by Tim Sommers
“I’d rather entrust the government to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory,” William Buckley once said, “than to the faculty of Harvard University.” If we can put aside his right-reactionary politics and look past the performative anti-intellectualism on display here (from a Yalie!), there is the seed of an interesting question here. Could we replace elections with random selections?
A recent mini-movement among political philosophers has answered, yes, we could. Arguably the leader of this movement, Alexander Guerrero, author of Lotacracy: Democracy Without Elections (2024), has gone further arguing we should eliminate voting in favor of a lottery system to appoint our political representatives. Here’s Guerrero describing his view and its advantages.
We would be better off using randomly chosen citizens, selected to serve on single-issue legislatures (each covering, say, transportation or education or agriculture), who would learn about the relevant issues in detail and engage with each other over an extended period of time to make policy decisions. Instead of a generalist legislature like Congress, we would have 30 single-issue legislatures, each with 300 randomly-chosen citizen legislators serving three-year terms. A true random selection of citizens age 18 and up could be established using mechanisms like those used for jury selection. Those selected wouldn’t be required to serve, but a significant salary, the promise to accommodate family and work requirements, and the sense that service is a civic duty and honor should encourage them. Without elections, we would lose the sense that ‘our team’ wins or loses. We wouldn’t have teams in the same way. Moving away from a generalist legislative process opens up places for us to identify issues on which we agree rather than having our attention concentrated on those few issues that most deeply divide us. Without campaign promises, political ads and re-elections, we could finally move beyond the capture and control of political institutions by wealthy corporate interests. This would truly return democratic control to the people.
I am not a huge fan of this view, but I have to say Guerrero deserves a lot of credit for his tightly argued, imaginative work. As John Rawls emphasized in developing his own theory of “justice as fairness,” the best way to evaluate ethical and normative political views is to have well-developed, comprehensive alternatives to compare. Guerrero has certainly developed – across 464 pages – a comprehensive alternative to democracy as currently practiced. Also, props to Guerrero for the bravado involved in even imaging an alternative to conventional democratic politics – especially in such detail.
Lotacracy is not entirely unprecedented. Athens had one. Sort of. Our current jury system can be seen that way. And there have been recent experiments with lotacracy around the world, for example, in Canada. But these lotteries have been been quite limited, deliberative rather than legislative, and advisory only.
Guerrero says he has four main reasons to prefer lotteries to elections. (But I think he has at least five.) (1) Under the current system elected officials are too easily captured and controlled by economic and special interests. (2) We are unduly, disastrously even, focused on the short term. Politicians need to win the next election, and given that most voters know very little about policy, it’s much easier to move from election to election doing very little policy, especially long-term policy, and, then, in any case just lying about what your policies are or were. One possible solution to that is robust, independent executive agencies staffed by subject-matter experts and not political appointees. (In the U.S., of course, we don’t do that anymore and our Supreme Court has decided it’s mostly unconstitutional (unless it’s the Fed).) (3) Party-based democracy, by putting people on opposing teams, ends up being divisive and polarizing. (4) With so much wealth equality, democracy turns into oligarchy very quickly. But I agree with Niko Kolodny that the real master argument behind Guerrero’s view, is argument (5) that lotacracy is better at problem-solving than representative democracy. Guerrero even refers to democracy as a “technology” – presumably to emphasize to argue that it is a kind of tool made by people to solve a problem or problems – and her sees lotacracy as simply an opposed technology.
I won’t attempt any detailed criticism of these main points, Kolodny has already done that admirably, so, instead of negative criticisms I want to make two positive counterarguments.
Here’s the first. While only about half the countries in the world probably count as real democracies, every nation in the world – except Saudi Arabia, Oman, the UAE, Qatar, Brunei, and the Vatican City – claims to be a democracy. So, why do China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, and the Congo claim to be democracies?
Forget philosophy for a minute. Everybody loves a winner.
The best argument for democracy is empirical. Democracy is seen as having been the most successful form of government on all sorts of measures: personal freedoms, social mobility, economic success, life expectancy, infant and maternal mortality, education, and keeping the peace. Set against the many detailed failures of democracies to actually, always achieve all of these ends, the old saw from Churchill feels sharper than ever. “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”
To be clear, I did not just prove that democracy works better on all these more or less objective measures. I only suggested that if it does, that this is probably going to be the best argument you will get for it. And though I can’t prove it here, democracy, I think, is going to a win pair-wise comparison with any other system, even if we don’t know exactly why; i.e., even if we don’t know the secret of democracy’s success.
Before I get to my second counter arguments, a little philosophy. There are basically two kinds of arguments available in favor of democracy. Instrumental arguments (like the one I just gestured at) say democracy is valuable because of its results. Mostly, the argument is that democracy gives the best answers or makes the right decision more often, though another version of this argument is that democracy makes the people that live under it better people.
But you could offer a defense of democracy as intrinsically good. Maybe, democracy is fundamentally about freedom, and whatever the effects, people have a basic right to some kind of equal, or at least fair, participation in their political community. Or maybe democracy is fundamentally about equality. Not having democracy may be a kind of relational inequality. In either case, democracy is good independently of its effects.
But there is yet a third, skeptical, way to approach this. Let me use an example. If you think of the government as a technology for problem solving, as Guerrero does, why not prefer epistocracy, rule by the knowledgeable? Let’s have only the knowledgeable vote or give them extra votes, for example.
But, wait, who are the knowledgeable? Shall we vote on that?
Democracy doesn’t look like a problem-solving machine, to me. It’s more of a way to prevent any one person, or group, from amassing too much power and controlling the rest of us.
Modern democracy was born out of the partial, attempted separation of political from economic power. This is what the enemies of democracy – from fascism to totalitarian socialism – have in common. They want to concentrate, and not disperse, power and power relations.
But reconfiguring a democratic society to run on lotteries instead of elections would be the greatest concentration of power in one place since the birth of the modern state. Who controls the lottery controls the state.
The error of technocracy is the fantasy that we can turn human problems into technological ones. To do that we would need to be able to step outside of, or rise above, politics and every day social life. There is no outside of politics. And, in this case, once in place, there is no outside the lottery.