Constituency juries: holding elected representatives accountable through sortition

Leipold, Bruno ORCID: 0000-0003-3640-1618 (2025) Constituency juries: holding elected representatives accountable through sortition. Perspectives on Politics. ISSN 1537-5927

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Abstract

This article proposes the creation of constituency juries to enhance accountability and check oligarchy in representative governments. Constituency juries would be made up of randomly selected citizens from an electoral constituency who exercise oversight over that constituency’s elected representative. Elected representatives would be required to give a regular account of their actions to the constituency jury, and the jury would have the power to sanction the representative. In addition to this general model of constituency juries, I offer a more specific institutional design that shows how the general model can be operationalized and realistically incorporated into existing representative governments. In contrast to lottocratic proposals that replace elections with sortition, constituency juries are a promising way to combine the two to address the oligarchic tendencies of elections in representative government.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2025 The Author
Divisions:	Government
Subjects:	J Political Science K Law
Date Deposited:	01 Apr 2025 11:27
Last Modified:	08 Aug 2025 07:45
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/127776

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