Introducing Tribunacy

There is a problem with institutions that the previous essays in this project have circled repeatedly without quite naming directly. It is not the problem of bad governance — that is familiar enough, and there are mechanisms, imperfect as they are, for addressing it. The deeper problem is what happens when the system itself is captured: when the people who operate a governance framework are precisely the people with the least interest in reforming it, and when the mechanisms that might force reform have been allowed to atrophy, or were never built in the first place.

The case of Venice is instructive here. By the early fourteenth century, the city-state had developed genuinely inclusive institutions — systems of participation and commercial law that distributed opportunity broadly and created incentives across the population. Then in 1297-98, the ruling oligarchy implemented the Serrata: a formal closure of the Grand Council that locked in the existing elite and converted inclusive institutions into extractive ones. Venice did not collapse immediately. It persisted for nearly two more centuries, still wealthy by the standards of the time, still powerful by reputation. But the atrophy was irreversible. What Venice lacked was any internal mechanism by which the Serrata could be challenged, reversed, or circumvented. The elite had captured the system, and the system had no means of reclaiming itself.

Contemporary democracies are not Venice. But the structural vulnerability is recognisable. Political elites owe their incumbency to the constitutional arrangements that brought them to power. They are, almost as a law of nature, the last people who will propose fundamental reform of those arrangements — regardless of whether they sincerely believe the arrangements are adequate. The question this essay addresses is: what kind of institution could be permanently tasked with asking that question, and empowered to act on the answer?

This essay is about a concept called tribunacy, and the institution that gives it effect: the Tribunate.

The word tribunacy is constructed from the same root as Tribunate: the Roman tribuni plebis, the Tribunes of the Plebs. The institution was created in the early Roman Republic specifically to protect ordinary citizens from the arbitrary authority of the patrician class. Tribunes had the power of intercessio — the right to intervene in actions by magistrates that harmed the people they represented. They were, structurally, a mechanism for protecting citizens against the state: not by governing, but by constraining governance.

The parallel is deliberate. Tribunacy, like sovereigncy, uses the -cy suffix (from Latin and Greek, as in democracy, diplomacy, bureaucracy) to name a system or arrangement rather than a quality. A Tribunate is the institutional expression of that system — a body established not to govern but to govern the rules of governing. The distinction matters. A Tribunate holds no executive function, passes no legislation, delivers no services, controls no budget beyond its own. Its sole mandate is the constitution: ensuring that the constitutional and procedural architecture of a democracy remains fit for purpose, and providing the formal pathway by which it can be changed.

This is a genuinely novel institutional role. Every existing democratic system has institutions to make policy, and institutions to execute it. Almost none has a permanent institution specifically empowered to manage the system of governance itself. The result is that constitutional reform — when it occurs at all — tends to happen through ordinary political channels, dominated by the same actors who have the most to lose from fundamental change, and driven by the same short-term pressures that make governing difficult in the first place. The Tribunate addresses this gap directly.

The most important question in designing a Tribunate is how its members are chosen. The obvious answer — election — is almost certainly the wrong one.

The reason is structural. An elected body will be constituted through partisan competition, attracting candidates who have navigated the same incentive systems that shape ordinary political parties. Its members will arrive with platforms, affiliations, and obligations to the constituencies that elected them. Over time, it will develop the same professional political culture that characterises the legislatures it is meant to provide an independent check on. The independence that is the institution’s entire rationale will erode before it is established.

There is an alternative with both a strong theoretical foundation and a substantial real-world track record: random selection, or in its formal designation, sortition — from the Latin sortitio, meaning selection by lot. Rather than asking citizens to choose among competing candidates, the Tribunate would be constituted by inviting eligible voters at random to participate, on a voluntary basis, until the required membership is reached.

The mechanism is far older than it might appear. In ancient Athens, sortition was the primary method for filling public offices, including the boule — the council of five hundred that prepared legislation for the assembly. Elections were considered the oligarchic method, favouring the well-known and the wealthy; selection by lot was regarded as the genuinely democratic one. Aristotle makes the point explicitly in the Politics. The irony, from a modern perspective, is that what feels like a radical innovation was, in the world’s first democracy, simply how democracy worked.

The contemporary intellectual case for reviving sortition has been made most accessibly by the Belgian historian David Van Reybrouck in Against Elections (2016), and most rigorously in the academic literature by James Fishkin at Stanford, whose work on deliberative polling — bringing randomly selected citizens together to reason through complex questions after exposure to balanced expert briefings — provides the strongest empirical foundation for the claim that randomly selected citizens can produce high-quality deliberative outcomes. The evidence consistently shows that ordinary people, given adequate information and structured process, reason carefully and reach conclusions that command broad public confidence.

The real-world applications are no longer confined to experiments. Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly, first established in 2016, used exactly this approach to address two of the most politically intractable questions in recent Irish history: the legalisation of same-sex marriage and the constitutional status of abortion. Both had defeated conventional political processes for decades. A randomly selected body of one hundred citizens, supported by expert testimony and structured deliberation, produced recommendations on both that were subsequently adopted by referendum. The quality of the deliberation, and the degree of public trust it commanded, surprised even its proponents. The French Citizens’ Convention on Climate, convened in 2019, took the model further in scale: one hundred and fifty randomly selected citizens developed a comprehensive set of climate policy recommendations, the majority of which were subsequently adopted by the French government. Earlier, in 2004, British Columbia’s Citizens’ Assembly — again randomly selected — produced a detailed proposal for electoral reform that went to a provincial referendum. The accumulation of these experiments across different political cultures and on questions of varying complexity and sensitivity now constitutes a meaningful body of evidence, not merely a promising idea.

The Tribunate is a permanent application of the same principle. A membership of between two hundred and five hundred citizens — the precise number to be specified in the founding constitution — would be maintained through rolling selection, with terms of four years and staggered renewal so that the body is continuously refreshed without ever being entirely replaced. The institution is never constituted from scratch; it always contains members with accumulated experience of its processes and norms.

Participation would be voluntary: citizens invited at random and choosing to accept. To ensure that the burden of participation is not borne disproportionately by those who can afford it, membership must be compensated at a rate sufficient to make it genuinely accessible across income levels — and continuation of membership made conditional on attendance, so that formal participation reflects real engagement rather than nominal appointment. The Tribunate would elect one of its own members as Chair for a fixed one-year term, with no immediate re-election available. The Secretariat — a permanent professional body — would provide administrative continuity, manage the referral process, and facilitate access to expert advice on whatever matters the Tribunate is considering.

How does a matter reach the Tribunate?

The precise mechanism is appropriately a matter for the Tribunate itself to determine, under whatever procedural guidelines are specified in the founding constitution. But the governing principle should be openness with a filter: anyone — a citizen, a civil society organisation, a political party, a branch of government — should be able to refer a constitutional question to the Tribunate, but referrals should be required to meet a threshold of merit before they are formally taken up. The analogy to a legal case is useful here. Courts are in principle open to all, but cases must survive preliminary scrutiny before they are heard. The mechanism preserves accessibility while protecting the Tribunate’s attention and credibility.

Whatever the referral mechanism, its most important function is ensuring that constitutional reform has a clear, formal pathway. Currently, in most democracies, proposed amendments must navigate ordinary legislative processes — requiring parliamentary supermajorities, or executive sponsorship, or some combination of both. These processes are controlled by the same elites who have the most to lose from structural reform, and who are likely to have strong partisan positions on values to the extent that these are enshrined in constitutions. The Tribunate does not eliminate political contestation around constitutional questions; it ensures that such questions can be determined by people without conflicts of interest.

Once the Tribunate takes up a matter and reaches a decision, how does that decision take effect?

Constitutions should be relatively difficult to change. The permanence and cross-partisan legitimacy that make them effective as constraints on executive power depend on their not being easily rewritten by any temporary majority. At the same time, a constitution that cannot be adapted to changing circumstances will eventually become an obstacle rather than a foundation.

The Tribunate resolves this tension through a staged process. A constitutional amendment must pass the Tribunate with a supermajority — sixty percent of members voting in favour is the appropriate threshold. A sixty percent majority means that fifty percent more people support a change than oppose it: a meaningfully high bar that requires genuine breadth of support without demanding the near-unanimity that renders formal amendment procedures effectively impossible.

An amendment passed at this threshold does not take immediate effect. It enters a four-year provisional period, during which it is public, subject to debate, and available for scrutiny. After four years, a Tribunate whose membership will by then have been fully renewed — through the staggered replacement of terms — votes again, applying the same sixty percent threshold. This requirement for a second passage by a body that is no longer the same body is the key structural safeguard. An amendment that reflected a momentary consensus, or that was advanced by a membership whose composition has since shifted, must earn the endorsement of a substantially different group of citizens before it becomes permanent. In the interim, the amendment has provisional status: its implications are understood, its effects can be anticipated, and any objections that emerged from the first deliberation can be refined through the process leading to the second vote.

The Tribunate’s financial independence is not a design convenience — it is a structural necessity. A body that governs the rules of governing is useless if its budget is controlled by the government whose rules it is governing. The threat need not be explicit; budget attrition is among the most effective tools available to an executive that wishes to neutralise an inconvenient institution without the political cost of abolishing it outright.

The solution is constitutional entrenchment of the Tribunate’s funding, expressed as a fixed proportion of nominal GDP. This has several advantages. It means that the Tribunate’s resourcing grows approximately in line with national economic conditions, without requiring any active decision by the government of the day. It removes the budget from the scope of annual appropriations. And by tying the allocation to GDP rather than to government revenue, it avoids the problem that a Tribunate might be tempted — or able — to influence the definition of what counts as government revenue in ways that affect its own funding. GDP is a politically inconvenient number to manipulate, and its definition sits largely beyond any single government’s control.

A further moral hazard is worth naming: the compensation paid to Tribunate members should also be constitutionally specified, and any change to it — which would have to pass through the Tribunate itself — should take effect only for future memberships, not the membership that approved it. Members cannot vote themselves a pay rise that they benefit from. They can only set the terms for those who come after them.

This essay has described the Tribunate primarily as a domestic institution, and that framing is deliberate. The principle of subsidiarity — the idea that decisions should be taken at the lowest level of governance at which they can effectively be made — argues strongly for constitutional guardianship to sit at the national level. The citizens whose constitution is at stake should be its custodians. A Sovereignate that assumed this role on their behalf would, paradoxically, reproduce the very displacement of citizen agency that the tribunacy concept is designed to resist.

But the relationship between tribunacy and sovereigncy is not merely parallel. It is, in an important sense, mutually constitutive.

The democratic effectiveness pillar of a Sovereigncy — its mandate to protect judicial independence, electoral administration, and anti-corruption mechanisms within member states — requires that member governments have already accepted meaningful constraints on their own authority. A Tribunate, embedded in a member state’s constitution, is precisely that form of constraint: a standing institution whose existence demonstrates that a government has accepted the principle that it is not the final judge of its own legitimacy. This is why there is a strong case for requiring a functioning Tribunate as a condition of Sovereigncy membership.

The logic flows in both directions. A government seeking to join a Sovereigncy would typically need to amend its constitution — to cede the defined scope of powers that membership requires. Constitutional amendment, in a country with a Tribunate, must pass through that body. This means that the decision to join a Sovereigncy would require a genuine democratic mandate: not a parliamentary vote alone, not a referendum imposed by the executive, but the deliberative endorsement of a body of randomly selected citizens whose sole function is to consider whether the constitutional architecture serves the people it governs. That is exactly the kind of decision that deserves exactly that kind of scrutiny.

Seen from the other direction, the Sovereigncy provides the Tribunate with an external referent that insulates it against capture. If the democratic effectiveness standards expected of Sovereigncy members include certain minimum requirements around constitutional review — and there is a compelling case that they should — then a member government faces consequences at the Sovereigncy level if it attempts to neuter or circumvent its Tribunate domestically. The two institutions reinforce each other’s independence in a way that neither could sustain alone.

The Tribunate is a modest proposal in scale and an ambitious one in concept. It asks for no new powers for governments, no redistribution of resources, no reconfiguration of borders. It asks only that the management of democratic architecture be given a permanent institutional home — one constituted not from the political class, but from the citizenry itself.

The Venice problem is the absence of any internal mechanism by which a captured system can reclaim itself. The Tribunate is an attempt to build that mechanism in — not as an emergency measure, but as a standing feature of democratic design. The intent is not that it will be frequently used, but that it will always be available: a permanent answer to the question of how the rules of governing are governed, and by whom.

The details of its design — the precise size of its membership, the threshold for referrals, the exact proportion of GDP that funds it — are matters on which reasonable people will disagree and which will vary across different constitutional contexts. What is not negotiable is the principle: that in a democracy, the constitution belongs to the citizens, and there should be a body whose sole job is to remember that.