Could sortition help to address voter apathy and public distrust in politics?

The theme of the 2024 General Election was meant to be change. Apart from the end of the chaotic Conservative government and its replacement by a Labour one, the course seems to have been stayed in many ways. Labour is pursuing austerity measures similar to those carried out by the Conservatives, and seems to have become mired in scandal, notably over freebies such as football and concert tickets. And Starmer has abandoned many positions which he endorsed as a Labour leadership candidate now that he is Prime Minister.

The 2024 General Election proved to be one of the most disproportionate in UK history. Voter turnout fell below 60%, Labour won over 400 seats with a lower share of the vote than they won at the two previous elections, and the two major parties won their lowest combined vote share since 1918. Such election outcomes and such behaviour by politicians have brought public trust in politics to record lows. This and resulting voter apathy can create a negative feedback loop where lower turnout can diminish the legitimacy of decision-making, leading to great distrust in politics.

We Liberal Democrats believe that proportional representation is the best answer to resolving not only the distortive outcomes of First Past the Post, but also negative and alienating behaviours by politicians which it encourages. However, with political parties facing a record low level of public trust at 12%, a possibly entrenched section of the population may believe that all parties are equally bad, or that no party truly reflects their values even under an electoral system that would make the votes count.

Sortition, or democracy by lottery, was originally used in Ancient Athens to elect magistrates to governing committees and juries. It is now used to form juries to deliberate in criminal trials in common law systems. By advocating for the calling of citizens’ assemblies to deliberate on such issues as Lords reform and climate change, we Liberal Democrats endorse a form of sortition. Could sortition be used to address the issues of low public trust and voter turnout?

Parliamentary and pluralistic representative democracy is a core Liberal Democrat principle. Most modern proposals involving sortition radically propose eliminating legislative assemblies, parties, states and bureaucracies. In line with the hosting of citizens’ assemblies, sortition as a means of selecting legislators should be employed supplementarily to ameliorate the consequences of low voter turnout.

How voter turnout would determine the number of legislators selected via sortition would depend on the electoral system. In 2024, if voter apathy counted as a candidate, it would have won 611 out of 650 seats under the terms of FPTP. While clearly demonstrative of its distortive consequences, most Britons are unlikely to tolerate such an outcome. Instead, if an absolute majority of voters in a constituency abstaining mandated the selection of an MP via sortition, such a procedure would have been triggered in sixty constituencies in 2024, most of which were safe seats.

For a proportional system, however, sortition MP could represent the non-voting part of the electorate at large, as proposed by Michael Donovan. Using the 2024 election as an example, if the 650 elected MPs represented the 60% of the electorate who voted, the other 40% would be represented by approximately 430 legislators selected at random. As with a system like Mixed Member Proportional, which uses overhang seats, the number of elected MPs would need to be reduced to comfortably accommodate randomly selected members.

Other than the technicalities of sortition, a major area of concern would be the impact upon the members it would select. After all, under the circumstances described previously, someone may be more likely to be randomly selected as an MP than they are to win the lottery.

Parliamentary candidates have the desire to stand for election and to serve in Parliament; members selected by sortition would need to serve whether they wanted to or not. Sortition is currently used for selecting members of short serving, narrowly interested bodies such as citizens’ assemblies and juries; MPs selected under this system would need to consider a wide range of topics for a full parliamentary term. Parliamentary candidates are usually vetted; no such process can be undertaken with sortition. MPs usually have clear party affiliations; would MPs selected through sortition serve as independents, or would they choose an affiliation after their selection?

Public disillusionment with politics is the fault of a distortive voting system, and the bad behaviours of some elected representatives. We should be working towards improving our political culture. Therefore, would it be fair to unexpectedly saddle someone, anyone, with the responsibilities of a lawmaker and a community champion?

* Samuel James Jackson is the Chair of the Policy Committee of the Yorkshire and the Humber Liberal Democrats and had served as the Liberal Democratic candidate in Halifax during the 2024 general election.

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8 Comments

  • Helen Dudden 28th Oct '24 - 11:05am

    In one scandal is becoming normal. We can all list the failures easily. I just have been commenting for a housing sector magazine. The Decent Home got lost and even simple remedies for damp and mould like dehumidifiers not suggested.
    If we really want to apply progression on the reduction of pollution then one step at a time.
    I can agree with modular builds like after the war how people loved the new temporary homes.
    The scandals have produced a situation that will be difficult to reverse.

  • Steve Trevethan 28th Oct '24 - 12:08pm

    Thank you for a thought provoking article!

    Might a system of government cease to be a democracy when it fails its people in its processes and its outputs?

    The House of Commons is inefficient and loutish.

    Political donations are, at best, questionable.

    Food banks have increased in number from too few to read off a block graph in 2008/9 to over 300,000 in 2023/4.

    “In 2023 the number of UK children in food poverty nearly doubled in the last year to almost 4 million.” [The Guardian]

    In 2023 at least 271,000 people, including 123,000 children were homeless in England.

    Might we be not a democracy but an oligarchy with elections of questionable validity?

  • David Le Grice 28th Oct '24 - 4:33pm

    The biggest problem is how much of a democratic mandate randomly selected MPs could be said to have, and indeed what could be done if they made decisions people were unhappy with. Under FPTP the simple solution is to show up and vote if you don’t like what they do, under pr it’s probably that turnout will never be high enough to eliminate them.

    Perhaps if we had mandatory voting we could simply have sortition as an option on the ballot paper and this would provide a clear mandate and under STV at least it’s likely there won’t always be enough votes to elect such members.

  • Mark Frankel 29th Oct '24 - 7:49am

    Sortition works for Citizens Councils but is too much of a stretch for Parliament.

  • Sandy Walkington 29th Oct '24 - 9:37am

    I have long argued (including at party conference) that sortition should be used to choose the second chamber

  • Micki Taylor 29th Oct '24 - 10:29am

    Voter apathy has little to do with voting systems, although FPTP is the worst voting system and does discourage some voters. Apathy is caused by people not believing that any candidate wants to or can change anything. We LibDems added to that apathy because in 2010 we promised one thing and did another after saying we wanted a different type of politics.
    Voters think that voting changes nothing and whilst STV (current party policy) would give voters a lot of control over WHO was elected, it would only change political outcomes of the people elected actually did what they promised. Our Liberal colleagues in Luxembourg promised legalisation of same sex marriage, legalisation of cannabis, free public transport, then delivered it and got re-elected. The Conservative Prime Minister in Greece, Mitsoutakis, delivered his promised manifesto (an unbelievable rarity in Greek politics) and was promptly re-elected at the next election, even though he is personally not very much liked. The solution to apathy is only partly about voting systems, important thought they are. Delivering promised outcomes (as Labour are so far conspicuously failing to do) will do much more to get people voting that mucking about with systems that many electors would find incomprehensible.

  • Jenny Barnes 30th Oct '24 - 7:19am

    No matter who you vote for, the government always gets in.

  • Peter Hirst 5th Nov '24 - 2:38pm

    My understanding of random selection in a political context is that each drawn person would decide whether to participate. The selection would proceed until the required number was reached. There is no point in involving people who don’t want to take part.

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