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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