Colloquium on Sortition and Democracy at Wellesley College
On October 17, the Wellesley College Math Department will host IMD affiliate Dr. Bailey Flanigan for her colloquium talk entitled “Algorithmic tools for targeting sortition ideals.” Her research involves the concept of sortition, or randomly sampling a representative subset, as it applies to democracy. See her bio and abstract for the talk below. The talk will take place at 1pm in H401.
Bailey Flanigan is an HDSI Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard, hosted by Archon Fung at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. Starting Fall of 2025, Dr. Flanigan will be an assistant professor at MIT joint between political science and EECS. Dr. Flanigan studies direct democratic participation and political methodology using tools from algorithms, social choice, and political science.
Abstract: In the past few years, there has been a flurry of computer science research on sortition, the task of randomly sampling a representative subset of people. This work has so far been primarily applied to choose members of citizens’ assemblies, but it could in principle apply to a much broader range of democratic models for direct citizen participation in governance. This talk will describe the key challenges of sortition in practice, and then overview some of the algorithmic tools that have been developed to mitigate these challenges.
Join us on October 17 for a lively discussion of both mathematical and political perspectives on sortition. Stay tuned for more events throughout the semester!
