What is a Democratic Lottery?
A democratic lottery, also called a sortition, is a way of selecting a group of people from a population that is:
- random: people are selected to participate by chance;
- inclusive: everyone has a chance of being selected, and the lottery is run a way that includes people who might normally be excluded;
- representative: the set of people who are selected are representative of the population from which they were drawn.
How does it work?
Imagine that we wish to run a democratic lottery to select 50 people from the population of a particular area to participate in a citizens’ assembly. The lottery would normally have several stages:
Invitation to register: People from the area are invited to register their interest in participating in the assembly. Invitations can go out in different ways:
- By post: letters are sent to randomly selected addresses;
- By door knocking: a team goes out to randomly selected streets to speak to people at their home;
- By email: messages are sent to people already on a database.
Registering details: People who receive an invitation and want to register can do so online, via a webpage, or via a phone call. When they sign up we ask them to tell us some information about themselves: their name and contact details, as well as information like age, gender, ethnicity and so on.
Setting targets: The people who register their interest are self selecting and this means that they tend not to accurately represent the population from which they are drawn (for instance, we tend to get higher numbers of older people and well-educated people registering their interest, compared with the overall population). To correct this skewing we set targets for things like age, gender and educational attainment.
We use census data to set these targets: e.g. if 27% of the population of Sortonia is aged between 16 and 29, we would aim to have 27% of our assembly members aged between 16 and 29. Since 27% of 50 is 13.5, we would set a minimum target of 13 and a maximum target of 14 for this age group.
Doing the selection: Once the registration period has closed, we might hope to have 200 or more people who have registered their interest. We then use some special software to randomly select 50 people in such a way that all of our targets are met.
Confirmation calls: We then ring each of the selected people to check that they are still willing and able to participate. Normally at this stage, a small number of people (perhaps 10%) will drop out.
Replacements: If anyone does drop out we use the special software to replace them in such a way that our targets are still satisfied.
Further reading
- You can read about some case studies.
- You can step through an animation of the process.
Invitation to register interest
Why and how do we send out an invitation to register interest?
The selection
What is a selection?
Confirming participation
How do we confirm participation for selected people?