---
title: Isegoria
summary: "The ancient Greek principle of equal right to speak in the public assembly — used by contemporary democracy reformers to argue that elections undermine equality of political voice while sortition-based processes restore it."
---

**Isegoria** (ἰσηγορία) is an ancient Greek democratic principle: the equal right of all citizens to speak in the public assembly. It is distinct from *isonomia* (equality before the law) — isegoria is specifically about equality of political voice and standing.

The concept has been revived in contemporary democracy reform discussions, most prominently by Australian economist Nicholas Gruen, whose 2020 DOD podcast episode is titled *"Isegoria: The Way Citizens' Juries Deliver It, How Elections Destroy It."*

## The argument

Gruen's framing: elections appear democratic but structurally undermine equal voice. Electoral competition rewards charisma, media access, financial resources, and tribal loyalty — all of which amplify some voices at the expense of others. The result is a system that selects for a particular kind of person and a particular kind of argument, while filtering out the considered opinions of ordinary citizens.

Citizens' juries and sortition-based processes restore isegoria by a different mechanism: random selection means that any citizen's voice has equal probability of being included. Within a well-designed deliberative process, participants engage on roughly equal terms — they are not competing for votes or airtime.

The argument is not just procedural. Gruen also draws on the observation that vox-pop democracy — where public opinion is sampled through rapid, unconsidered reactions — produces systematically worse outcomes than deliberative processes, because human cognition works differently under the two conditions. Electoral politics, by rewarding emotional salience over considered reasoning, actively degrades the quality of collective decision-making.


## See also

- [Sortition](sortition.md)
- [Citizens' Assembly](citizens-assembly.md)
- [Representative Democracy](representative-democracy.md)
- [Lateral Economics](../organisations/lateral-economics.md)
- [newDemocracy Foundation](../organisations/newdemocracy.md)
- [Sortition Foundation Australia](../organisations/sortition-foundation-australia.md)

## Sources and further reading

- DOD Podcast: [Isegoria: The Way Citizens' Juries Deliver It, How Elections Destroy It](../../blog/posts/2020-03-20.md) — Nicholas Gruen in conversation with DOD, 2020
- DOD Podcast: [Citizens' Democracy](../../blog/posts/2017-08-21-podcast.md) — Gruen's earlier (2017) presentation of the same isegoria / by-lot argument
- Nicholas Gruen's Substack: [nicholasgruen.substack.com](https://nicholasgruen.substack.com) — ongoing writing on democracy reform and political economy
- Centre for Public Impact: [Detoxing democracy: introducing citizens' juries](https://www.centreforpublicimpact.org/detoxing-democracy-citizens-juries/)
