Archive
A heavy head after Turkish election night
Well, I admit it, I can’t stop thinking about the latest episode of Turkish Election Night. That promising new story-line of David vs Goliath, how could anyone resist? And the plot twists! Goliath sneaking out distracting numbers to put his opponent’s aim off. A sharp new personage surging onto the stage as a co-combatant. And then Goliath beating the odds and coming out on top.
That ending seems unlikely to change in a run-off vote on 28 May. Challenger Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, who took 45 per cent of Sunday’s vote, will be hard pushed to catch up with the incumbent, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who led with 49 per cent and looks sure to pick up much of surprise kingmaker Sinan Oğan’s 5 per cent.
Perhaps a different result might have meant profound shifts in domestic and foreign policies, as the New York Times opined. For the Economist, it was “a chance to restore democratic rule, and a path to economic stability”, with the fate of relations with Russia, the judiciary and the central bank all in the balance. At the very least, it would have been good to see a prisoner of conscience like persecuted businessman Osman Kavala walk free.
Now we’ll probably never know. My head the morning after was weighed down by the realisation that Turkey’s stance on all these real dilemmas was riding not just on a narrow majority but also on just one day’s vote that will not be repeated for another five years. And the question: why would any country, business or organisation that wanted to be flexible and innovative allow its decision-making process fall into an iron trap like this?
Choices have long-term consequences. As Turkish Professor Murat Somer argues, the country has been charging toward an autocratic, untransparent model of centralised decision making since a narrow majority of Turks approved a presidential system in a 2017 referendum. “The current authoritarian constitution and ruling style has not been consolidated yet but if the current government wins … it’ll be hard to get back to democracy. Autocracy could last a long time,” he said.
In short, I felt like I’d been hitting my head against a brick wall and expected a different result. The same old political map emerged: inland Anatolia and the Black Sea coast voted pro-Islamic and conservative (that is, for Mr. Erdoğan); the coast and some the biggest cities voted secular and progressive; and the mainly Kurdish southeast voted for Mr. Kılıçdaroğlu for president and for their mainly Kurdish party for parliament.
But the prevailing injustice remains: one half of Turkey has got to choose what happens next, and for five years national decisions will continue to be made more or less whatever the other half thinks. (Since the opposition is a much more equal coalition committed to re-introduce a parliamentary system, it’s fair to assume that it plans less of a one-person show, but in principle the same applies to them). The many municipalities in opposition hands will struggle to get funds and stay out of legal trouble. Meanwhile the common ground of consensus and good sense are undermined as the system increases Turkish nationalists’ undue influence on the right, as it does Kurdish nationalists on the left.
The incumbent’s victory surprised even the markets and on Monday morning the Turkish lira dropped five per cent against the dollar. The workers who are half-way through rebuilding the roof of my Turkish home from home failed to turn up, knocked out by spending the night watching the results come in and in one case driving half way across Turkey to vote.
Now the whole country of 85 million people faces two more weeks of paralysing drama until the 28 May run-off. Polarisation will proceed apace as President Erdoğan is forced even further to the right to ensure victory, while progressives, left with no prospect of a say in government, will doubtless become more pointed in their opposition.
Voting is obligatory and well-managed in Turkey – with only one or two reports of violence at polling stations – and Sunday’s 88 per cent turnout puts many Western states in the shade. But whichever side wins, it is hard to see how stability, motivation and progress will be well served by a centralised presidential system in which half of the population is angry, frustrated and feels unable to have its voice heard.
This is the same divisive majoritarian logic that gave Turkey its presidential system in 2017 with just 51 per cent of the vote. Similarly, this logic gave Europe the 2016 UK referendum on Brexit (which left 48 per cent of the British population seething and impotent for an indefinite future outside the EU) or the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence (in which 44 per cent of the Scots were left frustrated inside the UK for another generation). There is also the razor-thin margin which will doubtless decide between a Republican and a Democrat candidate in the U.S. in 2024, driving ever-deeper divisions between Americans who would mostly be able to agree on many things.
It’s not just in Turkey that people are gravitating to authoritarian alternatives (as long as autocrat reflects their political preference, of course). Pew Research Centre finds that a median of 51 per cent of people in 27 countries are dissatisfied with their country’s democratic performance, and a median 52 per cent of people in 17 advanced economies think their systems need major change.
Why then should elections continue to be the exemplar of how we choose who runs human affairs? In the conversations I’ve been having in my nearby market town in southern Turkey (described before the elections here), people are definitely split down the middle in their preferences between the candidates on offer. But at the same time, it is clear that most of them want broadly the same things: rule of law, predictability, jobs, schools and municipal efficiency.
In Turkey, polls generally show that people may dislike politicians, but they still trust the country’s institutions (see my pre-election piece in Politico about Turkey’s ‘battle of the centuries’). Experiments in my favourite alternative or complement to elections – sortition-based democracy, that is, groups of randomly selected citizens informing themselves about a topic, deliberating and then deciding in the public interest – are spreading fast in Europe, and from the Philippines to Mexico. Could they work in Turkey too? Perhaps. A recent Harris poll found that 63 per cent of Turkish citizens would be ready to participate in a council to audit their municipality’s work.
A start could be made with a citizens’ assembly on a subject that isn’t one of the big divides of Turkish politics. Possible subjects could be:
What would Turkey’s best policy be to cope with the long-term presence of 3.5 million Syrian refugees in the country?
Or: How can this country, criss-crossed as it is by major tectonic fault-lines, revamp its existing and future buildings to deal with the dangers revealed in the February earthquake, when inadequate and poorly enforced building codes resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of people?
Or even: What does Turkey really want from its stalled membership negotiations with the European Union?
Such citizens’ assemblies would surely give a heartening example of ordinary people moving forward and finding consensus on difficult policy matters, as such mini-publics have done so well elsewhere. This would certainly lighten up the status quo, in which half the population is left alienated or angry the morning after. And for years of mornings to come.
Panels and Presentations for The Keys to Democracy
This blog is updated with the public presentations of The Keys to Democracy: Sortition as a New Model for Citizen Power, by my late father Maurice Pope. Endorsements and reviews can be found separately here. A fine hardback is available direct from Imprint Academic (where you can get a 30 per cent launch discount with code CAT23, but beware of Brexit charges if ordering to Europe!). Globally it’s on Amazon (e.g. US, UK, DE) as a hardback and as Kindle. The publisher also posted my Dad’s preface online here.
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4 June 2023 – FDRH Podcast with Michael Goldfarb
The eloquent American radio reporter and podcaster Michael Goldfarb and I had a fun and thoughtful conversation about democracy by lot and my late father Maurice Pope’s new book ‘The Keys to Democracy: Sortition as a New Model for Citizen Power’. (Also on SoundCloud here).
Goldfarb reported from around the world for National Public Radio, so our discussion on his First Rough Draft of History (FRDH) podcast ranged far and wide, even taking in the Turkish elections. I was happy that the veteran newsman, now living in London, appeared to like the book as well.
“Not a bad stylist, your Dad. Not a bad writer at all,” he hummed, reflecting what, in his adopted English home, could be quite strong expression of approval.
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27 June 2023 – Engines of Oligarchy: Podcast with Australian economist Nicholas Gruen
This is a full podcast with Nicholas Gruen – on YouTube here – but our full conversation was a lot longer and has been well-edited to capture all the best parts that make up a good introduction to the benefits of sortition. The sound and video are strikingly good too, considering that I was talking from the end of a very long, thin copper cable while supervising roof work at my Turkish mountainside home-from-home. We cover a lot of ground about elections, sortition, my late Dad’s book and we even had some fun along the way.
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24 May 2023 – Video of the book launch debate
“Fantastic.” “Visionary.” “Extraordinarily radical.” “It’s a brilliant book.”
This short video highlights the uplifting comments and buzzing spirit we had at the launch in Oxford of The Keys to Democracy: sortition as a new model for citizen power, my late Dad Maurice Pope’s long-lost work on how to understand and fix our dysfunctional, 250-year-old political system. To mark the occasion, more than 70 members of his family, friends and similarly minded enthusiasts for democratic innovation gathered on 18 March 2023 for a debate in Wadham College.
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18 April 2023 – Online panel with Germany’s Mehr Demokratie
Much to consider in this YouTube recording of our wide-ranging debate on 18 April organised by Germany’s big national democracy innovation NGO Mehr Demokratie about when and how randomly selected citizens’ assemblies may gain more decision-making power.
For the discussion, Mehr Demokratie’s Ina Poppelreuter hosted Polish sortition expert Marcin Gerwin, Mehr Demokratie’s Board Member Sarah Händel and me.
While there was mention of legally binding powers in some countries and in some domains already today, most interventions were in favour of step-by-step gradualism and more experimentation. Still, it was clear that most of us thought that some citizens’ assemblies are already gaining much legitimacy and credibility, and that politicians will have increasing difficulty to ignore their recommendations.
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21 March 2023 – Online panel organised by DemocracyNext
A first online discussion of The Keys to Democracy – alongside Professor Yves Sintomer, whose excellent new history of sortition The Government of Chance was published in February – was hosted on 21 March 2023 by Claudia Chwalisz of DemocracyNext and moderated by James Harding of Tortoise Media. Click here for a Twitter thread with key take-aways and more pictures.
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18 March 2023 – Wadham College, Oxford
We had a full house and a lively debate on Saturday 18 March 2023 at Oxford’s Wadham College to launch my late father Maurice Pope’s book The Keys to Democracy: Sortition as a New Model for Citizen Power. A short video of the event is here.
I told our audience of 70 friends, family and democratic innovation enthusiasts how my father conceived and wrote the work in the 1980s, why it didn’t find a publisher three decades ago and what happened after we found the typescript after his death in 2019, forgotten on an obscure shelf in his large library.
I also laid out how The Keys to Democracy challenges us to define democracy more honestly: that is, to convince proponents of our current system that elections are not the be-all and end-all of democracy. In fact, my late Dad’s book argues that elections visibly do little more than shuffle chairs within an oligarchy, proving that “a ruling class does not need a ruling committee”. The alternative is sortition, he says, the system that powered the success of a civilisation like ancient Athens: replacing elite party politicians with the random selection of citizen panels that set policy through informing themselves, deliberating and reaching consensus, not forcing things through on narrow majority votes.
My old Wadham College roommate Michael Potter, now Cambridge’s Professor of Logic, responded to my enthusiasm by pointing out some challenges ahead. For instance, he questioned how a court jury can really be transformed so easily, as my late father proposes, into a policy-making panel. Michael’s intervention was informed by many conversations with my late father about the mathematics of sampling and random selection.
Richard Pantlin of Oxford’s Citizens Assembly Network moderated our debate, mixing it up with some instructive fun. Rich recreated the buzz of deliberation in a citizens’ assembly by asking guests to discuss their views with neighbours. Then he gave a taste of random selection by using lottery tickets to choose who got to ask questions from the audience. As ever, using random selection gave everyone a taste of having an equal chance.
We also had the chance to listen to two other Oxford activists. Dr Al Chisholm added a practical note, describing how a Citizens Jury brought very different people onto the same page about travel within Oxford. Dr Rabhya Dewshi explained why Extinction Rebellion supported citizens’ assemblies as part of XR’s goal to #decidetogether.
We were honoured to have University College London’s Professor Alan Renwick in the audience. He rose to tell us about a citizens’ assembly that he led in 2017, in which the randomly selected citizens made consensual proposals that might have defused the post-Brexit crisis. For instance, they showed that informed citizens supported the UK staying within the EU customs union and single market. If only such an assembly had had the chance to debate EU membership before the referendum vote!
Pioneer Olly Dowlen, who wrote his book on the political potential of sortition more than two decades ago, told the audience about how sortition produces good decisions.
I was amazed to hear, just ten days after publication, that several people had already ordered and read the book. My proudest moment for my father at the event was when one top practitioner said he had bought and almost finished The Keys to Democracy already and found it an “astonishingly brilliant book. It thinks through many of the things that political theorists and political scientists have been gradually groping towards over the last 40 years.”
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13 March 2023 – Leiden University, the Netherlands
A light moment after a first book talk for The Keys to Democracy on 13 March 2023, for faculty and students at Leiden University’s Institute for Security and Global Affairs in The Hague, the Netherlands.
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1 March 2023 – Democracy Nerd podcast, Portland OR
The irrepressible Jefferson Smith and I left no stone unturned in my first podcast on 1 March 2023 in support of my late Dad’s book The Keys to Democracy: Sortition as a New Model for Citizen Power.
Starting with the impact of the earthquake in Turkey (where I happened to be), Smith and his podcast Democracy Nerd took us on an unstoppable and surprisingly fun romp through not just the philosophy of democracy (including testing questions on Plato’s noumenalism), my father’s work in South Africa, the lonely life of an independent academic, the things sons do & don’t learn from their fathers and what it’s like to attend a citizens’ assembly.
Along the way we did of course explore the ins and outs of random selection, deliberation and the possible uses of democracy by lot. It was midnight, we kept debating for more than 90 minutes, I was freezing by the end and I had no idea that the camera recording was going to be published on YouTube! So it was not my slickest look.
Maurice Pope’s book The Keys to Democracy
This is a guide to The Keys to Democracy: Sortition as a New Model for Citizen Power by the late classicist Maurice Pope. As you’ll see below, the book has been endorsed by many, including columnist Martin Wolf of the Financial Times (“strongly recommended“), leading Yale professor of politics Hélène Landemore (“visionary“) and the Belgian pioneer of democracy by lot David van Reybrouck (“extraordinary“).
You can order the hardback either directly from UK publisher Imprint Academic (note the launch discount with code CAT23), from bookshops like Barnes & Noble or globally from Amazon (e.g. US, UK, AU, DE, FR). It is also available as an ebook on Kindle and on B&N’s Nook.
Links to public presentations and discussions of the book are here. You can also read the preface online.
Reviews and endorsements are below, with the most recent entries are added at the bottom of this page.
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This is a visionary, luminous, wide-ranging and profoundly humanistic book … Maurice Pope saw the potential of democracy by lot to fight corruption, to improve the quality of deliberation, to build on ordinary citizens’ common sense and diversity, and to educate and spread in the body politic the fundamental ethos of social equality.
—Dr. Hélène Landemore
Professor of political science at Yale University and author of Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the 21st Century.
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The apogee of a career’s thinking as a radical-minded classicist … The Keys to Democracy remains unique in its philosophical breadth and scope. And in its vision, it is still bolder than many on offer.
—Dr. Paul Cartledge
Emeritus A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at Cambridge University and author of Democracy: A Life
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Maurice Pope was obviously something of a visionary, predicting the modern reincarnation of sortition in the form of citizens’ assemblies years before the recent “deliberative wave” was even a tiny ripple on a few disparate ponds. He was also incredibly knowledgeable and insightful. His arguments and reasoning as he sets out the case for sortition are still highly relevant today.
—Dr. Brett Hennig
Director and Co-Founder, Sortition Foundation, Cambridge, UK, and author of The End of Politicians: Time for a Real Democracy
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Maurice Pope’s book provides a compelling basis for the next democratic paradigm. He makes it clear that what we refer to as ‘democracy’ today is rather an oligarchy of elected elites—and that it was intentionally designed as such. It’s why we need to reclaim the true meaning, values and processes of democracy. Pope shows us why the ideal of government by the people is not only desirable, it is also possible if we return to democracy by random selection of representatives (sortition). It gives us hope.
—Claudia Chwalisz
Chief Executive Officer of DemocracyNext and former lead of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development’s work on Innovative Citizen Participation
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Required reading for our times. Innovation in democracy has never been more needed now that climate change requires long-term collective action underpinned by democratic consent—over decades to come. This bold proposal combines Maurice Pope’s insights into ancient methods of democracy with a brave vision for the future that overcomes the limits of representation.
—Dr. Heather Grabbe
Open Society European Policy Institute and University College, London
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Maurice Pope’s call for random selection-based democracy is a powerful, pre-emptive herald to the current expansion of citizen participation. It has the distinctive merit of connecting the field of sortition design to wider historical trends and political philosophy. In doing so, his book adds invaluable intellectual ballast to the quest for better democratic practices. Pope’s masterful tract shows that today’s attempts to involve citizens in politics should not be dismissed as an ephemeral fad, but have deep roots in political concerns and debates extending back many years.
—Prof. Richard Youngs
Senior Fellow at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, professor at Warwick University and author of Rebuilding European Democracy: Resistance and Renewal in an Illiberal Age
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Informed by a learned and entertaining sweep of the pedigree of democracy, this erudite book makes a cogent case for the merits of sortition as a means of revitalising citizen engagement and improving the quality of political decision making, while not hiding the obstacles to its adoption in the years ahead. At a time of growing cynicism, it should be read by anyone seeking creative ways to boost trust in politics.
—Michael Keating
Executive Director of the European Institute of Peace and former Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General in Somalia
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Those of us who yearn for citizens’ assemblies to be better respected, understood and used as a transformative tool for democracy will find much solace and hope in Maurice Pope’s pioneering book. Having a work of such calibre and prescience at our side will surely help many hitherto covert sortition supporters come out of the closet once and for all.
—Annika Savill
Formerly the Executive Head of the UN Democracy Fund, the Senior Speechwriter to UN Secretary-General Kofi A. Annan and the Diplomatic Editor of the UK’s Independent newspaper
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Awe-inspiring … [Maurice Pope] was an intellectual dark horse.
—Dr Edith Hall
Professor of Classics, Durham University and author of Aristotle’s Way and Introducing the Ancient Greeks: From Bronze Age Seafarers to Navigators of the Western Mind
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Maurice wrote his book decades ago. Couldn’t get it published. Too crazy an idea. Until now!
—Jefferson Smith
Democracy Nerd podcast host
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A masterpiece of thinking and writing, and a pleasure to read … I love the book.
—James Harding
Editor and founder Tortoise media, former director of BBC News and ex-editor of The Times.
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It’s an astonishingly brilliant book. It thinks through many of the things that political theorists and political scientists have been gradually groping towards over the last 40 years. It is radical, but also realistic. It recognizes that the full utopian vision is not going to come about any time soon, that many of the changes in democracy have been gradual processes that have taken hundreds of years to develop.
—Dr Alan Renwick
Professor of Democratic Politics at University College London, Deputy Director of the Constitution Unit and author of The Politics of Electoral Reform: Changing the Rules of Democracy.
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Encountering the book … is like discovering a time capsule: we peer into the mind of a genius whose work reaches out from the past and yet, in its perspicacity and ambition, stretches way ahead of us. It’s also a delight to read. Pope’s voice speaks through the text in his breezy style and inimitable wit; the anecdote and humor that he peppers throughout make his points pop in your mind. And they’re big ones...
Pope was … a visionary, and his plan’s more revolutionary than The Communist Manifesto. What’s incredible about it is the context of its writing. In the late 1980s—and certainly with the fall of the Soviet Union—citizens of the West were being told repeatedly that we’d reached “the end of history.” There were no alternatives, Thatcher declaimed, to liberal capitalism and the elective oligarchy that’s got us by the throat. Yet deep in the bowels of his study, this brave, brilliant man was working out an audacious dream for democracy entirely on his own. Reading the result is like being invited in and given a cup of tea in one hand and a stick of dynamite in the other—except the dynamite explodes your mind. The author’s out on a limb here; yet every place he leaps, he finds his feet. The epigraph from Chesterton above actually omits the full phrase: “All real democracy is an attempt, like a jolly hostess, to bring the shy people out.” Maurice Pope is that host, and his feast’s a joy.
—Nick Coccoma
Review in The Similitude, 5 April 2023.
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It’s surprisingly a lot more relevant today than when Maurice Pope originally wrote it. He was echoing his experience in understanding classical and Athenian democracy and the ways they used instead of elections, which he was very sceptical of. They used sortition, basically random selection, to put ordinary people in control of decision-making and government. Recently there’s been a lot of experiments in this, in Ireland, where they used it to reform their abortion law, and they are about to use it to discuss their neutrality, and in France where they’ve used it in … . carbon and environmental issues and euthanasia issues. So it’s a fascinating book on how random selection can be a more democratic tool than elections.
—Jeremy Shapiro
Director of Research at the European Council on Foreign Relations. Speaking on Mark Leonard’s World in 30 Minutes, 28 April 2023.
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Un livre né d’une belle histoire : d’abord refusé par les maisons d’édition il y a plus de 30 ans, le manuscrit a été retrouvé par son fils @hugh.pope, qui l’a édité et publié. Un livre précurseur sur les assemblées tirées au sort. Hugh Pope m’a raconté cette histoire incroyable lors d’une rencontre au Parlement.
A book born of a lovely story: first turned down by publishing houses more than 30 years ago, the manuscript was rediscovered by his son, who edited and published it. A pioneering book on randomly selected assemblies. Hugh Pope told me this unbelievable story during a meeting in parliament.
—Magali Plovie
President of the French-speaking Parliament of the Brussels Region in Belgium. Magali Plovie chose The Keys to Democracy as one of her three picks for “inspirational reading on democracy this spring.” May 2023.
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Of all the things I’ve read on sortition, it’s the most Socratic ... Recommended!
—Nicholas Gruen
CEO of Lateral Economics, Australia, during our May 2023 podcast discussion about the The Keys to Democracy.
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Not a bad stylist, your Dad. Not a bad writer at all.
—Michael Goldfarb
Broadcaster, ex-NPR correspondent and host of FRDH Podcast “Democracy in Crisis: One Idea for Fixing It“. 4 June 2023.
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A lot of people recognize that something is going pretty badly wrong. We have clearly lost confidence in core institutions … people feel they have been disregarded and ignored and given a pretty poor hand and they recognize that it might actually undermine the stability of what they expect. They are prepared to think … maybe we’ve got to change.
One of my most radical proposals … in a column two weeks ago, is that we should complement representative democracy with Athenian democracy, which is, we can’t have everybody in a room but we can use citizens assemblies. We want ordinary people engaged in political discussions.
There’s been much more work in this area around the world than even I had realized even when I wrote that … I have a very dear friend, very brilliant, Nicholas Gruen, an Australian economist who’s written a lot on this subject, with whom I have very long conversations.
This then led me into the modern literature on sortition: there’s a new book, JUST published, authored [by the late classics scholar Maurice Pope], long after his death, by [his son] Hugh Pope … on this subject, which I strongly recommend.
I thought this is an idea which I thought at least should be resurrected. If we want democracy to work in the long run and we’re not very happy with where we are we should start opening up the debate into whether we have got the best settlement.
Remember, the representative democracy we have is established within the framework created, broadly speaking, by Simon de Montfort rather a long time ago in the 13th century. We have made it more democratic but there’s no particular reason why it’s God-given, it is possible to ask ourselves whether we could do this better in one way or another. I think that’s a question we should be considering.
—Martin Wolf
Financial Times’ chief economics commentator and its best-read columnist, in conversation with Tortoise media’s James Harding at the KITE ideas and music festival, 11 June 2023.
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Over the years we have come to learn that in this country [Belgium] voting is compulsory, but citizens’ panels are not going to be compulsory. This argument has been slowly creeping into the field of deliberative democracy, “Ala, let’s not make it compulsory”.
And yet if you read about what people were thinking about it in the 1980s, and I’m in the middle of the process of reading The Keys to Democracy, the book recently published just a few weeks ago. It was written by Maurice Pope who was a professor of classics at Oxford – and his son Hugh Pope, who is sitting on the front right there, you took care of your Dad’s manuscript.
He wrote an incredible book in the 1980s which unlike all his other publications did not find a publisher, because it was seen as completely maverick, this book – all of a sudden, I mean – it’s extraordinary, first of all because the entire gist of deliberative democracy is in there. With one difference: he thinks it should be mandatory.
—David van Reybrouck
Belgian poet, playwright, novelist, co-founder of the G1000 democratic reform NGO and pioneering author of Against Elections. Speaking at the annual meeting of the Federation for Innovation in Democracy–Europe (FIDE) on 22 June 2023.
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I didn’t want to read [Maurice Pope’s manuscript] until I had written my own book on democracy, and now that I have read it, I wish I was as perceptive as Pope.
—Lewis H. Lapham
Founder of Lapham’s Quarterly, former editor of Harper’s Magazine, and author of The Wish for Kings: Democracy at Bay (1993). From a letter to Jonathan McVity, the literary agent for The Keys to Democracy, 7 December, 1992.
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In the year 2023, a book came out, and I have it in my bag, that had been written in the late 1980s by the Oxford classicist Maurice Pope. [He] couldn’t find a publisher in his lifetime. When it was published posthumously, readers discovered a visionary chapter on the future of global governance. I quote: “Unfortunately, the United Nations is the creature rather than the master of the sovereign states that compose it. It is not a house of representatives but a diplomatic rendez-vous.” As an alternative, Maurice Pope pleaded for a global assembly drafted by lot that would represent the world population. He realised the prospect was distant and the practical challenge immense, but he none the less concluded with the following words: “A forum of this kind would make for peace far more than one where government representatives make propaganda speeches. There is no other institution in sight that can offer any kind of promise to cure group rivalries, national, racial, religious and ideological that so dangerously divide humanity.”
—David van Reybrouck
Belgian poet, playwright, novelist, co-founder of the G1000 democratic reform NGO and pioneering author of Against Elections. Speaking at the Einstein Forum on 1 July 2023.
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“I’d love to debate the pros and cons of this system [of sortition] for longer because it seems like it has a lot to recommend it …. The interest [of co-editor Hugh Pope] is clear and the enthusiasm is inspiring, and I’m not at all surprised that people you talk to about this are infected with the same enthusiasm …. This has been a very interesting topic for me personally, and I hope for our listeners, partly because it is quite different from what we normally talk about. But I think it still fits squarely into the science of policy mould … the book you’re looking for is written by Maurice Pope, edited by Hugh Pope, and it’s called The Keys to Democracy: Sortition as a New Model for Citizen Power.”
—Toby Wardman, host of the podcast of the Science Advice for Policy by European Academies (SAPEA), during an interview about sortition with Hugh Pope.
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“The Keys to Democracy. Sortition as a New Model for Citizen Power was written twenty years before this interest in sortition took off [in the past decade]. Maurice Pope (1926–2019) was a classicist, an expert in the ancient Cretan script called Linear A and author of a captivating study of ancient scripts “The Story of Decipherment” (1975) …
“The quality of the argument is in my view quite uneven. Some of the political analyses and in particular the historical sections suffer from oversimplification, generalisation, and special pleading. For instance: “The political ideals and most of the political practices of Western civilisation go back through Venice and ancient Rome to classical Greece.” (p. 115). No, they don’t, this is simply not true, nor is Pope’s account of how sortition got “lost” in the course of history. On p. 123, Pope contends: “It would be possible […] to define history itself as the story of how experts have been proved wrong. For otherwise […] it would not be history at all, but current practice. […examples in] the history of science. Being history, it is possible to tell which side was wrong.” This view of history is simply bizarre. If Pope resorted to such sweeping statements to help easy reading, I don’t think they are the proper means to that end.
“But, making up for such drawbacks, Pope offers excellent observations on deliberation as a crucial ingredient of democracy and on the potential of sortition to prevent oligarchisation (the “law of Michels”), meritocracy and other problematic forms of hierarchy. Sortition enables implementing the equality of citizens and bringing their engagement in policy making about. Importantly, Pope points out that sortition, whenever it is employed, must be rigorous and compulsory to be effective, and allotted bodies must be selected from the whole population (p. 167; complemented by the outstanding comment by Potter in the appendix). He underlines that allotted panels of citizens must have moral authority and real responsibility (to which should be added a transparent system of accountability). Written with an open, engaging style, The Keys to Democracy is set to win a wider audience for its important and pressing message.”
—Prof. Dr. Josine Blok
Professor of History and Art History at the University of Utrecht and Chair of the European Network for the Study of Ancient Greek History. Excerpt from full review in H-Soz-Kult, 18.09.2023.
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“The great strengths of Pope’s writing are his independence of thought and his evident sincerity. Coming early into the field, and being a classicist rather than a political scientist, Pope was clearly breaking new ground, following his own logical train of thought. He was thus free from the burden of formulaically making connections to prior writings and from the petty-political considerations of self-promotion. This unique situation made a thoroughgoing impact on the book as a whole.
At the conservative end [of authors about sortition] sortition-based institutions are … seen as a way to infuse the system with new blood or new vigor … At the other end …. the current, elections-based system is [seen as] inherently (and by design) anti-democratic.
“The Keys to Democracy does not fit comfortably into either of those positions or in any one position on the spectrum between them. Befitting his background as a classicist, Pope’s attitude toward the elections-based system is radical… a complete replacement of the electoralist system by one based on sortition.
“… Other aspects of Pope’s narrative are less trenchant. In terms of policy outcomes of oligarchical rule, Pope is rather vague. It is only by implication, when in his sketch of utopia he discusses decreased economic inequality, that it turns out that this is a problem that he is hoping sortition will address. Other than that Pope asserts that elites tend to hinder progress being too committed to the status quo, but it is not made clear what progress is to be expected by democratization. Democracy is desirable as an ultimate goal, an inherently liberating power, rather than as a tool for certain public policy objectives…
“Despite the familiarity of much of the argumentation, and beyond the unorthodox explicit rejection of participatory ideas on the grounds that they are not democratic … Pope is offering an epistemological theory of sorts making a connection between truth and form of government...
“Pope’s book is certainly an important document. It presents an independent assessment of the politics of our society and the role that sortition could play in its democratization. It could be thought of as an alternative intellectual history of sortition, challenging the conventional thinking on this topic. It is neither a “rabble-rousing” manifesto nor a systematic cohesive analysis but a loosely-knit collection of ideas. Many of those ideas are not new to the field but others are novel and provocative even today, almost 40 years after the book was originally written.“
—Yoram Gat
Editor, Equality by Lot, an informal group interested in the deliberate use of randomness (lottery) in human affairs. 7 October 2023
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“When reading the book, it’s hard not to forget yourself. It’s hard not to forget that the book – although published nowadays – comes from decades ago! For it is deeply contemporary! And today more than ever it fits the political reality. It fits perfectly. It complements the ongoing debate around the world about possible ways to renew democracy, which is without a doubt in crisis.
“Pope is both a utopian and a realist. This perfect balancing act between an idea and its practical incarnations is a very strong point of the book. Pope is well aware of both the possibilities and limitations associated with the proposed model. He tries to discuss his concept in a clear manner, referring to numerous evidences and evokes images that work on the imagination. His narrative is engaging. The idea to describe a fictional situation after a disaster is great. We move with the author to another reality and begin to feel like members of this surviving community. We follow their fate and wonder, what would I do in such a situation, what would I decide, a supporter of what solution would I turn out to be? It’s an incredibly interesting experience …
“… At the time Pope proposed random selection … could the idea of a random selection of politicians be taken seriously? … I fear not. However, when the shortcomings of representative democracy become all too apparent and begin to trouble both established and post-communist countries, it becomes clear that the changes Pope wrote about must come.
“Was it necessary in the period when Maurice Pope came to his brilliant conclusions? Perhaps not, and perhaps that period in history and its circumstances would have meant that the topic would have been pushed to the periphery. Today it will no longer be pushed aside because the anti-democratic tendencies are too strong to be ignored.”
—Dr Joanna Podgórska-Rykała
Author of Deliberative Democracy, Public Policy, and Local Government (Routledge 2024) and professor of political science at Krakow University. This extract from her paper delivered to the annual conference of the Political Studies Association of Ireland, 21 October 2023.
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Attending a Citizens’ Assembly in Paris
How often do any of us study a single topic for 27 working days, spread over four months of reflection? Backed by the full support of a government and briefings by experts, officials, civil society and academics? Helped by regular deliberation with fellow citizens from all parts of our community? And in our conclusions, responsible to nobody but our individual conscience?
On 9 December, France embarked on exactly that to find answers to fraught questions around its ban on assisted suicide. As the centre of a national debate on the issue, it convened 185 people, randomly selected from all over the country and its overseas territories, to research, discuss and propose answers to the question: “Is the framework for end-of-life support suited to all situations or should changes be introduced?”
This article was originally published on 19 December in English and German on the website buergerrat.de, part of Mehr Demokratie, one of the biggest national organisations supporting the cause of sortition and other innovations in deliberative democracy. I was particularly happy to be invited to observe the assembly because “mercy killings” were identified by my late father in his upcoming book The Keys to Democracy as exactly the kind of topic ideally suited to a citizens’ assembly. For more on my work on sortition, see the end of the article.
Time will tell where the Citizen Convention on the end of life’s work leads to by the time it wraps up in March. But the first of nine long weekends of intense discussions was already remarkable, at least as seen from my position as one of 25 researchers and students invited to observe the assembly.
Most extraordinary was the depth of French government support for this second iteration of a radical experiment in democracy by lot. (The first was a similarly constituted Citizen Convention on Climate in 2019-20). When President Emmanuel Macron summoned the new Citizen Convention into existence in September, the job was again assigned to France’s Economic, Social and Environmental Council, a little-known constitutional body known by its French acronym CESE, which acts as a link to the broader population for the National Assembly and the Senate.
CESE thus coordinated the random selection of participants, found experts, prepared briefing papers and organized the convention’s three main phases: research, deliberation and summing up. The Convention also takes place in CESE’s fine Palais d’Iéna, which looks over the Seine to the Eiffel Tower. Ironically, an early revelation was how the building’s great spaces done in 1930s rational modernism are fine for top-down speeches to 150-250 people, but lack the subdivisions needed for deliberation in small groups that is a key part of today’s participatory democratic process.
“A place in which new forms of democracy are being invented”
“You are here in a place in which new forms of democracy are being invented and developed … and of them the Citizen Convention is without doubt the most ambitious, the most demanding and the most engaging,” participants were told by CESE’s president, Thierry Beaudet. “It’s impossible to do this [deliberation] on the scale of a country, so you’re going to do it for us, for the whole of society … This is the basis of both your legitimacy and our trust in you.”
The randomly selected audience hardly looked revolutionary. Participants had only some of the youth and diversity of, say, the crowds travelling in the nearby Paris metro; they also had very few of the confident smiles and neat, conservative clothes that are the hallmark of elected politicians. At the same time, every element of society and France’s geography seemed present: a cheese farmer from the Alps, a professor of Greek and a retired teacher from Lille were joined by an immigrant from Niger, people of Algerian and Moroccan heritage and Muslim women in headscarves.
A true mirror of a country’s whole population
It was unique to see a true mirror of a country’s whole population in one place: France came across as predominantly middle-aged, paler-skinned, polite, attentive and – after some initial shyness – articulate, collaborative and ready to challenge authority.
All whom I met were delighted to take part, even if, before they got the phone call inviting them to the Convention, few had given much prior thought to civic action or end-of-life issues. Even fewer had heard of random selection. “I can’t believe how lucky I was to be selected!” said one. “I’m very proud to be here,” said another. “I feel like for once my voice will be heard,” said a third.
The way people reflected the actual diversity of France was praised repeatedly in speeches to the Convention by French Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne and President of the National Assembly Yaël Braun-Pivet. The two elected politicians thanked the conventioneers and promised to take their work into account in deciding how to shape a likely future change in French law on accompanying the end of life.
“The level of government support and organisation is so different this time,” said Mélanie Blanchetot, one of the participants in the 2019-20 Climate Convention, who was invited back to brief the new assembly on what had for her been a life-changing awakening to political activism. “When we started, there were members of parliament who said: ‘What legitimacy do you have?’”
On their first weekend, the new participants mostly got orientation: on how a citizens’ assembly is chosen by random selection, how to get access to digital information and what the 25 observers sitting near their tables are researching. Belgian and Swiss practitioners took the floor in a sombre session to discuss what administrating assisted suicide feels like in practice. Jean-François Delfraissy, president of France’s National Council of the Ethics of Life Sciences and Health, reminded all that there was no one right answer. “You won’t get the last word, so be humble,” Delfraissy said. “I predict there’ll be another group just like you revisiting the issue within a decade.”
The quality of much of the information was striking, like a 102-page report from France’s National Centre for End of Life-Palliative Care. With scrupulous neutrality, the document gives participants examples of end-of-life dilemmas cases and a list of arguments for and against actively assisted death. It outlines French law and gives examples from 10 other countries where assisted suicide is possible. It shows how France is growing older and therefore more people are dying in absolute terms each year; and how most French people want to die at home, but only 25 per cent manage to, with more than half dying in hospital. It ends with a list of relevant official reports, books, documentaries, theatrical productions and films.
Most of these documents and speeches are being made public on CESE’s website to allow the rest of France to inform itself alongside the Convention. The participants’ deliberation, however, is private. This took place in between the briefings at tables of about 10 people, whose make-up was shuffled between sessions through repeated selection by lot. Here the role of facilitators was key, especially in making sure everyone’s voice was heard. Sometimes the discussions stumbled when it wasn’t clear what was being asked of the group. By the third day, however, most people were making sensible, lively and acute contributions.
Absent from the Convention was any sign of the polarization one might expect given the political, religious and ethical sensitivity surrounding end-of-life dilemmas; all the main religions were invited to say their part on the second weekend. “There’s the same mix of views on assisted suicide within the group that feels religious convictions as among those who say they’re atheists,” one participant remarked.
One unexpectedly lively area of private discussion among participants was the politics behind President Macron calling the Convention into existence. Some thought it might be an attempt to score a popular goal without losing the support of people with strong views, since the most recent poll in February 2022 shows that 94 per cent of French people agree with euthanasia in cases of extreme suffering and 89 per cent agree with assisted suicide.
Perhaps alluding to politicians’ perceived need to renew their legitimacy before an electorate alienated from politics – about one quarter of French voters abstained from last presidential elections – Prime Minister Borne hoped that the Convention would play a “central role” in a new national debate, bypassing polarizing debates in electoral campaigns.
The issue of what would happen to the Convention’s findings triggered the only moment of tension on the first weekend. In response to critical questions from the Convention floor, the president of the National Assembly sharply defended her conviction that while the conventioneers might have valuable inputs and reflect French society, the elected parliament had the final word.
“You are free, but so are we … even if you reflect greater diversity than parliament, you don’t represent the people! You are a foundation stone and we will all build the wall together,” Braun-Pivet said. “There is no question that random selection will replace elections.”
“Collective intelligence can produce tremendous things”
Even if this put-down grated with some – one participant grumbled about feeling like a commoner at the last Estates-General of Louis XVI’s crumbling regime, convened just before it collapsed in the 1789 French revolution – the atmosphere in the convention remained highly collaborative. As Prime Minister Borne pointed out, “few countries in the world would give such responsibility to randomly selected people and commit to collective deliberation.” After all, 27 days of work amid four months of reflection is “much longer than the time available to most members of parliament debating and reflecting on the writing of a new law”, the CESE’s Beaudet reminded participants. “The Citizen Convention is a wonderful tool that shows how being perfectly informed and taking time to deliberate, collective intelligence can produce tremendous things.”
In other writing about democratic innovation, I’ve described attending a school for sortition for The New European and how Citizens’ Assemblies Could Be Democracy’s Best Hope in the World Politics Review. In addition to the article above, I published other impressions as an official observer at the French citizens’ assembly about how important facilitators were and also the extraordinary role of graphic art.
Setting a course for a better-run future
One question often nagged me in my four decades as a reporter, writer and conflict prevention analyst: Is the occasional vote for a politician or party truly the best system to choose who runs a country?
Over the past year, I was delighted to learn I wasn’t the only one puzzling over the answer. I was even happier to discover a group of like-minded idealists who are working on DemocracyNext, an independent non-profit dedicated to researching and bringing to life a better-designed paradigm for future governance. Here’s their public online launch event on 15 September 2022 (International Democracy Day).
I’m also very proud that DemocracyNext has asked me to join their Advisory Board. At last, I feel that I have found a political ideal I can believe in and work for.
Learning to love sortition
The key innovation that DemocracyNext is looking into is how to bring people into decision-making through selection by lot, as in jury service. This is also called sortition and is inspired by the classical golden age of Athens, whose definition of democracy was a government by randomly selected citizens. All were equal and took turns, first to deliberate on problems, and then to legislate, judge and act as the executive in the name of the city.
DemocracyNext is one of a number of groups that have sprung up in recent years to promote aspects of sortition. All share many values and principles, but most focus mainly on one country: for example, Sortition Foundation in the UK, Equality by Lot in the US, Mehr Demokratie and its Citizens’ Assembly project in Germany, Tegen Verkiezingen in the Netherlands, G1000 in Belgium, WeDoDemocracy in Denmark, Deliberativa in Spain and newDemocracy in Australia. DemocracyNext adds a more international and radical vision: to put sortition “at the heart of a new democratic system,” not just in government but in the workplace too.
DemocracyNext aims to create brand new institutions, not to bring the sixth century BC back to life or have a lottery to choose the president or prime minister. The approach builds on a growing wave of Citizens’ Assemblies, which are randomly selected so that representatives are a true sample or reflection of their communities or countries. In the past decade, more than five hundred such assemblies in dozens of countries have been finding original solutions to problems that have long stumped politicians: climate change in the UK, France and elsewhere; conflict resolution in the Philippines and Bosnia; and in Ireland, breaking the logjam on abortion and same sex marriage.
Are these assemblies really different from elected parliaments? Two sets of pictures speak volumes to me. One symbolises the current system in the United States, showing the eight top Congressional officials in the Senate and the House. I know that individually some of them – notably Sen. Dick Durbin, whom I’ve interviewed – are wonderfully effective people. But the problem is that collectively, they all look exactly the same. Charismatic, good at raising money, old, male, mostly of one skin colour and likely all pretty well off.
The members of Citizens’ Assemblies, on the other hand, seem exactly like people you might meet on a bus, train or plane. They represent the full, balanced diversity of the community or population. The pictures below – from Citizens’ Assemblies in France, the UK and Germany – also capture both the intense concentration on discussing expert evidence and also the joyful sense of engagement that are characteristic of these gatherings.
Until now, Citizens’ Assemblies have mostly been convened in an advisory capacity. While some politicians have embraced them or joined them, others have stood in their way, seeing them as unqualified or as a threat to their lock on power. In future, such assemblies could achieve much more. At the top of DemocracyNext’s to-do list is the design of and advocacy for sortition-based institutions with real authority.
Why bother?
Personally, I feel many reasons to gravitate towards democracy activism.
I’ve never believed in elections, for a start. They have long struck me as the root cause of the political dead end that delivers government-by-pantomime in my native Britain, the worst polarisation in generations in the United States and multiplying numbers of authoritarian leaders around the world. I’m not alone in thinking that something is deeply wrong: a global survey in 2021 by the Pew Research Center found that almost everywhere people have less respect than ever for politicians and are hungry for change.
I’ve never felt that people involved in politics had a special call on my admiration or loyalty. At Oxford University four decades ago – breeding ground of many of the country’s parliamentary leaders – I remember being put off by the stressed and hungry looks of the politically ambitious as they plotted and partied for support. (The parties were fun, though).
I left England a month after graduating to become a reporter and writer. I spent decades criss-crossing the eastern Mediterranean and greater Middle East, from crisis to conflict to economic collapse. Yes, people wanted a better life, including justice, freedom, equality and more. But elections – whether real, faked or only promised – rarely made much difference to what was really going on in most people’s lives. And I never solved the equation that posits: elections equals democracy equals better government.
Take Malta, for instance. In the 1987 elections, an 0.2 per cent swing away from the previous left-wing ruling party triggered a 180-degree about-turn in the small island nation’s rulers. As a young reporter for Reuters news agency, I remember standing bewildered on a midnight pavement in central Valetta as supporters of the triumphant right-wing nationalists went mad around me. For the Maltese, and perhaps many others, it seemed perfectly normal. I however was completely confused by the logic of a system in which a country could so radically change course only because a tiny proportion of the people changed their votes.
Or look at Turkey. In recent decades, the technical side of the electoral process has been generally clean, with lots of parties competing and people able to vote freely. Yet the results are gravely distorted by vote-share thresholds that exclude smaller parties, monopolisation of media by the party in power and the locking up of dissidents. And, in the end, just one man rules.
Or Iraq. There was no doubt in my mind, when I observed Saddam Hussein’s referendum on his presidency in 2002, that the process did deliver him something close to the 99 per cent support he claimed. But looking at the traumatised faces of the ‘voters’ being watched every step of the way from the electoral roll to the ballot box, it was clear that the legitimacy Hussein sought was a brittle charade.
Referendums in a much freer country, the United Kingdom, look suspect to me too. How can a decision as serious and multi-faceted as Britain leaving the European Union or Scotland leaving the United Kingdom be left to a majority achieved by a razor-thin number of voters, after a process that is thoroughly politicised and open to all kinds of domestic and foreign manipulation?
Then there are the professional politicians. I have met and interviewed dozens of heads of state and government, almost all winners of elections. Only rarely, I found, did what they said leave a lasting impact or memory. When I did occasionally admire a politician, it was because of their achievements in life or the charisma of their personality, not because I felt that they deserved to be in charge of so many details of other people’s lives.
All that is before we take conflict into account. When I worked for the International Crisis Group, I once did a back of the envelope reckoning and found that nearly one third of the conflict prevention reports we wrote in one six-month period in 2015 were about violence before, during, or after elections. I wondered: were elections the symptom, or the cause?
Blanking out at the ballot box
As a result, I’ve only voted once in my life, in my Brussels neighbourhood, and I did that because it is a legal obligation in Belgium. I felt so overwhelmed that I just voted for the mayor, probably because he seemed familiar from the monthly commune newspaper. And maybe a bit because he had cancelled a plan for a carpark under our local square that everyone protested about. But I had nothing against the other faces on the voting slip. Compared to the commitment and seriousness of the voting station workers, I felt silly. But I also felt frustrated: as a former reporter, I knew that I would have to do days of work to know if the mayor was really the best candidate, days I just didn’t have.
Perhaps electoral politics and voting never had a chance with me. Growing up, my late classicist father Maurice Pope lampooned politics and elections from the head of the family dining table. He even wrote a book in the 1980s, advocating a completely new democratic framework based on sortition. When I read it back then, I teased him about how unrealistic it all sounded. His publishers rejected the work as too outlandish. He put it aside. Years later, the work seemed to be actually lost.
Over the decades, much changed and not just with me. A decade ago, there was only a trickle of books on sortition; it is now a torrent. As frustrations with politicians, corruption and political dysfunction mounted, academics and publishers began rediscovering the democracy by lot that made ancient Athens one of the greatest civilisations the world has ever seen. Looking at ever-more extreme inequalities of wealth in countries with electoral systems, they remembered what Aristotle and many other Greek thinkers took as self-evident: elections create oligarchies, and only the random selection of citizen decision-makers, or sortition, qualifies as democracy.
Those who support electoral systems often quote Winston Churchill in their defence. Britain’s World War II leader famously said in 1947 that: “democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”’
Britain’s electoral democracy may have been freer and more accountable than many others in the mid-twentieth-century – probably a generous view – but such thinking is too complacent and sets the bar too low for us today. Is our democratic ideal really only to be a bit better than dictators, absolute monarchs and monopolists of religion and ideology? Surely, we can at least try to take decisions for the common good in ways that give much fairer weight to principles like equality, participation and justice?
That’s why I’m glad to be a small part of DemocracyNext, contributing something to a real and growing wave of activism in support of sortition-based, deliberative democracy. In the same spirit, after my Dad’s death in 2019, my mother found the manuscript of his lost book in his library; finally able to understand its importance, I was inspired to edit it, with help from my brother Quentin, and pitch it for publication. A noted UK publisher, Imprint Academic, has now taken it on. Watch out for publication next spring: The Keys to Democracy: Sortition as a New Model for Citizen Power.
This text was updated on 19 September after the actual launch of DemocracyNext
“The Keys to Democracy” Has a Publisher
Good news! The UK’s Imprint Academic will be publishing my late father and classicist Maurice Pope’s last and long-lost book, which I and my brother Quentin been busy editing for the past several months. It will appear in Spring 2023 as “The Keys to Democracy: Sortition as a Model for Citizen Power.”
Three decades ago, my father’s then publishers turned down the text. They found his proposals for political innovation too radical, utopian and implausible, even though they were inspired by ancient Athenian democracy. He turned to other projects. The book disappeared into what we thought was an irreparably corrupted 1980s computer file.
Then, after my father’s death in 2019, my mother Johanna found the typescript in his library. Time changes points of view! Back in the 1980s I too thought the text wasn’t very realistic. But now I see how much politics-as-usual needs to change, his argument for decision-makers selected like juries looks fresh, relevant, clear & compelling.
The project to revive the book would have got nowhere unless others had felt the same.
Huge thanks for a generous Foreword to Prof. Dr. Hélène Landemore of Yale University, whose 2021 book “Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the 21st Century” sets a gold standard for academic studies of sortition. She calls my Dad’s book “visionary … a prescient and self-assured argument for democracy by lot before pretty much anyone else.”
I much appreciated too a scene-setting Introduction by classicist Prof. Dr. Paul Cartledge of Cambridge, author of the masterful “Democracy: A Life.” Here’s part of what he says: “The Keys to Democracy remains unique in its philosophical breadth and scope. And in its vision it is still bolder than many on offer.”
Many thanks as well for early endorsements from Dr. Brett Hennig of Sortition Foundation, Claudia Chwalisz of DemocracyNext, Dr. Heather Grabbe of Open Society Foundations, Michael Keating, executive director of the European Institute of Peace and ex-UN envoy to Somalia and Prof. Richard Youngs of Warwick University and Carnegie Europe. They have variously supported the book as “Incredibly knowledgeable”; “Gives us hope”; “Required reading”; “Learned and entertaining”; and “[A] masterful tract”.
Much gratitude too to pioneering political scientist Prof. Dr. Peter Stone of Trinity College Dublin, who connected us to sortition guru and publisher Keith Sutherland. Imprint Academic is placing “The Keys to Democracy” in its series on Sortition and Public Policy.
Over the years, we also owe much to the moral and real support of Jonathan McVity, an author and student of philosophy who helped my father in trying to interest US publishers in the text in the 1980s; he tells the story in one afterword. And also Dr. Michael Potter, Professor of Logic at Cambridge’s Faculty of Philosophy, who shared rooms with me when we were undergraduates at Oxford. Michael often discussed sortition with my father, and in another afterword describes what he would have liked to have had out with my father about the use of juries (and my father did love a good argument).
It’s been a busy year of typing out the manuscript, editing, reaching out and researching footnotes. But it’s been wonderfully motivating to meet leaders of the new wave of innovators trying to upgrade our democracies, and above all to feel their selfless support.
Personally, I felt a great sense of closure when I pressed the button and sent the final manuscript to the publishers on Thursday.
I’m also so glad too to think that my father – silently but deeply disappointed, I believe, that this culmination of his life’s work didn’t see the light of day – can rest in peace. His ideas will now live on.
Hugh Pope 