordinary residents convened to deliberate on a specific policy question — have been used to draft Iceland's 2010 constitutional proposals, advise on Ireland's 2016 vote on abortion, and recommend French climate measures in 2020. The OECD counted nearly 600 such assemblies worldwide as of 2020. None has the binding authority Athens gave them, but the underlying logic is the same.