Terry Bouricius is a former legislator and election reform policy analyst who advocates for replacing elections with sortition: short-term, representative random samples of everyday people, empowered to bypass politicians and decide political issues themselves after cross-examining experts and deliberating together. You can download Terry's landmark book, Democracy Without Politicians for free at https://democracywithoutpoliticians.org/ To contact Terry, get updates on him, or review his other works, check out https://terrybouricius.com/ To join the sortition movement in the United States, become a member at https://sortitionusa.org/members

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This book explains how electoral “democracy” is inherently undemocratic—enshrining rule by elites rather than popular self-rule—and argues that sortition (the use of random selection to form genuinely representative deliberative bodies) is a superior democratic alternative.

Making the case that representative government can function better without the exclusive reliance on elections, the author sets out the problems with modern elections, the inadequacies of the commonly proposed reforms, and examines the cognitive biases, detrimental psychological effects and societal polarization that elections exacerbate. The book further delves into the progression of democracy and sortition in ancient Greece, and the abandonment of sortition in the framing of the American Constitution and French Republic. Finally, it sets out both immediate and long-term prospects for renewing democracy through the use of multi-body sortition.

Written by a former elected politician and policy analyst, this book will be of interest to students, researchers and citizens interested in comprehensive democracy reform.

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Spectacles is a love letter to democracy, its values, its caretakers, and its ideas. Around the world, individual rights and representative government are facing unprecedented attacks from the forces of reaction and revisionism. But despite liberal democracy’s real shortcomings and today’s all-too-fashionable cynicism, we remain committed to its preservation and improvement. Join us as we explore just what liberal democracy is, how it comes about, and how it can best be maintained in a changing world.

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