Constitutional choice in ancient Athens: The rationality of selection to office by lot
George Tridimas*
University of Ulster, School of Economics
Newtownabbey, Co. Antrim, BT37 0QB, UK
Abstract
Contrary to modern democracies ancient Athens appointed large numbers of government officers by lot. After describing the Athenian arrangements, the paper reviews the literature on the choice between election and lot focusing on representativeness of the population, distributive justice, minimization of conflicts, quality of appointees and administrative economy. It then examines why in drawing up the constitution a self-interested citizen may give up voting for government officials and appoint them by lot. It is shown that appointment by lot is preferred when the effort required to choose candidates is less than the benefit expected from their actions as government officials. It is also found that, given the choice, office motivated candidates may unanimously agree to selection by lot but not to election.
JEL Classification: D70; D72; D74; N40; N43
Key words: Constitutional choice; Ancient Athens; Appointment to office by lot; Election.
*Tel: +44 (0) 28 90368273, fax: + 44(0) 28 0366847, e-mail:
Forthcoming in
Constitutional Political Economy
DOI: 10.1007/s10602-011-9112-1
Constitutional choice in ancient Athens: The rationality of selection to office by lot
1. Introduction
From the viewpoint of an ancient Athenian modern representative democracy would have been dismissed as an “elective oligarchy”. A fundamental aspect of the Athenian democracy setting it apart from the modern one was the selection of public officials by lot, a process also called sortition. Headlam (1891) who offered the first authoritative modern account of the lot in ancient Athens wrote “The lot … at Athens … helped to secure perfect equality among all citizens, a regular rotation in office, and the undisputed authority of the assembly” (p.88). There are several contemporary examples of using the lot to allocate scarce resources. These include lottery money, hunting permits, school places and tickets to popular events. Similarly, lotteries are used for the selection of jury members and may be used to allocate a burden, like the military draft. However, posts in legislative or executive bodies are filled by candidates who succeed in popular elections. Nevertheless, ancient authors considered sortition more democratic than election. A lottery generates a fixed number of outcomes with given probabilities implying that appointment by lottery is a mechanical form of decision making that does not reflect any rational calculation behind the result. It is, as Dowlen (2008) put it, “arational” and no individual agent can be held responsible for its outcome. On the other hand, when electing candidates voters acquire information about politicians and their policy platforms and politicians acquire information about the issues that affect voter welfare and campaign to win votes. In other words, the outcome of the election is determined by the choices of voters but the outcome of the lottery is not. How can then the a-rational sortition be rationalized?
In examining the lot as a mechanism of selection to office, scholarship in economics, political science and philosophy has investigated whether it can promote the welfare of citizens and especially whether it contributes to representation of voter preferences, unity of the citizenry, equality of opportunity to occupy office and selection of suitable political leaders. No doubt, the above criteria can provide a powerful normative justification for the desirability of sortition. The present study pursues a complementary line seeking to explain the constitutional choice of the ancient Athenians in the way the economist explains economic outcomes, that is, self-interested behaviour. It focuses on the choice of utility maximizing citizens at the constitutional stage to introduce the method of appointment to office expected to secure the highest expected payoff. It is argued that since voting in elections requires that the citizen is informed about the issues involved in collective choice and the quality of the candidates for office, sortition will be preferred when the expected marginal benefit from casting an informed vote is smaller than the marginal cost of being informed.
The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 discusses some features of appointment to office by lot in ancient Athens. Section 3 offers a short review of the properties of sortition focusing on its ability to serve representativeness, equality of opportunity and social peace, and the risk to select unqualified candidates for office. Section 4 models the decision of the citizen at the constitutional stage to choose the rules for appointment to office, that is, to select a public post-holder by competitive elections or by lottery. A citizen is prepared to invest time and effort into answering the question of “who is to govern” when the actions of the government official affect significantly his welfare. However, when the actions of the person in office do not require special skills, any citizen is suitable to carry out the responsibilities of office. In this case it is not worth for the citizen to spend the resources in identifying who is best suited for office and the random selection process emerges as an appropriate least-cost method of appointment. Section 5 turns to the complementary issue of whether a citizen may seek office through election or lottery, when office confers rents but not the right to decide policy. By holding office the citizen gives up his time and therefore foregoes income from work, while if he contests an election he also incurs campaign costs; the latter, however, are eliminated if he is selected to office by lot. His labour productivity, or equivalently the opportunity cost of his time, and the size of his non-earned income in comparison to the rent from office turn out to be crucial factors in the decision to seek office. In addition, the section inquires when, given the choice, a citizen as a candidate for office chooses to fight an election to win office or he prefers to win office by lottery. Such choice turns out to depend on the balance between the probability of success in the two different methods and the cost of election campaigns. Section 5 concludes.
2 Athenian practices of appointment to public office by lot
The ancient Athenian direct democracy that lasted between 508 and 322 BC, started with a series of institutional changes introduced by Cleisthenes in 508 defining citizenship and the powers of the Assembly of citizens of Athens[1] and was completed in the mid 5th century with the reforms introduced by Ephialtes and Pericles removing residual powers of aristocratic magistrates. Throughout the period of democracy the Assembly of (male only) citizens was the principal decision making body. It held ten obligatory meetings per year and as many additional sessions as necessary up to a total of forty. It decided all issues of public interest including public finance, foreign policy, war and peace, and any citizen could introduce a motion for discussion. It also elected one hundred executive officers including the ten military generals, who served as commanders of the army and navy and carried out some additional functions in domestic and external policy, and a score of financial officers and religious commissionaires.
However, what was unique about ancient Athens was the use of lot for appointing large numbers of public post-holders. During the 4th century out of a total population of 30,000, more than 7000 public officers were annually appointed by lot.[2] As the minimum age for holding a public post was 30 years (while all Athenians above the age of twenty could attend and vote in the Assembly) the pool of eligible candidates during the 4th century is estimated at 20,000 citizens, see Hansen (1999). The offices filled by lot can be divided into the following categories: (a) 500 members of the Council of the Five Hundred. The Council (Boule), set up by Cleisthenes, prepared the agenda for the Assembly, was responsible for the day-today administration of the state and oversaw the implementation of the various projects approved by the Assembly, and met at least 250 days a year. (b) 600 executive magistrates responsible for a variety of functions as voted by the Assembly. Amongst others these included the nine archons. In Archaic Athens (750 – 500 BC) the nine archons were the principal government officers; they were elected by the aristocracy and from its members only, had religious, military and administrative responsibilities and after completing their terms became members of the Council of Areopagus a powerful body which oversaw laws and magistrates and conducted trials. (c) 6,000 members of the Court responsible for trying civil, penal, as well as political cases and for reviewing the policy decisions of the Assembly. The Court met about 200 days a year and on each court day about 2,000 out of the 6,000 were selected by lot to serve as jurors; they were then allocated to cases after another lot. Moreover, during the 4th century citizens who had been selected as members of the Court, could also be called by lot to serve in boards of “legislators”, whose membership numbered in the hundreds, and were responsible for ratifying general constitutional provisions called “laws” including criminal and procedural rules of unlimited duration (as opposed to ordinary decrees passed by the Assembly in accordance to the laws).
Office terms were annual. Appointed officers received a monetary compensation for their services whose size varied from office to office. Council members received the average wage rate and jurors half the average wage rate. The sums of money involved where substantial. Reliable information for the 340s suggests that out of 400 talents of public revenue, the expenditure for the Council was 15 talents, while the Courts claimed another 22–37 talents, see Kyriazis (2009) for details. A man could only serve twice in his lifetime on the Council, but not in successive years, and once in other magistrate offices. He could hold different offices after his tenure in one office was completed and reviewed by the Court, which effectively meant that he could potentially serve in different offices every other year. The annual term limits meant that substantial rotation took place. Thus, sortition implied that any citizen might hold office, while rotation implied that every citizen might hold office at some time, see Engelstad (1989). Using the estimate of 20,000 eligible citizens, Hansen (1999) concludes that in the 4th century the rule that a man could be councilor no more than twice in his life implied that “over a third of all citizens over eighteen, and about two thirds of all citizens over forty, became councilors, some of them twice”, p.249. The various magistrates and judges of the Court were amateurs – ordinary citizens – without any specific training for the functions allocated to them.[3]
It is essential to appreciate that the lottery was used to appoint officers for implementing the policy which had been decided by the Assembly of citizens; officials selected by lot carried out routine duties. Lot randomized appointment to office and the consequent distribution of monetary rewards from holding office. Citizens had the right but not the obligation to serve in office. Lots were drawn between those citizens who volunteered for public service rather than all those eligible. Those wishing to be selected for office were subject to triple Court review: Before assuming office they were checked for their eligibility based on reputation of character and conduct but not competence. During service they were held accountable if an accusation for misconduct arose. Finally, they were again reviewed by the Court upon leaving office accounting for conduct during service, especially if they were in control of public funds. Thus, a citizen who chose to be selected for office by lot did so in full knowledge of the scrutiny that was going to take place before, during and after the period of service.
Although religious considerations may be invoked to rationalize the use of lot, in the sense that the outcome of the lot revealed the will of the gods, this explanation ill-fits ancient Athens. There is no evidence in the sources that any appointee attributed his selection to divine intervention; nor was opposition to the lot considered as blasphemous – see Headlam (1891) for a discussion of the arguments. Historians debate the date the lot was introduced, as the sources are not very clear. The Council of the Five Hundred founded by the Cleisthenes reforms was probably filled by lot from the start. Lot was certainly used in selecting the nine archons in 487/6 BC.
Socrates thought it was ridiculous that the Athenians appointed magistrates chosen by lot when they would never have thought of choosing a helmsman or architect or flute-player that way. Quoting ancient authors, Hansen (1999) maintains that Athenians did not think that all citizens were equally qualified to serve as public officers, but that all men were sufficiently qualified at what they were chosen for. The argument is essentially that serving in public office was something that could be done without specialized expertise. Hansen goes on to argue that “In the selection of magistrates the Athenians preferred the lot to election because it safeguarded the powers of the People and obviated factionalism and corruption, not because they believed in the equality of all citizens” (pp. 341-2). In his thesis that the development of the Athenian democracy was incidental rather than by conscious design, Lyttkens (2008) argues that the Athenian aristocracy introduced the lottery as a mechanism to reduce intra-elite competition for power, since such competition weakened its traditional dominance. He considered the lottery as a form of self-regulation among the members of the elite to avoid costly contests for power. However, his argument goes, rather than strengthening the position of the elite it had the opposite effect. The use of the lottery implied that no special abilities or skills were required to hold office, reducing the status associated with the post of archons. Access to the office was then opened to all citizens and its importance diminished. The next step was to extend the practice to other offices too.