A Critique of Electoral Fundamentalism through the Sortition Mechanism: The Democratic Proposals of Burnheim and Goodwin Seen from a Utopian Perspective
Abstract
Sortition has for a long time been considered as an important democratizing mechanism in political theory. It was first practiced in Athens in the early 5th century BCE. However, sortition fell into disuse during the development of modern representative democracy, replaced by ballot box elections, a phenomenon which some authors labelled as “electoral fundamentalism”. The objective of this article is to present, compare, and evaluate two so-called utopian proposals for democracy by lottery, offered by John Burnheim and Barbara Goodwin. The task at hand is to analyze their validity and limitations, as well as to consider their potential for improving today’s representative democracies.
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