In April 2013, four months after the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting killed twenty children, the US Senate voted on the Manchin-Toomey Act to expand background checks and to include gun-show and internet sales of firearms. Roughly nine in ten Americans, including a majority of gun owners, supported the bill—a figure that has held steady across more than a decade of polling. It fell short of the 60-vote threshold by six votes. This was not an outlier. On complex issues, representatives often fail to translate public consensus into reality. Research shows that legislators consistently vote in line with donor and interest group preferences over constituent opinion. Before the vote, the National Rifle Association (NRA) warned every senator it would “rate” their vote on its annual rating system, and a low NRA rating could cost senators their next primary. Consequently, the bill died 54-46, and the majority of Americans watched, powerless, as their consensus was overridden by self-interested representatives.
Liberal democracies need a method to bypass electoral incentives that run counter to public opinion. One already exists: Ireland faced the same stalemate on complex issues before it instituted a process called sortition. The beauty of sortition lies in its removal of the primary pressure that misaligns representatives’ interests from public interest: reelection. Much like jury duty, citizens are randomly drawn from the population. An independent body then stratifies the pool, so the final group mirrors the country by age, gender, geography, and income. The group meets over weeks or months, hearing from experts and the public, as well as debating frequently. At the end, it issues a recommendation that parliament may then put to a referendum or pass into law.
In 2016, Ireland gathered ninety-nine citizens to deliberate on an issue so divisive that for 35 years practically every party avoided it: the nation's constitutional ban on abortion. Yet for five weekends starting in November 2016, the group of citizens heard from 25 experts and reviewed 300 of the over 12,000 public submissions they received. In the end, 87% of the group voted to change the ban, and 64% supported full access to abortion within pregnancy term limits. Ireland’s parliament reviewed the recommendation through a joint committee and put the question to a national referendum. On May 25, 2018, Irish voters chose to repeal the ban by 66.4% to 33.6%. An issue that had been stuck in a political impasse for 35 years was resolved in less than two years. The recommendation itself was only advisory; what carried it through was the referendum, which placed the final decision with the public rather than with representatives prone to the same pressures that stall legislation.
Some critics may argue that the only reason this system succeeded in Ireland was that the country is small, homogeneous, and amenable to consensus in ways that the U.S. is not. They might say that American politics is too polarized and divided by party loyalty for sortition to succeed. However, in September 2019, Stanford University’s Center for Deliberative Democracy organized a study called “America in One Room” and assembled 523 Americans at a hotel in Texas. It was the largest representative sample of the U.S. electorate ever brought together for deliberation. Participants came from rural and urban areas, blue and red states. For four days, they discussed healthcare, the economy, foreign policy, the environment, and other fundamental issues. By the end, the proportion who said American democracy was “working well” had doubled. A peer-reviewed study in the American Political Science Review found statistically significant reductions in partisan polarization across nearly every issue. Or consider Oregon’s Citizens’ Initiative Review, established in 2011, which organizes randomly selected citizen panels to discuss ballot measures before they go to voters. Their findings are published in every Oregon voter’s official voting pamphlet. Independent research confirmed the statements were unbiased, accurate, and helped voters make better-informed decisions.
Sortition could work the same way in the U.S. As in Ireland, a randomly chosen, representative sample of citizens could debate controversial or polarizing topics, such as gun violence, informed by experts, advocates, and affected communities. The assembly would make a recommendation, and then the issue would be put to a binding national referendum, circumventing elected representatives’ conflicts of interest. Granted, a binding national referendum would require a constitutional amendment, as the Constitution vests legislative power in Congress, not the public directly. A next-best option would be to implement a statutory fast-track rule. This would bypass congressional committees entirely and send the assembly’s recommendation to the full Senate or House for an immediate, unamendable yes-or-no vote. This would require a change to Senate or House procedural rules, but each chamber could adopt it by a simple majority vote. Other mechanisms exist, but any process that returns the decision to elected representatives reintroduces the same conflict of interest that killed the Manchin-Toomey Act in the first place.
However, the sortition model is only as strong as a government’s commitment to it. In 2019, French President Emmanuel Macron formed the Citizens’ Convention for Climate amid the “Yellow Vest” protests. The assembly randomly selected 150 citizens to draft policies to reduce France’s carbon emissions. Macron promised to pass on the assembly’s recommendations to parliament or a public referendum “without filter.” However, when the final proposals were submitted, only 10% were passed on unchanged, with the other 90% either modified or rejected entirely, largely due to pressure from fossil fuel and agricultural lobbies. Without a legally binding authority, citizen assemblies risk being ineffectual.
Of course, there are other structural reforms that would give the public a stronger voice and blunt the influence of outside interests. For instance, establishing independent redistricting commissions to limit the effects of gerrymandering, as well as campaign finance reform to curb outside money and lobbying pressure that pulls representatives away from their constituents. The challenge with these kinds of changes is that they generally require winning over the same conflicted representatives whose self-interests and reelection priorities have blocked consensus for decades. While sortition isn’t a silver bullet, it has one critical advantage: it is one of the few tools that circumvent these misaligned incentives. Crucially, sortition also cuts both ways: a representative assembly might recommend looser gun restrictions rather than tighter ones, and the model only works if the outcome is honored just as faithfully. Sortition’s legitimacy comes from the integrity of the process, not from a particular result.
The memories of the children killed at Sandy Hook in December 2012 were betrayed by the Senate four months later. It took another school shooting, in Uvalde, Texas, to produce the first major federal gun legislation in decades. Yet, it arguably still isn't enough. It provided changes to background checks and red-flag grants, but only for states that want them. Ireland spent 35 years deadlocked on abortion, then resolved it in under two years through sortition. Instead of electing “better politicians,” they temporarily removed them from the equation. The U.S. doesn’t lack public consensus on gun violence; it has a shortage of mechanisms to translate public consensus into law. Sortition is one such mechanism—arguably the most direct path to bypass the conflicts of interest that have made progress on critical issues impossible.
Jack Shapiro is a high school senior from Chappaqua, New York. For more of his writing, follow his Substack, The Amateur Analyst, on economics and current events.
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