Sortition

In governance, sortition is the selection of public officials or jurors at random, i.e. by lottery, in order to obtain a representative sample.

In ancient Athenian democracy, sortition was the traditional and primary method for appointing political officials, and its use was regarded as a principal characteristic of democracy. Sortition is often classified as a method for both direct democracy and deliberative democracy.

Today sortition is commonly used to select prospective jurors in common-law systems. What has changed in recent years is the increased number of citizen groups with political advisory power, along with calls for making sortition more consequential than elections, as it was in Athens, Venice, and Florence.