Sortition, or democratic assembly by lottery, has massive potential to transform the world for the better: less partisan warfare, more and deeper deliberation, less corruption, more thoughtful engagement with experts, less performance, more representation, less angst and anger, more civic love...

So, generally speaking, the more experiments with civic assemblies, the better. But some ideas about how to embed sortition into government sound like lazy hacks of the old code. Many have suggested that we replace existing legislatures with parliaments selected by lot. The US House of Representatives, for example, could be replaced with a House of Citizens.

If we’re rethinking things, we need to question the old design more deeply. Do we really need to put a few people in charge of everything? Does it really make sense to empower one or two bodies to make all the decisions about all legislation for huge populations for years at a time?

For one thing, this fails the democracy sniff test in many of the same ways our current system does. If the same people are making all the decisions all the time, these people eventually cease to be the people and become the powerful. A representative oligarchy is still an oligarchy. And given time, these lottery-winning oligarchs would likely fall into many familiar traps: dividing into factions, horse trading, and generally succumbing to the seductions of power. A true democracy, unlike the aristocratic electoral systems that have co-opted the term, distributes power broadly.

Such lazy designs risk poor outcomes that could give sortition a bad rep. Worse, they waste a vital opportunity: the chance to structure ourselves to meet the complexity of the day. The world is only getting more complicated, and there are countless decisions to be made about how we want to govern ourselves. Do we really think a Senate of a hundred people, elected or not, can comprehend it all? When skeptics wonder whether random citizens can reason deeply about policy, the obvious reframe is this: can our current national elected officials possibly grapple with every single issue that they’re deciding upon?

There is little reason to believe they can or do. Few legislators maintain a pretense of having read the bills they vote for or against. They’re quite good at performing an understanding of the issues at hand, but given that the issues at hand can span very nearly the entire reach of human experience, it is preposterous to think they have their heads around it all.

(Yes, by the way, the answer is yes, everyday citizens can tackle challenging issues of an appropriate size, so long as they are given time and resources appropriate to the task. See juries, deliberative polls, and hundreds of citizens’ assemblies where the quality of deliberation puts the US Senate, still somehow styling itself The World’s Greatest Deliberative Body, to abject shame.)

Congress has extremely limited attention capacity and knows it. That’s why it has already delegated enormous policy-making responsibility to executive branch agencies. That’s why the so-called “muzzle velocity” approach so easily overwhelms it. Hard issues get shelved. Bills get rushed. Agendas get emaciated. Even if Congress were more compelled towards earnest deliberation than partisan squabbling – and they obviously are not – they simply don’t have the collective mental capacity to weigh everything we need them to weigh. No single group does.

We’d like to think that all national policy is thoughtfully considered by people who, by some limited definition of the word, represent us, but it just isn’t. And if we hand all decision-making authority to one or two all-powerful legislative bodies, it never will be. There’s not enough time for Congress to ponder the scope of the impacts of their decisions, even without all the fundraising and campaigning and peacocking.

A wiser, less hacky, design would break up the work, and not just into congressional committees. It would ask a few at a time to weigh a manageable set of problems and solutions. We’d all chip in by dividing the work of self-governance into right-sized chunks.

Among the many thinkers out there proposing thoughtful sortition solutions (Alex Guerrero, Helene Landemore, John Gastil, etc), none has done more to lead the charge of thoughtful redesign than Terry Bouricius.

His new book Democracy Without Politicians (which you can download for free) makes elegant arguments against electoral systems, bringing together a wealth of psychological and sociological research about politicians and voters. He discusses (in far more dispassionate terms than I’ll offer here) how elections select for big egos and then further inflate them. He discusses how the voters we chastise for ignorance have heavy disincentives against researching their choices. A long-time Vermont legislator and self-styled “recovering politician,” Bouricius conveys in lived stories the direct path from electoral misrepresentation to perverse policy.

But even more exciting than his take downs of elections are his proposals to take up sortition. If not like Congress-by-lot, what would a sortition-based democracy look like?

Bouricius starts with the assumption that there is no single optimal assembly design. Larger bodies are more fully representative but more cumbersome than small ones. Longer-term bodies can tackle more complex issues but demand more of citizens’ time. Mandatory bodies can use simple lotteries and avoid the traps of complex “stratification” schemes, but voluntary participants are more engaged. There are, in short, trade offs.

One solution might be to split the difference in search of the best possible compromise: medium-sized, medium-termed bodies that are heavily incentivized but not mandatory. Bouricius’ solution is better. His core idea is not to design the perfect assembly, but to design a system of assemblies of different sizes and durations and purposes. No single assembly is tremendously powerful, but together they give everyday people genuine authority over their own governance. Assemblies are the metabolizing cells of democracy, and by combining them cleverly we can bring the body politic to life.

Bouricius, the erstwhile legislator, focuses heavily on legislative bodies, and his assembly system features far richer checks and balances than the Congress we know and loathe. The folks who write a bill proposal, for example, are different from those who approve it. The proposing group works a lot like typical civic assemblies: sortition, learning, group deliberation, etc. He suggests these assemblies should be fairly large, with 150 or so participants selected through a stratification process. And because taking part in such an assembly takes a lot of time and commitment – too much to force people to do – participation is voluntary.

Based on the remarkable performance of civic assemblies to dates, we’d expect these groups to produce high-quality proposals. Civic assemblies have reliably yielded extremely high quality deliberation, far better than popularly elected bodies. They’re more willing to learn and listen to each other and work towards consensus. But, as Bouricius counterpoints out, such rich deliberation opens a potential door for groupthink and information cascades. In essence, a compulsion towards consensus can sometimes limit thoughtful dissent. It can be hard to imagine in our current political environment, but there is such a thing as too much agreement. And this can be particularly concerning if the assembly’s groupthink wanders too far away from the thinking of the general populace.

To address this concern, Bouricius proposes policy juries. These are also mini-publics, selected by lot, but they work quite differently. Because the task just to reach a thumbs up or down on formal proposals – not to produce new ones – jury service is comparatively short, perhaps just a day or two. About 500 jurors are chosen via pure sortition and are required to serve. More importantly, there is no group deliberation. Instead, the jury is presented with the law proposed by the group deliberators and given equal-length arguments in favor of and opposed to the proposal. Participants do deliberate, just not socially; they are given time and resources to deliberate individually.

The proposing group uses group deliberation to access collective intelligence. The approving group uses independent thinking to access the wisdom of crowds.

Different sizes, different durations, different deliberative practices, different participants, different tasks… These are real checks and balances. Meanwhile no deference to party leadership, no platform commitments, no donor relationships, no campaign promises, no individual meetings with lobbyists. This is real democracy.

Who, you might ask, chooses the agenda? Who sets the rules? Who oversees the process? Who coordinates across panels? In Bouricius’s system, the answer is almost always a group of citizens selected by democratic lottery. (His book’s subtitle is Government By the People, and he means it.)

An Agenda Council sets the agenda and initiates the legislative process for specific issues. A Rules Council sets the process policy for all the other bodies. There’s an Oversight Council, a Coordination Council…. There will be individuals with some degree of authority appointed by these councils, but ultimately, there is no man behind the curtain pulling all the strings. Much as in Ancient Athens, the people are genuinely in power.

A genuinely democratic, wise democratic design like this is only possible if we’re willing to muster a drop of audacity and really rethink how we do things.

Democracy Without Politicians offers excellent democratic design ideas, but not just that. It offers design principles, building blocks, rationales, pitfalls, patterns, and possibilities. It brings you into the design process and invites you to consider a world where we have a completely different relationship with our government and our neighbors.

The takeaway is not that Bouricius has offered us democracy’s final solution, it’s that he has shown us just how much creativity is possible in the architecture of our governance if we manage to get ourselves unstuck from the thinking that what we have is just what democracy is. So shall it be.

It isn’t. And no the hell it shan’t.