Sortition as a check on power: citizens drawn by lot to scrutinise Spain's appointments and institutions

Spain already trusts citizens drawn by lot with one of the hardest jobs in public life: judging public officials accused of corruption. Under the Jury Law of 1995, nine jurors chosen from the electoral roll try, among other offences, bribery, influence-peddling and embezzlement of public funds committed by officials. Thirty-six candidates are drawn for each case.

The radical-centre proposal starts there. If random citizens can decide whether a mayor took a bribe, they can also look at who is about to be put in charge of the watchdogs, and at how a public institution has been run. Democracia 21 asked for oversight bodies free of politicians and ex-politicians; we've set out how to appoint them and how to stop the revolving door behind them. Sortition gives the public a seat at both moments.

An old idea with a clear purpose

The Athenians used the lot precisely to check power. Athanasios Efstathiou's study of the euthyna in fourth-century Athens describes a ladder of accountability. Before taking office, officials passed a scrutiny. During their term, auditors drawn from the council reviewed accounts. When they left, ten auditors chosen by lot from all citizens, with ten public advocates also chosen by lot, examined their accounts for embezzlement and bribery, and for three days anyone could bring a complaint against them in the agora. An official could not leave Attica until the review was over.

The logic still holds. A body chosen by lot cannot be lobbied in advance, owes nothing to a party and dissolves before anyone can capture it. That makes it a good tool for exactly the job where elected and appointed bodies are weakest: judging the political class's own choices.

What Europe is doing now

The German-speaking Community of Belgium went furthest. In February 2019 its parliament voted unanimously to create a permanent citizens' dialogue. According to the OECD's 2021 paper on institutionalising deliberative democracy, a citizens' council of 24 people chosen by lot serves for 18 months, with a third rotating every six months. It picks the topics for citizens' panels and has, in the OECD's words, an oversight role: it makes sure the panels' recommendations are debated in parliament and answered by the committee and the minister. In the first panel, on care workers, the committee approved eight of the 14 recommendations and offered alternatives for the rest.

Brussels took another route. Since 2019 its parliaments can set up mixed deliberative committees of 15 MPs and 45 citizens drawn by lot. Min Reuchamps, writing for International IDEA, explains the two rules that make them bite: MPs who vote against a recommendation the citizens supported must explain why, and within six months the standing committee must publish a follow-up report and present it at a public sitting. The OECD paper lists monitoring among the mandates such lot-drawn bodies can carry.

The political theorist Samuel Bagg, whose work Oxford's politics department summarised in 2022, goes further still: juries drawn by lot would rule on whether particular government decisions had been captured by elites. He wants their tasks kept narrow, because the heavier the training, the easier it becomes for insiders to steer the jurors.

The proposal for Spain

Each tradition gives a reason to do this. The left wants ordinary citizens, chosen with equal chances whatever their income or connections, to hold the powerful to account. The right and the liberal tradition already own the jury as a classic safeguard against the state, and a small, cheap citizen check on the political class's appointments and spending fits a limited government. The piece that belongs to neither is the lot itself as an anti-capture device, joined to two ideas from this fortnight's reading. John Rawls's public reason, as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it, asks officials to justify constitutional essentials with reasons all citizens could accept. Elinor Ostrom found that commons last when their monitors answer to the users, as on Valencia's Water Tribunal. A lot-drawn panel is a room full of the users, asking for public reasons.

Two panels would do the job.

An appointments panel. For the top posts in the Court of Audit, the competition authority, AIReF, the Transparency Council, the Office for Conflicts of Interest and the judicial council, a panel of around 30 citizens drawn by lot and stratified by age, sex, region and education holds public hearings with the shortlisted candidates. It reads their record, asks questions and publishes a reasoned opinion on each candidate. Parliament keeps the vote. If it appoints someone the panel found unsuitable, the proposing groups must explain why in the chamber. The panel advises; the reasons become public.

An annual audit panel. Each year a panel of 24 citizens drawn by lot chooses one public institution, from a ministry's agency to a regulator, and examines how it has worked, with the right to request documents and hear officials and experts. The institution must answer the panel's findings in public within six months, as Brussels requires of its committees, and report again a year later.

Both panels are paid, like jurors, for their days of work, and both are small enough to cost very little next to the bodies they watch. Neither gets a veto. That matters: this fortnight we've also argued that Spain has too many vetoes, and a new check works best when it produces information and forces reasons.

The day-five piece on citizens' assemblies used sortition to settle hard questions of value. Here the lot does the older Athenian job. It reminds whoever holds power that, sooner or later, a random group of fellow citizens will look at the accounts.