A Lottocratic Political System Would Empower Ordinary People
American democracy seems to be falling into an ever greater crisis. A lottocratic system, in which citizens are randomly selected to serve as legislators, could empower ordinary people and stem political dysfunction.
A “lottocracy” a lottery-based political system, could better serve the values of democracy and equality. (Smith Collection / Gado / Getty Images)
- Interview by
- Matt McManus
American democracy seems to be falling into an ever-greater crisis, with public approval of our political institutions continuing to fall as Donald Trump’s presidency becomes more and more authoritarian. Behind it all, both the Democratic and Republican Parties continue to be dominated by the interests of large, wealthy donors.
Some of the United States’ political dysfunction can be attributed to our particularly antimajoritarian constitutional order. But could representative elections themselves be part of the problem? Alex Guerrero, professor of philosophy at Rutgers University and author of Lottocracy: Democracy Without Elections, thinks so.
In Lottocracy, Guerrero argues that a system where citizens are randomly selected to serve as legislators, rather than elected, would give ordinary people more influence over political decision-making and help break the power of economic elites. Matt McManus, assistant professor of political science at Spelman College and a regular Jacobin contributor, recently interviewed Guerrero about the arguments of his book and why he thinks a lottery-based political system can better serve the values of democracy and equality.
Your book opens, as you say, with some dark claims. Democracy remains a very popular form of government. But these days, even its ardent defenders tend to give it the “Churchillian shrug” and say that as bad as it is, it’s better than any other system. Why do you think contemporary democracy induces these feelings of ambivalence?
Those of us raised in a place with a more-or-less democratic government have also generally been exposed to a family of political ideals that are genuinely good ideals. These include the moral importance of equality in terms of our power in the system and the consideration of our interests; the core idea that we should work through our disagreements peacefully, transparently, and fairly; the idea that no one should rule over anyone else; the idea that we have individual, sacrosanct rights of liberty, thought, speech, association, and religion; and the idea that, in some sense, it is we the people who should be steering the ship and that government should work for the people, not just the elites.
We believe in these as core ideals of democracy. But we also have mostly been taught that there is exactly one way to live up to them: something like electoral representative democracy.
But then we look out at our world and what is happening. And the contrast between the ideals and the promise and what is actually being delivered could hardly be starker.
The ultrawealthy control and occupy our political institutions and our elections and our information environment. The rich get richer and richer, to obscene levels. Inequality grows along every dimension. Homelessness, poverty, child poverty, unemployment, and underemployment go unaddressed and exacerbated by political choices. People can’t afford basic health care. And on and on.
Where is the government for the people? The ideals and reality, and the mismatch between them, generate deep ambivalence. The problem is that our political imaginations are limited. We aren’t brought up or encouraged to question anything about the basic political and legal institutions around us. We don’t learn about how things are done elsewhere. So our political ideas are limited.
Lottocracy occasionally reminded me of Jason Brennan’s 2016 book, Against Democracy. It points to a considerable empirical literature that shows voters by and large aren’t very well-versed in politics.
Many worry about an apparent mismatch between the role that we the people are supposed to play in holding our elected officials accountable and the extent to which we possess the information and knowledge that we would need in order to do so effectively. That’s what I’m worried about. Jason Brennan is worried that many people don’t know enough to vote intelligently; I’m worried that we don’t know enough to hold our elected representatives meaningfully accountable. It’s like trying to walk a dog while holding a mile-long leash.
Why are we ignorant? There are several distinct explanations, and they don’t compete with each other. Indeed, I think they combine to make the problem deeply difficult to address.
First, a basic background fact: modern democracies are very large, including tens and even hundreds of millions of people, and so the problems they confront are incredibly complex. It is very hard to come to an informed view about health policy, financial services regulation, immigration policy, energy policy, education, or anything else. That makes it very hard and raises the bar very high — it makes it easy for elected officials to explain away their failures to solve our problems even if they made no good-faith effort to do anything about them.
Add to this some further facts. Most of us have no power or only a vanishingly small amount of power to do anything to influence the political machine. We are overworked, overburdened, and have very little time to become mini experts about all the issues of the day.
Even so, many people do try to stay engaged. But our sources of information about politics and policy are increasingly limited, distorting, and intentionally distracting us from focusing on our actual problems. News media and the social media infrastructure are in large part owned and controlled by two dozen ultrawealthy individuals. Their aim is to keep our eyes on their product, liking, sharing, tuning in, being entertained, maximizing “engagement” — not to improve our epistemic situation regarding policy and the political world.
Part of that effort to get us to engage involves an effort to enrage, to stoke powerful emotions and antipathy toward others, as a way of both distracting us from our real problems and dividing us so that we will be more easily controlled. Economic elites want to control the elected politicians so that they serve their interests; they don’t want us to control them so that they serve ours.
You also direct ire at elected officials, pointing out that they “are not very responsive to what their constituents believe, prefer, and value. They don’t respond to the attitudes (largely ignorant, often nonexistent) of their constituents. Instead, they manufacture, shape, and manipulate their constituents’ attitudes about politics and moral-political problems in ways that are beneficial to them or to those who support them.”
Oftentimes in practice the supporters politicians most care about are the very wealthy and corporations. How did we wind up with an electoral system where politicians prioritize the interests of their rich donors?
Electoral representative systems set up what economists call a “principal-agent problem.” We, the principals, are trying to pick someone to be our agent, to act on our behalf. We see this not just with voters and elected officials but also when you hire a mechanic to fix your car or pick a doctor to oversee your health care. In every case, there is a question: How will we ensure that this person, our agent, will actually act on our behalf?
In the case of elected political representatives, the theoretical answer is that our elected officials will act on our behalf because if they don’t we will vote them out of office. The problem with that is that we have to be able to assess whether they are acting on our behalf. But that requires us to know enough about policy and about what our representatives are doing to know whether they are acting on our behalf.
For all the reasons just mentioned, we aren’t able to do that. But in the absence of meaningful accountability to all of us, elected officials are free to do whatever they like. Some of them are well intentioned and still try to do right by all of us. But others are open to be purchased by the highest bidder, whether indirectly through financial campaign support and favorable media coverage, creating unassailable political fiefdoms of power, or more directly through revolving doors to post-politics wealth in the form of positions in lobbying or industry.
It is incredibly valuable for powerful interests to control what happens politically. That affects what laws and regulations are in place, who is allowed to build and control what, who is taxed and how much, and much else.
Many complain about the harms caused by largely unregulated capitalism of the kind we find in the United States, but our attention should also be laser-focused on the question of why it is that we have this version of capitalism, as that will also affect what version we might get with any other kind of economic system.
The heart of your book is an argument for what you call “lottocracy.” It has also been called “sortition” in the past and has a long history going back to ancient Athens. Can you summarize some of that history?
In at least one birthplace of democracy, ancient Athens, selection by lot was a significant mechanism for distribution of political power. Indeed, Aristotle and others remark that elections were associated with oligarchy and lotteries with democracy. For some political decisions, one might want rule by elites, but for many others it was thought that lotteries should be used, and this was reflected in the design of Athenian political institutions.
Strikingly, however, when we see the development of modern representative democracy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, elections are the centerpiece, and lottery is nowhere to be found. Bernard Manin’s excellent The Principles of Representative Government (1995) documents this story and offers an account of why it transpires, focusing on the use of elections and elected representatives as partially antidemocratic measures likely to preserve aristocratic, elite political control.
One argument you give for lottocracy is that such a system would potentially be less subject to elite capture and better respect our status as political equals. Can you explain why you think it has this potential?
The lottocratic system, as I introduce and defend it, would replace a generalist, elected legislature like Congress with a network of twenty single-issue, lottery-selected legislatures, each tasked with focusing on a particular policy area. Each of these single-issue legislatures would be made up of 450 people chosen at random, serving three-year terms, with terms staggered so that 150 new people would start each year.
Those serving would be paid a significant amount. There would be legal protections for those serving, and efforts would be made to accommodate work and family life. There would be learning, deliberation, and community consultation phases, and these legislatures would be empowered to enact policy directly. In the book, I go through all of these elements in detail and consider many natural concerns about such a system.
One of the central arguments on behalf of lottocracy is that capture of those selected by lottery would be more difficult, and that elites would be less capable of controlling political outcomes. Random selection prevents undue influence in the selection of representatives, eliminating the need for people to raise tons of money and reducing the importance of how one is portrayed in the elite-controlled media. Regular random rotation in relatively short terms would make buying people off more expensive and less beneficial, particularly compared to buying off a senator who might be in office for thirty-plus years. The significant pay to those randomly selected would be conditional on them not taking payments from others, and indeed there could be rewards offered to those reporting attempts at bribery and corruption.
Another central argument in support of lottocracy is that it would reflect a genuine commitment to political equality, where literally everyone would have an equal chance of being chosen as a political representative. Currently, Congress is much, much wealthier (and more male, and whiter) than the rest of the country. More than half of Congress has a net worth over $1 million. More than 50 percent have professional backgrounds as lawyers or businesspeople. Almost half of senators and 20 percent of members of the House of Representatives attended Harvard, Yale, Stanford, or Georgetown for an undergraduate or law degree.
This elite distortion dramatically affects what those in political power are likely to know, what they care about, what problems they will be attentive to, and how committed they are to genuinely addressing those problems. With random selection, we would have an entirely different community of people in political power, and they would be a genuine microcosm of the broader community.
New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani began his victory speech by saying, “For as long as we can remember, the working people of New York have been told by the wealthy and the well-connected that power does not belong in their hands. Fingers bruised from lifting boxes on the warehouse floor, palms calloused from delivery bike handlebars, knuckles scarred with kitchen burns: these are not the hands that have been allowed to hold power.” Under lottocracy, and unlike with elections, these are the very hands that would hold power.
You say that lottocratic structures “could be used within the context of employment governance as a way of implementing ‘workplace democracy.’” Can you say more about this idea?
I see sortition as a potentially useful tool to instantiate workplace democracy while avoiding some of the difficulties of elite capture and corruption that have affected other workers’ organizations. There might be cases in which large-scale elections will result in inadequate representation of workers throughout the workplace, at all different levels, perhaps tilting in favor of a certain subset. Or there might be cases in which management attempts to manipulate or capture those elected in much the same way as it happens in the political context.
Regular rotation through power might mitigate some of these concerns, and it might also provide valuable organizational and leadership experience to a broader swath of the workplace. Sometimes it is good to put power in the hands of those who have not sought it out!
Your book takes values like political equality seriously and rejects a “Burkean” view that deference to either tradition or elites is always wise. But there are some who share your reservations about contemporary democracy who adopt more revanchist views.
Jason Brennan has argued for epistocratic changes to put the more educated and intelligent in charge. Ultrareactionaries like Curtis Yarvin and Peter Thiel say we should reject democracy wholesale for a more aristocratic political system. Even the idea of corporate monarchy has been floated.
Why do you think these views have gained some traction?
I think there is a great deal of frustration with politics. Most people view the system as rigged, usually against their interests. There also has been at least a decade of intense vilification of those on the other side, whichever side one has been on. That makes it hard to live in a democratic community where we can see promise in working together.
I argue that these divisions are at least partly the result of the electoral mechanism itself, and that we should note this as a considerable cost. But I think it is a mistake to turn away from the idea that the people should govern.
Much of the book aims to draw attention to the ways in which elites manipulate us and misuse the power and control they have obtained. We should be similarly worried about other epistocratic or aristocratic arrangements. The question we should always ask is: Why will these people work for us? The answer provided by lottocracy is that they are us. They were picked at random from among us, and they will be among us again very soon.