Complementary Virtues and Competing Legitimacies. Inter-Chamber Relationships in a Bicameral Elected and Sortitioned Legislature. Insights from Belgium

In their proposal on a “Legislature by lot”, John Gastil and Erik Olin Wright (2017) propose to launch a bicameral parliament where one chamber would be composed by elected politicians and the other by sortitioned ordinary citizens. Their idea is to combine party-independent problem-solving deliberations in a chamber for which every citizen has the same chance to get selected, with adversial debates on conflicting policy preferences in a chamber for which every citizen was entitled to cast a vote. Given that election and sortition have distinct virtues, this looks like a promising proposal to... Mehr ...