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23 Const. Pol. Econ. 1 (2012)

handle is hein.journals/constpe23 and id is 1 raw text is: Const Polit Econ (2012) 23:1 21
DOI 10.1007/s10602-0ll-9112-1
Constitutional choice in ancient Athens: the rationality
of selection to office by lot
George Tridimas
Published online: 21 August 2011
© Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2011
Abstract Contrary to modern democracies ancient Athens appointed large num-
bers 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.
Keywords Constitutional choice - Ancient Athens
Appointment to office by lot - Election
JEL Classification D70 - D72 - D74 - N40 - N43
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
G. Tridimas (E)
School of Economics, University of Ulster, Newtownabbey, County Antrim BT37 OQB, UK
e-mail: G.Tridimas@ulster.ac.uk

I_ Springer

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