

Greek democracy involved comprehensive use of citizens to form policy, choose leaders and make rulings on laws and implementation of laws. 4 Making decisions based upon political expediency.3 Institutional corruption in political parties.2 Modern electioneering and theoretical modern application.The Old Order Amish use a combination of election and sortition to select church leaders men receiving two or three nominations to fill a vacancy (the number varies by district) are then asked to select a psalm book containing a slip of paper, one of those slips being marked to indicate who will take on the burden of the position. A similar system happened with the Dutch Burgerforum Kiesstelsel. In the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Ontario, a group of citizens was randomly selected to create a Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform to investigate and recommend changes to the provinces' electoral systems. Candidates were almost always male, Greek, educated citizens holding a minimum of wealth and status. The Athenian democracy made much use of sortition, with nearly all government offices filled by lottery (of full citizens) rather than by election. More generally, random selection of decision makers from a larger group is known as sortition (from the Latin base for lottery).

According to Australian philosopher John Burnheim, who coined the term demarchy, random selection of policymakers would make it easier for everyday citizens to meaningfully participate, and harder for special interests to corrupt the process. a largely passive, uninvolved and often uninformed electorate.

These groups, sometimes termed "policy juries", "citizens' juries", or "consensus conferences", deliberately make decisions about public policies in much the same way that juries decide criminal cases.ĭemarchy, in theory, could overcome some of the functional problems of conventional representative democracy, which is widely subject to manipulation by special interests and a division between professional policymakers (politicians and lobbyists) vs. Demarchy (or lottocracy) is a form of government in which the state is governed by randomly selected decision makers who have been selected by sortition (lot) from a broadly inclusive pool of eligible citizens.
