Sortition might not help. The problems include: • Skiving. People don't want to be torn from their lives and careers to do something else against their will. I

Sortition might not help. The problems include: • Skiving. People don't want to be torn from their lives and careers to do something else against their will. In the jury system this shows up as people deliberately trying to be excluded, which isn't that hard. • Length of time required. Jury trials last a few days or weeks, maybe months in really extreme cases. It often takes new ministers months to merely get up to speed on their brief, let alone work out what should be done and how to actually pass legislation. Everyone would spend 90% of their time just working out how the process works, then they'd leave and it'd start all over again. • Ease of manipulating the legislators. Combine ignorance, apathy and a strong resistance to even being there at all (they're being forced!), and what you get is people finding ways to outsource the work as much as possible. If you think lobbyists writing laws is a problem with professional politicians, that'd be nothing compared to unprofessional ones who even in the absolute best case will have no idea what they're doing and need all the help they can get. If you try and block external lobbyists, all you do is fully empower internal lobbyists (e.g. civil servants with an agenda). Sortition could maybe work in a very libertarian state in which there are very few laws or welfare programs, and so the average group of legislators don't need to do much and can master the process quickly. In the past politicians were often part time, in some parts of the world this still happens at the local level. But if you want something at the scale of the US government it seems completely unworkable. Even with hundreds of full time professional legislators they still outsource huge amounts of lawmaking to executive agencies. Sortition would just set that to be 100% and there'd be no accountability.