The Lottery That Was Democracy

In ancient Athens a citizen who wanted public office could not simply stand for election, and that was the point. Most posts were filled by lottery. The Council of 500, which prepared the business of the Assembly, was drawn by lot from citizens over thirty, each member served for one year, and no one could serve more than twice in a lifetime. Large juries were chosen the same way.

Aristotle, who studied such systems at close range, stated the consequence plainly in the Politics. Appointment by lot, he wrote, belongs to democracy, while appointment by election belongs to oligarchy. The modern reader finds this backwards, yet the logic is simple. Elections favour the known, the wealthy and the eloquent. A lottery gives every citizen the same chance and prevents anyone from building a career out of rule.

The Athenians took the fairness of the draw seriously enough to engineer it. In the Agora they used a stone allotment machine, the kleroterion, in which citizens slotted bronze identity tickets into columns and a tube of black and white balls decided which rows were chosen. The device made the outcome visible to everyone and removed any chance that a magistrate could quietly favour a friend.

The architects of modern republics understood the difference. In Federalist 10 James Madison separated a republic from a pure democracy and argued that representation would refine public opinion by passing it through a chosen body of citizens. The political scientist Bernard Manin later argued that elections were adopted partly because they were expected to select distinguished people. The word democracy was attached afterwards to a system that its ancient inventors would have placed in a different category.

The word democracy was attached afterwards to a system that its ancient inventors would have placed in a different category.

Defenders of elections reply that a lottery would put incompetents in charge, and that Athens was no model, since it excluded women, slaves and foreign residents. The second point is plainly true. The first is only partly true. Athenians scrutinised officeholders before they began, audited them when their terms ended, and elected the posts that demanded skill, such as the ten generals. The lottery was not blind trust. It was a deliberate design for the offices where fairness mattered more than talent.

The idea has begun to return. In 2016 Ireland convened a Citizens' Assembly of ninety nine people chosen at random to deliberate on questions that included abortion. Its recommendations helped shape the referendum of 2018. The members were not famous and had no campaign to run, and many observers noted that they listened to evidence more patiently than professional politicians usually do.

If a lottery treats citizens as equals and an election treats them as judges of talent, the two practices rest on different ideas of what equality means. Which of them the word democracy promises is a question that voting cannot settle, because voting is the very practice in dispute.