Sortition, ancient and modern
from Ancient and Modern podcast Hosted by James Kierstead
Recently I was asked to review The Keys to Democracy: Sortition as a New model for Citizen Power for Polis journal. The book was written by the classical scholar Maurice Pope in the 1980s but has only recently been published by Maurice's son Hugh. I was especially interested in reviewing the book as it seemed that Maurice Pope had become interested in random selection in politics in exactly the same way I did: by learning about the classical Athenian democratic system while studying classics - even (as it happened) at the same boarding school in south-west England! Maurice Pope died in 2019, but Hugh Pope (a distinguished writer and journalist in his own right) has taken up the mantle of reintroducing Athenian-style sortition to contemporary democracies. I spoke to Hugh about the boarding school to radical democracy pipeline, sortition vs. referenda, and whether participatory democracy takes up 'too many evenings.' My review of Maurice Pope's book: https://www.academia.edu/127407924/Review_of_Pope_The_Keys_to_Democracy My review of Sintomer and Lopez-Rabatel's volume on the history of sortition: https://www.academia.edu/86952726/Review_of_Lopez_Rabatel_and_Sintomer_Sortition_and_Democracy_History_Tools_Theories Hugh's Substack 'For a New Democracy': https://hughpope.substack.com/ Peter Rhodes on Athenian democracy in the 4th century: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3297282 Jim Fishkin's 'deliberative polls': https://deliberation.stanford.edu/what-deliberative-pollingr Get full access to Owl of Athena at owlofathena.substack.com/subscribe
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