ABSTRACT
Accountability is another concern some people have about sortition. Accountability is the major selling point for elections, which are generally assumed to be an essential tool of representative democracy. Accountability refers to a principal holding an agent to account. In a representative system, the principal is the public (or perhaps a particular representative’s constituency), and the agent is either an individual representative, the entire legislative branch, or the entire government. In this political context, I will focus on two sorts of accountability: corruption or ethics accountability on the one hand, and policy or representational accountability on the other.
