About the Sortition Working Group
What are citizen juries, and how can they help revilitize democracy? In the days before the Fall 2021 Hannah Arendt Center Conference on Revitalizing Democracy, researchers from the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory in Belgrade led a workshop on Sortition- the method of choosing government representatives by lottery rather than elections. After participating in the workshop, scholars then attended the two-day Conference. This working group is a collaboration between the Hannah Arendt Humanities Network and the Laboratory for Active Citizenship at the Institute.
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What is Sortition
Sortition is the use of randomly selected citizen assemblies to advise legislators or make legislation. Around the world, citizen assemblies of randomly selected participants are meeting to discuss and decide upon important political controversies. This is not an abstract issue. In the past few years citizens assemblies have grown in popularity in what has been called a “deliberative wave.” Initiatives such as the Irish assembly on abortion, the French national climate assembly, and the model East Belgium assembly have served as crucial examples. Then, on October 14th, Paris announced the creation of a permanent citizens assembly of 100 Parisians, which will have the following powers:- draft laws, which then go to the city council for debate and a vote
- request the drafting of scrutiny reports on an issue
- raise questions at city council meetings
- set the topics of the Paris participatory budget
- put at least one issue per year on their agenda themselves
The Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory has been holding Citizen Assemblies in Belgrade on topics such as increasing traffic mobility. They recently published a study, “Participatory and Deliberative Democracy: Citizens’ Assembly and the Organization of Traffic Mobility in Belgrade”.
