The introduction starts with a factual element showing the exponential development of randomly selected minipublics, which seem to remember the Athenian democracy. It describes the growing interest about sortition in the literature, both in history and in political science. It defends the strategy of the book, which couples historical sociology and political theory. It defends four claims. The first criticizes the idea that sortition in politics has preserved a transhistorical democratic logic, as political sortition has played a number of varied functions throughout history. The second claim explains the disappearance of sortition in the nineteeth century by a combination of factors: Without the notion of the representative sample, the use of chance appeared blind, irrational, incompatible with popular sovereignty, difficult to couple with an elective aristocracy or with an increasing division of labor in big nation states. The third claim is that sortition’s recent return to politics is explained by the coupling of representative sampling, which make possible the constitution of a “minipublic” or microcosm of the people, with deliberation. The fourth claim proposes a normatively convincing and politically realistic case for empowered minipublics and the democratization of democracy. The introduction concludes by presenting the outline of the book.

Amidst increased dissatisfaction with representative democracies new forms of direct political participation by ordinary citizens are becoming increasingly popular. There has been a proliferation of proposals for inserting deliberative minipublics such as citizens’ assemblies, citizens juries or deliberative polls in the political process. Indeed, many democratic theorists see these mechanisms as the best hope for overcoming the many representational “gaps” that afflict traditional party systems – gaps that have produced alarming levels of citizens’ apathy and disenchantment with democracy.1 However, despite the interest that these new forms of citizen involvement have garnered there has been little analysis of the specific nature of political representation that they involve.2 In which sense are citizens who participate in minipublics supposed to be representatives of the rest of the citizenry? Can they act both as citizens in their own right and as representatives of non-participants at the same time?

Growing dissatisfaction and disaffection of citizens from the political process has spurred innovative thinking about democracy. In the past decade, a broad variety of deliberative innovations has emerged to involve citizens more directly into politics, ranging from traditional town hall meetings to planning cells, citizen juries, deliberative polling and deliberative assemblies. Deliberative innovations – combining direct participation and dialogue about pressing policy issues – have not only proliferated further in recent times, they are also increasingly institutionalized (Chwalisz 2020). As Mark E. Warren (Chapter 15) has emphatically put it, “We are seeing hundreds of thousands of new channels of citizen involvement in government in most countries in the world, often outside of the more visible politics of electoral representation, and mostly driven by problems of governance in complex societies.” Deliberative innovations are frequently viewed as effective tools to (re-)integrate underrepresented citizens into the democratic process and create more reciprocal relationships between citizens and political elites. If they are well designed, in other words, employ random selection of participants giving each participant an equal chance to participate, provide participants with balanced information materials to enhance their policy-specific knowledge and use appropriate facilitation techniques to counteract dominance patterns in discussion, then they are expected to be inclusive and responsive to the views and interests of all (including underrepresented people), at least in theory (see Polletta and Gardner 2018: 71).