Terry Bouricius brings a rare mix of experience to one of the central questions of democracy: how ordinary people can hold real power in public life. His background includes two decades in elected office, years of work on election reform, and a long-standing focus on sortition—the use of randomly selected citizens’ assemblies in public decision-making.

Long before he won office, Terry was already “a political person,” concerned with both the wider world and his own neighborhood. As a student at Middlebury College, he heard a speech by a then little-known Bernie Sanders, whose willingness to speak plainly about issues most politicians ignored helped draw Terry into local politics. Both men entered public life trying to change the system through elections. Both won. But over time, Terry came to a different conclusion: the deeper problem was not which politicians win, but why democracy depends on politicians at all.

The challenge, he found, was not simply to elect better politicians, but to build forms of government that give everyday people a real voice in public decisions.

Today, Terry is widely known for his work on sortition and citizens’ assemblies. He focuses on how randomly selected groups of citizens can study evidence, hear from experts, deliberate together, and make public decisions outside the pressures of campaigns, parties, donors, and re-election.

He is especially known for developing the model of “Multi-Body Sortition”, a way of using several different citizen bodies, each with its own role, as part of a working democratic system. His new book, Democracy Without Politicians, brings together decades of hands-on political experience and democratic design work to make the case for a democracy built around citizens rather than professional politicians.