The professor will see you now: Do elections need some 'pot luck'?
Illustration by Tracy Worrall
4 min read
Professor Philip Cowley offers a political science lesson for The House’s readers. This week: should parties use sortition to choose candidates?
Candidate selection was once memorably described as the secret garden of politics. An article just published in Political Quarterly argues for pulling it all up at the roots – and resurrecting the Athenian practice of sortition. Under this scheme, candidates would be chosen at random from party members, who would then duke it out at the ballot box with rivals from other parties, also chosen by lot.
This would give us, its authors argue, the advantages of both electoral politics (public choice, accountability, policy coherence) and sortition (a more representative body, largely free of the worst sort of careerists).
It’s worth pondering, not because it is likely to happen soon but because it throws light on some of the issues around candidate selection.
Your immediate objection might be what we could call the Mad Derek problem. He’s the guy who sits at the back in local party meetings, of idiosyncratic views and questionable personal hygiene, and who would perhaps not be everyone’s first choice as the candidate in a must-win marginal.
Yet the article notes that sub-par candidates are rare in the few places where this has been tried, and let’s face it, every parliamentary party contains a Mad Derek or two already; maybe it wouldn’t be all that much worse?
Since we have an unrepresentative Parliament now, how sure are we that things would get worse?
More significant is that political parties are not socially representative. Central to the idea of sortition is that it would, for good or ill, produce a representative sample of the population. Yet as every party membership survey has shown, political parties are deeply unrepresentative institutions; and if you select by lot from within an unrepresentative group, you are going to end up with an unrepresentative parliament. Again, however, since we have an unrepresentative Parliament now, how sure are we that things would get worse?
Anyway, the article’s argument is that parties’ memberships would change, with people – especially those currently under-represented in political life – joining in order to have the chance of being picked to stand for election. I’m not so sure. Anyone who is a Conservative supporter and fancies being an MP is presumably already signed up. More likely, surely, is that the parties would shrink yet further, as those who had no desire to be an MP left.
Party membership would no longer be a vague gesture of support, accompanied with the chance to go out leafleting occasionally if you’re lucky. Members would also lose the one significant power most still have – to choose the local candidate, which in many parts of the UK is the chance to choose the local MP. Instead, it would now mean potentially being plucked at random to become the local candidate or MP. “For those who like that sort of thing,” as Miss Jean Brodie said, “that is the sort of thing they like.”
Yet readers of this magazine will need no explanation of the many reasons someone might not like that sort of thing. The loss of privacy. The career disruption. The damage to family life. “Hello darling, it’s me. You’ll never guess what happened… Well, you know I joined the Labour Party…? It turns out I’m going to be an MP! Isn’t that brilliant news? Hello…? Hello…? Are you still there darling…?”
Missing from the proposal in the article – but surely required – would be some ability to say no, if only because otherwise you would have people running for election while making it very clear they didn’t want to be an MP. But any opt-out reduces yet further the benefits of sortition. Rather than everyone, the pool of candidates would now just be the ambitious members of deeply unrepresentative political parties. Which is what we’ve got now.
So, I’m unconvinced that it would make things all that much better. Equally, though, it might not make them much worse.
Further reading: K Dowding et al, Sortition, Parties and Political Careerism, The Political Quarterly (2025)
