This book represents an important step in broadening the awareness and appeal of sortition—the use of random selection in political contexts. The editors and contributors strike a difficult balance between presenting the history of, and existing arguments about, sortition and offering fresh perspectives and proposals. The result is a set of essays that collectively contain enough background information to serve as an introductory text, while also advancing the scholarship on the subject. If the relative lack of familiarity with the topic among today's political scientists leads the book to lean a bit heavily toward past works on and previous uses of sortition, the volume's participants, having published copiously on the subject, are not to blame.

Lottery literati can be forgiven for thinking that “the age of random selection” will be “upon us” when readers no longer need to wade through the 2,600-year history of political uses of lotteries, presented at the outset of nearly every work on the subject (pace Sid Z. Leiman, “The Ethics of Lottery,” Kennedy Institute Quarterly Report 4 [Summer 1978]: 8; and see Antoine Vergne, pp. 86–87). But with interest in sortition on the rise, as long as new audiences await there will still be value in historical overviews. In this respect, Sortition does not disappoint. The first half of the book, entitled “Connecting the Past and Future of Sortition,” is largely devoted to such surveys, and, thankfully, the format affords fresh takes on the lottery's political past.

It is in part for this reason that the book makes a good point of entry for those interested in learning more about one of the most enduring yet least familiar political institutions. Editor Gil Delannoi presents two typologies, one of the different “uses” and another of the “use values” of sortition, with an eye toward the ways the two interact (pp. 18–25). Fellow editor Oliver Dowlen builds on his previous work on the arational nature of lotteries with a new sketch of the potential for sortition in the “polity of the future” (see p. 53, n. 1, and p. 67; and Dowlen, The Political Potential of Sortition, 2008). Vergne analyzes the literature itself. Though it is difficult to break recent works on sortition cleanly into distinct categories, Vergne's listing of lottery-related works will save scholars weeks or months in the library.

Yves Sintomer's well-written essay typifies the challenge with sorting works on political uses of the lot. Sintomer touches on the historical, discussing the use of sortition in early Renaissance Florence (pp. 34–40). But his aim is to apply these lessons in a contemporary setting. Drawing from history, he observes that the mathematical concept of a “representative sample” was not available until late in the nineteenth century. This realization helps explain both the Athenian emphasis on sortition as facilitating the rotation of officials, not their representativeness, and the American Founders' choice of election, instead of sortition, as the mechanism by which to select representatives (pp. 42–43; see also Bernard Manin, The Principles of Representative Government, 1997; and Sintomer, “Random Selection, Republican Self-Government, and Deliberative Democracy,” Constellations 17 [September 2010]: 472–87).

Sintomer also argues that random selection contributes to the improvements in epistemic legitimacy that deliberative democratic experiments achieve (pp. 47–49). For this reason, he sees potential for randomly selected participatory groups not only “to discuss, but also … to decide” (p. 49). It is interesting to note, however, that Sintomer remains concerned that “participatory devices based on random selection do not have enough legitimacy” to make binding decisions on general, political issues (p. 50). As a result, he concludes with a proposal that they be used instead to create a “fourth power” to balance the three classical branches of government (p. 51; see also, among others, Ethan J. Leib, Deliberative Democracy in America: A Proposal for a Popular Branch of Government, 2004).

The authors in the book's second part, “New Perspectives Connecting Theory and Practice,” focus more squarely on theoretical and institutional innovation. On the former front, Gerhard Göhler explores the benefits of thinking of sortition as an instrument for democratic “controlling.” Random selection of officials can better integrate citizens and community, thereby facilitating more indirect, nonheirarchical, “soft controlling” governance (pp. 97–103). The capacity of sortition to inspire new ways of thinking about other political concepts is on full display here.

In his characteristically penetrating fashion, Peter Stone develops an implication of his definition elsewhere of a “fair lottery” as one that is both “random” and “equiprobable” (see Stone, “Lotteries, Justice and Probability,” Journal of Theoretical Politics 21 [July 2009]: 405–8). Because probability is a contested concept, he considers four “leading conceptions of probability,” arguing that only one of them—the logical conception—“best meets the needs of defining a fair lottery” (pp. 158, 166). Stone makes no pretense of having resolved the debate about which is the correct way to think about probability, but his lottery-derived insights do breathe new life into the logical conception, showing, for example, how it better comports with “the intuition that probability judgments become more accurate … as the level of information supporting them increases” (p. 169).

Turning to the proposals for lottery-based reform of political structures, Barbara Goodwin adds to her many important contributions on sortition, suggesting a market-lottery hybrid as a way of awarding commercial contracts and government-regulated franchises. The combination, she argues, would help “new or innovative companies” compete, it would prevent “oligopoly and collusion” in markets, and it would allow regulatory agencies to further “non-economic objectives” where the “public interest is at stake” (pp. 106, 110).

Another significant contribution comes from Hubertus Buchstein and Michael Hein, who offer three nuanced and compelling proposals for using sortition within the European Union. They propose that lotteries be used to determine which member nations would have seats in a smaller European Commission, to fill committee positions in the European Parliament, and to create a second, randomly selected chamber of the Parliament (pp. 138–51; see also Buchstein and Hein, “Randomizing Europe: The Lottery as a Decision-Making Procedure for Policy Creation in the EU,” Critical Policy Studies 3 [November 2009]: 29–57). The authors offer these proposals to address problems confronting the European integration, which they depict as democratically deficient, inefficient, and nontransparent (pp. 131–38). This piece contains on its own all the elements of a volume on lottery. It offers an historical and analytic understanding of sortition and details the potential benefits of lotteries in today's politics generally. It identifies a group of concrete problems and relates in exacting detail how lotteries might help resolve them.

The book has something to offer political scientists new to the study of lotteries, as well as new perspectives and detailed proposals that make it worthy of attention by those already familiar with the basics of sortition. While there is something here for everyone, there is room for more on the topic. Arguments both for and against an enhanced role for randomness in modern, democratic politics go unmentioned. As sortition's profile continues to rise, future volumes on the topic may benefit from a narrower focus. This is the right place to start.