Lovers of lotteries need some new words.

It may not seem so, given that we’ve already got so many that describe, essentially, the same thing. Mini-publics, civic assemblies, citizens’ assemblies, citizens’ juries, citizens’ panels, citizens’ councils, citizens’ deliberative councils, deliberative polls, deliberative surveys...

If you’re screen-screaming that these are not all the same thing, I hear you (figuratively). And, I confess that, after years of deep interest in the area, I often struggle to remember the differences. Moreover, in my twenty-odd “lots” articles, I have largely avoided the nuanced distinctions to avoid vocabulary vertigo.

All those terms have been used to describe gatherings of participants selected by lots. That is to say, selected by democratic lottery, or sortition, or random sampling, or random selection.

We call a governing system constructed from such assemblies a lottocracy, a demarchy, a stochacracy, or, for classicists not willing to cede the term to electoral systems, a democracy.

Swimming in this polysyllabic sea, you may protest, we can’t possibly need more terminology! I thank you for mentioning syllables. I have listed above only two terms with fewer than four of them.

That, my friends, is an invitation to coin. We need something short. We need words that don’t make people lose interest before we’re finished pronouncing them. We need words that we can speak/type efficiently without jargon. I refuse to call them CAs. We need short words for swag, for calls to action, for bumper stickers that can be read at safe distances. We need them so we can make non-clownish verbs. Who can get behind the citizen-assemblification of American governance? In principle I’m so there, but it’s hard to feel roused to action if you put it that way.

So I submit for your consideration:

rabble (noun)
ˈra-bəl, plural rabbles

• a facilitated deliberative assembly of people selected by lot. I promote rabbles in my hometown.

I got here by playing with acronyms. Maybe, I thought, we could call it a Representative Assembly By Lot (RABL)? Yeah, painful, so just let that be a warty etymological footnote.

But the word rabble grew on me quickly. It has multiple existing definitions that resonate cheekily in our context.

First, a rabble is a disorderly crowd. A mob. It calls to mind the false caricature that American founders used to slander and reject democracy, which they claimed would lead to “mob rule.” This term as a characterization of the democracy of citizen assemblies, with their order, their diligence, and their community spirit rings so hollow it’s funny. It's an insult we can chew up and swallow.

When George Fox, founder of the Society of Friends, bid a judge to “tremble at the word of God,” the judge mocked them, calling them “quakers”. They swallowed the insult, took the name for their community, and shed FOUR syllables in the process. Quakers don't quake, but they do have a sense of humor. They still use the old formal name, of course, just as we can still use all our old terms when they fit. But consider how much better the nickname works as a rallying cry for the Fighting Quakers of Earlham College in Indiana. “Fight, Fight, Inner Light! Kill, Quakers, Kill!” So good. Succinct, saucy, self-deprecating…

Rabble is also used as a condescending term for ordinary people. It conveys contempt for those without power or status. We can all muster the image of an arrogant king lamenting the tedium and mannerlessness of the rabble. Another aristocratic insult; let’s chew it up. We are rabble, hear us roar in our orderly, deliberative, generative way.

Long may the rabble reign.

I’m not suggesting that “rabble” has much self-explanatory power; it doesn’t. For that you’re much better off with “citizens’ assembly”, say. But it’s sticky, and in conversation, it’s much easier to casually mention how, say, one rabble lasted a week, another rabble heard testimony from three speakers, a third rabble took tours of facilities… Every time you say it, you save four syllables by not saying “citizens’ assembly.” And it feels like a thing, not a description of a thing.

Consider how the term helps treat the vocabulary vertigo that makes it so hard to talk about all the different types of mini-publics in casual conversation.

• A soft rabble doesn’t carry any authority, it just takes the public’s temperature. Deliberative polls are soft rabbles. They’re usually one-off consultations not connected to any formal decision-making bodies.
• A hard rabble by contrast, has structural force. The Citizens’ Council in Paris that recently wrote a Citizens’ Bill on homelessness that was passed directly into law – that rabble was pretty hard by today’s standards. (Though a lot of us would like to see rabbles get much harder.)
• A common rabble selects between two and three dozen participants by stratified random sampling. They meet for a week to two months. The majority of the rabbles in the celebrated OECD report, Catching the Deliberative Wave, fall into this category: citizens’ juries, citizens’ panels, planning cells, citizens’ initiative reviews, etc.
• A big rabble has more participants (say 75+?) and meets for longer. If you’re snobby about the term citizens’ assembly, you might note that it originally meant big rabbles, even if today it can mean pretty much any rabble.
• A mega rabble is a really big rabble, like the G1000. It boasts hundreds if not thousands of participants. I’d like to see constitutional conventions held as mega rabbles.

We could go on like this for quite a while. A mini rabble is small. A web rabble is online. A face rabble is in person. A job rabble is one that’s tasked with hiring or nominating someone to a post (also known as election by jury).

And you can mix and match. An online deliberative poll is a soft web rabble. An in-person citizen’s assembly with only twelve or so participants is a mini face rabble. If that rabble is legally empowered to nominate someone to a post, it becomes a hard mini face job rabble. That’s… probably taking things too far. But you already get it and will probably remember most of these terms tomorrow.

And it’s so good for verbing. We can rabble (convene a rabble). We can rabblify (convert an existing assembly to a rabble). We can rabblize (transition towards a rabble-based system).

I’m ready to rabblize America. Any other rabblers roused?