Abstract
Abstract Chapter 8 argues that the epistemic value of democracy can be improved by combining elections with sortition. While voters struggle to motivate representatives towards the best decisions due to their limited knowledge, random selection offers the possibility for more informed citizen accountability and scrutiny of public policy. Popular proposals for combining elections with sortition, such as deliberative mini-publics and randomly selected legislatures, are found to face significant problems, however. The chapter therefore offers a new proposal for a sortition branch of a deliberative system which involves the formation of many short-term and randomly selected assemblies with the power to veto legislation. The sortition branch is argued to institutionalize random selection in a way which can balance substantive powers with reasonable burdens on citizen members, while also guarding against different forms of elite capture. It is therefore able to improve the intelligence of democracy in a way previous proposals cannot.
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