ABSTRACT
Democratic governance is crucial to cooperatives’ identity and success, yet it faces long-standing and evolving challenges. In seeking to identify promising ways to overcome these challenges, a growing body of researchers and practitioners have begun exploring the potential contributions of sortition, which refers to the use of lotteries to select representatives. As with any new area of research, this body of work is fragmented and leaves many questions unanswered, particularly when it comes to how cooperatives can use sortition and when it is likely to be more or less appropriate. In this chapter, I synthesize and extend prior research by advancing a framework of how cooperatives could integrate sortition into various facets of their governance structures and a contingency approach for weighing when it is likely to be more attractive than other selection methods.
