Democratic Lotteries: Should Organizational Decision-Makers Consider Decision-Making by Chance?

Authors contributed equally and are listed alphabetically by surname.

“If you think I’m crazy, you should say ‘Malcolm, you’re crazy!’’’
— Malcolm Gladwell (2020, 1:36)

Malcolm Gladwell, the journalist, podcaster, and best-selling author, was accompanied by democracy activist Adam Cronkright as they arrived at the Gothic campus of the Lawrenceville School in Princeton, New Jersey.^[1] They were excited for the meeting scheduled that afternoon with 20 of the school’s junior and senior high school students—including the elected student council representatives—where they planned to pitch the students the ancient but resurging idea of democratic lotteries (or stratified random selection). Gladwell and Cronkright were there to sell the students on the idea of ending student council elections in favour of representation by random chance, a switch Cronkright had already successfully convinced several schools in Bolivia to implement.

Gladwell was fascinated by Cronkright’s work on reforming the student government selection process through the non-profit organization he co-founded, Democracy in Practice.^[2] Cronkright argued that the standard student government selection process—where a few “popular, charismatic, and ambitious students”^[3] stood for election to represent the student body—was flawed and could be greatly improved. By the end of the afternoon, Cronkright aimed to convince the Lawrenceville students that “a lottery is a fairer and better way to form a school’s student government than elections.”^[4] Gladwell had invited Cronkright to make his pitch to the Lawrenceville students because he was curious to see if the radical-seeming idea could get support at an American school. When presented with the choice of selecting its student government by election or by chance, which model would the Lawrenceville students choose? Gladwell and Cronkright were prepared for a lively debate. They planned to measure the impact of the debate using a pre- and post-debate evaluation by students about their level of satisfaction with their current election system. Would the pair convince the students that a democratic lottery was indeed more democratic than elections, or would the students think the lottery proposal was just plain wrong? What would they think of other potential applications of lotteries, like the contentious topic of the college admissions process? Or would they say, “Malcolm, you’re crazy!”?^[5]

Gladwell’s Podcast Revisionist History

Revisionist History (RH) was Gladwell’s podcast about topics overlooked and misunderstood. While best known as a best-selling author and podcaster, Gladwell was also the president and co-founder of Pushkin Industries (Pushkin), an audio production company founded in 2018 and headquartered in New York City.^[6] He and Jacob Weisberg had founded the company to pursue new ideas they were curious about and wanted to try. As an employer with a staff of almost 50 and nearly 30 podcast hosts, Gladwell wondered whether the notion of democratic lotteries could have important implications for workplace organizations like his. Plenty of organizations used elections to select those who would represent a group (e.g., committee representatives, union representatives, group leaders, competition winners). As the use of lotteries for citizens’ assemblies increased around the world, more people would learn about the problems with elections and the benefits of lotteries. Gladwell knew that if democratic lotteries became more accepted and popular in the political sphere, the process would be proposed in workplace organizations like Pushkin. To Gladwell’s pride, “diversity [was] at the heart of [Pushkin’s] culture, alongside intellectual openness, respect, fairness, and ethical behavior.”^[7] If any company might be open to the idea of making decisions via lottery it would be his, he thought. But could he honestly see a day when any decisions at a workplace like Pushkin would ever be made by lottery and essentially left to chance? If not, would any of his busy estimated 1.1 million^[8]  listeners actually care about this unconventional idea?

Gladwell Contemplates a “Decision by Lottery” Episode

On the surface, the idea certainly seemed unorthodox: making selection decisions about such topics as representatives on citizens’ assemblies or student councils and scientific grant award winners via lottery instead of by the usual democratic election process we all expected. Other applications of lotteries include admission to the New York City Marathon, allocation of affordable housing, and admission to charter schools.^[9] After Gladwell’s preparation research and his discussion with Cronkright, however, he wasn’t so sure if it was as unrealistic as it initially seemed. Perhaps there was more merit and wider potential applicability to this idea than he had originally recognized—merit that his podcast listeners should know about. In fact, driving home that afternoon, he found himself thinking, “Maybe this idea could change a lot about what’s wrong with the world right now.”^[10] Specifically, Gladwell thought that lotteries could greatly contribute not only to increasing equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) within social institutions, but also to overcoming the perceptual and cognitive biases inherent in the election process, which together could increase the fairness of organizational decision-making. Perhaps his podcast listeners would be interested in learning about this uncommon decision-making system? For instance, Gladwell knew that half of podcast listeners worked full time,^[11] so if he did an episode on democratic lotteries, they could end up being discussed in a wide range of workplaces. Did those organizations and contemporary society at large need to consider and debate a radical new idea like putting chance in charge? Perhaps more importantly, did people need to be schooled in the downsides of the election process in order to have their minds opened to a seemingly unorthodox idea?

Democratic Lotteries

While the formal name was “sortition,” the process of selecting representatives through a lottery was commonly called a democratic lottery, civic lottery, or random selection. The basic idea was that instead of using elections to select representatives by voting from among the few who had chosen to stand for election, representatives would be picked via lottery from the entire student body—minus individuals who had chosen to opt out. Further, the lottery could include an algorithm that would help to ensure both democratic equality and population representation.^[12]

In the first democracy in ancient Athens, sortition rather than election was the dominant model for enacting democracy by lot,^[13] and was used to select legislative, council, and public administration jobs.^[14] Elections were used only for positions requiring highly specialized skills such as finance or military leaders.^[15] Consequently, many seminal political thinkers from ancient times through to the 18th century—including Aristotle, Rousseau, and Montesquieu—considered elections an aristocratic rather than democratic model because they were used to selecting only from the elite rather than from the common members of society.^[16] When representatives were needed on behalf of the general population, they were chosen by lot for a limited term and released from duty upon the term’s expiry to be replaced by those chosen in the subsequent lot.

Since the 1990s, the idea of democratic lotteries had grown in popularity.^[17] In part, this phenomenon was viewed as a response to the ways in which the electoral democratic process could fail, including (but not limited to) vote splitting, re-election incentives, party line voting, lobbying, high election costs, self-interested voting, and voter ignorance. Through advocacy work by organizations like the Sortition Foundation,^[18], Of By For*,^[19] Citizens’ Assemblies,^[20] Healthy Democracy,^[21] and openDemocracy,^[22] the lottery model for selecting representatives had been adopted and replaced elections in a wide range of contexts—including local, regional, and national councils, as well as civil society organizations and academic institutions^[23]—and in many countries around the world including the United States, Canada, Scotland, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Norway, Estonia, Denmark, Mongolia, Japan, South Korea, Macao, Australia, and across Western Europe.^[24] Several books had been written on the topic as a way to revive citizen engagement, and the authors had given accompanying TED talks.^[25] Most recently, lotteries had been used to compose citizens’ assemblies to address the COVID-19 pandemic in several areas, including the states of Michigan and Oregon.^[26] It seemed that after a two-hundred-year hiatus, the two-and-a-half-millennium-old idea of democratic lotteries was back.

Adam Cronkright

One of the proponents of democratic lotteries helping to support their comeback was Adam Cronkright. Since the Lawrenceville students all knew Gladwell, Cronkright introduced himself. He had grown up in upstate New York outside of Syracuse and studied Economics and Global Development Studies at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada.^[27] Ever civic-minded, he graduated during the global financial crisis and found himself drawn to the Occupy Wall Street movement that emerged in the fall of 2011. After arriving in Manhattan, Cronkright became deeply involved in the protests, including co-writing the “spokes council” proposal^[28] and, “co-facilitating two sessions of the occupation’s General Assembly.”^[29] There he met a water activist from Bolivia who invited him to Cochabamba after Occupy ended. Finding himself without a plan when Occupy was disbanded, Cronkright decided to go. Once there, through a friend he met Oscar Olivera, a former industrial metal worker turned water activist and director of a local non-profit organization interested in “alternative participatory and democratic processes.”^[30] Cronkright was discussing concerns about representative democracy with Olivera when he mentioned learning about sortition while at Queen’s University. Olivera was intrigued and, being well-connected with the local community, suggested the two of them test the model at two area schools. As Cronkright saw it, student governments in schools were great testing grounds to try out the sortition model and compare its impact to elections.

Limitations of Elections

To convince the schools, Cronkright had to make a strong argument against student elections. He recapped to the Lawrenceville students the arguments he had used. Cronkright explained to the students how his education and experiences had led him to believe that the way we selected leaders using an election process was flawed. He argued that the same issues he saw with elections in other domains like government were also true in schools, perhaps even more so.

One of the key issues with elections was that very few people put themselves forward to run, so the range of choices voters had was very limited. Many people who would be interested in serving in a role were not interested in going through the process of running—especially if they thought their chance of success was low—and so their potential contributions remained latent. As there were no other mechanisms by which they could serve, many people simply disengaged. As Gladwell put it, “elections are supposed to encourage participation, but they don’t.”^[31] Consequently, those people never got the opportunity to contribute or to build the skills, experience, and connections that benefited elected representatives. Democracy in Practice therefore argued that “elections undermine leadership and civic development, and violate widely held educational values such as fairness and equal opportunity.”^[32] As Cronkright put it, “We wouldn’t use a popularity contest to decide which few students get to learn math or history, so why are we doing this with leadership and civics?”^[33]

Second, the set of people who chose to run were those who were comfortable with the campaign process and thought they had a good chance of success. They were people who were popular, confident, and comfortable performing activities like giving speeches to a crowd. In short, they were the people others perceived to have the characteristics of a good leader. But Cronkright didn’t see much evidence that the people who got elected based on those characteristics did in fact make the best leaders. Didn’t some of the opposite characteristics make for effective leaders, such as the ability to listen to others, to learn from others, and to make necessary but unpopular decisions in the best interests of all? Instead, those who got elected were usually concerned about getting re-elected. Why did everybody believe that only the kind of people who won the election popularity contests would make the best representatives? As Cronkright argued to the Lawrenceville students, since representatives were never selected any other way, they actually didn’t know whether that was true. As Gladwell explained, “The mechanism we are using for predicting who will be a good leader is just flawed.”^[34] He went on to say that the problem was the false belief that people could make good predictions: “Elections are based on the idea that voters are good predictors—that they can look at a slate of candidates and accurately predict who will be the most effective leader.”^[35]

Lastly, Cronkright observed that the set of elected representatives rarely reflected the diversity of the population it was charged with representing. People who succeeded in the election game tended to be disproportionally from the most socially privileged members of society: male, white, wealthy, heterosexual, cisgender, able-bodied, etc. Although this was changing in some parts of the world and more diverse representatives were successfully being elected, most elected bodies still did not look much like their constituent populations. Many argued this was in part because of ongoing biases resulting in low support for diverse candidates, but also because fewer diverse people were willing to stand for election since the experience was riskier and often negative. For all these reasons, Cronkright was unconvinced that elections resulted in the best possible representation for many populations, including school students.

Democracy in Practice Puts Sortition to the Test

With all these questions in mind, in 2013 Cronkright and two colleagues, Bolivian Raul Olivera Pereira and Canadian Simon Pek, founded Democracy in Practice to put sortition to the test.^[36] The non-profit focused on “reinventing student government”^[37] and described itself as being “part of a growing movement of democratic innovation that is challenging traditional approaches to governance all around the world.”^[38]

By 2014, they had recruited two schools in Cochabamba that were willing to implement democratic lotteries to select student government representatives.^[39] The test schools were quite different. School A was a rural elementary school and School B was an urban evening high school. Both schools initially had student representation based on election to specific hierarchical roles for a full-year term. In both cases, the student government mandate was to advocate for student interests, and to plan and implement decisions relating to those interests, such as events and programs.

Under the new lottery model, students were randomly selected using stratified sampling so that representatives were evenly distributed across grades and genders. Students served their term and then the new lottery winners rotated in to replace them. School administrators did not have a veto over representatives, but as always could choose whether or not to support student council decisions and initiatives. Rather than being slotted into traditional hierarchical roles (e.g., president, vice-president), the system had a horizontal or flat organization structure where “students can work together as a team of equals.”^[40] Democracy in Practice volunteers helped support student councils through the transition as requested but had no formal authority whatsoever.^[41]

The Benefits of Sortition in Schools

The Democracy in Practice group expanded its work to two more schools and found that by contrast, democratic lotteries had a lot of advantages over elections despite the fact that they remained much less common. To summarize their findings, the group outlined a set of seven specific reasons why schools in particular should use lotteries over elections, based on their experiences in Bolivia.^[42]

Lotteries were fairer because every student who wanted to participate had an equal chance at the opportunity. This reinforced the message that every student mattered and had the potential to contribute.

Lotteries increased diversity because they drew from a wider range of students than those who stood for election. Lotteries therefore produced better descriptively representative bodies where the demographics of the representatives better reflected the overall student population.^[43]

Lotteries increased interest in student government because they were a more direct and participatory form. Students did not have to be afraid of being rejected by their peers since not getting a spot was simply bad luck. The lottery format transformed student government to a more psychologically safe activity for many students.

The random nature of lotteries and the fact that everyone had a stake in the outcome, with nobody being rejected by their peers, made lotteries more fun and less stressful for students than elections. Moreover, the random mix of lottery winners brought about a new set of relationships and potential friendships between students who may not otherwise have met.

The group’s peer-reviewed research suggested that both students and teachers broadly preferred lotteries to elections.^[44]

Cronkright argued that schools had a responsibility to be leaders of innovation, especially with respect to student governance. If there was a better way to get students engaged with their school than elections, schools had a duty to pursue options that reduced student apathy and disengagement and maximized student development.

With support from organizations that promoted sortition, the switch from elections to lotteries was easy and came at little or no cost. Democracy in Practice published a how-to guide for schools that wanted to learn how to make the switch.^[45]

Sortition had also been shown to have many of the same benefits in domains beyond school governments, including greater fairness and equality, better descriptive representation, and more direct participation. Beyond student government, the sortition model was also shown to improve the quality of public decision-making, to inhibit corruption, to be less socially divisive, and to be more resource efficient because the time and money spent on campaigns and elections was not required.^[46]

Using Sortition for Research Funding

While preparing for the Lawrenceville debate, Gladwell had researched other applications of democratic lotteries beyond schools and citizens’ assemblies. “After being schooled by Adam, I began to see versions of his logic everywhere,”Gladwell explained,^[47] and he researched other ways people were applying this idea. In addition to the civic and education applications, Gladwell’s background research had uncovered another proposed application beyond schools and politics: awarding scientific grant recipients.

Members of the biomedical scientific community funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) had called for sortition—or a modified lottery model—to replace the current peer review rating system that allocates scientific grants. The proposal was a two-step process whereby grant applications would be first subject to a peer review process as usual to eliminate unmeritorious projects, a step intended to prevent limited funds from being spent on unworthy projects. Projects that were deemed worthy would then be selected by lottery so that all meritorious research proposals were given an equal chance of being funded.^[48] In the context of grant funding selection, sortition was seen as a potential solution to the problems in the existing peer review process. Specifically, the peer review process was notoriously unreliable where the level of agreement between reviewers about the merit of proposals was often low. Moreover, the evidence suggested that reviewer bias “has a major influence on funding decisions.”^[49] Lastly, in discussion with Michael Lauer, the NIH deputy director for extramural research, Gladwell had learned that peer review scores on funding applications were not correlated with future citations of that research,^[50] suggesting that even expert grant reviewers were not good at predicting which researchers’ work would be successful. To Gladwell, this counter-intuitive finding was another example of Cronkright’s argument that voters—or in this case reviewers—were bad at predicting who would be successful.

Concerns and Criticisms About Sortition

There are concerns about the sortition model’s perceived legitimacy.^[51] Key among them was the charge that capable and talented individuals often missed the chance to serve and had to leave the job to those less able, leading to “inherent amateurism.” This situation frustrated those with ability and represented a loss to the group of what they could have contributed. Next, critics argued that those selected by lottery felt less responsibility or accountability to serve than those who were elected because the random winners were less committed to the public good, and because winners did not face re-election where their previous performance was judged. Critics also argued that the benefits of the process of election campaigns were lost, such as the chance to educate or gauge the support of the electorate. Lastly, one of the biggest criticisms and the key barrier to reform was the fact that lotteries had much lower perceived legitimacy among the public than elections.^[52]

In response to such criticisms, supporters of sortition argued that it was similar to the random process by which juries of peers were selected. Peer juries are also inherently amateur and yet were trusted to make decisions of guilt about the most injurious crimes in society. Evidence from juries suggested that members took their service responsibilities seriously. Moreover, the jury system enjoyed a high degree of legitimacy in part because of the random selection of members, which helped prevent corruption and reduce bias. Overall, supporters of sortition argued that the jury system showed that similar concerns about democratic lotteries could be overcome.

The Lawrenceville School

After making their case to the Lawrenceville students, Gladwell stopped and said, “I know what you’re thinking. It’s Bolivia. What works for teenagers in Cochabamba doesn’t necessarily work for the rest of us—apples and oranges and all that.”^[53] Indeed, the Lawrenceville School in Princeton New Jersey was half a world away from the schools in Cochabamba, Bolivia in more ways than one. Firstly, it was a private high school for grades 9 through 12 where roughly two thirds of students boarded.^[54] The American students represented 32 states and the international students came from 37 other countries or territories.^[55] The school boasted a low student-teacher ratio, small class sizes, a wide range of academic departments, and a full slate of athletic teams. Founded in 1810, the school was situated on a 700-acre, leafy campus with top-notch facilities, including a library, a stadium, facilities for multiple sports, a dozen laboratories, two recital halls, a proscenium theatre, a 24-acre farm, three greenhouses, and 18 dormitories.^[56] To most, it resembled a prestigious college rather than a high school, complete with expensive tuition and a nine-figure endowment fund. Lawrenceville aimed to be a place that “challenges a diverse community of promising young people to lead lives of learning, integrity, and high purpose. Our mission is to inspire the best in each to seek the best for all.”^[57] Many of the school’s graduates went on to attend world class universities, and the school was proud of its long list of notable alumni. Could a system that worked well in Bolivian public schools work well here too?

The student representatives at Lawrenceville were selected in the traditional way using elections to specific roles. During their visit, Gladwell and Cronkright observed that the current elected representatives—at least those in the top roles—were indeed the typical “performers” who were comfortable speaking in front of the entire school. In fact, the current student body president had gained notoriety and votes by rapping his campaign speech! While Gladwell and Cronkright were very impressed with the elected students, they wondered whether the same three main downsides to student elections happened at Lawrenceville too: few students would run, those who did would mostly be the popular types, and those elected would overrepresent the student population in some ways and underrepresent it in others. Why should only some kinds of students get the chance to serve the student body? If Gladwell and Cronkright could convince the school to switch to a lottery, all 832 students who wanted a chance to serve in student government would get an equal opportunity to do so.^[58]

During the discussion, a student named Summer suggested a hybrid model that blended the election and lottery systems whereby candidates for positions went through a qualification round first before becoming eligible for the lottery. Under “the Summer proposal,” students who wished to participate would first put forth evidence of their ability to bring value to the role in question, and all students who passed that test would then be included in the lottery for each role. The idea behind the Summer proposal was that students would be assured that the person selected for important roles like school president were in fact able to do the job effectively. This kind of two-step qualification process had the benefit of ensuring unqualified people didn’t end up in important jobs, and that among those who were qualified, each person would have equal opportunity to get it.

Is Sortition Relevant to Revisionist History Listeners?

Having found surprising support for sortition in several domains, Gladwell turned his thoughts to his RH listeners. In presenting stories about topics that were overlooked or misunderstood, he always tried to make his listeners see why the issue should matter to them. But was this just a novel concept limited to niche applications, or might there be broader potential applications in society? For instance, he knew that for most of his listeners, the organizations that most deeply impacted their lives were their workplaces. Could democratic lotteries be used effectively at work? Gladwell reasoned that many of the arguments in support of sortition could well apply to workplaces because many of the problems it was designed to address were also concerns at work; for example, that people who do reviews are subject to biases, that most of us are bad at predicting who or what will be successful, that choice for leadership positions is subject to a limited candidate pool often made up of similar candidates, and that the diversity of leaders continued to underrepresent overall diversity within organizations.

Lawrenceville Students Must Decide: Status Quo or Reform?

Gladwell loved to make people think twice about controversial ideas like this. He had started the discussion with the students by saying, “Now I know [it] sounds like a crazy idea. You wouldn’t go for that, would you? Or would you?”^[59] Having spent the afternoon in discussion with the students, Gladwell and Cronkright eventually rested their case. It was time for the students to render their verdict. Gladwell told the students that he was once again going to ask them to rate their happiness with their current election system on a scale of 1 to 10 (with 1 being total dissatisfaction and 10 being total satisfaction). Before he did, though, they needed to decide at what level the evaluations needed to be in order for the group to show support for lotteries over elections. Together they decided that an average post-debate rating of under 6.0 would mean that the lottery system had won sufficient support, and they may want to rethink their current election system. Gladwell then asked the Lawrenceville students to complete the post-debate rating of their happiness with their current election system. He collected their ratings on slips of paper and indicated that he would calculate the average when he got home. Glancing briefly as he collected the slips, Gladwell noticed that many of the post-debate ratings of the election system were a lot lower than the pre-debate ones. Before he left, he promised the students he would tell them the official results as soon as possible. Whatever the outcome, he stressed, the next steps would be up to them.

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How to cite this case: Risavy, S. D. & Woodwark, M. J. (2024). Democratic lotteries: Should organizational decision-makers consider decision-making by chance? Open Access Teaching Case Journal, 2(2). https://doi.org/10.58067/943a-3q11

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